Out of Pod Experience

I don't know how many of you have played Minecraft. I just got into it recently after I was reminded about it right here in OOPE as a matter of fact. I've been wasting away these past several days, doing little else but play minecraft. I started on single player and had a blast, but after a while I figured I wanted to share my experiences with others, so I decided to try out some of the public servers.

I'm not sure if maybe I'm just a different breed of person than most minecraft players, but the top rated servers are so bad that I'm literally speechless. I don't know how to bash them. I can't think of words to describe them that would sound any worse than mere descriptions of the way they are run. I'll tell you about the worst of them:

First server I tried out advertised itself as "unmoderated" and "the built in restrictions are the only thing to protect you" and "if you get griefed nobody will save you". Great, I thought to myself--as a player and fan of EVE Online, I'll probably fit right in on this server. I get in there and I'm deep inside this highly built-up city area. It's gorgeous, but I wanna play on my own, so I travel for several Minecraft days (20 minute cycles) until I am far, FAR away from any hint of civilization. (I stopped closer to town for a few days and realized my mistake when I couldn't dig a mine more than 30 blocks without hitting someone else's network)

Now they advertize that your golden shovel they give you is your key to protecting your assets as well as yourself, that only land you claim is safe and everything unclaimed is an absolute free-for-all. And you're limited to only a few hundred blocks you can claim initially--enough to built a modest house and maybe have a cattle ranch too. Seems great, I thought, I'll build a little fort to store my diamonds (iron, lets be serious here) in, and then I can get to transforming this land into something out of this world. I can defend my brittle structures from hostile creeper attacks and maybe the occasional griefer come to play. Maybe I can even set elaborate traps to defend against anyone who thinks I'm easy prey to fùck with. It'll be a blast! (literally, I bet)

So it wasn't long before I had creepers plowing down through my yard, cause the little bastards are so desparate for hugs and all. Human contact makes them explode with love. Or maybe dynamite or féces, I'm not sure. Anyway, that kind of love was threatening the safety of my abode, or it would have, anyway, if they could actually damage terrain. But soon enough I started realizing these guys weren't making craters in the ground. Not on my claimed land, and not off it either. No, apparently explosions did nothing to terrain. I discovered later you could set your claimed land to allow explosions, but I wasn't really able to go claim the entire thirty-something acres that I'd decided to call my home, plus the mountain I was digging out, AND my house AND my diamond mine. So apparently that also meant all that gunpowder I was collecting from the creepers I killed wasn't really going to be useful, either.

Well I liked the economy there, and the players seemed friendly, so I let it slide off my back. There's more to the game than blowing up terrain, right? After all, the creepers come in way too often anyway. It's really not so much fun to have two more come in less time than it takes to fill the hole from the last one, not to mention they make no sound till they're about to pop, and also they annihilate most of the ground they destroy, meaning you have to go dig dirt somewhere else to fill the hole. Meanwhile your average ground level gets progressively lower with every night that you don't go AFK in your brightly lit basement. So maybe it isn't so bad, I told myself.

I had my cattle ranch going and everything was looking up. I was going to finish digging out that giant square room in the mountain and sell it to someone. I was going to expand my farm. Someone sold me a ton of carrots for cheap, and someone else put a bunch of eggs up in auction for basically free. Before you knew it, I had myself a chicken farm and a carrot patch. I couldn't claim all that land but it didn't seem to matter. Nobody really visited my house anyway, I wasn't afraid someone was going to try to destroy my farm.

So I painstakingly got my new chicken coop all setup. I actually unclaimed my cattle ranch to free up some blocks to claim the plot in the mountain. But I go to feed the cattle and they wont eat. I come to find out I have to have claimed the land they are on or they wont eat. So I can't breed the cattle or the chickens either, unless I claim their pens.

Disgruntled, I go to check on the plants. I was starting a new sugarcane crop alongside my melons. I started it by building rows of dirt coming out of the shore, and was going to expand in-land by digging irrigation ditches. I painstakingly cleared some VERY thick-trunked trees from a plot I was going to start a mushroom farm on. After many Minecraft days of clearing, I was totally pooped, but I was finally going to be able to start growing giant mushrooms. I dig out the little holes to put them in, and grab some buckets to put water in the little holes. And wouldn't you know it, I can't pour water onto unclaimed land. Some sort of anti-griefing measure I guess. That means I also can't fill up my irrigation ditches if I ever decide to build them.

At this point, I was pretty much blazing mad, not just that there were too many restrictions, but that they had reeled me in with lies and gotten me to invest so much time and energy into it before discovering all of this. But I knew it wouldn't do any good to complain about it in chat. I'd already discovered that the nonexistent mods are very quick to boot you off the server for basically any chat that wouldn't fly in a public pre-school classroom.

So I quit.

Long story short, I'm looking for a decent Minecraft public server.

I've been hearing people say that. Seems that cars and Minecraft cause motion sickness, planes will with turbulence, but actual motion such as in trains won't usualy do it for most people. And it's extremely rare for people to get motion sickness from watching shooter games or racing games.

I wonder if it's not the motion that causes it, but the constant bobbing up and down?

You mean the head bob? I don't even know what that's like. I disabled it before I started playing.

I'm talking about the constant bobbing up and down from going across terrain. Instead of smooth slopes, there are big, blocky steps.

Everyone will get motion sickness, but most people have a considerable threshold for it. I generally have no problem riding in a car but sometimes something sets it off and I can't ride without vomiting.

Wha? my brain would melt playing like that for long. You know there are pvp servers, right? PvP tournament matches and all that? Some pretty elaborate systems. I think 80% of MC players are in the 10-14yo range, RPing with them doesn't sound very fun, but fragging them to tears?!?

Anyway, yeah, have had the game since beta. Though lately I mostly just fool around with MCPE on my nex7 which I think is still in beta. Well I never played it much on my desktop, usually on my laptop for the pc version, and then mostly PE when that released. With the recent replacement hard drive on my laptop I'll probably install it on ubuntu and start playing the pc version again.

Meh some pf the pvp mods are pretty good, ctf, building forts, gathering for supplies, organizing tactics. it's a pretty big thing actually, even on some p2p servers. Even original classes and skills with ranking systems and such. I didn't think it would interest me either, until I took time to check it out.