The closed Map Experiment

[TheAnarchitect]

I just read this thread on MCF (I found it through reddit). A very interesting look into what limited resources will do to play. I think this should give everyone something to think about in the upcoming anarchy play.

[Poppycocks]

I just read this and this is crazy, info's lacking, a link maybe?

EDIT: NVM, google is my best friend closed map experiment

[TheAnarchitect]

Jeeze, I could have sworn I put the link in there.

[Poppycocks]

Good article. One more reason to believe we'll kill ourselves sooner than later :P. I'm really looking forward to anarchy play now.

Also, this really puts FC's design choices into perspective. Damn, that man is a genius.

[Itamarcu]

Just finished reading it. It was a great article.

I really wonder, though, what would have happened if the walls would have been removed at the end.

[AngelWithDirtyHands]

That is amazing :D I'm not sure how suitable it would be for a future BTW anarchy map, though, because I reckon it would be too difficult to set up the renewable systems due to constant griefing. I'm not sure if I could keep playing sensibly under chronic acute anarchy conditions for 2 months :p

[The Phoenixian]

An interesting tale but given the stolen nether portal still having obsidian blocks, the little details like water not being walled in with dirt or cobble over ledges along with weird amounts of regularity and irregularity in the mined out terrain, and finally the fact that one of the posters in the thread mentioned having seen a very similar tale as a "copy pasta" elsewhere a week earlier, I find myself wondering if it is actually real.


Regardless, it is something interesting to think about.

[Mason11987]

I really don't think this could be real. How could the griefers from the grass area grief everything? Presumably they would die eventually. Even if there spawn was up on the grass, what's to stop a group of 5 or so people from building a dirt bridge underneath and just hand breaking their sticky pistons? Or even towering above their obsidian and punching through it? If the two of them were in the building they wouldn't be able to grief, if they weren't others would get in and destroy everything.

It's a neat idea though, but I think it's more a thought experiment with some pictures.

[ZeroKnight]

I would be one of the people who designs an impossible base to get to and just live self sufficiently. With unlimited access to food and trees, you could easily get any material you wanted from any other person.

Does anyone have access to a server? i would like to try this. :P

[Splee999]

Also, where did all the dirt go? It's not really all that hard to come by.

[ZeroKnight]

Also, where did all the dirt go? It's not really all that hard to come by.

I think he meant grass in the article.

[Rich131]

I also read this article through r/minecraft! Great idea, so much so that people starting organizing their own versions of it. I have put my name down to be one the guinea pigs here: http://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comme ... losed_map/

Should be interesting if they go ahead with it.

[Haidaes]

I doubt this is real (as everyone of the 30 [!] people seems to want to stay annonymous) as well. I started really doubting it when he wrote that they startted fighting over sapplings. Trees are the easiest to aquire resources and literally increase exponentially and who in their right mind starts building houses out of clay bricks? Also with trees beeing able to make charcoal I would have expected people to built better houses with stone bricks instead of simple cobble stone (its the only thing you can really do in this kind of map, like all the sky island surival maps.

When he wrote that one day all the flowers were gone (mind you there was still no 'dick-ass griefing' with strip mining dirt) it pretty much became clear that something is fishy. Bonemeal does wonders here. There is no way that 2 people could terrorize 28 others, especially when they start destroying their shit, aslo fences serve as a pretty decent glass replacement.

There is so much wrong with the facts here that in the end this is either some fake of someone who does not know minecraft very well or 28 of the 30 people were just morons. I'm leaning more towards the first with another guy wanting to prove some pseudo-psychological stuff and raise enviromental awareness with this hoax. Or as mentioned in the comments of that thread (just skimmed through it) its just 4chan trolling.

[Horizon]

If this were to happen, but with 30 lucky BTWolfaboos, it would be more like "Hey, just a thought, if we worked together, rather than trying constantly to fuck each other over, we'd be able to do something interesting, rather than fighting over a hell-blasted landscape like Redmond and Blutarch."
EDIT: And then FC would kill them and run off to build a giant phallus
EDIT 2: Also, I can host a server, but not at night, because that's when my internet connection goes tits up.

[Itamarcu]

I doubt this is real (as everyone of the 30 [!] people seems to want to stay annonymous) as well. I started really doubting it when he wrote that they startted fighting over sapplings. Trees are the easiest to aquire resources and literally increase exponentially and who in their right mind starts building houses out of clay bricks? Also with trees beeing able to make charcoal I would have expected people to built better houses with stone bricks instead of simple cobble stone (its the only thing you can really do in this kind of map, like all the sky island surival maps.

When he wrote that one day all the flowers were gone (mind you there was still no 'dick-ass griefing' with strip mining dirt) it pretty much became clear that something is fishy. Bonemeal does wonders here. There is no way that 2 people could terrorize 28 others, especially when they start destroying their shit, aslo fences serve as a pretty decent glass replacement.

There is so much wrong with the facts here that in the end this is either some fake of someone who does not know minecraft very well or 28 of the 30 people were just morons. I'm leaning more towards the first with another guy wanting to prove some pseudo-psychological stuff and raise enviromental awareness with this hoax. Or as mentioned in the comments of that thread (just skimmed through it) its just 4chan trolling.

Have you ever played in an Anarchy server with 30 players at a time? If you had, you surely would have noticed most of the trees are missing. Even if 29 of the players replant trees, it's enough for 1 player to not do this in order to slowly destroy the population of trees, unless the others actively try to plant more trees than they found (which wouldn't happen, considering the fact they were enemies).

Also, you should remember that this was taking place in a 1.6 (or earlier) server. The old animal spawning mechanics, no bonemeal-that-magically-creates-flowers, people needed grass to get food unless they were feeding off of mushrooms, which was not an option unless you had a mushroom farm (not possible with such a big amount of griefing/stealing).

2 people living in an unreachable fortress and terrorizing others is VERY possible. As you could see from the picture, there is no way of reaching them. If a player tries to build a dirt tower/staircase/whatever they would just shoot him with an arrow (or even things like eggs or snowballs, just to drop him down) and then destroy the dirt tower for profit.

By the way, fences are a replacement for glass? Whaa?

[Horizon]

For windows, he means.

[Itamarcu]

For windows, he means.

If you want a window to look nice and ti give you the ability to look outside, you either not fill it or use glass/glass panes. If you want a window to be there for lighting, you can use a torch or an open roof. Using fences as windows has no purpose except to look silly.

[The Phoenixian]

Also, you should remember that this was taking place in a 1.6 (or earlier) server. The old animal spawning mechanics, no bonemeal-that-magically-creates-flowers, people needed grass to get food unless they were feeding off of mushrooms, which was not an option unless you had a mushroom farm (not possible with such a big amount of griefing/stealing).

Actually, the mention of sticky pistons, and that the griefers had very early on, means that this experiment would have needed to happen during one of the beta 1.7 updates. Bonemeal's effects on grass were added before that so Haidaes still has a point there.

[TheAnarchitect]

I think flowers disappeared not because it would have been impossible to bring them back, but because people had better things to do than grow flowers.

[Itamarcu]

Actually, the mention of sticky pistons, and that the griefers had very early on, means that this experiment would have needed to happen during one of the beta 1.7 updates. Bonemeal's effects on grass were added before that so Haidaes still has a point there.

Oh, I was wrong.
Hmm...so why didn't they use bonemeal if they had all those monsters? is it because of the lack of grass?

[Horizon]

Or because they had better things to do than bring flowers back to life.

[Haidaes]

Or because it never happened.

Regarding the fences: The only use of glass blocks is to enable you see outside w/o getting hit by shit that spawns at night or more to the point: keeping it out while you still can watch it. Simply making holes allows for spiders to crawl through (if at least 2 wide and 1 high) or skeletons to shoot through it. The story did mention that they destroyed glass because they were running out of sand to make it, so fences are a viable substitute and they don't look half as bad considering they live in cobble shelters.

Regarding the trees. According to the tale they knew they were running short on supplies which caused them to form 4 groups. At this point everyone already should have an idea that simply taking wood w/o replanting it is bad, especially within groups something like this is frowned uppon and usually leads to consequences for the offender. Anyway,it might ber true for your average anarchy server that no one bothers to replant them because everyone knows there is a shit ton of them in the next chunk. Its also not the fact they became rare at one point as is written, but that they stayed rare or more to the point the sapplings 'price' increased which is the strange thing tbh, because they can be farmed like crazy if neccesary and all things considered they are always neccesary.

The most important thing though is: Even with a fortress and even if it would have started moving all a sudden (exaggeration!) there is no way that 28 people let themself be dicked around by 2 guys (that only works in RL when you have enough people with weapons to back you up, which they had not). To remind you, they supposedly only played when all 30 had time to play, so these were not cloak and dagger operations when no one else was around. If anarchy play with people, where it actually comes to the formation of groups, has taught me anything, it is that retribution comes swift and hard. They obviously did not have some kind of permanet death mechanic, but their floaty (dirt) home would have made a perfect target, not to mention there is still plenty of dirt left in the screenshots, enough to built a stairwell up and down again, considering the mapheigh back then was not as high as it is today.
Furthermore it should be considered that once you have cleared them out of their home, even if 28 people have to 'fist' them to death, they would spawn at the beginning and you would be sitting in their house with all their resources. And if you start telling me that they ever managed to set their spawnpoint by actually sleeping (afaik you acatually need to sleep in them,not just lay down) in beds on a multiplayer server with 30 people, I'd like to ask you the name of your dealer, especially given the fact that you can destroy them in a fraction of a second anyway.

Then there are a few things which seem quite odd to me, like why would someone bother to replace the missing pieces of the portal with stone? Why make beds in multiplayer? The fact that the screenshots were taken while it rained, to make it all look more dramatic. If this really is hardcore anarchy why bother making a roof out of wood? The strip mine picture that shows someone digging down a giant hole all the way down to bedrock and even past lava w/o plugging it seems really odd to me. Mining past lava but even taking the adjaced blocks just to get a few levels deeper to hit bedrock seems like a lot of trouble for next to no gain. Also everyone who ever actually did that would have closed tunnels and stuff on the sides because creatures would constantly spawn in them and fall on your head while digging. The island beeing next to the bedrock wall makes it quite easy to storm, because you just have to place blocks at the wall instead of going through the hassle of building a normal staincase.

[SterlingRed]

Even if this isn't real, the concept and discussion of anarchy play in limited resources is still very interesting. Something is fishy with the story and screenshots, it very much looks like mcedit was used to remove all dirt. And the perfectly defended platform doesn't make sense either. coordinated attacks by a few players could have easily destroyed it.
That being said, I think in smp anarchy even without boundaries using btw we will see finite resources quickly exhausted near spawn and a large number of griefed abandoned bases. It comes down to things like what's easier building a cobble gravel sand factory or stripping the nearest beach?

[TheAnarchitect]

Unless the people on the server agree not to be dicks. Or at least not to be dicks near spawn.

I think maybe the most useful thing about an experiment like this, and repeating it personally, is it hits you upside the head with the consequences of certain behaviors. Some of these problems are built into the game, and others are caused by shortsightedness and could have been avoided.

I certainly think that there's something to learn from this kind of setup, and not just in the context of the game. In the larger sense, our world is a (mostly) finite bounded area, it's just large enough that no one really notices. And that's dangerous. Many of the problems in the scenario supposedly happened because the players didn't realize soon enough what was happening. And the ones that were most successful were the ones that realized it soonest. I may be waxing philisophic here, but I think a game scenario like this could be a great educational tool to drive home what sustainability is and why it's important.