The factors that make it seem most like a work of fiction:
- No screenshots with players visible.
- Play only continues when all 30 people are online at once. Anybody who has tried to make something like this happen will immediately notice how difficult it is for this to occur with any kind of regularity whatsoever, yet the claim is that this was happening for weeks.
I agree with hoax just due to the fact that there's a lot of fail in this article.
First, grass doesn't matter. Wheat matters, and you don't need grass to grow wheat. For those that don't know, you need to eat or you'll die and wheat can be used to make bread. But there's plenty of stuff to eat, including renewable zombie flesh.
Second, while there are a few blocks that aren't renewable, there are plenty that are. Wood and cobblestone are completely renewable. And a lot of blocks aren't renewable but never used up. You should have just as much dirt in the world when you end as when you begin, unless it gets blown up by creepers or thrown into lava.
And you hardly need to build on a mountain and then cut away the mountain. Just build up and outward.
Eventually you should end up with people using only wood tools and be completely out of interesting materials. It would just be boring at that point.
That kind of comparison doesn't work because you can't get a tragedy of the commons situation in minecraft. All you really need is wood and stone, trees regrow extremely quickly, and stone is effectively infinite.
Seems very embellished. From what I know of minecrafters, it's very likely they would have flattened the ground, set up a tree farm, and starting communally building within the first hour or so of play.
The only competition would have been for highly scarce materials, however the other key point is that it's trivial to make another nether portal once you have access to the nether.
The claim that "the other team tore down the portal to use in their castle" is ridiculous. No veteran minecrafter would destroy a nether portal just to use it in their castle wall. If anything, they would just make the portal into the castle wall.
How can the "griefers" operate from their floating base? How are they able to leave the floating platform to get to the ground and back? And why couldn't the players of the other guilds simply take the same way up onto the floating base?
In Minecraft you can swim up a stream of falling water. The griefers used a lever to open/close the stream down to the ground. I assume one of the griefers had to stay up there and operate that lever.
This was one of the biggest red flags to me. If 2 people on a platform were doing well and the rest were struggling everyone would team up and take down the griefers. There's no way they could stop 5+ people coming up at once, especially if this was before there were potions. Build up behind a wall and they wouldn't be able to shoot arrows at you.
I'm wondering what kept people playing ... sounds like a recipe for mass desertion, unless they were paid / forced to play / something else. I imagine it was something else, which might also explain the end result. This doesn't seem to be the natural order of things.
Also, I wonder how large this box is. Given the size of the griefer base in the image, the whole 'world' seems pretty small.
Whether or not this particular anecdote is real or fantasy, Minecraft seems like an excellent platform for running studies in e.g. experimental economics. This sort of reminds me of the plague in World of Warcraft, which although the byproduct of a game bug, yielded actual data about the spread of epidemics. Nifty!
Couldn't they have stepped outside the bedrock wall after building a nether portal, or does it extend "underground"? Finding another portal in the nether would lead you back to a different point on the surface.
The mechanics of this game specifically, as well as the emergent social dynamics of online gaming, are plenty relevant to this story. I can't think of how else you could discuss it.
"During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that conditions called war; and such a war, as if of every man, against every man." --Thomas Hobbes
[+] [-] sp332|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] katovatzschyn|13 years ago|reply
- No screenshots with players visible.
- Play only continues when all 30 people are online at once. Anybody who has tried to make something like this happen will immediately notice how difficult it is for this to occur with any kind of regularity whatsoever, yet the claim is that this was happening for weeks.
[+] [-] Zimahl|13 years ago|reply
First, grass doesn't matter. Wheat matters, and you don't need grass to grow wheat. For those that don't know, you need to eat or you'll die and wheat can be used to make bread. But there's plenty of stuff to eat, including renewable zombie flesh.
Second, while there are a few blocks that aren't renewable, there are plenty that are. Wood and cobblestone are completely renewable. And a lot of blocks aren't renewable but never used up. You should have just as much dirt in the world when you end as when you begin, unless it gets blown up by creepers or thrown into lava.
And you hardly need to build on a mountain and then cut away the mountain. Just build up and outward.
Eventually you should end up with people using only wood tools and be completely out of interesting materials. It would just be boring at that point.
[+] [-] jballanc|13 years ago|reply
You can read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
[+] [-] Dylan16807|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] debacle|13 years ago|reply
The only competition would have been for highly scarce materials, however the other key point is that it's trivial to make another nether portal once you have access to the nether.
[+] [-] stephengillie|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ssdsa|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daveid|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] driverdan|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] milesskorpen|13 years ago|reply
Also, I wonder how large this box is. Given the size of the griefer base in the image, the whole 'world' seems pretty small.
[+] [-] reustle|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jfb|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ricardobeat|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lazugod|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jewbacca|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] driverdan|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maayank|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eschulte|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Auguste|13 years ago|reply
Minecraft owes more to Infiniminer, but it has been its own game ever since development on Survival Mode started.
[+] [-] droithomme|13 years ago|reply