Mojang's Nerfing of Endermen: Thoughts

[Confector de Caeli]

So I was just in the Development Diary thread and remembered one of the initial reasons that drove me to giving up on Vanilla. Obviously, Mojang has made a lot of mistakes over the vast expanses of time, but one of the last straws for me was their continued efforts to reduce the danger of Endermen. Back in Beta 1.7-ish, Notch promoted Endermen as this extremely dangerous mob that would soon threaten our Minecraft existence, and, when they were released around 1.8, they were not only dangerous but could also damage buildings with their ability to move nearly every block in the game. However, their ability to move blocks, especially bedrock, was absolutely ridiculous, so Notch fixed it but largely reduced the blocks that Endermen could move to plants and dirt, nerfing what I saw as a relatively good feature. I had thought that the chance for property damage to take place due to lack of player presence (as opposed to due to player presence as with creeper explosions) and the likelihood that structures would gradually "decay" without player maintenance was a good one. Notch admitted that he had nerfed them pretty badly, saying something along the lines of, "Yeah, I really nerfed those Endermen. I'll fix it eventually." But he never did beyond somewhat boosting their health. Luckily, we have FlowerChild to correct this sort of mistake. Anyways, I don't really know where I was going with this, but: any thoughts?

[Sarudak]

My thought : Flowerchild > Mojang

[ion]

ederrman were and still are like a bad boy that destroy my lego things. i always hated that feature and made me rage quit some really established worlds in vanilla. i still don't like that they pick up blocks in BTW but at least FC made them dangerous so it's a fair trade.

[jecowa]

I don't like Endermen. Endermen are hard to fight because they keep teleporting away. Endermen grief up my lawns and reed farms, and there's not a lot I can do to stop it. I feel like the only reason that they were given the ability to pick up blocks is just because they can. Landscapes that have extensive exposure to endermen look terrible.

[FlowerChild]

Landscapes that have extensive exposure to endermen look terrible.

Are you actually aware of the changes I made or are you just blowing smoke out of your ass?

Their impact on the landscape is something I spent an awful lot of time on to avoid what you're describing above, and you seem to be talking about vanilla behavior: not mod.

[ExpHP]

Ehm, the thread itself really is more or less about vanilla. I think it was misplaced into the BTW board.

[FlowerChild]

True. OP has already been temp banned for going on a conversational rampage in the bug report section, but I'll move it over to off-topic.

[jecowa]

I know that you made changes to Endermen back around the time you introduced Ender Spectacles, but I'm not exactly sure what those changes are. I actually asked about the Endermen changes a couple weeks ago on the Mincraft Forums but didn't get a response. There don't seem to be any details on the wiki or the change log, but I think I found one of the Hardcore Endermen changes while searching through the forums:

possible hardcore endermen spoilers

Show

In this thread it is implied/speculated that Endermen can only teleport on top of blocks with a light level of 7 or lower.

[FlowerChild]

I know that you made changes to Endermen back around the time you introduced Ender Spectacles, but I'm not exactly sure what those changes are.

Blowing smoke out of your ass it is then.