Is Anarchy gameplay realy that much fun?

[EvanT]

This is a honest question since I could never imagine how it can be any fun especially while playing with BTW. I know there are many who prefer to play on anarchy servers. So I would like to get some assumptions corrected.

• Because you have to fear someone will rob all your resources, destroy your base and bomb you back to Tier one while you are off-line one can not build large visible bases or farms so I would guess that the best concept is to run as far as possible from server spawn, find a natural cave so no one can follow your track and more or less hide.
• Because leaving mine shafts open would direct anyone directly to your base you would have to replace any block of stone you dig or mine far away from your hidy-hole.
• Building farms or huge machines is only "save" if one spreads them so loosing a kiln does not mean your pottery and soul-bottler are gone too.
• Defending such an array of not connected mini bases is of course impossible, you can not be at two locations at once.
• Building traps is only effective for one hit because after the location is known the attacker can simply dig around it or wait until you go off-line. So camouflage is the best bet.

Nevertheless after you spend hours of work getting to soulforged steel all it takes for an attacker to wipe out an entire base is a bombing mechanism which is build in under a minute after he has found your base. Or just set up a few tnt which is by all means very easy to get to.
So one can not effectively defend his base or belongings and the only way left is to run for tech supremacy and keep anybody else from reaching the tech level necessary to harm you. But because explosives are cheap and easy to get its just impossible to keep an opponent from gathering a stack of sand and hunt down a few creeper.

And if one gathers a bunch of his friends they could easily camp the server spawn point too. So I really do not see the fun in playing a build-machinery and tech-tree based game-mod in an environment which enables the willing to destroy everyone's achievements with low tech (vanilla) stuff within a minute after he finds a base or building.

So based on those assumptions I do imagine an Anarchy-Server to be like a strategy game in which everybody has End-Game-Weapons in their pockets waiting looking for a Steve to send back to spawn.

So please enlighten me.

[Mason11987]

This is a honest question since I could never imagine how it can be any fun especially while playing with BTW. I know there are many who prefer to play on anarchy servers. So I would like to get some assumptions corrected.

• Because you have to fear someone will rob all your resources, destroy your base and bomb you back to Tier one while you are off-line one can not build large visible bases or farms so I would guess that the best concept is to run as far as possible from server spawn, find a natural cave so no one can follow your track and more or less hide.
• • That's true, you can't build large visible bases, but you don't need a natural cave, I built my first base in anarchy by finding a big mountain digging into the dirt up top then replacing it. A few minutes later it's completely invisible
• Because leaving mine shafts open would direct anyone directly to your base you would have to replace any block of stone you dig or mine far away from your hidy-hole.
• • Not really, you could dig your mineshafts in a non-standard way. It's EASY to dig shafts in a way where it's nearly impossible to find the center. It's also easy to set up holes to lava in the wrong tunnels/turns. If you've ever fallen into lava or go lost in your own mineshafts you could see this. Your base also could be ANYWHERE above your mineshafts. So anyone who encounters a 16 chunks wide mineshaft operation could easily miss your base 40 blocks above this area in a hill, even if they spent a lot of time looking for it.
• Building farms or huge machines is only "save" if one spreads them so loosing a kiln does not mean your pottery and soul-bottler are gone too.
• • Sure, spreading them out is an option, another option is once you get safe you can put some "backup" chests in far away locations that are impossible to stumble across, I had about 3-4 of these on jaded's anarchy server, with everything I would need to be up and running again, except animals.
• Defending such an array of not connected mini bases is of course impossible, you can not be at two locations at once.
• • Sure, but defense is really about obscurity, and FC did say he would make death mean more, so traps would mean more in the future.
• Building traps is only effective for one hit because after the location is known the attacker can simply dig around it or wait until you go off-line. So camouflage is the best bet.
• • True, but obscurity is the best defense, and since you can't remember coordinates you may never re-find that base 3k blocks from spawn, so one hit might be all that's needed.

Nevertheless after you spend hours of work getting to soulforged steel all it takes for an attacker to wipe out an entire base is a bombing mechanism which is build in under a minute after he has found your base. Or just set up a few tnt which is by all means very easy to get to.
So one can not effectively defend his base or belongings and the only way left is to run for tech supremacy and keep anybody else from reaching the tech level necessary to harm you. But because explosives are cheap and easy to get its just impossible to keep an opponent from gathering a stack of sand and hunt down a few creeper.

This is true, but getting to steel isn't really all that hard, and you would have back up bases in other places in the world likely.

And if one gathers a bunch of his friends they could easily camp the server spawn point too. So I really do not see the fun in playing a build-machinery and tech-tree based game-mod in an environment which enables the willing to destroy everyone's achievements with low tech (vanilla) stuff within a minute after he finds a base or building.

Yeah, but camping spawn doesn't get you anything, who cares? I haven't seen this as an actual problem because there is so much to lose (the armor/weapons you're using to kill unarmed people) and so little to gain (they have nothing)

So based on those assumptions I do imagine an Anarchy-Server to be like a strategy game in which everybody has End-Game-Weapons in their pockets waiting looking for a Steve to send back to spawn.

So please enlighten me.

It's a different kind of game for sure, one of the reasons I played it a lot was because it actually created fear. The feeling of finding someones base that may or may not be occupied is something COMPLETELY different from any other experience in minecraft. The same thing happens when you negotiate trades with another player, there is suspense, there is risk, you have to plot out where you'll meet. It isn't just interesting like BTW normally is, it's EXCITING. It's not for everyone though and there aren't full-proof ways to stop assholes from ruining the game for everyone in every situation, but it's getting better with each BTW release.

Give it a shot, preferably on a new server so you have equal footing, maybe with another friend. As they say, don't knock it til you try it.

[SterlingRed]

Anarchy is an entirely different mind set. It adds a new level of strategy to btw. It makes you think about the impact noise levels of your base could have on it being found, it makes you think about the size of your base, how you conceal the entrance, etc. It also encourages multiple bases in case you get raided, you don't loose everything.
If you're interested in that sort of challenge, check it out.
Personally I only take something from a base if I need it for my own progression of the tech tree. PvP, I really only do if its a player I've had conflict with before or if I know the player has something I want.
A lot of people get bored in anarchy SMP because they join expecting lots of activity, but the problem was everyone spread out and hid.
Recent changes help this a lot and the future of btw is tied to the strongholds which are fixed locations. So its only going to get better with time.

[EvanT]

I do not rule it out without giving it some thought first, that is one of the reasons for this topic. The other is the topic in which they discuss how to build a low-resource /max-boom area effect bomb with BTW.. which is completely unnecessary because vanilla gives you everyting you need for that.. BTW offers a very effective time trigger though. (I posted over there) (by the way do BB react to opening chests?)

While the scenarios (trade, forming of friendships/allies, lurking death) are providing a nice level of adrenalin isn't it angering to login and find yourself standing in a lava field which was your base not 3 hours ago (with hardcore bucket that is impossible (or hard to achieve I should say).

And by "better" you mean more potential fatal PC encounters?

Maybe my experience with the asshole faction is setting this off but aren't 95% of those encounters like "Nice basssse you got there!"

[TheAnarchitect]

We're still sorting this anarchy thing out a bit.

Here's the deal as I see it: with most vanilla MC servers using a host of block control options and the like, most griefers can't do much there. So they gravitate to anarchy servers because they can grief. Anarchy servers get a reputation for being a grief fest, which drives more players to controlled servers, until they're all on controlled servers and anarchy servers are nothing but griefers griefing griefers. That develops into the accepted style of anarchy play: hide your shit, and if you find anyone else fuck their shit up before they fuck you up. People think this is how anarchy HAS to be played.

But is this playstyle inherent to anarchy play? Not really. If you look at the progression, it's actually a product of all the non-assholes leaving. It's analogous to how Middle class relocation to the suburbs in the 50's and 60's caused the horrible inner city conditions of the 70's onward. If all the decent people leave, then all that's left is a collection of assholes. Anarchy play got abandoned by everyone but the griefers.

Now BTW goes multiplayer to much fanfare and rejoicing but what's this? Anarchy only? Oh dear god I don't want to play in an endless grief fest!

I don't think that's gonna happen in the long run. Sure, at first there's gonna be a lot of it, because people associate anarchy play with griefing each other. But there's one important component of the progression missing. There's no option for block control if you want to play BTW SMP. There's no controlled servers for people to flee to. So while individual servers might end up getting abandoned due to bad culture, every server has the same vulnerability.

Why is that a good thing? This is Hardcore server mode, people. Block control mods are like F3. They're entirely artificial, hacky solutions to the problem that ruin immersion. They're an easy out for people to avoid coming up with in game solutions to the problem. With no control mods to force cooperation on people, you're going to have to actually work at *gasp* BUILDING a server culture that involves being decent to each other. And also figuring out in-game ways of dealing with the griefers instead of abandoning the server to them. Is this gonna be hard? Yes, especially since we have this ingrained idea that anarchy=griefing. Is it gonna be worth it? Oh yeah.

[Adjudicator79]

This is Hardcore server mode, people. Block control mods are like F3. They're entirely artificial, hacky solutions to the problem that ruin immersion. They're an easy out for people to avoid coming up with in game solutions to the problem. With no control mods to force cooperation on people, you're going to have to actually work at *gasp* BUILDING a server culture that involves being decent to each other. And also figuring out in-game ways of dealing with the griefers instead of abandoning the server to them. Is this gonna be hard? Yes, especially since we have this ingrained idea that anarchy=griefing. Is it gonna be worth it? Oh yeah.

I completely agree with your analysis, Anarchitect. The problem is that, again, this presumes that everyone has hours and hours to spend on a game to develop that culture and make it worth enjoying. For those of us with limited playtime, the investment doesn't equal the reward. I don't want to have to spend 75% of my available play time developing in-game ways to defeat griefers or interacting with assholes online to try and educate them into something approaching human behavior. I want to build stuff with other people and have fun doing it. Until there's some kind of community agreed-upon standards that damp down griefing behavior on anarchy servers, I'll contentedly plug along in my SSP world and engage with a predominantly civil community here at the BTW forums. Hell, I don't even read the MCF forums any more because the time investment of wading through the crap there is so much less efficient than just sticking with the BTW community.

Anarchy may be a lot of fun, if you've got the time to put into it, but for those of us with limitations on the number of hours we can pour into a game, it falls short on the cost-benefit analysis.

[EvanT]

OK that sounds like getting the people of a server to form a community which can camp the spawn point for the griefers instead of just banning them? So in that mindset a whitelisted server is like an protected neighbourhood (those with the guards, fences and security cameras) in RL?

But that's the problem you can't punish the player for griefing (and you should not be able to it is still a game) so the player will just go to the next server and start over.

I guess this forum is a good example too any troll or uneducated suggestion maker gets banned (at least to set an example for all the others) constructive members get promoted. So that's the "game" mechanic of this forum to keep the people sane. This can .. (oh that was going to be a suggestion like statement)

I run a very private BTW-Server (just three players, will be four soon .. maybe) with rules I will enforce. But this is a RL-Friend-Server so the rules are not apply able to the majority of servers.

Yes there are no Servers to flee to so the sane guys are enforced to make their stand.. OK sometimes one has to say things out loud to recognise the designers intention. I really am looking forward to see how Flowerchild will hand out weapons game mechanics to the sane to keep the scum at bay.
But until then I will stick to my private guarded server where I have the bannhammer and restore-a-backup powers.

[Cuchonchuir]

I see nothing "wrong" with anarchy play if that's what someone wants to do. It's not my bag, and I think the problem with trying to create a "civil" society on any server is that there's just not really a population base. Without thousands and thousands of people, there's no natural social control - you just have a clique. Either everyone is included and everything works okay (as it does on my private server, we're just a few friends who cooperate), or you have some people who aren't in that clique and they grief/get griefed.

Some mods try to alleviate that by essentially acting as digital police, keeping out the unknown and potentially dangerous or catching them in the act and banning them or denying them the worst weapons they could use for griefing.

If I went out right now and started smashing windows in the houses of people at work, I'd be caught and stopped by other people who saw me and called the police. Minecraft has no police, and if you have a neighbor, they might grief you because there aren't other neighbors to monitor them.

This lack of social control is something FC is addressing with hardcore spawns. It may change a lot, by essentially acting in a way to create control over people's random urges to destroy something just because they can.

Again, I'm not saying anarchy play is "bad". Just saying that right now it's not really a society that can police itself. It's anarchy.

[TheAnarchitect]

Just saying that right now it's not really a society that can police itself. It's anarchy.

This statement bothers me but explaining why skirts the "No politics" rule. Lets just say that it's inaccurate to term a society that can't police itself an "anarchy" or to imply that anarchist societies are incapable of self-policing. Anarchy doesn't mean "No rules," it means "No rulers."

It's certainly valid to say we're not there yet. I for one am glad because entering a multiplayer situation where the social contract was already in a stable state would be about as fun as starting a new game of minecraft and finding all the automated factories built already.

[Indras]

I have three basic problems that keeps me from playing anarchy in BTW.

1) Destroying is very easy. Building is hard, especially complex BTW machinery that actually does something. In a normal minecraft world, if I see half a house missing due to a creeper crater, I can usually very quickly figure out what blocks are missing based on symmetry and/or visual theme and put it back together, even if I didn't make it. With BTW machinery, one blast of creeper, TNT, mining charge, soul-urn made ghast, etc. and the destruction can take quite a while to fix, even a machine I built myself just a few days ago. In a mod where the placement of blocks matters, like orientation of gearboxes, a little destruction goes a long way.

2) Not everyone is online at the same time. I've played on quite a few SMP servers, some modded, most vanilla. Inevitably, at some point I am the only one logged in. Mostly this is because I work odd hours, and tend to play in the wee hours of the morning. I am not a griefer, but if I was, this would give me incredible amounts of power to destroy and be completely undetected. Some servers have tools to let you see who destroyed a particular block, and even give you the ability to ban that player and roll back the damage. Nothing exists like this in BTW-compatible SMP servers.

3) On a similar note, it is very easy to cheat in Minecraft and not get caught if you are smart. I've been an admin for a large non-whitelist minecraft server. Detecting and banning cheaters is a full-time job. Fly hacks, inventory hacks, X-ray mods, X-ray texture packs, et al. are very easy to find and install. If you use them carefully, it is next to impossible to get caught. Digging a 1x1 hole straight down into a mob spawner room, grabbing the loot, and climbing back out with a stack of dirt is fairly easy to detect. However, if you get there in a non-obvious manner that makes it look like you stumbled upon it by accident while mining, how can anyone prove it? And the REALLY blatant cheaters, flying around at warp speed, throwing fireballs/bombs as fast as they can click can go completely undetected if nobody is there to see it without some form of server logging (see point 2).

I love the concept of anarchy play. I like the increased fear of getting found, of figuring out how to hide your builds, keep noise to a minimum, and so on. I like the idea of going out hunting for other player's homes and sneaking in to steal a few choice things that hopefully will go undetected. It is the truest form of competitive play in Minecraft, even if there is no clear winner or loser.

However, all of that falls apart if even one player is dishonest and uses an xray texture pack and can see right through the ground at everyone's creations below. And frankly, my time as an admin has made me come to realize that cheaters are everywhere, even on whitelisted servers with only a handful of players.

[FlowerChild]

Guys, I don't think the term "griefing" applies anywhere near an anarchy discussion. You may not like it, but it's an integral part of anarchy play, and one that I practice myself when I feel the urge to do so. The point is freedom. Whatever in-game solutions you find for defending your stuff is entirely up to you, and again...in game.

Cheating is another matter, and is of course a problem: probably even far more so than on a creative-style server.

Also, I'm fairly tired of people that obviously don't even play anarchy bitching about it as a play-style. Play it for yourselves if you want to have a reasonable discussion about it. Talking about whatever prophecies you may have for it based on your own fear of actually trying it is entirely masturbatory, and I think you can spare the rest of us having to wade through the resulting strictly theoretical posts.

So try it, or please STFU. Those kinds of posts are incredibly tiresome for people that do enjoy playing this way.

[devak]

While i don't really enjoy the prospect of griefing as an integral part of gameplay, i think the recent minimap incompatibility and the removal of coordinates makes me feel a whole lot less objected to it.

I have a massive underground project on a non-anarchy server, but there were some griefing problems. a guy travelling 4k blocks just to grief made me uber-paranoid. Anyway, after i removed every trace of my base from the surface, i found some people had simply tagged the location of my base with a Minimap program, which made me even more paranoid.

So yea, happy that any person seeking to deliberately harm people, will no longer have such cheat tools, making the possibility of repetition and endless harrassing by someone a LOT smaller. Also, it makes stealth worth something, or even terraforming the surface to throw people off.

Basically, my objections to it are decreasing every release...

[DaveYanakov]

I actually assumed that when people were talking about griefing they meant cheaters. Having people find your stuff in a legit manner and destroy it is totally kosher. Either give people a reason to not destroy it because leaving it intact serves their own self interests or learn to hide it better. That's part of the design challenge. As it stands, whitelisted servers are still a good idea.

[FlowerChild]

I do want to make one note on this:

I think people may have the mistaken impression that moving up all the way through the tech-tree should be somehow a guaranteed part of the play process. In anarchy: it really isn't.

Yes, as people have mentioned, building large bases where you can produce everything in the mod is actually dangerous in itself as it means you are investing more and more time into a fixed location that may be overrun by barbarians wielding stone weapons at any time.

IMO, this is exactly how it should be. Someone walking around in SFS armor should both be a sight to be feared, and a strong motivation for other players to knock that person back into the stone age. He is exhibiting a huge technological advantage over them, and the natural tendency will be to try to keep that in check.

When you play anarchy it is with the implicit acknowledgement that pretty much everything you have may be lost at any time. That in itself is a big part of the fun, a big part of the fear and motivation for camouflaging your possessions, and a big part of the reason why it is not for everyone.

When I see people discussing out of game "solutions" for that, it is inherently frustrating for me, because it's also a big part of why I love this play style. To me, it is not a problem to be "fixed", but an incredibly challenging aspect of gameplay to be embraced. Anarchy is like playing MC with the whole world having turned against you and having become hostile while you struggle to eek out an existence in it and get whatever edge you can over it. To me, it's "survival" magnified by a few orders of magnitude. No, you won't be building gigantic and magnificent castles like you might in SSP or friendly SMP because they are an inherent liability. No, you will never be establishing a permanent base, as sooner or later, you will be found and it will be destroyed. Your whole mode of thinking and playing must adapt to the new circumstances it presents.

Similarly, when I hear about people building bases twenty kms out from spawn on anarchy servers, and then just playing as if they were in SSP, it is inherently frustrating for me as it's obvious these people don't actually want to be playing anarchy and will just scream bloody murder if and when their base is eventually found and leveled. Why these people don't just play on a friendly server to begin with is really a mystery to me.

Most of the changes I do make with regards to it are to enhance its purity in that regard. No more magic navigation for example. No more magically popping back to your base on death. With my upcoming Hardcore Spawn, no more spawn camping either and increased significance to player death.

[Dextralus]

EDIT: Darrr, ninja'd in part by the man himself...

For someone who has never played anarchy at all, much less anarchy on a BTW server (having only done the former myself), I think it will be important to keep in mind that BTW provides a very different set of constraints and incentives than what is offered in vanilla.

Consider an example: someone once broke into my base and stole some stuff, but did very little damage. What could they have done in this case anyway? * At worst they could send me back into the mineshafts looking for watermelon or pumpkin seeds. They could kill the wolves I never tamed or the cats I never used. For a melon farm, they'd have to destroy every stalk, every melon, and every slice to set me back that far, and all to very little benefit of their own. Furthermore, the actual work involved in even the most minimally effective vanilla melon farm is very small. One water source block will provide for what, about 20 melons? It's not as though access to water is limiting in any case. In this kind of scenario, breaking your stuff really is, at best, an annoyance. The cost to you is minimal unless the other person is very, very thorough.

Then, think of the kind of damage someone could inflict on you with one well-placed TNT block in your factory. It takes me a couple stacks of dirt to repair tnt damage in vanilla and be back to working order. If someone detonated your factory, how much time and effort has been vaporized in that instant? The need and motivation to hide yourself very effectively is much greater. The reward for finding someone else is much greater - you no longer have to make all those SfS blocks, because you just stole 17 of them from someone else. Stealing is much more legitimate an approach because you actually have something to gain rather than accumulating stacks and stacks of diamonds that are never used. This isn't even touching on the now-or-future need for indestructible natural resources like the server spawn or the map's three strongholds.

Or another scenario: you stumble across another player. Now, you figure you're well-matched with the other person. You could probably kill them if you wanted to. In vanilla, there are a few things to consider. First, you're wrong and they kill you - this would boot you back home, to a modestly safe space, and they have no idea as to where you've just deathported. You lost your equipment and levels. No worries though, you'll probably gain those levels back mining more diamond or iron to replace aforesaid equipment. On the other hand, you might kill them. Well, you gained their xp, which you don't need because you're bathed in xp from mining and smelting. You gained their equipment which might be of some use to you when your own breaks. But they're gone and safe for the moment. Unless this is a confrontation inside someone's base the period of vulnerability is over.

But now, this is a BTW server - that bed won't put them back home. Whoever dies is back at the server spawn and running home uncovered and vulnerable. Now you have to weigh your options for returning home. If you build far from the spawn, every death is a considerable pain in the butt due to the travel time - and you have to know exactly how to get back. But maybe that's impractical - now you have to build and hide a rail system at some point along the way. And anyone who finds it gets a path directly to your house, or, a very easy way to kill you with a bit of digging. If all that seems awfully impractical, you could build closer to the spawn... But that has it's own risks.

The tl;dr here is that you probably don't have a lot to gain by comparing your worries and expectations to a vanilla anarchy server because BTW significantly changes a lot of very important features that affect player behaviour and motivations in anarchy. And this doesn't even touch on something like what Anarch is expressing, in trying to get the players to set their own standards and possibly work together.

----

* I will grant that a particularly villainous person might build a trap around my bed that perpetually murders me with no way out.

[Mason11987]

Similarly, when I hear about people building bases twenty kms out from spawn on anarchy servers, and then just playing as if they were in SSP, it is inherently frustrating for me as it's obvious these people don't actually want to be playing anarchy and will just scream bloody murder if and when their base is eventually found and leveled. Why these people don't just play on a friendly server to begin with is really a mystery to me.

I get this definitely. And I'm happy knowing that you've solved this partially by removing coordinates/beds and the final nail in the "hide extremely far from spawn" strategy will be your mentioned goal of creating points of control.

This will mean the people hiding may be safe but they'll lose something meaningful, and if they trek all the way to the point of control to try to get it and die they'll have to run 20k back to their base (if they can find it!)

That'll be the nail in the coffin for 20k-from spawn bases in anarchy. I'm excited to see how that changes the game, and I hope there'll be a few servers that start fresh at that point to create the real experience.

[FlowerChild]

That'll be the nail in the coffin for 20k-from spawn bases in anarchy. I'm excited to see how that changes the game, and I hope there'll be a few servers that start fresh at that point to create the real experience.

Yeah, it's definitely something that I've been aware of and planning for, for a long time now. I had many "it should really work that way" moments when I used to play a lot of vanilla anarchy, and those are now slowly working their way into the mod now that it is SMP.

Again, I don't think those players should even be playing anarchy really. It's obviously not the kind of play experience they actually desire, and they're just taking up a server slot and bandwidth (probably a fairly large amount since they'll have more developed bases than everyone else) on anarchy servers for nothing by playing that way. In putting themselves in a position where they never interact with other players, they probably shouldn't even be playing SMP.

It's really rather rude when you think about it.

[Extreme Boyheat]

Anarchy promotes smart play.
If you're silly enough to let your belongings and structures to be stolen and destroyed, you're deserve it. :P

[Andellmere]

All this sharing provokes me to share something:
I suck at anarchy.
No. Really. I can't hide my buildings very well, I'm terrible at finding others and even worse at actually fighting them.

And yet... I enjoyed the short while I got to play on the jade server. You know why?

I dug through probably 20 blocks of stone with my bare hand in order to try and ambush someone. I was betting on the element of surprise to carry the day. Wooden sword in hand, I bust out of the ground and see my 'victim' has a partial set of iron armor and an iron tool of some kind. Needless to say, I ran over the nearest hill to hide.

A moment of peace after that and then a message pops up in the chat bar: "Thought I saw someone..."
And his name is getting closer. Desperation sets in and as he crests the hill, I attack! Knocking him back off the hill and away from my unarmored flesh. It takes three tries before he stops trying to come up the hill, and then he flees, taking to the sea. I decide, in a moment of pure hubris, to pursue.

Moments into the pursuit, I effectively cripple him, my sword shattering his boat and leaving me with superiority of movement. Two sweeps later, he breaks my boat.

One very short struggle and partial drowning later, my corpse, loot, and tiny amount of xp are sinking to the bottom of the ocean as I stand blinking in the server spawn. And a message appears in the chat bar: "Nice try"
I'm left cursing in the middle of a jungle as my killer is off setting up his base in a location I found, but only after he was long gone, leaving me cursing on the same hillside that I once drove him from.

And that set of feelings, from triumph to arrogance to the bitter taste of defeat, is why anarchy is the way to play minecraft.

And that's my story of anarchy play. Shortly thereafter, life got busy and I never got a chance to go back as I simply don't have the time to dedicate to a server where the world constantly changes.

[Cuchonchuir]

This is an interesting discussion, sorry if it's tiresome for the anarchy players. I think I understand their point of view a bit more now. Me, I'm definitely not the type to want my stuff destroyed; I'm very orderly and can't stand the thought of it being broken, lol. I also play minecraft to relax, rather than to have an exciting game (though again, that's just my view, and not saying others aren't legitimate). It's just a matter of preference.

The "flaw" I see in anarchy play is basically my own conception of wanting a peaceful and orderly society. Flaw is in quotes, as really I was coming from the incorrect assumption that the goal was to form a society rather than to have an exciting time - I've spent a lot of time thinking how interesting it would be to make a server with as many players as you could get and set it up like a feudal kingdom, with knights, lords, and a king, and very limited rights as you went down the tech tree - see how people reacted, rebelled, betrayed each other, et cetera. That's a digression, however.

This has been informative.

EDIT: Oh, as for the term "griefing", I always took it to mean basically doing anything that causes grief to another player; whether that is considered legitimate or not defines whether the server is an anarchy one or not. But if we take griefing to be implied rule-breaking on a non-anarchy server, then perhaps the term "sabotage" would be better for breaking someone's base on an anarchy server.

[OldMarriedDude]

I will never play on an anarchy server- why?

Well I learned many years ago that while destruction in the moment is exhilarating but the adrenalin is short lived and one must start the hunt all over again. For me, I get greater satisfaction in creating something than I do from destroying it. Perhaps it is because Ive seen enough death and mayhem in real life that I find it a pointless endeavor in my games. Obviously many games are based on creating mayhem and yes I do play them, I prefer Minecraft and BTW over all of those games because of its creativity value. Playing on an anarchy server would, to an extent, limit ones creativity in some areas but it would give way to creativity in a more hostile direction which for me is not at all what I am looking for in this game.

[Ultionis]

Anarchy play on Jadedcat's server has been my most fun BTW playthrough thus far, and knowing that it could all be blown to hell at any time adds to that. Creativity is still a factor, you're just not showing it off. In anarchy you have to get creative with concealment and automating in tight spaces.

I get a kick out of the constant imminent sense of danger, it's akin to flirting with death and doing questionable things with it in public places.

It's not for everyone, but you have to make your own mind up about it. Sharing my experience isn't going to make it any more real for you - so if you're still wondering whether it's fun, just try it out already, otherwise you'll never know.

[TheAnarchitect]

Old Married dude: Join me. I'm out to prove you don't have to be a dick to play anarchy, and it doesn't even help.

[odranoel]

Playing on an anarchy server would, to an extent, limit ones creativity in some areas but it would give way to creativity in a more hostile direction which for me is not at all what I am looking for in this game.

i agree completely with that. MC/BTW is the kinda game that offers many different styles of play, because after all people like to play in different ways. so anarchy is ideal for some, and a headache for others. this shouldn't really be an issue once the mod API comes out tho. because then as stated above, controlled servers for BTW would exist. so everyone will be happy again. those who like anarchy can play anarchy. those who prefer to build large and aesthetic surface structures and bases, can play on a controlled server with some form of anti grief enabled.

EDIT: spelling

[FlowerChild]

Old Married dude: Join me. I'm out to prove you don't have to be a dick to play anarchy, and it doesn't even help.

"Help" in this context is what you personally find fun man. So yes...being a dick on anarchy servers definitely helps me do that.