What’s a company that objectively improved after it got “bought out?”
Everyone knows the tale of Brand X getting bought out by some faceless global conglomerate and going to shit, but does the opposite ever happen?
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Minecraft maybe? I would say at the minimum it's a net neutral but considering how far off the deep end Notch is now I imagine it was a good thing.
They've made some pretty awful changes to the game since. That being said, I bet minecraft would have fizzled out if microsoft didn't purchase them. They're still pumping out regular updates and its popularity is huge. I'd definitely consider the acquisition an overall win.
What awful changes
Accidental delete.
Like forcing everyone over to a microsoft account, which will sneakily force you to hand over your phone number for verification for "suspicious activity" ~1 week after registration, no matter what you do or don't do.
There was also something about channeling all server chat messages to a central filtering team/system, and irreversibly banning anyone who said something that's not "child safe", even if it was just on a private server where the measure was not turned off
I guess the Microsoft account thing I don't really get, it wasn't difficult to move it over in my experience but I already had several Microsoft accounts for Windows and Xbox stuff
Idk about the filtering thing, i definitely don't like it in theory but also haven't seen anyone actually banned/muted due to it, definitely doesn't make sense that it's enabled by default on private servers, should have been a realms only thing, then again a majority of servers with most of the population likely aren't on realms
I guess the Microsoft account thing I don't really get, it wasn't difficult to move it over in my experience but I already had several Microsoft accounts for Windows and Xbox stuff
For new MS accounts they now require a phone number. Not at registration, but in a week after it.
The game has overall become way too easy. 1.14 villagers completely broke gameplay making trading and building iron farms way too boring. The pre-1.14 mechanics were way more balanced and fun. Raid farms are just way too powerful especially with the nerf to natural spawning that 1.18 brought making witch farms basically unusable. Loads of features like that which just made things too easy. It feels like you're rewarded too much for very little effort.
Chat reports and microsoft migration are also really controversial, of course.
Not to say that they haven't made lots of positive changes but that's my main gripe with the development over the past few years.
I think it's only easy if you know all the tricks for farming and whatnot, normal players wouldn't likely say it's too easy necessarily, I also didn't notice any big change between 1.13 and 1.14 unless you mean the light level thing?
People will always find a way to break the system, and for longtime Minecraft players, it's nice not having to do all gathering by hand, instead being able to use your knowledge to create a ridiculous farm is... Cool imo.
To be honest though, I can't really get into vanilla in general, I'm always playing modded if I'm playing myself, tho I watch vanilla players like Hermitcraft
I also didn’t notice any big change between 1.13 and 1.14 unless you mean the light level thing?
They entirely overhauled villager trading making it a game of just placing and breaking workstations to get the trades you want. The pre-1.14 mechanics were a lot better and more rewarding imo. Iron golem spawning was also totally overhauled and they're just too dead simple these days. You can build a 900 ingot per hour farm in about 10 minutes or less.
People will always find a way to break the system, and for longtime Minecraft players, it’s nice not having to do all gathering by hand, instead being able to use your knowledge to create a ridiculous farm is… Cool imo.
I love farming, I'm a technical player so that's my main focus. I'm saying that the recent changes have really diminished the skill and fun in creating certain farms. Like how portal based farms have been the new meta for basically everything. Just changing it so mobs have a cooldown period after spawning before they can go through portals would be a massive nerf and force people to actually develop cooler farm concepts.
But you're a different kind of player then the "target" for these kinds of changes right? Think about kids playing Minecraft, you think they're generally going to be setting up massive raid farms, shulker farms, etc? Probably not, they'd be playing it more "as expected", which isn't really "easy" unless you know the cheese farms you can build.
Same kind of thing with storage, there's tons of storage systems out there that you can use, but majority don't know about it unless they go out and find the information online.
What's great about minecraft is that it can be enjoyed by kids but there's a lot of depth to what you can do as well. No one complained that it was too difficult to make iron farms before the changes. Also kids likely aren't farming thousands of obsidian blocks to make portal based farms either. There's a balance that can be made.
I agree but also don't understand where your problem really is, like you want it to be more frustrating to use the non-intended things in the first place?
The fact that you can make crazy raid or iron farms isn't a bad thing, compare that to how "normies" would play the game and how trying to balance the two would mean just overall worse experience for the normies most likely with more work needed also by the more in-depth farmers.
Rereading your prior response, I think I get where you're coming from, but I feel like it'd be very hard to balance such a large difference between the player bases/styles, like if mob drops were nerfed then typical players would noticably get less loot, or some people aren't into the designing aspect of farm creation but do it simply for the resources because they prefer to build or create redstone contraptions, idk.
I want the mechanics to have more depth and to be more challenging and fun to work with. Most normies don't build farms so the game would be pretty much unchanged for them. You could still make easy farms if you want to dip your toes into it but the effort to reward ratio would be more balanced.
I'm not familiar with the detail of that one - was he always a lunatic, or did that come with the money following the buyout?
He always was a weirdo.
Yup. Comes with the nationality.
Source: am Norwegian
That is what I call untrustworthy source, to much conflict of interest.
I don't know if it is better than when notch was in charge, but certainly they have updated it more frequently and have taken good care of it, true.
I think it was at its best once Jeb started to take the reins. Notch wasn't really good at adding features that were actually fun to play with. I liked that they were willing to take risks but that quickly soured as it pairs extremely poorly with their excessive traditionalism. It took like 5 years for them to undo the disastrous combat changes when it became quickly apparent that they sucked, and the hunger/sprinting mechanics are still a pure cancer to the experience to this day. I want to see them make big sweeping changes like in the earlier days while also not being afraid to dial it back or try again if it ends up not being fun.