
Economics of Minecraft - scribu
https://www.alicemaz.com/writing/minecraft.html
======
hopfog
Very fascinating and inspiring read!

I run a small browser-based MMORPG and I've seen a lot of interesting
metagames play out in the game economy.

One thing I thought of while reading this is the effect of scarcity. I
specifically remember one time when a stupid bug made the world a post-
apocalyptic wasteland.

My game has a political aspect where one player is the ruling king, giving
them a few unique abilities such as setting taxes. It’s a powerful position
and players are constantly fighting for the throne. The way this works is that
the king hires NPC guards to defend and protect the throne. The more guards,
the more expensive and time-consuming it is to dethrone the king. The downside
is that the upkeep to staff a full kingsguard is equally expensive. This has
naturally made it so that only the wealthiest players can actually afford to
sit on the throne and the easiest way to accumulate wealth is to run a shop.

The economy is centered around resources and mining. Normally the mines are
replenished from time to time but the bug broke this mechanic. The first thing
to deplete was the noble metals such as gold and silver, the same metals that
the wealthiest merchants made their fortune from. With prices going through
the roof a class division was created between players who had accumulated
metals before the bug and players who hadn’t.

The problem is that without good gear you have no chance of coup d'etat. Even
if you had a gold armor and sword you need a constant influx of new gold in
order to repair them when fighting the guards. Even bronze became a rare
commodity.

In effect, what happened is that the kingdom became a dictatorship. The king
could set maximum taxes without any consequences. Normally such action would
start a riot, have all players get their pitchforks and create a rebellion but
without good weapons this was impossible.

I finally got around to fix the bug once normal iron started to run out as
well and new players were restricted to useless wood gear, barely enough to
kill rodents. I lost a lot of players but it was a really interesting social
and economic experiment.

~~~
cejast
Sounds interesting, where can we play?

~~~
joefreeman
I guess here: [https://tombs.io/](https://tombs.io/)

(The coin mining doesn't work for me though - looks like my ISP (Virgin Media)
is blocking the coin-hive.com domain.)

EDIT: Oops, didn't fully read OPs comment. More stalking... Probably this one:
[http://canvaslegacy.com/](http://canvaslegacy.com/), but it's down.

~~~
hopfog
You're right that it's canvaslegacy.com and yes, the server is down at the
moment.

The screenshots on the website are from the new dungeon patch I'm working on.
If you want to get a better feeling of what the game is like I recommend
checking out the photo gallery on the Facebook page:
[https://www.facebook.com/pg/canvaslegacy/photos/](https://www.facebook.com/pg/canvaslegacy/photos/)

tombs.io is another multiplayer game of mine, or rather an experiment where I
explored the concept of using in-browser XMR mining as a monetization and bot
fighting method.

It won't mine anything without the player explicitly pressing the "Start
mining" button, in case anyone wants to check it out. It's totally unrelated
to my comment though.

(Fun fact since we're on HN: the backend for tombs.io is built with Firebase
and Google Cloud Functions. I haven't really seen anyone make a realtime game
with server-side authority using that stack before. Wrote a bit about it here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15977261](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15977261))

------
dannyw
If you liked this read, look into the upcoming ‘One Hour One Life’. Here’s the
description:

“A near-infinite, persistent online world full of untouched wilderness. Build
a new civilization from scratch, starting from rocks and sticks. When you join
the game, you're born as a helpless baby, with another player as your mother.
Each minute marks a passing year, and over the course of an hour, you will
live a full life, having children of your own along the way in the form of
other players, then growing old yourself, and eventually dying. Hopefully, in
your brief lifetime, you can make your own small contribution to this growing
world, passing something useful down to your children and grandchildren.”

I have no affiliation with the developer, other than enjoying his previous
games.

~~~
GuiA
Is this a Jason Rohrer game? Because if not Jason Rohrer probably wishes he
had come up with it.

~~~
ansible
It is indeed a Jason Rohrer game.

------
kiddico
This was one of the most entertaining things I've read lately.

I tried playing on minecraft servers with economy plugins, but never really
saw the point. I just liked mining for the sake of mining so an economy didn't
do much for me.

But this... it's like a gigantic meta-game on top of the game you're already
enjoying. Something tells me I'll be playing some minecraft tonight...

~~~
ReverseCold
Note that the server the author played on was in 2013ish (judging from the 1.5
version number given). I recently (2016) wanted to play on an economics server
but I don't feel it works anymore. It feels like the whole game got more
simplistic, no more metagame.

Not sure if it's just me or if the game's audience has shifted.

If anyone knows of a good economy based server, I'd love to hear about it.

~~~
KirinDave
Hi. Obscure fact about me: I started the Resonant Rise modpack and have helped
test and promote ATM3. I have also appeared in the minecraft productions of
the Yogscast. While less active now, I still know a lot of people in the
scene.

Given this...

I think you're right, the playerbase shifted. No one does it because the vast
majority of the playerbase is in 3 camps:

1\. Heavily modded servers. Lots of these servers revolve around gimmicks that
ultimately produce a lot of materials, be they Botania and Mekanism or some
kind of explicitly something-from-air premise like Sky Factory 3. The audience
here is all 20+

2\. Specialist modded servers that accept vanila clients. These are very showy
and vary in complexity from modest story driven affairs (see Lyinginbedmon on
youtube for good examples) up to the absurdly complex game-driven Hypixel
world. Lots of kids play here, and to them this IS minecraft. Survival-style
play in vanilla is no longer the norm.

3\. The very youngest end of the audience has almost no exposure to the game
as it was originally played, instead playing the subtly different mobile &
iPad editions. These folks may have multiplayer, but it's their parents paying
for a realms server.

I'm sure economy servers exist, but they're quite hard to find and they are
nowhere near they were back in the older 2013 (and earlier) days when that
sort of modest bukkit mods were THE way folks engaged the scene.

~~~
erikb
And here I am, only having played in beta, considering villages "a new feature
that I should try some day", and maybe even play on a multiplayer server, now
that the devs have updated the thing to a point where it's viable to play with
more than 5 people for more than a few hours before things crash due to low
performance.

That there even is something like a possible, viable economy in that game is a
news I haven't even considered realizable. And now you come and tell me that
is old news from 4 years ago. Jesus.

~~~
KirinDave
Well, this is not to say it's bad.

But try something like All the Mods 3 or Sky Factory. Here's a quick video
where I describe my mid-to-lategame custom power system to get a feel for what
kind of tasks we do in modded:
[https://youtu.be/5ztDvQan99Q](https://youtu.be/5ztDvQan99Q)

Not that I play very much. Learning Idris scratches the same itch as working
through the combinations of mods, so...

------
chezhead
I grew up playing minecraft and got into a medieval role-playing server. This
RP server taught me a lot about having moderation responsibilities and
politics between city-states of users. Also coming from a small town, it was
fascinating talking with people all over the world (mostly Scandinavians
though)

One server you might be interested in looking at is 2b2t[1], which is a
vanilla server which had the same map since 2010 and has no rules -- Hacked
clients are "allowed" since nobody gets banned for anything! Me and a large
group of people from another forum tried creating a republic there and I
learned a lot about how to organize large groups that would split off into
peripheral bases in a very hostile environment. Reading stories like this
really makes me nostalgic for those days!

If anyone knows any servers that have trading communities and mechanics like
the OP, please let me know!

[1][http://www.jamesrustles.com/2016/12/2b2t-history-2010-2016.h...](http://www.jamesrustles.com/2016/12/2b2t-history-2010-2016.html)

------
pluma
Surprised to see so many positive comments considering her behaviour in the
game seems eerily similar to that of the kind of startups HN likes to hate on.
Her success was mostly based on exploiting the naïvity of other players,
draining their money by selling excessive amounts of overpriced goods. She
even brags that "scrubs" complained about her behaviour. The traders she
bankrupted are the "moms and pops", the handful she eventually allied with
formed a literal cartel (and she even describes it as such).

Sure, it's "just" a game but she was clearly playing a very different game
from the one the majority of players were playing and it sounds like she was
adversely affecting their experience.

The account sounds more like a cautionary tale than something worthy of
praise.

~~~
BearGoesChirp
Why? To me this is no different than a person who is against mass murder being
okay with multiplayer first person shooters.

The consequences don't impact real life, you can leave at any time, and in
most cases it is very simple to recover, even if not fully.

I think the real interesting morality starts happening when it does impact
real life. For example, someone in a poor country farming items to sell on the
black market as a way to make real life currency they need to live. I've read
about (though am not really sure about the authenticity) of gold farmers in
places like Venezuela doing this to survive.

What happens when killing and looting someone in a game actually costs them a
meal in real life (even if the real money trading is banned, a rule is only as
good as it is enforced)?

~~~
nouveaux
"Why? To me this is no different than a person who is against mass murder
being okay with multiplayer first person shooters."

I'm not sure it's an apple's to apple's comparison. Multiplayer first person
shooting games are designed for mass killing. Minecraft players are playing a
game to gather resources to build things. Alice is playing a economic
simulation. Obviously she is going to win.

The equivalent analogy would be that Alice gets on to a Counter Strike server,
and somehow manipulates the economy where she gets the best guns and all the
other players get a knife. IMO, the game will not be fun for the vast majority
of the players.

Obviously, the consequence is minimal compared to losing a meal. The only real
consequence is that the perpetrator is a big bully and an ass. In real life,
we (as a society) would look down on an adult who went to the playground and
kicked out all the kids. There are no real consequences for kids to not play
in one particular playground, but that's not the society we want.

~~~
BearGoesChirp
>Minecraft players are playing a game to gather resources to build things.
Alice is playing a economic simulation. Obviously she is going to win.

What is missing is that people were still able to play minecraft without the
market, even on the given server. Did like the price? Then go mine your own,
with the same chance of getting it as you would in the vanilla version.

The only person who did anything bad (which I think may still be arguable, but
lets just say the only one who did anything bannable) was the one duping the
items.

If anything, the tax they implemented in the 1.7 server was worse than the
market takeover of the 1.6 server because it wasn't something a person could
opt out of and forced an effective black market.

------
sshagent
Was nice to read. Would love to read more of this "After sinking 10-20k hours
into a single MMO and accomplishing a lot of unbelievable things within the
confines of its gargantuan ruleset"

------
z3t4
The Minecraft multi-player experience always was a bit limited. You could have
fun building and exploring stuff with your friends, but PvP was a terrible
experience. Steel doors ? Just dig around them. Traps ? Just destroy it ...
Although I never played on the modded servers, the economy PvP seems like a
fun metagame, although very time consuming.

The best multiplayer experience I've had in Minefraft is the notorious 2b2t
server. With vanilla Minecraft, no plugins, no rules. Did I say the pvp
experience in Minecraft was bad ? Cheaters insta-mine all blocks surrounding
them, turn on x-ray vision to see diamonds and chests, etc, fly, speed run,
etc. There's literally no restrictions or checks on the server side, while at
the same time the server is a huge resource hog ... Because of cheaters the
spawn point on the 2b2t server is a complete wasteland, with experienced
players fully geared killing all fresh spawns. If you manage to avoid the
spawn-killers, you'll probably die from hunger. You have to run for several
minutes just to find a tree so you can craft yourself a pick-axe. And if you
manage to find food and survive you have to walk for hours until you find
unsettled land. But you'll have an incredible journey. You will pass ruins of
great castles, and monuments. Some of them still having farms with crops in
them, that will help you on your journey. And once you find unsettled land you
can build your own castle, or underground city.

------
extr
I used to do something similar in WoW, but less on the "know every item in the
market", mostly just a few crafting subsegments. There was a Auction House
plugin that let you monitor/record prices, so it was easy to learn the normal
price/supply of materials. Especially for things that didn't trade at a high
volume, it was easy to see that some uneducated player had listed a single
jewel at .5x the actual value and then auto-buy and flip it for 100 Gold
profit. As OP says, I do miss that feeling of completely understanding
something and being able to ruthlessly exploit it.

~~~
Dramatize
Yes, that was my favourite part of WOW. Had level 80s of each profession and
my own guild to use the guild bank.

------
pugio
Can anyone recommend a good book about the Minecraft phenomenon? Something
that covers its history, rise, proliferation; economics, education, global
engagement, etc. It seems like a really great story...

------
princeb
interesting post. having never played minecraft before i don't know much about
its multiplayer - i've always assumed it is a single player (or has a single
player component) where resources are essentially infinite. this appears to me
like the server admin incorporated scarcity in order to allow an economy to
develop. or perhaps scarcity existed in terms of time it took to procure
materials.

the other economy that appears to be fairly interesting to understand (but not
necessarily to partake in) could be EVE Online. Because I only have a few
unscheduled hours of free time a week to play video games, I haven't been able
to get into it. Eve is one of the rare MMOs to allow two-way markets which
presents plenty of opportunities for traditional market making. As far as I
can tell, pure arb is hard to come by given all the fees and most mkt mkrs
make money taking a combination of inventory, production and transport risk.
now if Eve standardizes chartering freight the economy will get closer to how
commerce works in the real world, but as of now these activities feel a little
disjointed.

as for the other MMOs, i feel they are a little bit on rails. games like WoW
and PoE allow all kinds of low-risk "arbitrage" because of the lack of a two-
way market. i played wow for a while and i found it's not much of a rush to
snipe ignorant listings as acquiring 1000s of g in raid materials to craft
raid level gear that sell for multiples, just from the tremendous risk being
undertaken. the best guild traders were not merely trading on the auction
house, they had Top-of-Orderbook relationships with "Chinese farmers" and
they'd craft discounted raid level materials into equipment and potions to
sell to new guilds getting into the heavily-gated raid scene (this was back in
2004-2008 when i was active), so that these new guilds may one day have their
best tanks poached by the very same guild that got them started in the first
place.

i played wow just before my college days when i was all ready to make an
education and career choice for the rest of my life. i was all set on EEE but
at the last minute switched out (to math/econs) when i realized i hadn't been
merely playing video games in the same way this person hadn't just been
playing minecraft.

~~~
BearGoesChirp
>or perhaps scarcity existed in terms of time it took to procure materials.

I would say this is pretty much the case.

Even the simplest most abundant resources takes time to harvest. And that rare
resources take much longer to fine, and can be much more dangerous to gather
(requiring people to suit up with a set of expensive gear that they could lose
in the process).

What makes different servers so diverse is that mods can drastically change
the underlying cost and risks of gathering material. There is a turtle mod
that allows you to program a turtle to mine resources for you. While it is
kinda slow, it runs steadily without intervention and can quickly strip mine
an area to provide you with plenty of resources. But it can't farm animal
items like wool, so it significantly lowers the time investment of ores while
not at all impacting animal product costs.

------
Cyph0n
This reminds me of the good old days of trading in MapleStory. I recall
spending many hours buying particular items from lower skill level areas and
selling them at a profit in areas where they are in demand. It was such a fun
game to play, but trading was the most interesting part of it for me.

------
lifeisstillgood
OK - really dumb questions

\- if your child (8years or so) loves minecraft but you think staying away
from public servers is sensible, is there a good way to introduce them to
these worlds or just wait for some years ?

\- what are the tools and scripts for looking at the real world like a
MMOneconomy game?

~~~
hackcrafter
Be warned of the time sink that is trying to get mods running on desktop
Minecraft.

Each version update breaks compatibility and your kids have a hard time
understanding why they can’t use that cool mod their friend told them about at
school where they portal to the moon!

------
samlewis
That was a really fun to read, well written piece.

Definitely makes me interested in trying something like this - does anyone
know of any other games that have similar economy aspects?

~~~
mos_basik
Eve Online. If you dare - it's a commitment. See some discussion in this
thread
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16027146](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16027146)

~~~
joshdance
Spreadsheets in space.

------
extr
i follow alice maz on twitter (@alicemazzy), was surprised to see her on the
front page here. not sure I agree with about half of what she says but she's
always insightful and interesting nonetheless. if you do twitter she's worth a
follow.

~~~
jd3
I almost never find her bargain bin brand of post-libertarian NRx/UACC
reactionary drivel insightful (who the hell unironically retweets kantbot and
those #rhetttwitter teenagers), but to each their own I guess.

~~~
extr
i don't really follow those circles well so maybe i'm giving her too much
credit. what does UACC stand for?

~~~
jd3
unconditional acceleration — think accelerationism but replace the traditional
adherence on partisan political paradigms (seen in L/ACC and R/ACC) with a
Landian (Nick Land from the CCRU) cyberpunk eschatological cult that employs
ironic internet culture and an anti-Fordist faux-mythologization of 19th
century literature & material relations à la alt-right.

There was an attempt to institutionalize the movement (outside of the twitter-
sphere) through the likes of LD50[0] and Vince Garton's Urbanomic piece[1],
but since their whole ideology is based around the principles of "anti-praxis"
the entire thing is kind of just a big self-own imo.

Anyway, I find people like Alice Maz (who suckle themselves onto these
fashionable but theoretically barren movements that fetishize an aesthetic in
order to aggrandize their own narcissistic image[2]) kind of annoying. I don't
doubt that Maz may make interesting observations about tech and cs, but I
can't stand the constant alt-right posturing on her tl.

[0]: although it is more of an outwardly alt-right thing, many of the U/ACC
people seem to engage and condone what is happening there

[1]: [https://www.urbanomic.com/document/leviathan-
rots/](https://www.urbanomic.com/document/leviathan-rots/)

[2]: I find this behavior also expresses itself more generally in the tech
world through the proliferation of ideological contempt culture and platform
capitalism

~~~
IIAOPSW
This raised more questions than answers for me.

What are we even talking about here? Economic theory? Political ideology?
Philosophy?

What exactly is anti-Fordist, accelerationism, L/ACC, R/ACC and CCRU?

~~~
bufferoverflow
That's what happens when someone wants to look/sound smart, but actually isn't
- lots of jargon, piled like spaghetti, impossible to follow.

Actual smart people are generally effective at explaining complex things
succinctly and in simple terms.

~~~
andybak
A bit harsh. He might be busy rather than a charlatan.

I often err on the hand-wavey side when I don't have time to do the topic any
justice. It was just a HN comment after all.

~~~
ansible
Yes. Though effective communication involves knowing who you are speaking too.

I have a mental model about the typical HN reader. So, for example, I would
not bother explaining the term 'container' in the context of application
deployment. Even for devops who don't use containers, just hanging around here
providers plenty of exposure to that concept.

But in this case...

------
IkmoIkmo
I'd hoped by the end the author and friends would've set up some kind of
labour system. After all, it seems they controlled the economy and controlled
a lot of mining-time indirectly. I'd have hoped this would lead to them
tendering large infrastructure & art projects / city-building with their
massive wealth and leave a long-lasting mark on their world.

~~~
andybak
For every Guggenheim or Medici there's a multitude of the elite who lack the
imagination to bequeath anything more than a garage full of gold Rolls Royces.

Maybe the conditions for that kind of behavior are less common than we think.

------
tw1010
I wonder if other societies would play Minecraft differently. Would people
coming from a more egalitarian background do things like this?

~~~
vidarh
Depends what you mean by "egalitarian" for starters. E.g. socialists come in
many shades - some want redistribution for the sake of some measure or other
of fairness, while some see redistribution as a means for the poorer in
society to _demand_ a better deal.

Assuming that people actually bring their ideals to a game - which is by no
means certain (my Civilization-style games tends to end with total war because
it's fun when nobody gets hurt for real), the two (and numerous variations)
would lead to very different results, and such results would also depend
greatly on ability of in-game enforcement.

E.g. you can't have a revolution and change the mode of production if the mode
of production is hardcoded into the server (property right enforcement;
protecting capital; inability for the in-game community to set and enforce
their own law rather than rely on the mods) - unless of course the mods are in
on it.

The latter, I think highlight a lot of the difficulty in getting such
societies to be good simulations rather than "good enough" simulations for
specific types of games: they tend to take a lot of shortcuts in enforcing
certain rules "out of game" because having malleable but reliable in-game
government and law enforcement is really hard to do with NPC's and requires a
fairly big and dedicated user base to make viable with human players, and a
lot of the potential strife it would lead to may not fit most games.

When the worst case consequence of a failed attempt at in-game revolution,
coups or large scale war is that you "burn" an account, and empathy can be
expected to be stunted by lack of perceived real world consequences for your
victims, it's much harder to expect people to behave.

~~~
tialaramex
The obscure MMORPG A Tale In The Desert has (had?) a mechanic to fix this
stuff.

Players have a mechanism to feed their desires into the actual game rules.
They also had some sort of indirect democratic control which enabled them to
give characters a death sentence, ceding all their property. I think they
elect a "Demi-Pharaoh", and the DP gets to give out one death sentence during
their "reign", something like that. So it was possible to _really_ screw
somebody who caused trouble.

However, Vanilla Minecraft has some labour-saving devices, where you invent
some resources to make more without proportional effort, e.g. using stone, and
metal from a furnace you can hook up a simple machine that turns wood into
charcoal and feeds the furnace, so compared to a beginner you are now using
much less wood to make the same resources, and no extra effort. ATITD mostly
avoids this, it has a strong click economy, a serious player must spend hours
every day clicking on things, machines that reduce the amount of clicking are
almost unheard of while of course clients that automate clicking _outside_ the
game are common. This can't help but tilt the way the game is played.

ATITD when I played it (many years ago now) was already a very niche game, and
I believe it now has even fewer players than it did then and is maintained
entirely by fans rather than a third party developer, but the reddit still
seems to exist, as does the game's web site.

------
pavel_lishin
That was a great piece of writing. It reminded me of the best parts of Neal
Stephenson's books, especially REAMDE. I wish there was more than just two
more long pieces to read.

It looks like there haven't been any updates in almost a year - does anyone
know what Alice is up to now?

~~~
sincerely
She's active on twitter:
[https://twitter.com/alicemazzy](https://twitter.com/alicemazzy)

------
BearGoesChirp
This reminds me of the time a few friends and I were playing a modded
minecraft server and destroyed the market and entered into a post scarcity
economy. The mods were different, but we took over so fast that every admin on
the server was investigating us for hacking (eventually we were cleared).

The server we were on was much smaller, and while there was an economy, it was
never to the point that B would buy from A just to resell at a higher price
than A was selling.

One game that fascinates me with its economy is Path of Exile. It tried to do
away with gold, and in doing so gave evidence that there will always be some
sort of currency. Granted, I think this was already shown in Diablo 2 when,
because of the gold cap being far below the value of the best items, a second
organic currency economy was born trading in runes (I think it was runes, its
been a long time).

------
AlphaWeaver
What a fantastic story. Brings back memories of participating in stuff like
this, it was always a lot of fun.

~~~
gamebak
What a great story, I remember I found the same mod on a server and I played
for one month on a daily basis until I got rich, mostly by taking advantage of
the trading system as well. Just that in my case the economy crashed and we
were forced to start over.

------
wowbot
Amazing! Wow such great buildings and style. Really blown away at how well
designed this project is. I used to play Minecraft with such a plugin and I
never built an empire hahaha. What an autistic pleasure to read!

------
nathan_f77
I've never played Minecraft, and I had no idea you could do things like this.
Add some VR and a few more plugins, and it's pretty much the Metaverse from
Snow Crash.

------
fpaboim
Well written, so many economic concepts easily explained by means of the
minecraft virtual economy..

------
pilif
_> No one who wanted wool for consumption was actually paying those prices, it
was all wool merchants buying each other out_

Kinda reminds me of Bitcoin. Or these free to play apps that force people to
look at ads of other free to play apps (on an infinite time scale, only the
bank^Wad platform will win that game)

------
Kiro
I always presumed Minecraft had most of the logic in the client but this kind
of complex economy obviously wouldn't be possible without someone cheating.
How does it work?

~~~
tialaramex
The server is the source of truth. The client only duplicates logic that's
present on the server in order to optimise for network delay.

For example suppose I smash a block of iron ore with a pickaxe. The client
tells the server that I used my pickaxe to smash the block of iron ore, the
server checks that yes, that pickaxe can smash the iron ore, and adds one
chunk of iron ore to my inventory. By duplicating this logic the client can
anticipate that I'll get a chunk of ore, but the fact it did that doesn't
actually give me ore in the world, it just means my display updates even
before the server replies saying "Also now you have ore". I actually think the
ore example doens't happen in modern minecraft because a better pick might
give more ore, or even auto-smelt it into iron ingots, and the server would
decide some of that randomly in some cases - but you get the idea.

Network problems can cause this to de-synchronise. The symptom might be e.g.
you dig a block of sand on a new server, your client shows you now have sand,
but when you move to where the sand was, your client rubber-bands and the sand
re-appears in front of you. But the server is the truth for everybody else,
they'll see you lurching about trying to dig sand but failing, and when you
fix the problem, you won't have any sand.

Modders are mostly working on the server, although since they add new graphics
and other elements the same mods are usually also needed by the client (it
just doesn't run the server elements).

Some logic does live purely on the client but it's mostly quality-of-life
stuff, e.g. auto-mapping. All the visuals live on the client. So a client can
make opaque blocks see-through for example, to some extent, which would be a
problem for cheating in combat games, and hit-scanning would be easy to cheat
in a client too.

~~~
rainbowmverse
This leads to fun things in high-load situations (like Extreme Hills biomes)
even on a local single player game. You break a block...and it comes right
back. Break again, comes back. The internal server is rejecting it all even
though it's on the same system as the client.

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gallerdude
This was an amazing read!

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choonway
wait till he plays against alphazero...

~~~
majewsky
> he

Her name is literally Alice. Women can be sucessful in business, too, y'know?

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kevin_thibedeau
How have the economics worked out for MS? Have they gotten a return on their
investment?

~~~
Flammy
Not really the point of this discussion...

That said, I suspect Microsoft views less as 'return on investment' and more
as value of having Minecraft on Xbox / Windows Store as an immediately
recognizable title, just like how they acquired Halo to do the same back in
the day.

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harrisjt
Monospaced font the whe way through? Killing me man. Good rrad though.

~~~
db48x
Your browser can enforce whatever font choices you want.

~~~
SolarNet
Do you think this is a place for hackers or something?

