Please reply to this ticket with any and all problems that you have with Minecraft. ALL OF THEM. There is no problem too small, and no problem too big. There is no complaint too radical, and no complaint too basic. I want to know every. single. one.
DO NOT give responses to other people's complaints yet. This is solely to gather an initial wave of ideas. Later, i will open another ticket with an organized list of all the grievances given here where we can discuss them in more detail.
I guess i'll start this thread off. In keeping with the thread being simply to gather complaints, i'm going to just list out whatever comes to my as i write this without much thought about the order or whatever, like a stream of thought juice directly from my brain with no editing or filtering or whatever.
- Microsoft is a terrible company
- Telemetry is built in
- Servers don't have a built-in way to have local accounts if the server is in offline mode
- Java is generally compiled to a VM that's slower than direct machine code
- The game is slow; the fact that optimization is something that modders have to do instead of it just being a part of the game is bad
- Infamous client-server merger of 1.3.1—the fact that it's possible to experience server-side lag in single player would be insane in most video games
- Y'know how chunks kinda just pop in in the distance? I think that could be fixed
- Bedrock edition does this by fading the chunks in
- There's some mod in the RLcraft modpack that causes the chunks to appear to fly up from the ground when they're generated, which is also a cool effect
- There's also the level-of-detail mods, although i worry that could make it less clear to the player whether or not something is in simulation distance—having simulation distance be the same as render distance makes this clear
- This may not actually be that much of a problem
- One problem that i mostly don't have with the game is the graphical atmosphere of the game; this is something that should ideally be stolen straight from Minecraft to the degree that it's legal, bar maybe a few tweaks here and there
- On the other hand, the auditory atmosphere could probably do with some tweaks and fixes, particularly when it comes to ambient sounds and sounds being affected by the environment (e.g. muffled when in water, echoed when in caves); then again, this could be distracting to the player, and if it's overdone it could completely ruin the atmosphere of the game
- Come to think of it, one atmospheric thing that Minecraft could do with is more ambient, decorative structures that don't serve much purpose besides atmosphere (e.g. the desert well), though again this shouldn't be overdone or else it could ruin the atmosphere of the game
- One modpack that i remember doing an excellent job of using these to absolutely nail the feeling of adventure is RLcraft; then again, i never got particularly far in that pack, so i may not be the best judge there
- Though one thing that i did notice is that after a while, i kinda got used to all of the structures because there wasn't enough variance between them
- That could be fixed not by just stuffing the game with more and more ambient structures (and now that i'm thinking about it, ambient other stuff, like the weird little structure features like erosion and forest rocks and, uh…well frankly besides the desert well i mentioned earlier that's kinda it for ambient terrain generation isn't it), but instead by designing the ambient structures in such a way that they're generated with sufficient variation that they won't get boring quickly
- Really, one of the main things about the fundamental atmosphere of Minecraft is its simplicity, so we gotta be careful not to stray too far from that and we need to not go overboard with stuff
- On the topic of structures, i've learned that they're apparently generated pretty stupidly. Suppose there's a situation where a chunk is generated which contains some kind of big structure that overflows into the chunks around it. However, some of those chunks have already been generated! What should be done here? Well, what Minecraft decides to do is just completely overwrite the neighboring chunks with the structure. That's really bad if we want to have any big structures in the game; we don't want to have the player modify a chunk only for it to be overwritten later.
- Perhaps this could be fixed by having each chunk scan the chunks around it to see whether they have any structures that generate into them. But i'd be worried about the time complexity, since if we want bigger and bigger structures we're going to need to scan more and more chunks per chunk. And of course, this completely falls apart for structures of arbitrary size like villages.
- Perhaps a more clever approach is needed.
- Minecraft has insufficient built-in documentation, practically necessitating a reliance on tutorials and the wiki
- The advancements system is conceptually good, but the excecution that Minecraft uses is not
- A better execution of the advancements system could be used for a "user manual", whereas a more manpage-like approach could be used for a comprehensive "reference manual"
- These should NOT be a questbook! Finishing all the advancments should NOT be the end of the game! This needs to be made clear to the player!
- Hey, we could also have challenges too, both in the form of big tasks to do and in the form of self-imposed things to not do (akin to conducts)
- Keystrokes that the player can do at any particular moment should be shown on screen, maybe—i've seen other games that do this, and actually if i remember correctly i think that legacy console edition might have done this?
- The reference manual should not shy away from documenting things more complex than just the basic mechanics, e.g. common idioms that pop up or frequent strategies used in stuff
- I don't like biomes as a concept; what i think would be better is if we scrap the concept of biomes entirely and have the perlin noise or whatever directly influence the generation of the terrain without the middleman of biomes
- This would lead to a much more detailed world generation that would flow much more smoothly between different areas
- One important aspect of this would be that edges between different "base" blocks (e.g. sand and grass) would be dithered in worldgen
- On the other hand, this could make it more difficult to implement the "weird" biomes like the Mushroom Fields, the Ice Spikes, and like the entire badlands
- Gonna go on a bit of a tangent here, but i kinda miss the edge biomes and biome variants. I know that they were, like, clearly a bad design decision, but i still have a certain fondness for them. I'm still miffed that when the Nether got biomes, it didn't have any edge biomes or biome variants.
- Go onto the Minecraft Wiki and search up "odd generation". Weird stuff like that doesn't occur often enough.
- There's way too much boring grinding in the game. The enchanting system is perhaps the worst culprit in this.
- Grinding doesn't necessarily have to be completely eliminated, but it shouldn't be boring.
- Hell, i'd argue that XP grinders count as a form of pudding farming. Pudding farming is universally a bad game design decision.
- The fact that being AFK for long stretches of time so that an automatic farm will generate stuff is considered normal is a terrible design decision.
- Creative mode provides insufficient tools for building, and a lot of what does exist is arcane and not really clear to the average player (mostly i'm referring to commands here)
- Honestly, survival mode could also do with some tools for building
- Combat is one of the most controversial issues in Minecraft history; we'll need to have our own go at making a good combat system
- I'm not much a fan of how the most optimal way to do villager trading is to enslave them in tiny spaces in hallways to slave away eternally
- The concept of the illagers as a Purely Evil Race discomforts me
- The dye system fails to follow basic color theory (yep, i'm complaining about this again)
- Also, the dye system doesn't really map to any sensible color palette (the closest it gets to is the sixteen-color palette)
- There's just kinda too much stuff. Everything should fill a unique niche, yet there are plenty of things that either don't do that or take up a niche already occupied by something else. Worse, there are things that are too specific in their usage, like copper and echo shards. (That may not be the best way to phrase that, but hopefully you get what i mean by those examples.)
- Partial blocks might have been a mistake
- Inconsistency; why isn't there chiseled andesite or smooth stone bricks or cobbled granite, for instance?
- Minecraft's crafting system may be iconic, but it's also just, like, bad, and no game would create something like it today
- Relatedly, crafting blocks are not the best form of locking recipes behind progression
- The music added from 1.16 onwards completely fails to meld together with the classic music of Minecraft. It's not that it's bad (except for Lena Raine's music, which is corporate and soulless), but if you pay attention to the classic music of Minecraft (perhaps by listening to the albums), you'll notice that there are certain patterns in the music (this is most clear in Volume Beta, where some of the music directly samples from Volume Alpha); this is something that the post-1.13 music fails to do.
- The height limit is an unnecessary restriction (as the Cubic Chunks mod shows), and should be removed in all dimensions
- With regards to the end in particular, i don't like how the floating islands always appear around the same height and are always pretty flat
- Frankly, the end is just kinda lifeless in general, and while i know that that's kinda the point of the end, i think that goal could be achieved without it being so boring
- The sea level in the overworld and the nether might pose a challenge here
- PvE combat is disinteresting and doesn't provide a sufficient challenge
- The boss fights in particular are both kinda lame and notoriously easy to cheese
- Insufficient motivation to explore throughout the world
- Redstone is kinda crappy and relies on a lot of archane magic for things that are damn near necessities
- On the other hand, we need to be careful not to overcomplicate things, nor should we have things that are too specific in their usage or which do too much for the player
- Why is armor divided up into four pieces? Why is there a separate axe, pick, and shovel that all do the same thing, just on different blocks? Why are the tiers of gear so disinteresting? This stuff seems redundant to me
- Don't mind the dirt paths or the netherite
- Death is too harsh on the player; gravestone systems have proven to be the best way to mitigate this
- The history of stuff in the world over time is not kept track of sufficiently, meaning that historical artifacts in a world can just go poof without leaving behind a trace of their existence
- Why is there so much food when all you need is golden carrots and sometimes golden apples?
- A lot of the attacks that different mobs have aren't very interesting
- Inventory management is notoriously unpleasant, in part because there's just so many items in the game and not enough space in the inventory
- The amount of items could be reduced without reducing the amount of content; for example, block variants could all be the same item and the block they get placed at gets determined at placement time
- In my experience, almost the entire game happens after the "end" of the game; take a look at any popular series and you'll see that almost no time at all is focused on anything before the ender dragon in the modern day
- I'm not completely sure why i feel that this is a problem, but i definitely feel that it is
- I don't feel any sense of adventure when i play Minecraft anymore, and i don't know why