FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

There seems to be a lot of “why are you leaving Minetest?” asking recently. ...So, I thought I would address it here.

What I am doing is making a majority of a switch to MineCraft because of more users. With numerous resources as well as coworkers, friends and family, the choice for me is really obvious.

I am going to college right now for digital media and don't have time to pester those on forums or admins/moderators on servers. While I have a huge thank you to TenPlus1 who has sort of pointed out some obvious things I was overlooking, I'm just tired of the player vs player mind set with the exception of a couple of VannessaE's servers and my personal favorite, Xanadu server.

There is a lot still to be learned on Minetest but such a very limited number of servers to get on for someone like myself who is middle aged, (who's a 40 club member), I am being pulled in the MineCraft direction. What I don't like is going to a server like (name removed) server and getting spawn killed over and over, or a server like (name removed) where the server was so unstable, it was not playable at all. Or the worst ones, the screaming, spamming kids who fill the chat feed with nonsense. Seriously? These are the Minetest options?

Here's a bit of boring read…. I cannot stress enough that while I've played Minetest before I played Minecraft, the HUGE lacking element in Minetest is the “how to” mods. I've downloaded about 20 or so mods for my Minetest single player game but something like World_edit is completely foreign and I have no clue how to use it. There is no book to buy, no instructional video, only something that vaguely states how it works. *I never did learn the auto-crafter in the Xanadu server...I'm still lost.

I dont' think it will mean much but I did want to also say thank you to neri2, VanessaE, Neon, Fredrick, bonny, Big3Force, neozerosv, Texan...you guys have made playing on Xanadu fun. I'm just needing more social interaction when playing a multiplayer game. Hopefully, if (any) other server owners see this post, they may go over to Xanadu to see how the game interactions with players is managed. I just hate the fact that Minetest has only one server that is an option for me.

On one more note, I'm not leaving Minetest for good but I will be getting back on Xanadu because I don't get spawn killed and completely ignored.

Happy building!

I hope that you do keep playing minetest. It is not a one or the other. You can play both. Things change all the time and eventually there may be other servers that you like.
I agree that more documentation is needed for a number of mods. There are more youtube videos being made now. Nathan has a nice channel and does reviews of mods.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCr8qeS ... YMD7IPE0NQ

Goodluck to you and keep checking back. You never know what might happen in the world of Minetest.

botch wrote:I will be getting back on Xanadu because I don't get spawn killed and completely ignored.

If you're tired of the pvp mindset and you don't like screaming kids, getting spawn killed, and being ignored, you could always head on over to LinuxGaming2.com. We'd be happy to have you there! It's a stable server and the worst thing that I can say about it is that it gets lags spikes.

This post is plain ridiculous in every way.

We all know about those things you've said, and still, is not that bad. MT has few players, but that's not true for some servers, where I see about 20 users online at the same time. If you need to feel more people around you, head over Facebook.

There are more than enough servers for many subgames. If you don't feel like getting spawn-killed, go to a non-pvp server, like MFF Skyblock, and build. If you intend to fight other players, then don't complain about being killed all the time, since that's the point of pvp, don't you think??

If your issue is also being ignored, then do something important. Nobody will pay attention to you only because it is you. Who are you anyways?

You seem like a noob ragequitting. So I assume in Minecraft it will just be worse, since that game is full of trolls everywhere, then you will miss the quiet environment of MT.

since you were on xanadu i can't stomp you into the ground with my arguments how xanadu is better then the other servers you described, since you have probably seen it yourself.

i don't know how minecraft users behave, but you cannot cut off half of the statistics:
if there are more users, there will surely be more friendly users, but also an equal or greater amount of bad users.
in the smaller minetest community it is easier to know everyone, but in a huge minecraft croud, you never know what will happen. plus, there are not only human griefers, but npc griefers as well. (they walk into your house, go to your diamonds, and explode)

i hope to see you on xanadu more often. it has just become more lively since many people suddenly had the simultaneous idea to start a new city.
Phiwari123 also uses both, minetest and minecraft. and he is mostly on xanadu and copies the best buildings from famous minecraft maps. maybe you could work together ;)

Yet here you are... I saw you online the other day on LinuxGaming...

botch wrote:T I just hate the fact that Minetest has only one server that is an option for me.

Have you even tried the ESM server? Always 20+ people, everybody is really friendly, there is a tutorial building explaining how to do things, easy currency, and PVP is off in protected areas.

The server has everything in it to keep it a safe happy place. :D

Why have all of these leaving topics? The soul purpose is to just show "hey I played this game, none of you know me but I am leaving so ha" and then it also sometimes says "let me explain to you why I am leaving, I have not fully experienced every server and can't make a good decision based off of every thing the game offers.". Seems like people are just looking for attention and a way to (for a lack of a better term) express "vengeance".

Botch: I am sorry to hear that you are not going to be regularly playing. However, I respect your decision; you probably know what is best at this point. I hope to see you online more than "sometimes".
As for the previous comments:

Tmanyo wrote:Why have all of these leaving topics? The soul purpose is to just show "hey I played this game, none of you know me but I am leaving so ha" and then it also sometimes says "let me explain to you why I am leaving, I have not fully experienced every server and can't make a good decision based off of every thing the game offers.". Seems like people are just looking for attention and a way to (for a lack of a better term) express "vengeance".

RREDesigns wrote:This post is plain ridiculous in every way.

We all know about those things you've said, and still, is not that bad. MT has few players, but that's not true for some servers, where I see about 20 users online at the same time. If you need to feel more people around you, head over Facebook.

There are more than enough servers for many subgames. If you don't feel like getting spawn-killed, go to a non-pvp server, like MFF Skyblock, and build. If you intend to fight other players, then don't complain about being killed all the time, since that's the point of pvp, don't you think??

If your issue is also being ignored, then do something important. Nobody will pay attention to you only because it is you. Who are you anyways?

You seem like a noob ragequitting. So I assume in Minecraft it will just be worse, since that game is full of trolls everywhere, then you will miss the quiet environment of MT.

He can do whatever he wants, really. We like seeing him on Xanadu, but he has obviously already made up his mind. Let him be, there is no reason to assume and judge.

Also Illuna is a neat server with its own little community.
Our griefer and bad-kids protection is pretty solid and bulletproven.

I think the thread creator tried too less servers.

There is a lot still to be learned on Minetest but such a very limited number of servers to get on for someone like myself who is middle aged, (who's a 40 club member), I am being pulled in the MineCraft direction. What I don't like is going to a server like (name removed) server and getting spawn killed over and over, or a server like (name removed) where the server was so unstable, it was not playable at all. Or the worst ones, the screaming, spamming kids who fill the chat feed with nonsense. Seriously? These are the Minetest options?

I usually ignore shitty servers and go on with the next one. Servers come and go, and I would never (rage-)quit any game just because some servers happen to be bad. It depends largely on the community, which is in permanent flux, other than the game itself, which may change slowly or not at all. Checking back in a few months or so can (sometimes) do wonders. This is also in the very nature of a game engine like Minetest: Since the engine is very generic, servers (and hosted games) can be very different, so logically not every server fill fit everyone's taste. You may or may not find a server (or game) which fits your taste.
This is just how I see it, I don't try to “convince” you should stay or something like that. ;-)

I cannot stress enough that while I've played Minetest before I played Minecraft, the HUGE lacking element in Minetest is the “how to” mods.

I couldn't agree more! This is a very crucial point which is lacking. Currently, the only way to learn how something works is by looking for a readme file, or for a wiki, or forum posts, or whatever else you can find. But some mods don't have any documentation at all, which is very sad. Trying to figure out how a mod works can be very time-consuming. Figuring out Minetest itself is also not obvious.

Usability and documentation is not just “lacking”, it is utterly and completely terrible. The engine does not provide any documentation or even just a help interface at all, and also the mod situation is also very sad.
At least Minetest has a more or less complete Community Wiki. This resource was for a long time the only way to even get started at all. So it is not entirely true that there is no documentation at all. But I think just having a wiki is not enought. In my opinion, every non-trivial mature game must have an in-game help/documentation system because it is 1000% more convenient than printed manuals or browsing through messy “game wikis” (which I love/hate with deep passion), both in usage and maintenance.

In the past I have tried to improve the situation a bit.

First, I have created the Tutorial subgame and tried hard to get it into Minetest by default, but I failed so far. Some players had shown even a very strong opposition to the very idea of a tutorial, which sounds a bit crazy to me, to be honest. The tutorial is technically finished at major version 1, but the newer major version 2 is still experimental. I should fix the bugs when I find the time.

In the past weeks I have worked on a new mod called “Documentation System” [doc] to provide a generic framework for mods to add their own documentation, and I already released mods to explain many blocks and items. If this mod and related mods gets finished and gains widespread adoption, this will be a huge step forward. Understanding how “weird block X” works would (hopefully) only require a few mouseclicks, instead of endless wiki/forum searches which (experience shows) often yield wrong/outdated results anyhow. Development on this mod is currently slow because I am busy with bullshit.