Development Update; Minecraft 1.9.2 & Combat

[501warhead 1796]

Greetings Lord of the Craft!

 

Today I’m here with you to talk about our plans moving forward into the future with the controversial Minecraft 1.9.2 update, the “Combat Update”. I know my statements on the matter have already somewhat circulated throughout smaller groups but today I wanted to make a formal statement on the matter so that you, as a player, know what’s next for LotC. Before I get into the fine details of this announcement I’m going to take a moment of luxury to sidetrack into reasoning, explanations, and methodologies. You can skip this if you’d like although I would advise against it - it’s important to understand reasoning that goes into this.

 

Design Theory

 

I first joined the development team under the then Lead Developer Kowaman about a year ago now and began with a few goals in mind - I had this idea and mentality that I talked about in my post when I ascended to Lead Developer in July 2015 to create content for players to enjoy. For a while I was on the Event Team and Lore Team attempting to pursue these goals - trying to create content for players to enjoy. Did I succeed? Probably not, all things considered. I moved from these teams up to Moderator where I began to do further work, toying and tinkering with command blocks to try to create interesting events (and horribly burning out in the process leaving runesmithing the utter mess it is these days).

 

However I’ve had something of a flame sparked within me for developing and have taken to it heartily - from introducing Ice Boxes, “One-Chop” wonder axes, and other small quality of life fixes which have been slowly introduced into the game. Throughout this process I’ve been moving forward with one mentality and one that I hold as key to developing on LotC.

 

LotC is a game server which suffers from a strong and almost overwhelming sense of nostalgia - players often reminisce about the greatness of days of old and compare experiences that they’ve had to experiences of the past which are often boosted onto a higher pedestal than usual due to the process of remembering the good and forgetting the bad. While I do not hold nostalgia to be some great enemy I hold it with caution - developing content which has the only purpose of attempting to bring back a previous experience is flawed from the core.

 

With this in mind my motto has been something along the lines of “Keep moving forward.” The idea and principle is simple - while we can take and learn from the past the past is gone and cannot be relived so we must embrace the future, embrace our direction, and keep moving forward. Learn from the past but don’t get so caught up in it you fail to see where you should be going. Progressive action, new concepts, changing the game around - we’re doing these things to further LotC as a whole and move toward each new and exciting phase with a smile on our faces saying “What will we do this time?” Rather than looking at change with a pessimistic and wary view.

 

The News

 

Before I begin I must make at least one point clear; LotC is not and will never be a Legacy Server. This means that when a new update is released we will try our hardest to update the server as soon as possible so that it’s easy and clean for a new player to join or a wandering soul to explore. We aren’t going to halt the progress of the server entirely due to a dislike of a minecraft patch - minecraft moves forward and so must we. We are a changing server and we must embrace the changes and learn to work with them.

 

So, on that note here is the news - We will be integrating and using the Minecraft Stamina mechanic with the 1.9.2 update. For those of you unfamiliar with this mechanic after you swing with a weapon you are put on a short “cooldown” which, if you swing before the cooldown is over, will do less damage and reset the cooldown. In 1.9.2 this mechanic is changed a bit further albeit it’s client-side only; you can’t swing before the 70% mark. If you wish to change this mechanic so you can swing with the reduced damage at any time you can find it within your options.txt in your minecraft installation.

 

Reasons

 

So I covered some of the reasons behind this decision above but now I’ll go into full and explain exactly why we’re doing this with no reserve.

 

Firstly, Spigot/Bukkit/Minecraft have no way of “turning off” 1.9.2 combat. When the first version for Spigot 1.9.0 released I immediately delved into the process of digging through the new changes to see if there was some switch I could click inside of Spigot to allow combat to be reverted - it was futile. There is no native method for disabling this within minecraft or Spigot. Where does that leave us, you wonder? We would have to engineer our own “anti-1.9” combat system if we wanted to go that route. Let’s talk about that now.

 

Secondly, after digging for a little bit I accidentally stumbled upon this post by md_5, the Lead Developer behind Spigot. This little plugin he wrote was an example for editing attributes within minecraft, a feature introduced with Spigot 1.9 which LotC’s Dev Team has been waiting eagerly for. (Seriously, we had to literally write our own code to change attributes which had us digging around in minecraft’s server-side code. It’s a ******* mess.) In this example plugin md_5 creates a small snapshot of what we, as a development team, could do to “combat” the 1.9 combat update. Essentially, he adjusts the “swing timer” attribute in this code so that it emulates pre-1.9 combat, making the stamina bar so little (he sets the base attribute value to 16 in this code, by default it’s 4) that you can swing as fast (albeit probably a bit faster) as 1.8.

 

Now, this is bad. This is a terrible fix - md_5 posted this as a demo for coding allowing developers to understand how to use it properly and also gave a real example with how to do this which was relevant to a few servers. This is, however, not a fix. Why? The Stamina bar is just one part of the 1.9 combat overhaul and, while a notable factor in the 1.9.2 it is not the only major change that has come to the environment of Minecraft. Rescalings for the new system have been applied across the board, rescaling armor protection values and changing damage values between weapons and tools. All of this is centered around and focused around the speed that Mojang has set in place with the new combat update - just changing the speed actually imbalances things even further - axes which are intended to be slow and strong suddenly become fast and strong, insanely damaging in comparison to all other forms of weaponry. This is one of the large reasons we’re shifting to the stamina bar - the balance changes to Minecraft are too vast and are based around this mechanic, just scrapping it isn’t possible for balance - it would create massive imbalances and some we simply don’t have the ability to fix.

 

Third, Moving forward the Development team can do some interesting and unique things with attack speed. This is something I’m looking forward to - faster weapons with lower attack, slower weapons with strong attack, values based off of skill levels, we have a large kit of customizability with the attack speed. We can explore finally the concept of custom weapons in a fluid and simple way, allowing further reward for skill investment. I always keep in mind the concepts of what we can introduce into skills mechanic wise and this was one of the ones that I was the most excited about, introducing a variety of weapons which can be chosen from when going to battle.

 

These combined are the reasons we will be using the stamina bar. It will likely receive some tweaking by the team before implementation.

 

The Discussion

 

This is a heated topic of contention. I have already had many players come up to me with active concerns regarding this with very heated opinions on the matter. Some may agree, some may disagree with the actions taken here. This is an open letter from myself on the topic of the future with nothing left out in regards to my opinion on the subject and I hope that at the very least you, as a player, can empathise with my position on the matter even if you do not directly agree.

 

This topic will be left unlocked for discussion under the grounds that the following remain true, to be enforced by myself and the FM team.

 

1. Comments which aren’t contributing (e.g. “first”, quote-only, or image posts) will be removed if nothing is provided.
 

2. If you share an opinion with a post don’t repost it in different words, use the up arrow or the post will be removed.
 

3. Directly inflammatory and derogatory posts will be removed
 

I will be monitoring discussion here.

 

-- 501warhead, Lead Developer

 

EDIT:

 

Minecraft 1.9.2 patchnotes. They've worked on hit detection for those concerned.

 

EDIT 2, tl;dr:

We're going to be using Stamina bars in 1.9.2. There are a lot of technical issues with trying to circumvent this and it's not healthy to try to keep things like this pushed under just because we might not like them. We plan on doing a lot with custom weapons with the new swing timers.

[chaotikal 2392]

TL;DR? first

 

It seems you are going to be turning or trying to turn off CERTAIN things from 1.9.2? That's fine by me.

 

I like 1.9.2 combat, I haven't seen much negative feedback on it? Mind you list the reasons why you think it's bad? I liked it imho.

 

 

[501warhead 1796]

4 minutes ago, Cʜᴀᴏᴛɪᴋᴀʟ said:

TL;DR? first

 

It seems you are going to be turning or trying to turn off CERTAIN things from 1.9.2? That's fine by me.

 

I like 1.9.2 combat, I haven't seen much negative feedback on it? Mind you list the reasons why you think it's bad? I liked it imho.

 

 

 

We aren't turning off features of 1.9, we plan to integrate as many as possible (albeit the elyatra might be a stretch). I personally don't have an issue with 1.9.2 combat, as listed here I'm excited about what we can do with it - however it's something that is extremely controversial.

[Naj 545]

The community will adjust to any change and has before. I think we may all be slightly scared of what the update will change about the game. But hey, we felt the same way about the sprinting update and the hunger update. Its all just par for the course

[Harri 4815]

First priority is first: NERF BOWS INTO THE GROUND IF YOU'RE GOING TO CARRY THROUGH.

 

Bow's are absolutely disgusting in default MC already in 1.9 (I went 35/1 with Leather, a Wood Sword and a default bow against people in full diamond, shields, d axes, the lot). We need to stop using Velocity, seriously. Flat archery damage/ archery damage % is what we want on bows, it doesn't result in absolute rail-guns that you can 1 tap to shoot across the map to help kite until your high hitting weapon is recharged.

 

(Editing more into it when I'm free)

[Dizzy771 900]

I read most of the thread but might have missed it, do you have a vague estimate when the change might occur yet?

[501warhead 1796]

Just now, weeaboo said:

For those of us who despise the new combat methods, could a Warclaim condition be to use 1.8 combat since it's a toggle able feature? It could be something both party leaders decide on.

 

Read the post. It's not toggle-able, I spent a long time on that point.

 

Just now, Dizzy771 said:

I read most of the thread but might have missed it, do you have a vague estimate when the change might occur yet?

 

I haven't announced dates. My finals are coming soon, it's all subjective. Probably less than a month, hopefully a week or two.

[Harri 4815]

1 minute ago, Why. said:

 

Read the post. It's not toggle-able, I spent a long time on that point.

 

 

I haven't announced dates. My finals are coming soon, it's all subjective. Probably less than a month, hopefully a week or two.

Oh, apologies then, mb.

[Narthok 10416]

Does this mean that staff will be implementing shields? Also would it be possible to put in pikes for anti cav combat? Additionally will you be implementing the various status arrows that are added in the 1.9 update?

[chaotikal 2392]

I do not understand yet the controversy? We're moving to a new update, how's that controversial?

[501warhead 1796]

9 minutes ago, Narthok said:

Does this mean that staff will be implementing shields? Also would it be possible to put in pikes for anti cav combat? Additionally will you be implementing the various status arrows that are added in the 1.9 update?

 

Shields - Yep!

 

Pikes for Anti-cav - A strong consideration. Shields might render this not needed. I wanted to do this before 1.9 was released but when spigot updated so quickly I was spinning I didn't have time.

 

Arrows - Yes. You'll see them integrated all over the place, alchemy will be a prime location but we'll probably do like "special" arrows you can craft which have some of the potion effects. They won't be vanilla crafting, however - they'll be a fair bit different in how you obtain them.

 

6 minutes ago, Cʜᴀᴏᴛɪᴋᴀʟ said:

I do not understand yet the controversy? We're moving to a new update, how's that controversial?

 

1.9 has been deemed the "death of pvp" by a fair portion of the PvP community external to LotC and a fair portion of LotC's combat based players as well.

[Z3r05t4r 855]

Custom textures for certain items? As far as I know 1.9 supports that..?

 

Would be neat to hold long lances in your hand for real.

[Mj. 697]

****

[AntonVoron 39]

Imo can't wait. Savoyard shield walls incoming.

[501warhead 1796]

8 minutes ago, Godwein Stafyr (Z3r05t4r) said:

Custom textures for certain items? As far as I know 1.9 supports that..?

 

Would be neat to hold long lances in your hand for real.

 

yes however it has stipulations, namely that it's based off of data value. Data value for weapons and tools = durability... so we'd have to make the weapon completely unbreakable so the texture didn't change. We've had the ability to change and add custom textures for a while but weapons and armor being unbreakable or having to have some value on their description as to their durability just didn't sit right. There will likely be custom models for some blocks and items in the future, however.