Thanks for all the support over the past 2 weeks, in all we've had 44 responses so many thanks to everyone who put forward their views. So, let's get down to business. Minecraft VersionThe choice of Minecraft Versions is always a point of major contention, with the recent news that 1.13 might take quite a while and also be hell to update to further cementing 1.12's place as the stable version for many, as others stick to 1.7.10 despite Thaumcraft updating . And to the person who suggested 1.2.5, I like your optimism. These values are out of 37 responses. As you can see, it is pretty close between 1.7 and 1.12, although 1.10 is also pretty popular. What you can't see, because it would be slightly too much work to collate graphically, is that the majority of responses who would like to play outside of 1.7 were willing to play on everything from 1.10 to 1.13. It also appears that there is very little love for 1.9, the poor irrelevant patch. I am somewhat surprised at the continuing desire for 1.7 versions, since support for the vast majority of mods there has been dropped for several years, and the number of mods from those versions not reaching 1.12 is dwindling rapidly. Mod SelectionThis is probably the most important part of any pack, since with a poor mod selection there's a limit to how much you can do, although DivineJourney still manages it quite well (burn?). I think this is one of the things that will need to be addressed further in a secondary survey, as my initial questions were maybe a little too subjective in their definitions. These values are out of 44 responses. Since there are quite a few separate styles to get through here, I'm going to split it up. I have not discounted the instances where people have said that they both like and dislike a style of mod, since the definitions I used were way too wide so it is quite feasible that one person can love one subgroup and hate another. Magic A pretty hefty number of people enjoy Magic Mods, although a comparatively large number dislike them. The people who dislike magic mods tend to enjoy tech mods, although this was in no way true for everyone. Despite being liked by the most people, Magic had the 3rd lowest like/dislike ratio of 4,7. Tech Again, tech mods are enjoyed by a large majority, but a relatively small number dislike them. As before, those who disliked tech mods tended to enjoy magic mods, and in this case that was actually true for everyone disliking tech, although the small sample size and poor categorization means this is almost certainly not true for the wider world. Tech had the third highest like/dislike ratio of 8. Magitech In hindsight, this was an awful category. Depending on your viewpoint, this can fit anything from Draconic Evolution to Thaumcraft, and it overlaps way too much with the magic and tech categories. Anyhow, it was still pretty popular, and had the second highest like/dislike ratio of 9,7. Farming This was probably the most understandable category, even if it is still pretty awkward. Anyhow, it had both a pretty large number of likes and a joint highest dislikes, with the second lowest enjoy/dislike ratio of 3,2. Exploration Apparently this is a really important category, as 40/44 people considered it a requirement for an RPG pack. It was also the least disliked category, and had an overall highest enjoy/dislike ratio of 30. It is also quite an unclear category, but so are the others so /shrug. Combat This is definitely the most controversial topic, as is has both the lowest likes and joint highest dislikes, but was also considered a requirement by 32 people. It had the lowest enjoy/dislike ratio of 2,3, although is again a really quite unclear category, so actual values may vary heavily. This also seemed to be quite influenced by people's general like/dislike of difficult combat, suggesting that many people read this as mods which make combat more challenging. Draconic Evolution I included Draconic Evolution in the chart not because it was of any real use, but because I found it quite funny. Anyhow, 3 people disliked it, and nobody liked it. Poor Draconic Evolution Overall we can see from these results that the majority of people like most types of mod, although I was surprised to see that half of responses disliked at least one type given the popularity of expert-mode packs. In my view, the results from this make it clear that a class system is pretty important, so that those who for example dislike combat will be able to avoid the worst of it without missing out on the depth of the pack. On top of the styles of mods used, it is important to consider the relative sizes and feature sets used. While in general play, it doesn't matter too much if a mod's features dominates those of another mod, as it will still come down to preferences i.e. Ender IO against Thermal Expansion, some players will do one, some the other and some both. This is not the case when PvP and other competitive play is involved, as suddenly relative power is much more important in order to come out on top. Ignoring this is why so many modern kitchen sink packs are quite bad for PvP, because a single mod will generally be the undisputed most powerful, and the only ways to beat players using it are to either also complete that mod, or use some cheese method. Including more mods also increases the work required to balance them all against each other, especially if a class-based system is used. Some foresight is required here, along with heavy alpha/beta testing, as if a particular system or mod feature is found to be incredibly powerful compared to others, it may break the world's economy irretrievably if not fixed immediately, which may not be feasible in a server environment. Finally, the number and size of mods in a pack can have a hefty impact on load times and memory usage, especially in later versions of Minecraft where models are preloaded. This may limit the pack's potential playerbase, which is a natural issue in an RPG setup if multiple players are needed to complete a given project. These values are also out of 44 responses. Note that while it was possible to select multiple options for each type of mod, few people did. I'm not certain as to whether this is because the categories were wide enough to cover most peoples' wishes or just that I didn't make it clear enough that selecting multiple was an option. For future reference, a question like this would likely be way better served by allowing respondents to input their own ideal number of mods and displaying as a histogram or scatter plot. Here we see two main groups of interest, with a peak at 5-10 and another at 20+. To me, this shows a strong interest in either a medium-size or a large pack, although the interest in a larger pack is a little more compacted due to the low maximum of 20+. I was surprised that people tended to want more content mods than utility or quality of life, although in hindsight this makes sense given that a pack without content is pretty limiting, unless you're looking for a more vanilla+ experience. It is important to note that some of those selecting low numbers of content mods, i.e. 0-5, indicated that this would be the maximum they would like to play with, whereas a few of the 15-20+ responses noted a desire for a spread of content to allow for differing play styles. Decorative mods were also mentioned enough that any follow-up should include these as an explicit category. In hindsight, I feel it would have been better to simply offer a list of several well-known mods, a few from each category, and allow ratings both on how much respondents would like each mod to be available in a pack of this nature, and how likely they would be to play with it. The categories in which the mod fits could then be used to generate a more accurate picture of what people actually like to play, with other mods from the category being used to normalize for dislike of a specific mod i.e. thermal expansion's popularity balancing IC2's unpopularity for tech mods. WorldWhile in many packs, mod selections and progression have a much larger impact than world generation. In a community-based RPG, however, world generation is incredibly important. Make the world too large and nobody will ever meet each other, too small and bordering players will less likely build communities and more to build walls (and make Mexico pay for them). Further, a lack of incentives to explore may well lead players to simply sit in a starting village and never leave, whereas an excess without risk and people will rob graves with impunity, much like industrial archaeologists. Here we can see that the majority of the 44 respondents liked a fantasy theme, with a far-future setting being the only other option liked by over half of responses. This is somewhat to be expected, as they are the two themes with strongest links to RPG games. Follow-up questions should probably focus on ranking the top options here, likely everything with 15+ responses as this represents about 1/3 of the responses. Here we see that while a pretty hefty potion of responses (35%!) don't mind what type the world is, of those that do, about 90% would like custom generation of some sort. This is a bit of a cheat statistic, as some of the responses indicated support for multiple options. Fortunately, this portion is small enough so as to be negligible within a reasonable 5% confidence window. So, this next bit is a mess. I tried to get a qualitative measure of how large of a world people would like using a vague 1-10 scale. While it does show that people generally want a larger world, that is about the extent of it. Really, I should've just asked for an ideal radius and used that for the distribution, but I digress. Anyhow, it seems most people want a large world but not one too large to find anyone. Probably. Really not much more to say here, because I did a bad question. Sorry. Now we're getting to some better questions with nice, simple analysis. So, we can see that while a few people wanted vanilla terrain, the vast majority wanted custom terrain of some sort, split about 2:1 for procedural:handcrafted terrain. So that's handy. Naturally, handcrafting the terrain will take longer the larger the map, so it would be much better suited for either a small map, which is evidently not wanted by the majority of players, or for sections of a larger, procedurally generated map. It may also be possible to use a tool like Worldpainter for something between fully handcrafting the terrain and custom procedural generation, which may well satisfy both the majority who wanted procedural generation and the sizeable minority who wanted handcrafted terrain (take that Theresa). Structures Here we have it pretty even between those who want custom procedurally generated structures and manually built structures. About a quarter of all respondents wanted vanilla structures only, or possibly as well. This may also have been a badly designed question. Anyhow, it seems like there is pretty even support for all types of structure generation, so the burden of decision is left squarely to the pack creator. Sorry about that, whoever ends up making this. Maybe it will be my future self who will end up hating me for the grievous errors in this survey. Maybe both could be used, to make the life of builders easier. Maybe instead competitions to create new public structures in the world could run. Maybe something completely different could be done. The possibilities are endless! This turned out pretty similar to the previous question on structure generation, although with a slightly larger difference between the procedural and custom options, likely resulting from the slight split from Small and Large custom construction options. The discrepancy between these might not have been so large had the procedural generation construction option been split too, although I felt that this would have been pointless as large-scale procedurally generated settlements don't tend to go very well. The largest settlement generation that I know of would be Millénaire, and even that delays most of the generation to use builders instead. ProgressionThe choices in progression may well make the pack. There are entire themes of modpack based around a certain style of progression, most notably Expert Mode packs such as Infinity Evolved Expert and Project Ozone. Here we can see that less than 1/4 of responses wanted default progression, while less than half wanted expert-mode progression. This is pretty reasonable, as packs of this type are already pretty prevalent, from Infinity Evolved and Sky Factory to Divine Journey and Project Ozone, and it is likely that the majority of players looking for this kind of experience will already be able to find it in an existing pack. One interesting idea that I did see noted once or twice is location-based progression, wherein the ability to complete a given task is dependent on first reaching a location. This could present some interesting tie-ins with combat mechanics, if travelling from place to place is made more of a challenge. Here we see the results of another poorly written question. All we can really see from this is that the vast majority of people would like classes to have multiple purposes, and the only strong opposition is to recipe gating. Really, this should've been a simple text entry to allow for some creative ideas rather than limiting to the 3 I could come up with at the time. To be honest, the cosmetics likely wouldn't be feasible anyway, as this would be the type of thing that would necessitate gating behind payment in order to supplement running costs, so unless cosmetics required both a given skill level and a paywall, they would probably be separated entirely from a class system. QuestsA common theme in RPGs from Fallout to Chrono Trigger is quests, both to guide the player through the game and to distract them from their goals. Of course, they aren't compulsory for a good RPG, as Dark Souls and arguably The Sims show off quite well, but they can still be a major component in player acquisition and retention, as the rise of quest-based modpacks helps demonstrate, with 17 of the 20 all-time most downloaded packs on Curseforge containing quest systems, many of which require questing for any reasonable progression. Of course, an RPG pack can be successful without any quests, as MyM's own Civilization pack has demonstrated, so this may arguably come down more to preference of the pack developer than anything else. Here we see that the vast majority of the 48 responses were in support of quests in some form, while only 1 person was outright opposed to them. Quests are probably a good idea then, although what type of quests, and who from, you ask? All this and more coming in the next post because I ran out of images.
Quests So, we can see here that pretty much everyone was happy with pretty much every source of quests. One idea that I didn't add to the survey is quest information from mob or chest loot, like a more advanced form of the 1.13 treasure chests, so that might be worth a later polling. Anyhow, it seems that people would be pretty happy to have quests done however, even using multiple sources. It might even be possible to have all quests unified in the book using 'notes' given by NPCs to unlock quests, although this might well be an excessive amount of hassle for both players and pack developer to use. This could also be done using gamestages unlocked by quest givers, for a slightly less immersive but significantly more developer-friendly option. In hindsight, I'm really not sure what exactly I was asking here with this question, but it seems that people were most interested in a somewhat even mix of single-stage and multi-stage quests, skewed somewhat towards more multi-stage processes. This is probably another one of those questions that quite handily shows off something that we could already guess at, that people don't just want a long list of simple checkbox quests. Or maybe it shows something else that I'm missing. Subjective numbering questions are awkward. We can see here that support for pretty much all types of quests is even across the board. There weren't any other types suggested at the time, although I do have some vague ideas that may come to fruition in future, so look out for follow-up polls on that. Here was something of a surprise to me, there's a very clear skew towards a high number of quests, but the sheer number of people wanting quests for pretty much everything possible was a lot more than I expected, given the relative popularity of some packs with vaguer aims, although this may well come down to higher quality packs outside their questing. In any case, quests are something that can be added to in updates without much upset under reasonable systems (looking at you, 10 bit questing system) so this could well have potential for ongoing development. Overall, there's a clear desire for quests in a pretty large scale, of many types and from several sources, and I think one of the respondents summed it up best by requesting freedom in the choices available. This could be achieved a few ways, so some more specific follow-ups could be handy. Also of note is that I didn't have a question regarding quest rewards, an oversight on my part, although there were still some insights available from responses, which mainly requested to avoid progression-skipping, "OP loot", and one response suggested buffs for completing certain quests, for example killing 100 spiders would grant a small bonus to damage against spiders. These would be of interest in any further polling. CombatNow for the final category polled in this survey, and what looks to be both the shortest and the source of most disagreement among the responses. Combat is a common element of role-playing games, and with good reason, as it can be a fantastic yet simple source of gameplay conflict and challenge that requires little work for players to understand. Of course, it isn't a requirement by any means, and games such as Undertale take great measures to avoid requiring traditional fighting, even if the way to avoid fighting is still combat in itself. Minecraft itself has a bit of a rough history of combat, starting as a pure sandbox which was 'ruined' countless times by the addition then sequential changes to the combat system we now see today. In modded Minecraft, combat is rarely a concern outside of packs where it is a specific focus to make combat harder, as players otherwise tend to quickly obtain powerful weapons and armour that make vanilla combat irrelevant, as mobs become a minor annoyance and PvP ends up a simple question of who has more capacitors installed in their fully upgraded draconic armour. So, it's time for the first point of controversy: PvP combat. Outside the 7 respondents who disliked combat altogether, about 80% enjoyed PvM of some sort, while only a small portion liked PvP. It should be noted, however, that a number of those disliking PvP did so because of its tendency to be hugely imbalanced, causing newer or weaker players to be at significant risk of losing items being preyed on by experienced players with little to no ability to fight back. This could be mitigated with systems to protect players from these situations, either by disincentivising hunting weaker players, allowing players to opt in/out of PvP as is done in many current MYM servers, or allowing items to be kept during PvP deaths in the player's own territory like was done in Civilization. Another option is to add a bounty system, like was used for a time in Civilization, and allow players to effectively police spawncamping and hunting the weak themselves by placing a bounty on the heads of those who target those who can't fight back. Yay, we get to finish on another one of these subjective number messes. We can see something of a skew in favour of harder combat, as well as a few comments asking for actual laser zombies, but very little else outside the expected, that most of the players who like PvM combat also wanted higher combat difficulty, while those who disliked all combat tended more towards wanting middling-to-lower difficulties. So, that's it. Ignore the fact that it took me almost a year to finish this.
I thank you for posting the results. Had there been any players that wanted bounty hunting? Another thing to consider is balancing exploration and base living so that chunkloaders are not necessary.
Analysis on both of these is coming soon, I'm currently out of town so it may take a few days, although you can rest assured that bounty hunting is mentioned, and I am still kicking myself for not putting it in the original survey.
You've just reminded me that I chased that particular squirrel for a week. I'll get back to the analysis >.>
This is an extraordinarily well written document! But it needs more pie, less graph and maybe add in a TL;DR?
You can sneak it in, I tend to take the figures as I go so you'll be included in the analysis for later ones.
Well then... Minecraft Version i think 1.7.10 is the best, cause the 1.10 pvp/pve sucks. Like, it really sucks Mod Selection I enjoy both magic and tech, and i think exploration is required, i dislike combat (both PvP and PvE) oh, and also farming is great. And i WANT 20+ of category ! World What about... an entirely different kind of world. i think that mixing all the different types of world will be super great, i'm thinking of a hidden futuristic city underground, that rules the world above wich is a fantasy-steampunk mixed world (like World of Warcraft(goblins/gnomes are a bit... steampunky ?)), wich is being invaded by monsters, or a gigantic storm, that destroys the underground futuristic city as well (apocalyptic part) oh... and it's not too difficult to add some prehistorictribes around the map Of course i don't mind what type of world generation it will be, cause i want a handcrafted world (i am an experienced builder/terrafromer, so, i can help with it) By the way i am VERY, VERY disappointed that no one wanted a steampunk world ! Structures I want of course hand made structures and settlements, and as i said, i can help with it. Progression I think a quest/class/expert-based server would be great, however i definitly dislike combat and default.
We can say that with at least 0.05% certainty, the majority of players would like to play in 1.2.5. If that's enough to discard a result, it is most certainly enough to accept it. Probably.
So, here's my point of controversy, as I know many people rage on this. So, let me flesh this out. Essentially, when they announced the 1.8 (1.9?) pvp mechanics, the playerbase was halved into two groups. Those who enjoyed button mashing for kills, and those who wanted legitimate pvp. At first, I disliked the idea, but after trying it out, it was actually kindof nice. Sure, I couldn't go up to a creeper and mash it in the face with my sanic arms of death, but in hindsight, it makes the game more enjoyable, at least in my POV(Point Of View). Now, there are many who say that 1.7 is still the most popular, and while I can see why (as it is much more stable than later versions, specifically 1.10 and 1.12 [do we include 1.11? It was kindof a shrugged off version from my understanding, basically 1.9 with a bit more love] and while it is more stable, it lacks new content and mod support. 1.10 and 1.12 are for more supported, 1.12 especially. But 1.10 does not get support anymore from certain mods (Questbooks... ). Now, to say it's an unsupported version is not true, as many other flagship mods as well as new and improved versions of previous mods (Draconic Evolution! haha! take that Drac Evo haters XD) and it is the only modern version of MC that has Thaumcraft 5. 1.12 has not gotten it's own port as of yet. 1.12 is also lacking EnderIO, reason being that the developer is porting to 1.11 and rewrites the mod for each new version. As such, it takes quite awhile. Some other mods are missing from the most modern (moddable) version of MC. So in truth, a pack involving Tech/magic/magitech might want to either wait for 1.12 versions of these mods, or stick the 1.10 route, which is arguably more stable at this point in time than 1.12. TL;DR ... wtf is a tldr? 1.8+ pvp mechanics aren't as bad as you may think, and 1.10 / 1.12 are the most supported major versions, and as such a 1.7 modpack may be subject to bugs that will not be fixed by their authors.
The reason that 1.10 is still quite supported by mods from 1.7 eras is that ports from 1.10 are much, much easier than 1.7.10 - 1.8+, and it only really causes big issues to port from 1.10 or 1.11 to 1.12 for codebases which haven't been rewritten since ~1.4 like Ars Magica, so many developers on large mods used 1.10 to start their port as a stable version, then jumped or plan to jump to 1.12 on completion. From the developer side, 1.12 is pretty much universally better than 1.7.10, even if JSON is still painful to work with if you aren't just generating it programmatically anyway, and I still grumble about the 1.12 itemstack changes, which is why a pretty large portion of us are now 1.12-only. I'd personally argue that at this point 1.12 is pretty even on stability with 1.10, but also has the advantage of a probable longer development lifespan due to the extent of some of the changes coming in 1.13, as well as being all-round more supported. (Just based on a really lazy CF search, 1.12 versions have 139 pages of mods compared to 155 for 1.10 versions, but 1.12 mods are being updated about 3x as frequently)
So I just realised I forgot to finish the analysis here, just completed the quests and combat section today.
