As the title suggest what is some of the things you as a community hate from the hardcore packs that are out there? Is it the crafting recipies? the forced use of multiple mods? the large amount of single use items that can only be crafted in a stupidly large crafting table for no reason then "ha ha "hardcore crafting" go brrr" (not dissing on any pack makers btw just like to get the communities thoughts on the packs out there.
When they get excessively grindy. I love myself a nice hard pack with complicated recipes, but having to create 100 singularities consisting of 100k items each is not my idea of fun. Oh and bigger than 3x3 crafting recipes that you can't automate immediately. I'm looking at you DDSS.
The one thing I don't like in expert packs is when you have to collect random stuff from random dimensions into a 9x9 that don't make any sense. I am looking at you, project ozone.
What I don't like about Hard Core Packs is the Simply stupid way to get ANYTHING done. For the most part, I enjoy stretching the neurons to wrap around a new problem, but the setups that some need (making a crystal pick) is just downright Criminal! I wonder if any of the mod authors had heard the old phrase KISS! For the most part, I really enjoy the packs.
I hate having to progress through tedious undocumented mods (like lordcraft, abyssalcraft and ember), also when a mod is 'paint by numbers' (like rockhounding) I don't really see the point. Also, in a server environment, I don't like when you have to kill this one mob that spawns in this one biome. Generally, you'll be really lucky to have a ghast spawn on a MyM server as a random spawn. Also, packs that have millions of non-automateable microcrafting (gregtech) I find too tedious too. I really enjoyed Multiblock madness this time, up onto the point that it scaled too much for it to be server-friendly. This could easily have been fixed with making reactor to make inf. ingots x20 and singularities 50x per.
Not having seen the end of the pack, I can't respond to that as I play multiple games in my defense. I'm almost 70 with a severe breathing problem. so I do not work except to create small contracted programs for other people. I play because I want to. I do agree that the pack is a lugger as it by itself and will slow anything less than an 8 core processor with insane memory and graphic card. It slows the processing speed of my 6 core to that of a dual-core. I play many other games... some of them requiring 8 core with 32 gig memory. My play is faster than larger machines doing the same thing.
for me, it's mainly the grindiness and repitition. i tried several hardcore packs, but quickly lost interest after spending hours without any progress at all, be it either due to having to manually craft thousands of electric circuits for a basic low voltage machine, or searching for hours on end for some rare material. i have a busy daily life, with only limited time for videogames, and if the pack is too grindy, it feels like i wasted precious time i could have spend with other games instead
That's called "adult gaming" when you have limited time for gaming you dont "waste" time on not interesting game and you have not feel regret by doing that. Clearly you can say when you are adult your gaming is more enjoyable bc you play only games you like with rare occasions where you try some other game but on the other hand you make long research about that game, opinions and such stuff. From my experience on hardcore packs(GTNH) I hate doing them alone - spliting the grind between at least 2 people (best regards @mrminesheeps ) It's very nice to discuss what to do next, brag what you accomplish or come back and see hundreds of X stuff that you need to do Y. If that pack have questbook(GTNH, i love and i hate it) even single quest reward is enjoyable if you got lucky and get some stuff you need to progress
… that I never get to finish the pack before the server closes down Because I play too slow on too many servers. Or any pack without a good story, expert or not. Just "collect 2^64 of cobble just because" is not fun, mostly because you cant do it without being a complete bongohead on a server. That kind of pack is best done in private, where you can put up a thousand cobblegens, or a chunk full of annihilation planes and the only one to suffer is yourself, but any efficient and fast way of doing those kind of packs would make everyone else on the server suffer.
This thread is kinda meh, I was actually tempted to copy the entire introduction post and make a "what do you dislike about kitchen sink packs in general", but i am lazy, so i guess not. Maybe later if I feel like it. I could take most arguments here in reverse and post them there.
I share my very fresh "what I dislike" - lags, yes, lags. You can't even play the pack bc some individuals make their setups without safety measures, so ofetn they end up laggin whole server and those things are very hard to track down by staff. Because of those unfriendly player i abandoned the IE:E... I rly wanted to complete it bc I abandoned GTNH but not bc lags or high chunkload price but... my potato couldnt handle it no more...
There's a few things that set me off with expert packs. Pointless grinding, having recipes be harder is fine, if it makes sense, making a recipe complex to just waste time is a hard pass. Logs into one plank falls into this category. Relying heavily on obscure mods that are not easily understood, have little documentation, or again have recipes changed to be just plain resource intense irks me. Not having quests in a expert pack bothers me, not just because I lack the attention span to know where to go next, but the creator normally has a vision on which way they want you to go, it's nice to share that with the audience. Not providing balance to the recipe as you advance, it should become LESS painful to create that block of wool as you advance not remain just as stupidly hard.
It really depends on the make up of the Mod Pack and it's intended purpose... Expert/Hardcore Mod Packs vary in their approach... Most tend to use a Progression based system, but you have to ask yourself some fundamental questions: Do the recipe changes make sense for progression from early game, on to mid game, and then on to end game? Are the recipe changes reasonably time consuming, or do they feel more like time wasters, having to pointlessly grind out materials/components over a lengthy period of time for something that should be much more simple for that point in the mod packs progression? (in essence are they just designed to waste the players time in order to pointlessly and artificially draw out play time in the pack?) Does the progression fit into the theme of the pack? Does the progression logically flow from one mod to another? Does the progression feel unnecessarily burdensome just for the sake of making the player waste time doing repetition/tedious work? Then there are some Expert/Hardcore Mod Packs with quest systems... Do the quests follow a logical flow of progression or are they just there to give some meaning to the tediousness of the recipe changes? Do the quests hold your hand through the pack, to help give the player an understanding of the mod they are currently involved with within the quest? Or does it assume you already should know something about the mod, and just exists to point in the direction of the intended progression without giving meaning to that progression per se? Are the quests just there to offer a choice for game play, without necessarily needing to be used to progress through the pack? Or are they essential to actually progress? Do the quests feel meaningful and helpful? Or do they feel like a giant waste of time? Are the quests put together well, or explained well, so you know what is expected? There are obviously lots of other questions I tend to ask myself... But I also look at what makes the pack Expert or Hardcore... Most Mod Packs of this nature revolve around recipe changes as the device used to make the packs harder... But are the recipe changes overly modified to just waste a players time, or are they designed in a way that makes sense just adding a slight difficulty curve to the basic recipe? If the recipes changes make no sense, or the reward doesn't feel equal to the difficulty of the change, then I typically just become annoyed, as the change is more a time waster then anything else... As an example, if I have to cut down 200 blocks of tree wood to make one simple crafting table (just so I can make simple tools), then that is a monumental waste of my play time... But if I can make simple tools in some other fashion, and the crafting table is only necessary for more advanced tools beyond basic ones, then perhaps the time is not necessarily wasteful, if the rewards are worth that time... Taking more play time to go through a pack through unnecessarily grindy systems does not necessarily make a good Expert/Advanced/Hardcore pack... The originating point of so called Expert packs was to allow for more pointed game play, so that a player would need to touch more mods within the pack to properly progress, therefore giving them a more Expert experience, not always relying on the same ole mods every time they played Mod Pack Minecraft... This usually would involve more time played in the pack, because you were having to play with more things within the pack, to progress, in comparison to typical kitchen sink pack... The issue I see now, is that in some cases, the lazy development route is taken instead, where some mod pack creators just make the pack overly grindy... Forcing the player to waste more time playing the pack just gathering the right resources, or requiring players to make tons of machines (thereby overloading servers for multiplayer) to gather the right materials together just to get one step done in the progression of the pack... Multiply that craziness multiple times due to multiple players having multiple setups for all the needed items, just feels pointless and unnecessary... Pointless time wasting through grindy crafting steps, is not what I call fun... Especially if the rewards are not equal to the time invested (you see this a lot in how quests sometimes reward a player, where the reward does not equal the intended time investment just to complete the quest)... Anyhow, as longwinded as this post is... I find most "Expert" packs fall into one of two types... Either they are designed only to prolong the suffering of the player with unnecessary and grindy crafting recipes... Or they are designed with a specific goal in mind, and they follow a logical progression that either follows a story/theme well, and/or the recipe changes make sense and do not feel too overly burdensome most of the time... Zip
And this is exactly what regrowth did and why I will always regard it as one of the first expert packs
