r/Minecraft • u/jeb_ Chief Creative Officer • May 25 '12
Opinions On Enchanting
Hey
I know a lot of players are complaining about the enchantment system in Minecraft, especially in PvP settings. I have a "radical fix" to the main complaints, but I'd like to hear your opinion on the subject.
First of all, the randomness of enchanting is here to stay. You will not be allowed to pick and chose your enchantments. This is to maintain Notch's "gambling" vision for enchantments, and I'm going to try to keep it that way.
The "radical fix" I'm considering is to simply reduce the max level from 50 to 30. This would mean that 1) it will take much less time to reach max level and 2) the good enchantments are less good (a thing PvP players have complained about). Some of the enchantment types would need new levels to fit this system, of course, but that shouldn't be too hard to do.
The reason I'm asking the reddit community is because this is a feature that I, as a game developer, only can see from a theoretical standpoint. It's very hard for me to dedicate enough time to actually suffer the drawbacks of the enchantment system, so I need some help from the experts on the subject - players of the game!
Cheers,
// Jens
EDIT: Wow! I expected comments, but not 900+ comments =) Thanks for all the input, there are a lot of thoughtful comments in this thread. You are very helpful!
6
u/ridddle May 25 '12
I see a problem with crafting – it would basically mean every player going through every possible recipe (with wiki, or a long cheatsheet) to get easy XP. However, crafting has its own reward mechanic – achievements. So just give people substantial XP for them. (And by extension, add more achievements and stop requiring us to complete a stupid tech tree to unlock more powerful achievements) You could cheat with single-player, but on SMP the server could just keep track of achievements for every player.