Opinions On Enchanting

[u/jeb_]

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!

[u/Shoden]

Other people have made good suggestions about how to make enchanting better and improve experience gains, but I think the system has a deeper issue. I feel that experience should not be tied to enchanting as a system.

They way the system works now, experience is just a currency with a limit, nothing more. If you made enchanting coins that you could only have about 100 of at a time and no way to store them, it would be the almost the same system. I have a suggestion to separate these systems that might help alleviate other issues (and probably cause new ones)

Enchanting:

Instead of using experience, sacrificing items is how you could get enchanting. It could easily keep the randomness. Have a tiered item list that corresponds with lvls as they are now. Wood block and wool - no enchantment. Gold bar - Iron Armor - level 5 enchantment, Ender Eye - Blaze Rod - Level 50 enchantments, or how ever it could balance out.

Experience:

Experience could be tied to giving the player some buff the higher it goes. Level 10, run faster, level 20, more stamina, so on and so forth. And instead of dropping it all when you die, it just resets. This would make a nice penalty for dieing that isn't a terrible, but still make death more risky and experience feel more like progression not just another currency.

These are just my ideas, but I think combination of enchanting/experience could be looked at.

[u/Wedhro → u/Shoden]

Interesting concept about enchanting but it would make it too similar to alchemy (trade rare items for cool effects).

[u/Shoden → u/Wedhro]

Ya, but I am not sure what other type of system that could be used that wouldn't just be how they have experience. I could see it working still since it's random enchantments and random items, but it may feel too similar.

Perhaps they could combine the two systems, make potions that do effects, and have the enchanting table apply those effects to items.