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Skymines, Low Quality Plots, and You

DogWithHats

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Recently, there's been a lot of complaining about a certain category of plot, known as Skymines. For those who have been living at the bottom of the Marianas Trench and have no idea what the hell I'm talking about, Skyminers are basically just low-quality prison servers. Yeah.

In my opinion, the complaints are justified, seeing as how these plots take little to no effort, and the devs seem to be supporting this category of plot, as they've recently made block-breaking related actions free. However, complaining about it isn't going to do anything about it, so how do we fix it?


Let's start by going over why these skymines are such a popular game, both in the context of making games and playing them. Skymine plots are, for both of these categories:

-easy to learn
-simple, easy to get into
-popular

Skymines are easy to learn because they focus on the concept of, well, mining. That's really all they are. Because they're so simple to get into, they get significantly more popular than other games, no matter how much effort went into these games. However, this is a fundamental problem with DF as a whole, rather than a problem with skymines. No matter how much effort you put into a plot, it won't get as much attention as something that's much simpler to get into.

In my opinion, the idea of skymines being simple to make isn't a problem. They're a great learning experience for newer developers. The problem, however, is when those developers decide that they don't want to make any more games, and instead just want to keep farming CP from their skyminers.

So how do we fix it?

From a regular player's perspective, there's only one thing we can do, which is fairly simple: Make more games. Like, a LOT more games. If developers keep making more games, there will be more games for new players to gravitate towards. On a higher level, the devs are perfectly capable of tweaking the way CP works. Maybe it could be changed to implement diminishing returns over a period of time, or scale CP decay based on the amount of CP you currently have. The possibilities are endless.

At the end of the day, we're arguing over a block game. It doesn't really matter in the end, but if you care that much about people doing the block game the way they choose, then get out there and make more games. If you don't want to do that, then I don't really know what to tell you.

-DogWithHats, AKA big crazy
 

ARMcPro

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The only problem with Skyminers is that they have keep inv (and sometimes no pvp in the mining area), I love killing people but it's for nothing cuz they don't lose their stuff 😭
 

General_Mudkip

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Like you said, Skyminers are popular because they're fun and easy to get into, and there's a lot of interactivity with other players. It feels like I've said this a hundred times at this point but people play on DiamondFire for fun, short, easy to get into games. Most people won't want to dedicate 10-20 minutes of their life to learning the mechanics of a highly polished plot when they could just play a skyminer and mine away.

If you're able to create a high quality, polished game which has a very low skill floor, takes basically no time to get into, then you'll end up with a very fun plot. It's why plots like Blockparty were extremely popular. Play the plot, wait for the round to finish (2-3 minutes max) and then just run to the blocks that appear in your hotbar. It's a relatively polished plot with simple yet fun gameplay. If you're able to recreate this formula then you'll end up with a very popular plot that most people will enjoy and play on.

Keep in mind that having plots with tons of minigames isn't always the best idea. In my personal opinion, players are much more attracted to games where they can play the same thing over and over with very little pause between rounds (Blockparty) than games where you have to wait a while for a new round to start, and that minigame could be one that you don't even like.

I don't mean to target this at any person in specific, but I don't like people who criticise simple and "easy to make" plots which garner a lot of player attention without actually contributing anything to the development scene other than some senseless criticism which only serves to further widen the gap between new players and elitists.
 

SamMan_

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players spend the time making their games indepth & complication and wonder why it kills the plot
 

ACraftingFish

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In my opinion, arguing over this is kind of useless, we see the exact same thing in real life, take for example youtube where clickbait thumbnails and overexaggerated titles get millions of views. And guess what? People have been saying for ages that clickbait videos should be stopped, but they never have been. If you go to the US trending page there is an 11/10 chance you will see at least one video like that

I think we should just leave them be, as this has been tried many times before (prisons, survivals, community games, etc) and it changed nothing. They die out on their own anyway so that other genres take over
 

sludsVEVO

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this is just the cycle of diamondfire

the community will latch onto something else eventually lmao
 

Henri_Rihard

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You've hit the nail right on it's head with this.
I'd also like to add something that ties in with the "easy to learn" argument. I've played quite a few skymines and the players it attracts are the very young and non-english speakers, I've seen many people who don't even seem to know how to use chat so we can assume some may even be illiterate. Because skymines are most of the time basically limited vanilla with resource islands, it makes it so the games don't take much more learning to understand and are perfect for people who may not know how to read/write or don't even speak english.
 

MineOrDie_

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I don't mean to target this at any person in specific, but I don't like people who criticise simple and "easy to make" plots which garner a lot of player attention without actually contributing anything to the development scene other than some senseless criticism which only serves to further widen the gap between new players and elitists.

Seems like I'm targeted here, so I'm answering

I get that skyminers are very easy to get into, but...
> Where's the fun? It's literally about going from 3x3 squares to other 3x3 squares in order to get some blocks, get a few wood, then stone, iron, diamond, then netherite & enchants. It's almost like a survival but you removed all the "killing mobs" part, along with exploring and dimensions. It's just a clicker now I guess...
> Why making hundreds of them? Like, don't you get bored after playing 5 of them and get your progress reset after joining yet another one ? Don't you get bored getting randomly killed ? Don't you get bored after reaching the best armor (which you can get after 10 minutes of playing, if not 5; netherite, enchants, done.)

I also heard that people don't play games that are too complicated, but in my opinion it's just about people's ability to understand (simple) steps/rules; as an example you can place a sign telling "right click to [idk, open the main menu]" then the average player would ask after 5 minutes "how do you [open the main menu]?"
As some proof, I remember people asking on cactus king where the trader's tent was even though you could see it from spawn, it's literally, well, a tent.
 

Requals

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I also heard that people don't play games that are too complicated
necropost but this is me when new players cannot understand how to use a custom crafting table that is just the mc crafting table
 

stinkey

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as an example you can place a sign telling "right click to [idk, open the main menu]" then the average player would ask after 5 minutes "how do you [open the main menu]?"
you have to spam their chat and send titles and play tons of dragon death sounds or else they act like they didn't see a single thing
 
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