Introduction
This is a collection of things that represent common, fallacious claims or arguments, many of which are "pet peeves" of mine. Saying them will at best make you look like you put little thought into your statement, particularly if you repeat it once corrected. Some are egregious enough that they will make you look rather worse than that simply because you chose to say them, either because holding such opinions requires a decidedly unpleasant personality or worldview, or because they require such a level of ignorance as to make dishonesty a more likely prospect.Note that the examples included here are both to more accurately demonstrate the argument in question, and to provide some level of proof that people actually say such things. The intent is not to highlight a particular person, nor to punish people for saying particularly illogical or offensive things. The fact that the names have been hidden from all examples should make this fairly clear.
For each entry, I list one or more "typical" formats of the question/argument/demand/accusation, often with one or more examples, as well as a reasoning for why such a thing is either completely baseless and/or completely unacceptable. Some of these are direct copy-paste from when I responded to such arguments at the time of receiving them.
"Can you turn off the animations? They are lagging my server/game."
This is plainly wrong, on several levels:
- Animations and other rendering effects can never lag a server, as they exist purely on the clientside of the game, and thus cannot have any effect on the server's tick rate. Arguing otherwise is like saying that what texturepack your client uses affects the memory usage of the server.
- For a given render, (properly coded) animation is no more intensive than a static model. In more technical terms, the OpenGL transforms or texture UV selection used to create animations are run regardless of the animation state; for example, on a RotaryCraft machine, the animated parts of the model are always being rotated, just by zero degrees if the machine is not animating. Additionally, such code is extremely fast, and accounts for a minimal amount of overhead. As a result, shutting down the animations would have a negligible performance impact.
"[Item] is more powerful than anything else like it, so it's overpowered. Power creep is destroying the game."
A common claim from some people is that anything more powerful than a given standard for that effect (such as increased ore multiplication, or faster machines, or bigger-area mining tools), no matter the actual cost or difficulty in obtaining it, is an example of power creep, with the (usually) unspoken implication that it must be nerfed to be in line with other effects.This mindset is both wrong and highly problematic to encourage, for several reasons:
- There is little consensus on what the acceptable standards are. Many will argue that the standards are set by the most common implementations, such as a 2x multiplier for ore processing, but many other concepts - like armor damage protection, mining speed, and so on - have no one "common value" and as a result this argument fails. Even where there is a common value, most people are willing to accept slightly exceeding that for sufficient cost, such as 3x ore multiplication, whereas others will condemn even that as power creep. Overall, the net effect is that this threshold of unacceptability is more fluid and less rigorous than is initially let on, making it more a reflection of the opinions of the person making the statement than any rule worth following.
- Much of the time, arguments about power creep are made because anything exceeding the standard is seen to unbalance another mod based off that standard. This is an invalid argument, even if superficially true, because not all mods are or should be designed with each other in mind. For example, several mods, like Twilight Forest and Battle Towers, are balanced against vanilla, and even armor and weaponry that is mediocre by the "heavy tech" standards tends to significantly alter the balance of these mods. Conversely, in a pack built around the heavy tech and magic mods, noone blinks an eye at armor or other tools that makes you virtually unkillable, so long as it is expensive enough; few would seriously claim that none of these tools should significantly exceed vanilla's power (and at 500x the cost to boot). Therefore, the problem is not that crossing some threshold unbalances other mods, it is that some mods' styles are incompatible in the first place.
- The idea of a hard limit on what mods should and should not do is dangerous. By marking some line in the sand and saying "anything over this line is too powerful and must not be made", you have just excluded anything related to it from even being considered for creative development. This may seem harmless when the issue at hand is a simple numerical arms race such as ore multiplication, but it hardly stops there; what about entirely new ideas that nonetheless are very powerful? Are you really going to say that some new feature must be summarily rejected based purely on its power level? That "overpowered" new idea today could become the next big mod of tomorrow.
- Not only new mods are affected by this; existing mods also run into claims that their content is contributing to power creep, and some will try to mitigate this by either nerfing their potential or introducing massive caveats to using them, severely handicapping the utility of the mod, especially considering the first features to go are often the most useful.
- The whole argument is based on a false premise, that players will always go for the most powerful tool available. In reality, players go for what they feel has the biggest reward/effort ratio. Example: Despite the RotaryCraft Extractor having the highest ore multiplier I know of - topping out at 13x - which sees it daily accused of causing power creep, it comes in dead last for popularity among the general player population. This is purely because it is much harder to get working, and until late-game and with good design skills, takes longer to process a stack of iron than it does to manually mine five times that amount. Indeed, despite being one of the weakest options (only saved the title of weakest due to a rare bonus item), the TE pulverizer is far and away the most popular ore processor, purely because it is easy. Point is, no matter how powerful something is, the idea that all the players will flock to it and ignore everything else, no matter the cost, is ludicrous. I could put a "win the game" button in RotaryCraft that gave you creative mode invulnerability and access to infinite resources, but if I made it cost millions of units resource, and made it require assembling a multiblock that makes the ReactorCraft Tokamak look like a dirt hut, most people will not even attempt it, and the ones that do will have reached nearly that level already.
- The argument is hypocritical from the start. It assumes that "historically", mods have worked together and designed around each other's balance points, that nothing in "classic" modded Minecraft upset the balance of other mods, and that problems of inter-mod balance problems are new to recent versions of modded Minecraft. This is simply wrong. Even blatant examples like EE2 aside, nearly every mechanic you take for granted today was at one point a radical new idea that offered as-yet unseen power, and was accused of power creep back then. Given that these tools are ubiquitous and widely accepted today, what does it say about the argument when two years ago [2022 edit: this page was originally written in 2013 and 2014; the mentioned debate was much more than "two years ago" now], it was used against the macerator, seeing as it halves the cost of nearly everything in the game? Or a jetpack? Powered armor? Teleportation? Automining? Autofarming? Designer worlds? Nearly infinite item storage in a few blocks?
- This is exactly the argument made by a large proportion of "vanilla purists" who see mods as inherently cheating. To them, new abilities not present in the vanilla game, no matter the cost, go against the standard set by the game, and this is arguably the most official standard of all, far more well-defined and justifiable than any used within the modded community.
"I reported this bug a week ago, where's the fix?/I don't like how this mod works, give me a config option to redesign it./I want this feature, you can't say no!/The customer is always right!"
Mod developers have exactly zero obligation to conform to your requests or demands. You have every right to make them, but if you expect - and complain when you do not receive - things you want, be it fast bugfixes, features you want included, or so on, you are acting extremely entitled and ignoring the fact that mod developers do not work for you, do not have any obligation to serve you - much less in the manner and schedule you demand - and have full control over their decisions.
Demanding a developer spend their time to satisfy your impatience shows to everyone that you consider your whims more important than their time or other obligations - which does not say good things about you as a person - and demanding features and/or changes, especially if you act like the developer is unreasonable to reject them, is tantamount to claiming you have as much creative control over the mod as they do.
And if you really want to dig yourself into a pit, and trot out the line that "the customer is always right!" - almost invariably delivered dripping with contempt and self-importance - when developers are neither paid nor under contract, you can be sure that the developer has a series of words they might like to use to describe you, none of which are flattering or publishable here.
"I really don't like the way you design/manage the mod, get someone else/You're not a good developer, give the mod to someone else/let's tell FTB/MCF/Mojang to make Reika leave/let's change the owner of RotaryCraft"
Are you seriously suggesting that someone take a mod from someone, me or otherwise, just because you do not like how it is designed or managed? Do you seriously think you have that right, or that even if you did, that would be morally defensible?
Even if you are not trying to be hostile, something I very much doubt, even asking is so shockingly nasty and self-entitled that it leaves me at a loss for words, at least ones that can be used in polite company.
"Your mod belongs to the community/You can't tell us what we can and can't do, we own the mod as much as you do/If you don't do as we say then you are an idiot/Pack perms? Are you kidding? You don't even own the mod!"
No. Just no. Despite what your sense of entitlement might be telling you - and if my experience counts for anything, it also tells you that you own whatever you desire by virtue of desiring it - you do not own the mods. The author of the mod, unless they explicitly release the rights, retains full, complete ownership of a mod and no amount of whining on your part is ever going to change that.
If you are going to argue that Mojang owns mods, that remains untrue: No matter what Mojang says, copyright law takes precedence, and they own all their code and assets. Plus, unless you happen to be a Mojang employee - an unlikely bet, given your behavior - then you still own exactly zero percent of the mod.
"You fixed an exploit I was relying on, bring it back!"
...What? Most players decry exploits, and most server admins blow a few dozen arteries the moment they find one, but you complain when it gets fixed? Is playing the mods or game properly too demanding of a task, yet creative mode is still unacceptable?
"Rules? For me? You have got to be kidding."
This is called entitlement. Enjoy seeing how far that gets you in the real world.
"Your mod is the laggiest mod I have ever seen. Just looking at it hurts my tickrate, and if I build anything the server lags to hell."
Assuming your version is not so ancient that wikis might as well be for a different mod, the mods do not cause any more than any other, unless of course you did something stupid like spam 5000 engines then wonder why your framerate sucks.
And protip: Avoid making statements that are falsifiable with a single screenshot and ten seconds of effort, because if you do, it is not me that comes off looking like a liar or a fool.
Also, if you are in a high position in the community - such as a major developer, streamer, or pack maker - and do things like this, you are abusing your position to further a personal vendetta, and do not deserve to remain in that position.
For everyone else, if you see someone doing this, step back and re-evaluate how high of a regard in which you hold their words.
"My game crashed, this is a virus!/I FOUND MALWARE IN THE CODE, BECAUSE IT CRASHED MY GAME WHEN IT FOUND ANOTHER MOD!"
A crash due to ID conflicts, installation errors, or similar is not malware, DRM, or a virus, and claiming that it is makes you look completely and utterly incompetent as a pack maker.
"I sold some of your stuff and people griefed with it, you are going to fix it or pay me back!/When I gave someone something, they did something I didn't like, and since you made the thing you are responsible!/I'll see you in court over my lost server donations!"
My response to the original user says all you need to know. Screwing up, and then blaming someone else - especially if your initial screwup was patently against the rules to begin with - are not the actions anyone in their right mind would take. And if you, like the original user, try to seek legal action against me for your own mistakes, enjoy the pit you are digging yourself into.
"What's with your rules? Why do you care about how I play the game?/Reika is very much a 'play my way' kind of person/With Reika, it's my way or the 'highway'/If Reika were any more controlling they might as well reach through the screen and play the game for you"
The rules are in place for a reason. For one, five of the rules are things that no person has much ground to disagree with, including things like not claiming you made the mod, not trying to replace me as the distributor, and not trying to use my content in order to line your pockets against the Mojang EULA.
The last of the six - the one regarding modification rules - has very good reasons for its existence, and not one of them is "I want to tell you how to play". I do not care how you play, and the fact that the rule does not exist for singleplayer is proof of that.
"So what if I am the tenth to report this bug today?/I can't be bothered to update!/Why do you think you can force me to read a changelog?"
If you are too lazy to read a few lines of text, you are also too lazy to play my mods, which are designed to chew up and spit out people who want point-and-click instant gratification. Go find another mod to play.
[To other developers] "Do not bother trying to work with Reika, you'll never please them/Stop being nice to Reika, they aren't worth it/Don't do anything Reika asks, they are trying to hurt you"
If you are going out of your way to create a toxic atmosphere for me among other developers, and trying to make my time making mods difficult, you are the equivalent of someone in the real world going around telling rumors and lies to their coworkers, family, or friends in an attempt to make their life difficult. In other words, you are the absolute bottom of the barrel of humanity.
"I found login stealing code in DragonAPI!"
No, you did not. You may, however, be referring to the pull request someone made to insert code that looked like it would serve that function. However, that code was never in DragonAPI, and never would have worked to begin with.
And if you are a developer making that claim, when you obviously know full well the untruths of what you are saying, you should be ashamed of your behavior and the respect your followers have for you would be better spent on someone more worthy of it.
"Why are your mods so hard to install?/I have to jump through hoops to use/play/update/remove the mods!/Why don't you make the mods work properly, I crashed my game adding/removing them!"
First and foremost, make sure the things you are complaining about are both my doing and unique to my mods. If you come to me yelling about how you crash if you install it twice (good luck getting the game to launch with two copies of ANY mod), things that are vanilla/forge bugs, or things that I am far from the only one to do, you will accomplish nothing except looking like either an idiot who complains before thinking or a liar who will harass one person for doing something while idly tolerating everyone else doing the same.
Similarly, if you complain about something that is entirely outside my control, like about how the downloads are slow or take too long to become accessible, you will look even more ridiculous - akin to the stereotypical angry customer screaming at a cashier over the price of a product, as if they had any control - or more hostile, happily criticizing them for what you know they have no part in.
As for actual issues with installation, by far the most common two concern ID conflicts and the IDFixer for removing DragonAPI.
ID conflicts can - especially for biomes - completely corrupt a map, and often cause all sorts of glitches and headaches. You never have reason to want one. Moreover, the process for fixing them is simply editing a config, hardly an arduous or complex task, much less "jumping through hoops" to "see if we really want to try the mod".
The IDFixer is to fix a bug in FML itself. The fix is natively part of DragonAPI, but for obvious reasons DragonAPI cannot fix your game if it is not installed, and as such the fixer is also provided standalone. The bug is in FML, and though I have attempted to have it fixed, I have been ignored or actively rejected. Complaining to me about that is no different than complaining to me about a crash in some other mod.
"Who are you to tell me what rules to apply on my server, I treat my players how I want/It's not your place to bar servers from using your content to pay bills/If I your mod can't handle being modified by me, that's your problem".
My and other replies above explain rather comprehensively the problems with such an argument, and the things let slip by the admins above are fairly good insights into the motives and ethics of those who proffer them.