Mines: What are they and why are people so angry over them.

I'm sorry to hear that you had such a bad time. Some have no tolerance for newbies in-game. But I'll try to answer your questions as well as I can.

As you may have realized, the wiki is extremely outdated. Like, most of the stuff is still from classic. The community has put some effort into adding things, but there hasn't been much progress.

1. Mines are team-specific explosives that can be bought from a knight shop for 60 coins. (They look like this: )

When you drop a mine on the ground, it will arm after about a second. Once it is armed, it will explode on contact with an enemy. The explosion has a small-ish radius, but it will instantly kill any enemies in that radius.

2. You should avoid stepping on mines of the other team, because they will not only kill you, but kill your teammates and destroy your team structures. As such, detonating one on purpose could be viewed as griefing.

How should you avoid accidentally triggering a mine? Well, people make mistakes. Experience will allow you to analyze a battlefield more easily, but even long-time players can be caught off-guard by a well-placed mine. Still, it helps if you can recognize the common places where enemies will place mines. These include:

• In front/inside of a doorway. It's an easy way to killing an enemy while opening up their base.
• On top of a vertical door. It's impossible to safely pop out of a vertical door, when there's a mine on top
• On top of/next to your flag room. Mines do a decent amount of damage to blocks, so you can chip away at a flag defense using mines
• Inside foliage. Well, there's nothing much you can do when the mine is hidden by a bush/tree...

Another good thing to recognize is the sound a mine makes when it arms. Here's a video I made just for you:

Spoiler: Click to Expand

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmXuGiHfjd4&feature=youtu.be

If you hear that sound, you know there's a mine nearby.

3. People usually get angry over mines because all it takes is one unobservant player to kill everyone, possibly losing the game for your team.

Now, there are a few ways to dispose of an enemy mine safely. The easiest way is to pick it up, but you have to do this before it arms. In other words, you have to swoop in and take the mine in the 1-second window after an enemy drops it. Another way is by remote detonation, which implies shooting it with an arrow or dropping a teammate's corpse on it. You need to be careful that no allies get killed when you blow it up. A third way is to hit it with a pickaxe/sword until it breaks. This takes precision, because you need to get close enough to hit it, without actually touching it with your body.

Now I'll try to help you understand the rage.

Spoiler: Click for a short story

Say I'm playing knight on blue team. I buy four bombs for myself and prepare to head out into the battlefield, to slay some red goons. But as I go to exit the base, I notice a red mine in front of one of our doors.

Being the resourceful player that I am, I begin an attempt to break it. I carefully position myself and I slash the mine once, knocking it back slightly. I re-position myself and slash it again, knocking back once more. I re-position and slash, re-position and slash, again and again, slowly and cautiously.

I do this until the mine is one hit from breaking. (It takes 12 slashes to break one.) As I charge up the final attack to destroy the mine, a teammate casually strolls up and steps on the mine without looking. BOOM! I die, losing the 100 coins worth of bombs I had.

But it's not only that: I had invested so much time into getting rid of the mine! I could've easily jumped over the mine and let someone else deal with it. But I did it for the good of my team. And how does a member of said team repay me? By blowing us both to kingdom come.
...
I'm not saying that every situation is like this, but it doesn't take much to see how mines can cause anger in this way.

Inevitably, some people are dickheads no matter the situation. I would never votekick anyone for an honest mistake. I would recommend playing on Official CTF servers, the ones that appear gold-colored in the server browser. If an admin is on (someone with a red/orange name), you should be treated more fairly.

 

Yep, haha. That basically sums it up. I believe there's a balance tweak inbound at some point (@Verrazano or @Skinney would be able to say with more certainty), but given that's it's a contentious issue there'll probably still be some people who'll get unreasonably fired up regardless.