I generally agree with a lot of the responses here, but also have this to add. In alpha/classic, the general pacing was much less frantic. It was more of a strategic combat playstyle, and much less of a twitchy reflexes-based affair, like it is now. As a result, there is not time for the builder to put together ingenious and/or large constructions. The pacing is such that the only way to put something together in time is to follow a bunch of tried and true best practices, rather than coming up with your own design on the fly. The result is that all of the buildings look the same. They are the most efficient, mindless, and quick to build. Doing anything else would be doom for your team; you'd run out of resources (because they're so limited, as others mentioned), you'd not be finished by the time the enemy came knocking (because the pacing is dramatically faster and more twitchy), and your teammates would rip on you for deviating from the norms (due to many unsportsmanlike community members). In addition to all those points, constructions are highly fragile by comparison to alpha. Every class has ways to make a building into rubble all by himself in seconds (ironically, the builder is the slowest at this!), so builders probably don't see the point in spending the time on building an ingenious fortress, because the next time an opponent so much as looks at it funny, it will fall over. Fun building is one of the unfortunate casualties of the game's current direction. I think @Strathos put it best when he described current building as more of a chore that has to be done, rather than a fun diversion. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
In classic every class was much more limited than now, A standard public ctf match will generate very little buildings since people are looking to have fun and destroy things. The amount of supplies you can get does not allow you to build "gigantic castles" but strategic towers that can counter the high flying kegs and bomb arrows brought by the opposition. Building a gigantic castle will just be a loss of stone and/or wood which will probably be mole'd and having the flag snatched and leaving the castle barely touched.
Thing is, good boys don't care about their score anyways. Which kind of means we have more bad boys. --- Double Post Merged, Feb 22, 2015, Original Post Date: Feb 22, 2015 --- Well thing is, classic community was way more peaceful, minecrafty. They recieved more fun from creating rather than destroying. And I do believe this is a change for worse by any means if you ask me. If you disagree, let's go to the philosophy thread and sort this out. You're absolutely missing the point here. The thing was, in classic, the way to victory was also building good towers at good spots with minimalizing the amount of resources used. And yet people were finding fun in going their own way, and building was the perfect way to do that. Minecrafters weren't to be yelled at, the mentality of the community was a total opposite of what it is now.
Dont Forget about resupply option in KAB! Usually guys dont use it but its quite useful in long matches
You're telling me you've never seen people having fun in beta by wasting mats and building stupid/cool stuff? Everybody does that at some point. (Almost) nobody yells at people for making things inefficiently in beta, only for messing buildings up. When we say "minecrafting" in the bad way it means building a house by tent and stuff like that. Sometimes minecrafting is just a reference to building the base up, and is only really seen as a bad thing when nobody is helping on the front lines.
Wow, look at all the classic circlejerking going on here. Amazing. See, that server you joined is a 'Capture the Flag' server. That means you're supposed to capture the flag, not build a giant, nice looking castle. We have servers for that too though. Go join a sandbox or Aphelion's RP server and build to your heart's content. No problem, right? Really, saying the game's gone downhill because players are actually trying to fulfill their objectives and make the game competitive is beyond absurd.
That's quite possibly the best example you can give to support my argument, there's absolutely nothing "creative" about what you just showed me. A toddler can think of this "castle" and build it provided the resources. When I said castles, I didn't mean large buildings, I meant actual castles with large corridors, not whatever you just showed me.
I never saw castles with large corridors in all my playtime of KAG. They were always notch towers with drawbridges inbetween, some traps here and there. Nothing more.
>points out that the spoiler tag says cancer tower >points out that I know its the same thing over and over again >reminds myself sarcasm doesn't go well over the internet
That's flame bait. Please try and be constructive. Your point is well taken that winning the game should be the goal, but since this is a game, having fun is also an implicit goal in every game type. As mentioned in my post, as well as some others in this and similar threads, modern building doesn't do much to meet that criterion. Personally, though I doubt I'm alone in this feeling, I find building to be a chore. It's something that I, or one of my teamies must do in order to have a chance at winning, but there's no joy in it. Whatever I (or they) make will almost surely be undermined and/or destroyed with much less effort, time, and resources than it took to build. That's a big contributor to builder being not much fun these days. Builders have almost no opportunity to shine; the best they can hope for is doing their job adequately so they don't get flamed.
Thanks for keeping things in perspective. The OP does have a little bit of the "rose-colored glasses" effect, but I think the point still stands that building in classic was at least somewhat more free-form, and definitely more fun to do.
As far as I'm concerned this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Two sides of this discussion are talking over completly other point. If we don't stop, we'll turn this into a flamewar.
But the game will never be competitive, be realistic here. Games aren't serious business, and especially one with a bunch of pixelated medieval characters running around causing mayhem. Games were created for us to have fun.
People who wait as archer/knight in build time are literally the worst people in all of kag. Also, kab, different people have different ways of having fun, some have fun by advancing in the game and winning, and some (such as yourself) have fun creating useless structures that don't even help the team for fun. Just join a sandbox server if this concerns you so much.
The game already is competitive. There are already tournaments and clan wars. But it's always about a game, it would be a big mistake forgetting it's one. The discussion here was badly put: the problems with building are minor. Most of the time it's lack of offensive builders or just players who know what they're doing. There is no big difference with classic if not the huge clusters of stone that were back then. You can still do whatever you want, but it depends on the mindset of the players in that moment, what will then come up as a building. Don't make a big deal out of it.
Also, I have lost the hundreds of screenshots I had of incredibly big and ingenious designs I've seen in Beta when I formatted the laptop to try and fix its performance issues, but I have no doubt that even today such creations exist plentifully. I think the OP is full of shit.
Does anyone remember why it was so much more fun to build in classic? I honestly don't remember a lot about classic other than how fun it was and how everyone was carefree. I used to tunnel under enemy towers and break all the bottom blocks so they were one hit and then I'd break them all at the same time. What a freaking wonderful game that was. I don't know why it's so difficult to play as a builder nowadays. Every time I get a tower up front, bomb arrows and kegs have already brought it down. Maybe the real problem here is the easy access people have to special weapons.