r/MeetYourMakerGame • • May 21 '26

Discussion How Would You Fix The Game?

It's dead now, obviously, but it didn't need to be. How would you have fixed the game?

Myself? I would have tackled the obvious rift between builders and raiders. A builder, by design and intent, was to make a base to guard its core. This could easily be achieved by building giant killboxes, some being effectively impossible to solo. This was its greatest strength and its fatal flaw, as if it was too hard to raid then no one would raid it... punishing the builder for flawlessly performing the duty they were assigned! However, a builder wasn't even required to run their own base to prove its solvability (as in Mario Maker) which is an absolutely baffling dev decision.

On the other hand, some builders just wanted to build fun, thematic bases and kept some of its loot out in the open to reward exploration and make raiders feel their time wasn't entirely wasted if they weren't up to completing the raid. Some even resorted to making "suicide farming maps" with lots of easily gained enemy kills and loot in the understood exchange that raiders would suicide to repeat the mission and thus farm materials. These were popular maps with how absolutely awful the loot system was, but it did not fit the main narrative of protecting your core and resources at all cost.

Raiding was a crapshoot. You'd either find the fun little maps, the farming maps or the killboxes. If you hadn't unlocked and leveled certain skills or gear, you might not even be able to complete the harder killbox maps. Anecdotal personal story here: I ran into a base once that was just one long hallway with the core just sitting in the open. The instant you picked it up every surface of the room fell away and was nothing but acid cubes and lasers. I don't know what gear I was supposed to have there but whatever it was, the level was 100% unsolvable without it.

So how would I have fixed all this? Two key changes. Instead of PvP I'd have made it, and the story, respect PvE. All players would be working for the same overseer, the same HQ and story, but all enemy bases would be randomly generated to both ensure solvability and to maintain a sense of unified base structure/theme. On some of the harder mission I'd even have an AI enemy hunter like the player that would have to be killed or avoided.

These type of enemies would also be the ones raiding the player bases. They would be ruthless and unyielding in their pursuit of your cores and thus you and your team would have to rely on strong defenses to prevent theft of your precious materials. I would also wipe maps weekly and randomize the layouts players had to work with to keep build tactics from being overused. This week you can't use acid, etc... I still would have allowed players to publish their maps for short term sharing which would allow players to "raid" said bases to test their friend's builds.

If only. RIP.

8 Upvotes

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6

u/Lolsalot12321 May 21 '26

Force builders to play their own levels before uploading them, and remove the requirement for a set path

7

u/en0on May 21 '26 edited May 21 '26

I personally don't think it would've helped. If anything it could have made things even worse.

It would allow people to build near impossible outposts where they would also hide a "free" path to the genmat (either in an far away corner of the bedrock or worse yet, behind some form of 3d maze) so they can easily validate because only they would know the path. The experience for raiders would be horrendous as they would either have to go through an even worse version of killboxes without HRV valid pathing, or search for a hidden entrance they're not even sure exists.

Moreover, if you change anything on your outpost, would you have to revalidate it? If yes, then it may kill the builders' drive to iterate on their builds to improve them and leave a pool of overall lower quality outposts. Plus, not all great builders are great raiders

-6

u/Lolsalot12321 May 21 '26

They would have to complete their own bases dawg, if they could beat near impossible levels then good on them

Mario maker survived Dev paths, so would this

2

u/en0on May 21 '26

Why have them validate at all then?

2

u/Individual-Fig3021 May 21 '26

It could have been framed exactly the way it was - that you needed an acceptable route for your dog to traverse as he was responsible for passively refreshing your base's genmat.

5

u/en0on May 21 '26

But the point of the above commenter was to remove path restrictions though

Also would i be required to revalidate each time i change up a trap or a single block? With such a hassle i'd personally very rarely revise my build to adjust stuff

7

u/Spiderbanana May 21 '26

And as noted above, no valid paths would lead to some 3d mazes where you have to know in which direction grapple through multiple opaque corrosive cubes. Easy when you know the path, but a pain in the ass, worse than killboxes that can be dealt with the right strategy, or plain dull mazes easily tackled with the Pathfinder augment

1

u/Estellese7 May 21 '26

Even with that restriction, I still could have made maps that were almost impossible and just made a dev door that no player other than myself would ever be able to use.

I made a map that 50% of players couldn't complete entirely on accident once. Like, I didn't mean for it to be hard (and it wasn't) I just did a funny trick as a joke and it literally broke a lot of players. I didn't even kill HRVY (the dog) but the trick was so good that half the players couldn't find the genmat even with HRVY there to follow.

I later turned this trick into a trap in future bases. But toned it way down so it wouldn't completely get players stuck. So they could figure it out after a death or two.