But I agree that there are far better anarchy servers than 2b around.

because of a long history of duped high value items, PvP is just simply spamming ender crystals which deals massive damage when broken, and the defense is just how many "totems of undying" you have which absorbs lethal damage.

of course all the hacked clients automate placing ender crystals, reloading totems and identifying weak/strong locations so you're following those guidance to spam damage.

a little before that there were hacked +32,767 damage swords that will insta kill you that was patched out by the server.

What’s the difference between a weak and strong location?

I could imagine funny evolutions over time, just a random thought, if everyone is running a “glass cannon with lots of 1-hit protection” build, then I guess if players had to pick between fast/little attacks and big/slow ones, they’d favor the former. If everyone is walking around with little attacks just intended to trigger the 1-hit protections on their fellow glass cannons, then actually using the in-game armor system might turn those one hits into two-hits, making it relevant again. If the systems were properly tuned, (it could be exponentially difficult to gather 1-hit protections and extra lives, so turning those 1-hits into 2-hits could be really valuable), mechanics could be saved from obsolescence in interesting ways.

I’m not describing Minecraft at this point, just spitballing. It would be interesting to see a game designed with this evolution of “things being broken” taken into account, though. I guess that’s what Magic the Gathering is, hahaha.

IIRC ender crystals can only be placed on bedrock, and a lot of PVP happens on the bombed-out terrain that goes all the way to bedrock.

The weak terrain in the bedrock are locations where it requires multiple jumps to get out of, iirc

Balance converging around bugs and exploits is pretty typical for all PvP sandbox games with cutthroat gameplay, even if not allowed by the server. ARK: Survival Evolved and Eve Online are infamous for having huge clans (thousands of players) willing to go extreme lengths at metagaming and bug exploitation. It isn't always that rosy, ARK had certain mechanisms to dox players and their multiple Steam accounts, which I believe led to a few spillovers of the ingame relations to the real life during the Great War. Sometimes it's very basic stuff though, like building a huge tower and breaking it upon being raided, DoSing the server and crashing it, after which it rolls back to a previous backup made 10-20 min ago, making your base very hard to raid if you have active players. (an ancient thing that was fixed many years ago)

Rust (the PvP game, not the language) also had the policy of encouraging players to spread and publish bugs and exploits on YouTube, but with the different aim - so that the devs would notice and patch those faster. This resulted in a pretty robust game that is extremely hard to exploit without resorting to actual external hacks.

the fun is no longer the game in an anarchy server. It's in beating other play's strategies - which actually makes it quite close to a real war in the physical world.

For example, the 2b2t minecraft wars between factions involve logistics, misinformation and intelligence (such as spies, fakes etc). It's no longer just minecraft. But that's what makes it fun and interesting.

Welcome to the multiplayer gaming, especially games like Minecraft or ARK.

Sometimes you got funny situations like top guilds cheesing new raid content in their race to finish it first, leading the devs to go "cmon bro, you only played yourself" and then patching it immediately after, but almost never taking any loot away or banning anyone.

Also funny is the common situation where you don't want to _admit_ to everyone in your guild that you have at least one person running it, but you can kind of figure it out and it becomes an open secret.

1 - These are the days where you might have to clear down a dungeon 4 hours to see if a mob is up, or, even worse, to see if it's camped or not. Alternatively (or as a cover) people just parked alts but you get the idea. Also, come to think of it, Diablo had this too with maphacks and grabit and such

Isn't this basically any non-VAC CS 1.6 server?