I don’t know if this is an unpopular opinion, but I feel like villager nerfing was really needed. I haven’t played Minecraft for a while, but all people would do is look for villages and abuse the system until they made everything god tier. At a certain point, you completely lose the immersion and stop seeing villagers as these NPCs that you have to interact with over time to build a better “relationship” with. Instead, you see them as a block that spits out enchants for stuff you put in it. Plus, the whole process of abusing it is miserable. You just sit there breaking a block over and over again with a villager you trapped in a 1x2 space until you get what you want.

And this is part of a much larger problem in Minecraft with people just messing with the systems that run the game to get easy progression. Especially with stuff like iron farms. It’s just a bunch of technicalities that make it so that you can just be given free materials without actually working for it. What’s the point of mining for iron then? So you can just use that iron to make an iron farm?

This is also why I think many people miss earlier versions of the game. They were less complex and less abusable, which made people actually focus on surviving, exploring and building and doing what they want to do. You can’t just hop in and start progressing because there wasn’t as much to do. Your goals were set by you. It’s much slower paced gameplay and you can take time to just do what you want. I’m not saying stuff should be removed from the game, but Mojang should do more updates that focus on balancing the game to make it be about what it’s supposed to be about, which is “survival/exploration/building”. If that means nerfing dumb systems like iron farms and op villager enchants that break immersion, then yeah, do that. I feel like those changes would get hate at first because it’s like taking the addict away from the drug that is algorithmic gameplay and monotonous abusing of game systems. But over time, as they get back into just playing Minecraft without a constant need to progress, they’ll start to enjoy actually experiencing Minecraft instead of “playing through” it, if you get what I mean.

This is also why I think many modpacks like RLcraft or Hexxit are so fun, because they perfect this idea. They have a bunch of fun things to do, lots of branching paths you can take and no real defined linear progression. Just go around, see what happens and have some fun.

Kind of a tangent, but this is part of a larger issue where players just algorithmically go through the game. Wood -> stone -> iron -> diamond/nether -> kill the dragon with a bunch of beds, which is pretty dumb as well (and removes the gravity from the fact that you’re defeating the end boss of the whole game). And then get god gear with villager enchants. And at that point, you’re just looking for more progression in the game when there is none. You completely forget about the fact that Minecraft is a survival/exploration/building sandbox game and turn it into a regular game with linear progression, which makes it seem like it has no replayability.

I don’t wanna make it seem like I think it’s all the community’s fault and their mindset because it’s only like this because Mojang made a game that rewards this kind of gameplay. I feel like a boomer shaking my fist talking about “back in my day things were so much simpler and people just had fun” but I think it really is true. But what do you guys think?