Notch bought Amnesia!

[hollowleviathan]

"skinner box mechanics" apparently meaning limiting the speed at which individual players and/or a realm community at large acquires loot by raid lockouts and delayed or random chance drops instead of certain reward.

How this is "despicable" is beyond me, if all loot in adventure games was certain to drop under certain circumstances, then there is no excitement in attempting to earn it, or much meaning in having it, since it's a certainty.

In World of Warcraft the chance that you simply will not get the drop due to the long end of the statistical bell curve is offset by having multiple options for each gearslot drop from different places, offer points for each boss beaten which can be spent at a vendor for replacement parts for anything that just won't drop, quest rewards, which ARE certain loot, and the world drops which, for a large enough population, will always be available on the in-game auction house at a predictable price.

All this is a sophisticated and reasonable system, in vast contrast to, say, Ragnarok Online, where very low droprates off of very rare monsters is the norm for the best loot, and is worth reproach.

You can combine soap with your lunch in all kinds of creative ways, it'll still taste terrible.

but so far all I've gotten are straw man arguments

Careful.

So, your entire reasoning on why Minecraft is bad is because you say it's a Skinner box? I can't say that really needs disproving, since it's almost a willful misunderstanding of the whole point of Minecraft. The goal of the game is definitely not to hoard rare earths and diamonds, which are not difficult to find.

You can't really justify dismissing the game as a Skinner box simply because you do not have access to any and all materials in-game without effort. Acquiring them is simply delayed, not rare drop. It's not difficult or risky to take 10 minutes to tunnel to the bedrock and find ample amounts of any resource.