Talk:Energy Condenser/@comment-454133-20121112082923

I'm upset that the condenser is going away, but I can understand why from other people's perspective.

To give you some background: I love building factories and perfecting them. I compete with my friends to make ever more refined factories that produce items like Filters and HV Solar Arrays more and more efficiently, or with better layouts. For me, this is like playing Space Chem all over again. That's where we derive our LOVE of Tekkit -- building, refining, perfecting, automating. And we use condensers fed by MFMs (Mass-Fab Macerators) to feed these factories and automate them.

However, my experience with MFMs (and my tutorial page describing how to make them and how effective they are) should be evidence enough for why so many people would balk at the condenser's power. Even the famed Power Flower is blown away by the MFM's ouput, and the power flower takes enough flak for being OP as it is.

The MFM is so ridiculously effective at creating EMC that building one in a 2x3x4 meter nook in your base will produce all the EMC you'll ever need. Build two just for good measure, because it's easy. You'll struggle to use that much EMC fast enough unless you're building a mansion out of diamond blocks, and even then the MFM will produce ample supplies if you let it run for a few hours or days or so.

At that point, the only components that will leave you wanting are those that cannot be condensed because they have no EMC value. But build a few factories, fed by condensers and the EMC product of your MFM, and you can easily automate the production of any complex item in the game.

Now understand... I LOVE THIS. This represents paradise for me. I get a special thrill out of building factories, figuring out the most effective way to automate my world, and enjoying the fruits of my labor. My friends and I play Tekkit for this reason -- this is where we have fun with this mod.

However, I realize the survival component of Tekkit, the presence and drive of scarcity over abundance, is the primary motivator for many other players. Take away that scarcity and tell them they can have any item they want, and their motivation for playing the game evaporates. The energy condenser also displaces more conservative machines that are meant to do similar jobs on a smaller scale, like the Mass Fabricator. On our server, the only reason we build a mass fabricator is for irridium for our armor. Then we turn it and its recyclers off. The MFM is giving us what we want, so why settle for a much more limited option?

So yes, I can definitely understand where players are coming from when they accuse the condenser of being overpowered and game-breaking. It is, if that's the game you're playing. Quite simply, it ends scarcity of rare materials and even facilitates the direct fabrication of new EMC for making those materials.

Now with all this said, I really hope the energy condenser lives on in spirit, even in a more conservative form. Yes it's overpowered in its current incarnation. However, it serves an incredibly useful role for feeding factories the raw materials they need, and for converting materials I don't want into those I do (Ugh... who needs more emeralds?! Give me diamonds instead). Remove the condenser and you leave a wide, gaping hole. A hole, which if not patched, will probably drive away players like me. Remember, I love automating my world. Make that impossible, or simply too hard, cumbersome and slow to be worth my time, and I'll find another way to spend my time. That may not feel like a loss to the devs, but I feel like it should.

The Mass Fabricator might be able to fill this gap, perhaps with some modification or perhaps without. It already produces most of the raw materials the player can find in the world (or maybe all?). It could presumably be scaled up in factories with dozens or hundreds of recyclers fed by cobblestone generators to produce respectable levels of raw materials for feeding solar array factories and others, using UU-Matter as the universal conversion unit. It would take incredible investment to build and power, but it's do-able. So maybe.

But I suspect that, if used in that way, fabricators may go away as well (if the creators really want to shut down large-scale material fabrication). This will make some players happy, but players like my friends and myself will probably give up and leave.

So hopefully the devs will give us an outlet. Remember, when things like mass fabricators and energy condensers/MFMs exist, you always have the option to ignore or ban them. But once they're gone, you don't have the option to use them anymore. That's probably worse than having optional overpowered components that you can use or not use. I'd like to see a real solution that fills the gap, instead of just ripping condensers out of the mod and villainizing anyone who laments the loss. We're not evil. Well, some of use are not evil. >:D

I hope this post gives some people perspective on each side of the debate, and humanizes both sides. I'm clearly biased toward condensers, but I don't want to be dismissive of the condenser's opposition. I also don't like how supporters are being called cheaters or lazy though. Let's stay civil in our discussions, and hope the mods ultimately find a solution that makes both sides reasonably happy.