There is a topic I feel I failed to elaborate on fully in my article about Blaze & Caves, which is the type of collaboration I feel is essential to the pack working properly.

I would split the ways people can work together on small servers into 4 main groups: competitive, economic, communal and cooperative. These aren’t standardized terms, so let’s define them: I consider a server competitive if players actively achieve goals at the cost of others, by stealing or in other ways performing selfish actions1. I consider a server economic if people get help with goals by providing other people with assistance with their goals. This can be in the form of helping someone with something, then they help you with something else, or by having an explicit economy. If players sell items for diamonds, which they can use to purchase other items, they essentially trade the time spent getting the item they sold for the time spent getting the item they bought. I consider a server to be communal if people assist each other without clear returns. Helping each other when possible is somewhat expected, and resources are available to all server members. So, for example, if someone builds a farm, all players on the server can use it. Finally, I consider a server to be cooperative if there is no concept of individual property, all resources belong to everybody and are used and acquired on a needs and ability basis.

One note about these systems is that the subgroups in a server can choose to live in a higher system2 than the server as a whole to reap the benefits of that system. It might be easier to buy something than to steal it. A group of friends on a server might share their belongings to better utilize economies of scale to do better in a market. But the server’s system is defined by the lowest system present.

With that preamble out of the way, I believe BAC is only good in the cooperative model. The goals coming out of the pack should not have to compete with other goals, and non-cooperative systems create alternative incentives. It doesn’t make sense to spend a bunch of resources on an advancement if doing so puts you at a material disadvantage to other players. Whereas in a cooperative system, spending the existing resources to achieve the mutual goal is expected and desired. Players are not put at a disadvantage as such a concept does not exist on this type of server.

Final note: This article is writing assuming the pack is set up to share advancements between all users. A server where players compete to gain the most advancements individually could work in any system, but it is not something I personally have any desire to do, and as such I don’t consider here.

  1. Selfish here is used as a descriptor, not a value judgement. Minecraft is a simulation, and it can be desirable to simulate behaviour that would be frowned upon in real life. ↩

  2. Higher is again not used as a value judgement, I simply need to order these in some way to express this point. ↩