[...]You can try and argue it is about balance but lets be real if everyone can do the same thing it has nothing to do with balance because that is already balanced.[...]
This is slightly off-topic, but I've seen that assumption/idea/... in several posts of yours, and in my opinion, you are misunderstanding or misusing balance here. This is something which ticks me off.
You seem to think that in a competitive game, if each of the N player has about (100/N)% chances of winning, then the game is well-balanced. In practice however, such a property is almost completely uninteresting because it always hold true as long as the game is perfectly symmetrical (when you introduce asymmetrical elements, the simplest of which being a designated first player, it may be nice to have but it is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for players to feel and think that the game is well-balanced in general). When people talk about balance, they are mostly using it in a broader sense. I, for instance, would say a game is well-balanced only if no strategy could be cut off the game without altering its Nash equilibria (in other words: if there are useless strategies, then the game isn't well-balanced).
I'll try to explain why this meaning makes more sense to me, let's take a simplistic theoretical game :
+--+-----+----+
|.....|.C....|..D..|
+--+-----+----+
|.A.|0/0..|1/-1|
+--+-----+----+
|.B.|-1/1..|1/-1|
+--+-----+----+
There is a single nash equilibrium here: (A,C) which basically puts both players on an equal footing (none of them loose anything, none of them gain anything). If I were to follow your meaning of balance, this game is balanced for that very reason : no one wins, no one loses.
I think this definition is flawed because I think that "balance" should also reflect the "balance between strategies", and in that game, strategies B and D are utterly useless. In fact that game might as well be :
+--+-----+
|.....|.C....|
+--+-----+
|.A.|0/0..|
+--+-----+
And that means that the game developer failed to add interesting strategies to the game.
(Of course, if each player must choose a strategy, the game might be well-balanced, but also severely lacking in depth.)
Now, sometimes, some strategies overshadow others and render them useless, for that reason, they must either be removed, "nerfed" or the overshadowed ones must be "buffed" (which can lead to other problems, mostly snowballing into "power creep")
Now, let's go back to the topic.
[...]Funny, how they build so much stuff and didn't ever expect anyone to actually make use of it. Who's fault is that? What level of failure is that?
If we accept your line of thought it would be the same as if you handed a crack addict $20 not expecting them to try and score some dope with it. Then after they do you give them another $20 and keep the same expectation, and again and again.[...]
I think there's another misconception here. The game is an
alpha, which basically means
they are still deciding the details of their mechanics. This is typically done by quickly implementing mechanics,
checking whether the mechanics work (using their community as testers), and
tweaking, nerfing, buffing, or downright removing them as needed. (edit: bold and underlined fonts are not meant to be offensive, but to emphase what I think is important and you are missing)
It's not a failure. Adding and removing things both belong to the process of game development, you can't blame them for removing mechanics if they deem they haven't fared as well as they thought or caused too many problems. You might blame them for the lengthy alpha though, but hey, making a game isn't exactly an easy and quick task.
Your analogy doesn't work either : in your analogy you follow the exact same course of action, whereas when Schine implements new mechanics, those mechanics are too different to reliably predict whether players will be able to abuse them or not, and more importantly
how they'll abuse them (even knowing whether previously implemented ones were abused or not).
Not to mention that Mojang also fixed unintended bug/features (to the extent of my knowledge). I think when they did, they tried to compensate with new blocks offering similar features however, but Schine usually tries to do the same. For instance, when they "removed docked reactors" they also gave us power auxiliaries (and even if I don't like them very much, you gotta admit they're a good replacement).
