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I'm not sure what he meant by "zero luck involved" though. If you can mine on a tile in FRESH minehole and cause a cave-in, there's the "luck" factor. I've just learned to take what they say with a grain of salt. Usually they're pretty straight up with the mechanics (when they do answer a post about them), but I've seen them toss out half answers and let us continue to try and figure them out.
Also, the easiest change may not fix any of the bugs or exploitable mechanics. The "easiest change" is the one that fixes the problem without creating more. If that means changing a few lines of code, great! If that means completely redesigning the algorithm, then that's what it takes. The "problem" is that this isn't a major commercial game. It's a permanent alpha/beta, and changes are made public that may not be completely optimal because there's only so much internal testing two people can do to make sure something works without being exploited. Your Warcrafts and other commercial MMOs have multiple stages of testing to make sure the worst of the bugs never even make it to the public test servers. Damn backseat hackers
