Of course hundreds of modders are going to end up fleshing out what one guy (and then a handful of guys) could not. The nether system being "pretty sorry" at release is almost a parody of a statement. If it's not meant to be, I guess the implication is that he should have released it only after "finishing" it? Or not added features at all, instead focusing on more core features? Those approaches have a massive hidden assumption that alternate-universe-Notch would have taken those paths and then focussed on features you wanted, rather than spending months, on, say, making a higher height limit, or better biome distribution, or better cow grazing behavior, etc etc all of which would not have added substantially to the fun of playing the game.
Minecraft was and is an incredibly fun game. I'm not suggesting you should kiss the feet of every stray thought Notch has, but I find the people that write these kinds of posts have lost any sort of perspective.
Think of the number of elaborate and most of all actually fun games written by one person that have not only shipped to players, but also were fun to play at every stage of an open development process. The number is tiny, and the reason is that it's really really hard. Maybe people don't have game making experience? Making games is hard, making a fun game is much much harder, and making a fun game out of a bunch of different interlocking systems that is relatively bug free is basically a miracle if we look at an existing games to attempted games ratio.
Now, whether or not Notch owes you updates to the Nether for life for your $15 for Minecraft is a whole other story, but Minecraft has been fun to play in every incarnation I've played since Alpha. Calling his work half-assed is bullshit, even if we only compare his output to the actual output of every other aspiring video game maker that has ever existed. I'd say he's in some pretty good company on the far end of the curve on that one.
And mod developers are out there writing far more fleshed out, balanced and reliable code despite the fact that they still do not have access to the unobfuscated source. Minecraft is still released without an API, or any mod tools, and no source.
When I look at the brilliant and dedicated work of those who reverse engineer the binary for every major release, building third party mod api's like Bukkit and Forge, and allowing for ever-more-smooth updates of a spaghetti of dozens of disparate mods... it's hard not to look down on Notch's work.
I mean hell, the teams reverse-engineering and supporting so many mods are unpaid, and small. They've gotten better, faster, and are more dedicated.
In the past year we've seen unified liquid API under Forge allowing for mods like IC2, Buildcraft and Railcraft to share their liquid tanks, liquid pipes, etc. We've seen multiple microblock API's with Chickenbone's brilliant implementation rolled into Forge. We've seen the massive surge in popularity for managed modpacks (basically package management for first party and third party minecraft distributable). So not only full mod api's and basic package management, but brilliant new functionality exposed in wonderful api's. And half a decade later, Notch/Mojang still can't roll a basic mod api for the game (and their 'plugin-api', which has been in development since 2010 and is still unreleased, is woefully underfeatured compared to what the community offers today from multiple different third party modloaders).
But why does it matter? No one looks down on Jobs for being bad at product design. Because he wasn't a designer by trade, he was a leader. Notch created an amazing platform and has handled it rather well. I'd love to have seen a lot of things prioritized or handled way sooner, but in the end, no one can question the success of his idea.
This coming from a longtime Minecrafter (pre-survival) and current host of an FTB-based server.
Skyrim has an enchanting system where you can reduce the mana cost of spells by a percent value. It isn't terribly difficult to get to the point where you can cut the cost of casting for a school, say, destruction, to zero, and have free spells forever after that. This is pretty game-breaking, and doesn't even get into the level 100 enchanting perk, which doubles the number of enchantments you can have (would you like 75% magic immunity to go with your infinite spells?)
I find this to be poor design, plain and simple. It shows a big disregard for balance, and the reason it annoys me so much is its not hard to fix: make the enchantments increase spell damage/duration instead; or reduce the strength of those enchantments so in total they won't hit 100%; or put a hard cap that these don't stack past 80%; anything, really, that doesn't cause a player to get to that point, run around killing everything for an hour, get bored, and quit.
This sort of thing is pervasive. The pickpocketing tree, for example, is worse than useless - it'll actively harm your character by causing you to level if you pursue it, leading to stronger opponents without an increase in power to match them. And so on. Plain and simple, it looks to me like whoever designed these systems put a minimal amount of thought into them.
Which brings me back to Minecraft. The core components of Minecraft - the mining, block placement, and the simple progression it has are very well done. So are the plants, animals, and environment. But the vast majority of the other stuff just isn't. Beacons - very cool idea. Too bad you have to kill a couple hundred wither skeletons to get the skulls to make a wither to get the main part for it. Enchanting - an entire system constructed out of grinding and chance. The Nether - I remember on release that if you made a portal and went to the nether, it would make a new one on your return instead of sending you to the one you'd constructed. One of the selling points was the ability to travel long distances in the overworld via the nether, and yet the portals wouldn't even tie to each other correctly!
My point isn't that Minecraft (and Skyrim for that matter) aren't great games; they are. And Notch is a cool guy; I have a lot of respect for him. But. Tossing random stuff into the game (mooshrooms?) and having poorly designed systems with clear fixes is what I expect from a 16 year old modder, not a mature game dev (and this goes double when a lot of the worse systems were implemented after Mojang was incorporated; QA testing? Second opinions? Where were these? Am I missing something?)
You guys should really give Notch a break. He's a human like everyone else. It must be incredibly hard to work under the pressure of 100,000 derisive hackers that will use every opportunity to point out why he is inadequate. My reaction on this story is rather to call him up and go have a beer and relax somewhere. That's what you do when someone fails a project. You don't start pointing out all his previous flaws and explaining why his effort was doomed in the first place. That's antisocial. Can you imagine saying something like this to his face? Can you imagine someone saying this to your face?
His work ethic has been criticized in the past because features introduced in one version of Minecraft would be abandoned by the next and remain incomplete. Bugs would remain unfixed for long stretches of time. There wasn't a public bug tracker (if there was any at all), so users had to list bugs themselves on a fan wiki page.
To claim that criticm is "antisocial" and that we should instead treat him as a best friend to have a beer with is an odd notion. Unless Notch is your personal friend, he is just a programmer working at a company, and the only relationship you have with him is as a customer. If you sell something, get used to criticism.
He doesn't have to be a whiz programmer with iron dedication. He just had to have the smarts to hire one to take over the project. Which he did.
Where does one find such friends?
Yes. And since I am fully aware of my tendency to lose interest in projects part way through and move on to something else, I don't publicize them while they are in the "hey this idea sounds cool" stage. Thus avoiding having people point out the objective reality that I don't finish much of what I start.
2. Given that Notch had all this incredible success even though he's so "half-assed", imagine what you could do if you adopted his approach?
(For the record, I thought 0x10c was a stupid idea. OTOH I really liked the idea of the minecraft world - where the cube basis is universal and malleable, and sacrificing nicer graphics for that - though the actual game doesn't grab me. I think Notch is awesome and inspirational, and should keep doing what he values - regardless of my opinions!)
"I should write a post about the type of games I want to make in the future." 2 hours ago: https://twitter.com/notch/status/369423842155843585
"My #7dfps is done, after 8 days of work. http://shambles.notch.net/" 4 days ago: https://twitter.com/notch/status/368058518365949953
No - I presume most on here are hackers and not only in it for success. The difference is that I'd stop coding for others, and do it for myself, pursuing the challenges that excited me, independent of the income they could generate. Which is what I think Notch is doing - he doesn't owe anyone anything.
No doubt everyone would keep hacking if they had unlimited money, after all, it's fun.
But programming? Tediously banging away on edge cases so a random consumer doesn't get frustrated? Polishing bullshit after the fun work is done so you have a 'product'? Maybe 3% of people enjoy the sheer grunt work involved with programming. Very few people would keep that up if they had unlimited money.
Much more likely, they'd do what we see notch doing right now. jump from interesting project to interesting project, discarding as they go along.
Once I'm wealthy and financially free, I might take some time off of work initially, but eventually I expect I'll do fewer of others' projects and more of the things bouncing around my head right now. I just love working on this kinda stuff!
That was the feeling I got from this article -- since Notch doesn't need the money, he works on something that interests him until it doesn't anymore, regardless of whether it's the best money-making option, don't you think?
I doubt my personality would let me just shelf a project when I'm in the middle of it, though... once I start something I can't help but see it through to completion!
If I had piles of cash in the bank, I might be less inclined to see something through once I hit that 20%...from what I hear this seems to be how Notch writes code in general, and now that he is very wealthy...well....
If I had a never ending flow of income, I would program more. You might see less output, though, as I would be more liable to jump to whatever project seemed the most fun at the moment. If Notch's success is the cause of less output, that's the more likely reason.
As far as I'm concerned, quite the opposite. I would keep coding but this time, without anyone telling me what to do.
/Simpsons
I feel like I should point out, the "idea of the minecraft world" came from Infiniminer. Notch's contribution was the part that doesn't grab you :)
I very much recommend trying out Scrolls if you're into deep strategy games.
Hearthstone is way more complex simply due to the 9 (vs 3) classes.
3 factions yes, a fourth on the way. 3 decks? No way! Decks evolve constantly and new ones pop up, some die out - seems very healthy for such a small, young game so far :)
Just my 2 cents and experience.
That said, I can imagine that Minecraft has set dauntingly high expectations for him. He wouldn't be the first to suffer under that pressure. Albert Einstein famously said that his years at the patent office were the happiest of his life, because no one expected him to lay golden eggs.
High expectations coupled with basically unlimited funding really is a problem. I see Notch as a highly creative (if unstructured) programmer and people like that usually do their best work when facing constraints.
IMO, hes still building games with the right attitude. He plays around and tries to find a cool idea, just as he has done before.
Edit: There are also many easy to use front ends for adding mods and working with different minecraft versions etc.
* Because your patches only work against one version of the game.
* Because you are directly updating files, so both of the previous restrictions can easily be violated, which tends to cause a crash on startup.
The front-ends work around this lunacy by keeping multiple clean copies of the entire install, at multiple version levels, so that each mod can trash it on its own or use the version it needs.
There's no way I could have single handedly managed the 500+ game server instances with out something like that.
As an aside, if you've never had to deal with any of the CoD series servers count yourself very lucky. I think it was still a requirement for CoD3 that the windows dedicated server required directx installed..... just so it could show the splash screen.
Disclosure: I also run a modded Minecraft server (with an easy-to-use launcher and many nifty features), if anyone cares.
I'm aiming for western and a lot of the Magic and Dragons don't really fit with that.
There are reasons to want to remove features.
It's a pvp-enabled anarchy server. Nobody can get banned for any reason whatsoever. The server is ~3 years old and the map has never been reset. What this means is that from spawn to about 5km away from spawn is desolate wasteland. You have to travel at least 10-20km out before you find areas that havent been burned down or still have regular trees. At about 30km from spawn, the chances of your base being discovered drop pretty fast, but most people keep their full blown bases at 100+km out, with advance bases 20ish km from spawn that they use as temp bases for raiding people near spawn.
There's pretty much two things you do on 2b2t after establishing a base - exploring to find other peoples bases, and raiding them. There's hundreds of bases that are plenty old, many of which still have loot in them, with new bases being created by new people every day. Here's a handful of pics I took of the spawn, some bases, and a few megaprojects I found: http://imgur.com/a/sGoRc#0
If you want minecraft 'survival' mode, you'll get it on this server. </endshill>
I first felt this when I played Minecraft; with successive patches and new added elements, it always felt as if Notch had had an idea, and gone to implement it, and then never bothered to flesh it out or work out the kinks. The Nether and portal system was pretty sorry at release, with basically nothing to do in the nether; rails and carts were always minimal given the possibilities as well as having various non-obvious mechanics that were somewhat frustrating; and so on. I feel you can really see this with the help of the modding community, where often a poorly implemented idea like villages or what not is decently fleshed out by someone who had a strong interest in it.
After Notch stopped working on Minecraft, and even before, there was talk of Scrolls, and the suit with Bethesda; after some time, that sorta fell by the wayside, was eventually handed off to the rest of Mojang, and Notch went to work on 0x10c. And now that, too, has been left in incomplete form.
I dunno whether its a matter of expectations, where the massive fan responses he gets damages his creativity, or if he just loses interest in projects (I have no lack of half-completed works laying around myself) but at this point I'd rather hear about a new project when its close to completion or released, rather than as he develops it.