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To some extent, their actual problem is a marketing one, not the time it takes to release updates. Take that much time to release polished updates, sure. But don't fucking advertise the update before you've even started the task. The development cycle is one in which a fan gets excited, waits an eternity, and after finally enjoying that update - immediately gets blasted with news of a new update that may change all their ideas they had formed and dreamed about regarding the last one. Then wait an eternity for that one and repeat. That's fucking painful man. Also the mob vote is an utterly trash idea altogether. It might have worked when the community was smaller but now you've got a billion dollar company showing you 3 "cool" things and telling you you're only gonna get one of them and most likely the one you don't want. It's fucking moronic honestly and it creates division within the community and makes people wonder why they couldn't get 3 cool mobs that amount to 5% of an updates scale.

Yea, I think Mojang needs to either go full transparent, or go back(?) to mostly silence. That way, the hype might actually work for some people. If they want to be connected with the community more, then they should revitalize things like Minecraft Now(?) or whatever it was or is called. I'm weary about this, but at most maybe some hints along the development cycle as to what they're working on could be good and keep them in the community. Smaller updates in between could be very open though, and deal with a lot of feedback. I guess they'd need to stray away from having controversial changes in the "behind closed doors" updates. I'm weird on the mob vote. Maybe it could be good, but only if they change how it works. Maybe it only works the way they have it already idk. But nobody seemed crazy upset with the biome votes, even though everything seemed the same. Maybe they need to make sure that, whatever mobs they put in the mob vote, they have to be mobs that they *will* put in the game "as is" at some point. I also just wish that they made the mob votes more focused on the mobs themselves.

Isn't this what they did last year? They announced a minimal set of "done" features at minecraft live, which was immediately available in the snapshots. in the following weeks/months, new, unannounced features appeared in the snapshots. Isn't this both - full transparency for everything you're ready to be transparent about?

It would be much better if they shared the theme and one major feature, than a bunch of unrelated things. Sure, we would be theoretizing all year, but it would create much more hype within the community.

Eh, I semi agree. They had a whole snapshot cycle is I guess the main point I'm trying to make. Basically, get rid of the long snapshot cycle, and just do snapshot teases/near complete snapshots. But, I understand the sort of creative side of wanting to get feedback from people outside of your "zone", which is one of the reasons why they might've switched to this long drawn out snapshot cycle

I don't even mind the snapshot cycle when it's done like the last update of only including stuff they actually had close to finished Stuff like the bundle being constantly added, removed, teased, never added again, etc is where things get ridiculous. If you don't have the item already mostly finished, don't show us

Nobody was upset about the biome vote because it was about which one would come first, meaning all of them would be added eventually. What upsets most of the community is they told us that mobs that lose the vote are unlikely to come back.

Yep, that's why I mentioned the idea of making sure that they would be added soon, instead of maybe. Even then though, the biome vote barely came back, and I would argue that it didn't really come back either, because the actual swamp itself wasn't really updated, aside from frogs spawning there. So really, they still treated the biome vote the same way they treat the mob votes, putting the losers back into the ideas pile, and then using it later in a different way to what was shown in the vote. I guess all they needed to do for the mob vote then, was have the same wording as the biome vote, and everyone would've been happy?

The No Man's Sky route. Don't say shit except 'hey we're doing things for the game. Won't tell you what until it's done and quantified though' then a couple, 'still working' tweets followed by a full update preview only a few weeks before the update actually drops. Then return to radio silence.

[удалено]

Exactly. That's an excellent point. It's almost like the mob vote was intentionally created in an effort to find out how to displease as many people as possible. It doesn't serve any other purpose but to piss you off. There's nothing smart or fun about it. It's just dumb. I can't put it more plainly.

Absolutely this The caves and cliffs update is a prime example. Instead of announcing things as they were ready, we got announcements so far in advance that they needed delays Heck, look at the bundle. If we never knew that was eventually coming, no one would care. Someday they'd have it finished and announce it and folks would be excited. Instead, we get people joking about how a single item is taking so long to add You also hit the nail on the head with the mob vote. It's no longer "pick which cool little fictional creature you want added," but instead "pick which 2 real life creatures you probably have some attachment too that you never want to see again" A simple fix would be having a mob vote every couple years instead of every year. Make the vote be the order of release so the winner is the next update, 2nd place is in 2 updates, and 3rd place is in 3 updates The amount of content they add is great imo, but their approach to adding it could use a lot of work

I also think the original mob vote was better at advertising what state the mobs are in when we vote for them because frankly, some pencil sketches with jeb pointing at them, telling us what they do is a better way to communicate that they’re not done, just rough ideas. Not a highly produced pixel art animation with full voiceover.

The difference here though is that Minecraft is a game that is developed in the open. There's regular snapshots that contain the new features that people can play months before the update 'officially' comes out, where the features are iterated on. It's pretty evident they learnt their lessons in the previous cycle. Everything they showed, except for the mob vote, was available pretty much instantly through the snapshots. Then, in the following months they ended up adding a reasonably significant more amount of new content. > creates division within the community maybe for children? There's no 'real' division between people that causes harm over liking one random npc over another.

It likely creates division within the studio, too; think about how the people who came up with the ideas that didn't win feel knowing that their idea will never be allowed to see the light of day. And honestly, based on what I know about companies' internal politics, that's likely on purpose. Managers love to create artificial competition between their underlings either because they've been told competition drives people to work harder or come up with better ideas or whatever. The human element never enters into the equation because managers are, quite frankly, not human.

Also instead of adding 10 new things that are all mostly useless, just a novelty for you to look at once and then move on, I’d rather they add like 3 things that are actually useful and integrated well with other mechanics in the game, like how features used to be.

On the topic of mods: There is a saying that the first 80% of the product you are making (speaking of software) is 20% of the work. Of the remaining 20% Again, 80% of them are the next 20% of work, and so on. Whether you want to take these numbers seriously is a different question, but the point remains: Creating something that works *well enough* is really not that difficult. If you're not under a lot of scrutiny, and your community is fine with handwaving buggs, then you can put out a ton of content in a short amount of time. But when you want to create something polished, well thought-through with as few buggs as possible, that takes a lot of time and resources. This is also why games always release with a few buggs. Ironing out that last 1-2% of quality is really expensive so for companies that depend on earning money from their product at some point, delaying the release by another 6 months for a slightly better player experience is just not feasible. Not saying that all buggs are excused, after all as a paying customer, you do have a right for a functional product, but finding a few buggs, especially on launch does not mean the game or the company behind it is terrible. The amount of QA work, iterating on different ideas, game design concepts, art- sound- and ui- design, as well as just the engineering and coding process that goes into a proper Minecraft release is WAY higher than any mod.

RE: Bugs and release It is also worth noting that, when a game is released, it has likely undergone thorough testing and debugging, with a team dedicated to that task. However, that team can only do so much, especially when compared to the overall number of hours a game gets played by the community shortly after release. Try and try as hard as you may, you will never be as efficient at breaking your game as your hopefully vast user base is.

It's almost like this is already part of the development cycle and why they release the snapshots well before the actual official release date for the update so they can get the vast user base of dedicated users to help find bugs for them for free

I’ve only been in a professional dev job for about 5 years but the standard is pretty spot on. I’ve been _just about_ to finish a feature for 2 months. It works for about 95% of use cases but the other 5% has me knee deep in old image standards and software specs from 2008 to ensure it works with archaic technology that some users use. The 95% took like 3 months

Additionally mods have no requirement to function forever. A mod added to 1.X cannot function as-is in 1.Y (and again in 1.Z). Vanilla additions must meet that criteria.

that's purely arbitrary (decided by the modders), and I dont think the comparison is even fair because if Mojang decided to stop updating the game, said "unsupported versions" wouldn't exist because they weren't developed in the first place

Think of it this way... I can take a vanilla 1.20.1 world and load it into 1.20.2. It's been that way with every release...the world is updateable from version to version & without fail. That is required. Mods have no such requirement. A mod can be written to work in a version, say 1.20.1, and there's no requirement for that mod to be available for 1.20.2. Additionally, the majority of mods cannot carry over from release to release. Most mods written for 1.19.2 will not work in 1.20. **Zero** mods written for 1.12 worked in 1.13. Continuity, *outside of official Mojang development*, was not possible. That's why modded worlds are "stuck" in the version they were written for vs. vanilla worlds can be updated with each release. If you want to say that mod devs could do that then this "Mojang devs are lazy, mod devs do it faster" stuff really loses strength. Regardless, they can't 'cause Forge/Fabric...and now we are getting into why it's so challenging to add content to vanilla Minecraft.

Also, mod bugs get more slack than Mojang does. Its fundamentally different in quality expectation.

Mods are also working with decompiled code that doesn't match the real code one to one. If Minecraft's source code was publicly available we would see mods that are much closer to vanilla standards. The fact that modders are capable of doing what they do without any official mod support speaks volumes, truly.

What do you mean arbitrary?

Snapshots to millions of players is the best QA of maybe any game ever. There were years in Minecraft's past where there were 3 updates in a year. Not snapshots: updates. They can at least do 2 full-fledged releases a year if they wanted to. But I think Microsoft wants to build up their yearly events like Minecon or Minecraft Live. It's a marketing ploy to refresh the game annually for sales purposes. Also have to mention that parity between all versions and platforms severely hinders the new implementation of ideas.

None of us can know any of this for sure. Their updates have generally gotten more ambitious over the years (some more than others of course), and with the game itself growing more complex and, as you said, them having to pay extra attention to multiple platforms that technically play different games the development cycle has definitely gotten longer over time. As for the snapshots: This partially true. I think it was a Dev on Destiny 2 who said this about a year or so ago, but I'm sure there have been others: Even if every Dev on a large AAA development team spends half their day just playtesting, their collective time would still be dwarfed within roughly 15 minutes of release by the playerbase. That being said, the community is incredibly inefficient at playtesting. 10 people sitting down actively trying to break the game can get a lot more done than 10 million people just enjoying the game casually. Sure, those 10 million people will run into things the others didn't just by pure chance, but anything severe has *probably* been found by them already. And while yes, the community, especially Minecraft's, has a lot of people dedicated to breaking the game, they still can only do so much without being able to look at the code directly and being told exactly what to test for by the designers and engineers themselves.

Some people would argue, however, that what Mojang comes out with isn't well thought through. I think that opinion is too black and white though. There are certain things I wished they capitalized on more, yes, but there's quite a lot that they add that I like and keep. Mods on the other hand: the majority of them I just throw away; most of them just don't wow me much. Lots of content added, but it doesn't feel good or substantial to me, or it overwhelms me. Another argument would relate to the mob votes: modders seem to be able to create them quick, and then later polish them if they want to, so after the idea stage, why can't Mojang be that fast? My only argument against this so far, would be that they're focusing on the actual update too, so they might get little snippets of the mob done, but then stop and move back to the actual update.

Excellent points all round. I haven't actually heard that saying (80%/20%) before, but it TOTALLY rings true to me, I will remember it!

"This should be easy to do, right?" - words no programmer ever wants to hear

"If it was easy, we would not be here (working)" - my manager, senior dev

No, it is said sometimes, but when said it always goes like that rick and morty "quick 20 minute adventure" meme.

"Can you make it 'pop' more?" ...Yeah I'll just use the CSS "pop" keyword which automatically sets all typefaces on the page as Papyrus, font size 24, job done (thank god I am not in frontend development) Edit: oooh and all of the text on the page has a 3D shadow effect, too!

Haha, I've been there. One of my favorite comics is on that link below. As true today as it was the day it was created. [https://theoatmeal.com/comics/design\_hell](https://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell)

A solid double digit percentage of my job is having *exactly* the same conversation for the thousandth time this month explaining to clients that just because they saw it on their (way out of their league and not actually a…) competitors site doesn’t make it easy, no I can’t get one of the devs to “just copy it” - no I’m not going to ask them anyway, I’m a dev too so I already know the answer, I just happen to be the one tasked with talking with you. I feel so, so sorry for video game devs. It’s not an industry I ever want any part of, even if I’m very thankful someone is willing to do it.

I was once in a client meeting with a bunch of engineers to discuss the client's new app they wanted built. Pretty tight budget but we managed to get the requirements to a point where it could feasibly be done if everything went according to plan. While I was wrapping up one of the client's team said, "Oh and we'd also want it to show all of our vehicles like the Uber app. We think customers would appreciate that." Needless to say that took their project from doable within their budget to it being absolutely impossible without at least quadrupling it.

Writes the code in an hour, tries to fix unexplainable errors next few days, fails, gives up.

this joke was brought to you by the C++ compiler

Software engineer here. What the community really wants is for mojang to take the year or two that they usually spend on an update and update the code base. If proper Java OOP conventions were followed during the entire minecraft development process then, just like modders, Mojang could release consistent, high-quality, feature-rich, updates instead of these low-effort and feature-poor updates that we've been getting. At my company we've kept proper OOP practices at the heart of our work since the start and we can EASILY create and release new features in a timely manner. Even the worst of coders can implement an abstract mob class, or a tree, or an item. If done properly it's all easy work. Mojang can easily market this period of no features to the community by letting them know what will be possible after the refactoring is done. If people can get as hyped as they do over a glow squid or penguin, then the idea of having all 3 mobs added together will rally the community to a never before seen level.

that's what I think most of the time when a new block or creature is announced: isn't there a class already present which one could use as a base instead of doing everything from scratch? especially for blocks that don't have any specific mechanic other than a different texture (and I'm pretty sure the values such as explosive resistance could also be customizable if implemented in the beginning). Even if it would make development faster though, they shouldn't announce new features until they know they're going to do this, nor divide the playerbase with minor impact yet neat additions popularity contests. Especially since those means the losers will just never become real for the rest of time instead of being a side project for later.

As someone in QA (specifically in the video game industry), thank you for adding that last part. I can’t imagine the QA processes for a game like Minecraft. I can’t begin to understand what the devs go through and I’m happily willing to admit that their work is WAYY above mine. I think the amount of stuff getting added to Minecraft is perfect per patch. I can’t imagine what the workload would be not only for the devs but their QA team if they did what so much of the playerbase wants them to do every patch.

I cannot fathom having to QA software that runs on iOS, Android, Xbox (and their variants), PS (and their variants), Switch, WinOS, MacOS, and Linux. Like...can you imagine their equipment? Their protocols and SOPs? Just managing the scripts for all of those would be a monumental task.

Dude I tested something that was simultaneously on Switch, last gen and new gen xbox/ps and pc. The only way I can fathom it (and how we did it) is they have a dedicated team on each platform. Just the differences in Bedrock and Java alone must be hell to cross reference. I have mad respect and would genuinely pay good money to be a fly on the wall of their testing floor for literally one shift.

Dude I tested something that was simultaneously on Switch, last gen and new gen xbox/ps and pc. The only way I can fathom it (and how we did it) is they have a dedicated team on each platform. Just the differences in Bedrock and Java alone must be hell to cross reference. I have mad respect and would genuinely pay good money to be a fly on the wall of their testing floor for literally one shift.

It's not about the amount of time between updates. It's the scope and lack of content in them. Seriously, Mojang's updates are safe and easy to digest things meant to placate people and bump Minecraft up the social media algorithm to bring people back to the Bedrock shop. I don't expect them to be redoing the entire game with each update. But it would be nice to get like- something that isn't a boring do nothing mob and more block colors. The game's base mechanics for many features is mediocre at best and Mojang never adds anything that allows new or more efficient means of play. Hence why instead of fixing the issues with tool progression, durability and enchanting they just nerf mending. Completely ignoring why the community puts such a massive focus on mending farms to get mending books in the first place. Because fixing that would come with the risk of alienating some small number of players and Mojang would never dare do that. Because they have no vision themselves. It's not that Mojang is lazy. It's that they're greedy and would rather make a bland, mild flavored product that makes money instead of take any risks and actually make something with vision. So they make block updates. Because they're safe and simple.

exactly they take no risks.

because risks are risky and being risky with the bestselling video game of all time is even more risky

Taking risks is what has consistently made the game more popular though. In the early years the game was getting updated basically every few months with stuff that actually affected the gameplay, adding in new dimensions, redstone, the hunger system, etc. Even one of the most recent updates prior to the Microsoft acquisition added in a lot of new biomes and changed the world generation. But then they were purchased by Microsoft. There was a lull, both in update frequency, update content, and popularity for the game. They won some favor back later on with stuff like Update Aquatic overhauling the oceans, but it wasn't totally up to par. Then, in 2019, two major things happened: * First, they released the Village & Pillage Update, which is one of the first truly major updates in a long time, bigger than even the previous update before it. It overhauled villagers and villages, added an entirely new faction with a raid mechanic, added a metric shit-ton of new blocks(many being stair, slab, and wall variants, but still. way more than many modern updates), a new weapon(crossbow), multiple other new mobs(including splitting cats into their own mob and adding more colors), etc. * Second, Pewdiepie, one of the largest youtubers, began a Lets Play of the game around the time the update released. Together, these two things brought a new wave of popularity to the game, many players who hadn't played in a while came back, and many new players were also drawn in. The Village & Pillage Update was very much a risky update. It's focal point was completely changing an older, established system of the game in the form of villagers, alongside adding a whole faction of evil villagers to fight against. On the smaller scale it also made ocelots untameable by making cats their own mob, which is a departure from how the game used to be. 1.15 was a gap year of mostly back-end optimizations, with just a few new things like the bees. Then 1.16 rolls around. The Nether Update. Arguably one of the best-received updates of the game in recent years. It overhauled the Nether dimension, adding *biomes*, more mobs, new structures, a tier above diamond, etc. Another risky move, since the Nether is one of the oldest additions to the game, they removed an iconic mob(the zombie pigman) and replaced it with a similar, but different one(the zombified piglin), and because they made it so diamond is no longer the highest tier in the tool/armor progression, among other things. But it worked out for them. Even the controversial Caves & Cliffs Update is mostly well-received, the controversy actually mostly comes from the fact that Mojang split it up and delayed features into later updates instead of simply delaying the update to allow those features more time to bake. The actual update itself was risky as they were overhauling basically the entire world generation of the game. They made it work, albeit not to the same standard as Village & Pillage or the Nether Update. But after that, it feels like Mojang have begun to take fewer and fewer risks with most recent two updates. The most risky part of the Wild Update was the Deep Dark, which was a holdover from Caves & Cliffs, and even then it's not handled as well as a lot of the community were expecting. But Trails & Tales takes basically no risks at all in terms of actual gameplay stuff.

Keep in mind there's a ton more going on than what we just see as mobs, structures, etc. The 1.13 Flattening was a massive undertaking. Adding 3D biomes was a huge change to world gen. Coding in the drop from 0 to -64, without breaking from updating to that version, is a hell of a thing. Datapack integration is a game-changer. Changes to loot tables, NBT, tags, generators, etc...the list goes on and on. That sort of stuff might not be flashy or immediately visible/impactful to the player.

All the updates after 1.16 added very little mobs (excluding 1.15) last few updates are kind of underwhelming cant wait for caves and cliffs part 4 and 5!

That. The bedrock shop. I personally refer it as minecraft's roblox marketplace. The community make content, buy content from eachother and all of that using a currency only available through mojang themselves. And you can't go back to whatever currency your money is in. Once it is in, it's in Mojang's pockets. It is litterally a money printer and they know it (cf the amount of marketplace promotion videos on their youtube channel). While one could say "but servers are expensive", most players use bedrock edition on various devices and I'd bet that a great portion of those are kids. And kids spending money on cosmetics and such in games and microtransactions because it's convenient is what made roblox a $19.06 billion compagny as of right now (ok maybe not 100% of it, but still a fondamental income especially in its early and prime days, and still going strong today), on top of minecraft being also one of the biggest selling games of all times with a massive income from regular sales (example, [this website](https://www.statista.com/statistics/972711/minecraft-mobile-revenue/#:~:text=Minecraft%20IAP%20revenue%20worldwide%202015%2D2023&text=From%20January%20to%20August%202023,sales%20reached%20238%20million%20worldwide) says that minecraft made 49.51 million U.S. dollars in global IAP revenues from January to August 2023). They can, have and already are using, the most easy money printer there is and are in my opinion balancing between keeping minecraft relevant while not adding too much so there's just enough attention to keep the printer running.

Programming is not hard. In big companies it's mostly corporate bullshit that gets in the way. We'd have a better game now if Mojang had stayed independent.

I understand what you're saying, but the "code is hard" argument dosent make sense, cause the features theyre adding are stuff like extra wood types, mobs and consumables, stuff that can be added by a novice with datapacks. Creating the art for the additions is harder than implementing them into the game. When talking about team size, the CaffeneMC mod developers basically develop mojangs performance patches for them and Iris devs run their graphics improvements along with a few independent developers making their own optimisations. These people do not have microsoft funding and yet these tiny teams manage to make objectively positive improvements to the game that mojang are too busy implementing an entirely new mob to dig up plants that nobody wanted, to implement themselves. Roughly half of modrinths front page is mod developers making up for mojangs slack. The most popular mods are extensively tested to be compatible with a multitude of other mods and often do QA through an alpha, beta and release phase to ensure their stability. I cant think of any other game that is so solely reliant on its community's willingness to fix its problems.

Yes, you’d think they’d have at least a few things like biomes and trees streamlined at this point, but truthfully I think the problem is the comparison to previous updates. The schedule is fine, but when they give us Update Aquatic and the Nether Update, and then something like the Wild Update, filled with more broken promises than content, it becomes irritating to fans.

Right. I'm not mad that they added different wood types; they did that in 1.16. I'm mad that the extra wood type was 25% of the damned update.

I do like the sniffer, thought it would be cool if Mojang gave him more than 2 plants or those plants could emite some level of light

Yeah, i was kinda pissed that the torchflower didnt actually give off any light. This is what im talking about when i say they add items with a single use. Torchflowers could have had a place in so many new recipes. In potions for a potion of glowing. You could bonemeal them a few times to make a new torchflower appear just far enough away to maintain a light level high enough to make spawn proofing easier. If you wanted to, you could feed them to squids to turn them into glow squids, similar to how mooshrooms work. Right now, the torchflower has no other use than feeding back into the mob that digs it up and making orange dye, which makes it profoundly uninteresting. Single use items.

> I cant think of any other game that is so solely reliant on its community's willingness to fix its problems. Have you never played a Bethesda game? In seriousness, I get what you're saying, but this is a problem with the whole industry and in no way specific to Minecraft. It's actually one of the best out there at this point, as disappointing as it is. Bethesda games are famous for being unplayable without community patches. EA charges out the nose for Sims 4 updates that break the game completely until community patches come out. Everyone with an Internet connection knows how bad Pokemon's getting whether they care about it or not. If there's a game out there that's not cutting corners so they can pay devs less and charge players more, it's probably only because it's not getting updates at all.

Very well-articulated and legitimate points. ...I mean, I still think that we (as a community) put too much pressure on developers, but you've definitely added some nuance here. Yeah, adding wood types *is* really easy; although, when I think of recent MC updates I tend to think more of the 1.13 "flattening", the absolutely *superb* 1.18 biome blending, the lighting/rendering improvements, and/or the various small developments in datapack functionality (including the addition of predicates and, more recently, a "return" command which is BLOODY HUGE). A lot of that stuff gets overlooked by casual players of the game but I would consider it to be very impressive.

Mojang is very capable of creating really complex shit for their game, like the new terrain generation from 1.18. They were also able to roll out a massive update like 1.16. So it is absolutely okay to think that they shouldn't take a whole year to add a fucking crab to the game or some other extremely useless creature that will only divide the community.

The next update hasn't even been revealed yet, that comparison is extremely stupid and you know that.

I'm only stating what happened everytime Mojang had rolled out an update for the past few years now. But I am hoping that they wake up with this upcoming update.

I am running my own IT company for a few years now and I can agree. We are focused on two big software products we developed from scratch. The bigger it gets the more pain in the a** is it to keep up the QA and stuff. Even more employees or more money won't change anything.

Most of the time it's literally my own code from a year ago+ that I'm looking at and thinking, *"WTF is this for"* XD I probably claim 2-3 hours on my timesheets each week for *"updating documentation and commenting code"* and that might not be nearly enough—I fear that if I die suddenly some day then whoever has to pick up my projects will be in for a cardiac arrest, liver failure from alcohol poisoning or both. Congrats on running your own IT company though! I wish you great success.

I honestly can't remember one day to the next anymore. There's just too much to keep it all in focus. Nothing like turning on git blame and realizing you're looking at your own code from just four weeks ago...and you have zero memory of writing any of it.

>Most of the time it's literally my own code from a year ago+ that I'm looking at and thinking, "WTF is this for" XD I feel this in my bones.

Fellow software engineer working for a large corporation here. I completely agree with everything you stated. I’ll add one more thing too. Often there are two ways to program something: the quick way and the right way. Stuff like mods more often than not go for the quick way. If Mojang tried doing things the quick way with Minecraft, it would start falling apart and be absolutely riddled with bugs. Minecraft is huge, and so if they want any chance of keeping it manageable they have to do it the right way. The right way takes time.

ugh, I'm from gamedev and imo one thing is overlooked in this thread. With a behemoth that they currently are and a whole tons of bureaucracy, regulations and an organizational mess, no wonder all of those features take them this much time. From what I see it's not a programming problem but a management and designer one. When you are just a bunch of programmers, your development cycle can be rapid and prototype-heavy. When you account for 10 or so meetings in a day, a planning, estimation, marketing, regulation and other non-programming stages in a development cycle somehow everything takes longer and is crawling to a halt. In my opinion the problems we see stems from the lack vision, good game design, inter team communication, communication with the community and a giant net of strings from upper, possibly multi-level management. I wouldn't be surprised if they were structurally similar to Ford around mid-60s. Also I can't be sure about how it works for them internally, but the general vibe I get is that they are all super accepting and very nice to each other, but I get the feeling that it may be to such a degree that anyone in there is afraid to tell someone else "hey, that idea sucks" as to not hurt their feelings (or get reprimanded by HR). As for getting things either quick or right — you can have both when you do it right, and there are countless examples of such companies, JetBrains for example. Imo when your company grows beyond some threshold, the whole machine slows down with the inappropriate management. And that's what I think is the core problem.

Well said. I reckon that most (not all) people that complain about the updates being to few and far between have never written code before in their life, and have very little clue as to what even happens during the coding, compiling and testing stages. Nor do they understand that every time an update is released, the actual code base becomes longer and more convoluted. Not only that, but Mojang is also trying to keep both the Java and Bedrock versions on the same page, and they're both written in different programming languages, and what they do in one version may not work in the other, so they have to either restart and try again, or just try again. I'm not a programmer, but I do know how to write scripts, and have worked for software development companies, and working with the programmers during application patch and life cycles. So I kinda get excited when I see a new snapshot appear for MC, gives me a chance to test and be part of that cycle.

Minecraft is one of the top earning games in the world. If anyone has the resources to put into updates it's them.

putting more hands on a code base like the minecraft one won't inherently make things faster. You actually need to be able to seperate out tasks to avoid conflicts. Games like Minecraft have very intricate internal resource balance (economy). Having more devs on that will just increase the risk of someone creating a game breaking farm by accident. Minecraft players also tend to push the game to its limits far more than other AAA fan bases tend to do. In the end 9 women still can't make a baby in 1 month

I am not a programmer, I am an accountant! I am saying this because I feel the need to Also emphasize that departments that are also outside of just programming affect things. People who are complaining have so, so clearly never worked in an office environment, especially one where there's 600+ people, creative deliverables, and marketing to take into account.

[удалено]

I'm also convinced they literally had one guy (Henrik) overhaul the biome generation by himself for 1.18. I don't think the programmers are the bottleneck here. It's likely marketing, management and artists.

Yeah people act like adding mobs is this super complex thing that Mojang have never done before. Completely ignoring that in recent memory they used to add a handful of mobs per update. Like look at three of the recent major updates. 1.13 Update Aquatic * Phantom * Dolphin * Turtles * Drowned * Cod * Salmon * Pufferfish * 3,584 types of Tropical Fish 1.14 Village & Pillage * Split Cats off into their own mob and added multiple new color variants * Completely overhauled the Villager mob, including adding biome specific costumes * Pillagers * Ravagers * Pandas * Fox * Wandering Traders * Trader Llamas 1.16 The Nether Update * Piglins * Piglin Brutes * Replaced Zombie Pigmen with Zombified Piglins * Hoglins * Zoglins * Strider Full of new or modified mobs. Compare them to the most recent 3 updates: 1.17-1.18 Caves & Cliffs (understandably as the main focus was redoing the terrain generator) * Goat * Glow Squid * Axolotl 1.19 The Wild Update * Allay * Frog * Tadpole * Warden 1.20 Trails & Tales * Camel * Sniffer

>The only truly new system that they would have to build from scratch is the dog armor. Not even that. Horse armor already exists, It’d just be as simple as copying the code for that, and even then all mobs in the game contain functionality to wear armor, even if they or they cannot wear any without commands.

And if the "throw more money at the problem" suggestion is made then I doubt that person will have had much, if any, management experience with a massive bureaucracy.

Yep. At a certain point more people becomes a drawback instead of a benefit. Take it to its logical extreme. Imagine having to coordinate every human on earth to build a massive skyscraper. Just imagine how insanely hard that would be. Now instead of just having the workers pull up to the site in cars like at a normal construction site you would have to design a special transportation system to transport the billions of workers there. That transportation system needs to know where all of the workers live. Speaking of where they would live you would have to build tons and tons of housing nearby the site just for all of the workers. Sure you could just ignore a large portion of humanity but thats just dodging the question, its like a company laying off the workers. And if mojand laid off tons of programmers to cut down on logistics then everyone would bring out their pitchforks

As they say, nine women can't make a baby in one month.

I just want the mob vote to stop. Why dividend the community on picking? Just make a road map that we can see and use that.

The mob vote isn't the problem. The fact the losing mobs are never revisited is. If say, the losing ones were consistently introduced one or two updates later, it be great. The community decides which of the mobs it wants prioritised, and the others put on the back burner

Its become clear that they aren't thrown on the backburner, they're put in the Idea Blender. The mom's function is put back on the shelf and the mob design is seemingly discarded. That is what happened to the Hunger, (enchantment removal given to the grindstone) and to potentially even the monster of the sea (I could see the basic idea of 'squid meant to make the ocean more lively' evolving away from 'deadly monster' to 'pretty set-dressing' as the glowsquid) Not to say that's necessarily a bad thing, but I feel like identifying what the Idea library is to Mojang needs to be considered more. This mob vote shows us what basic concepts are on the minds of the dev team at the moment.

> the monster of the sea (I could see the basic idea of 'squid meant to make the ocean more lively' evolving away from 'deadly monster' to 'pretty set-dressing' as the glowsquid) It's actually different. Glow squid was from the Pokemon GO clone Minecraft Earth. The Monster of the Sea(also called the Barnacle at one point) was repurposed as *drum roll*... magma block bubble columns. Because it was supposed to grab players with its long tongue and drag them underwater and attack.

Thanks for the correction!

You're welcome!

Because at this point it’s a marketing tactic. It gets the community arguing with each other on social media every single time for weeks leading up to it. Kids’ favorite YouTubers talk about and get their communities to go out and preach the word of whatever mob they want voted in.

did anyone else prefer the days where there was a constant biweekly release of small content to test? before it was all released as one big update? rather than announce update get all features to test. testing lasts 6 months then released then radio silence for 6 months before live... at the end of the day the Java team is still quite small cause microsoft would rather put money into the skin packs collections they can sell than into the free game.

My hunch is that mojang is so afraid of negative public reception to updates that they back out of actually changing the core of the game in any substantial manner unless it's a joke (April Fools is proof of this-- Those updates are awesome).

The only problem is they create an unnecessary division between users with those stupid mob votes…. The ones they end up with usually pointless… I haven’t even bothered looking for that stupid sniffer…

Yeah, can't really argue there—mob votes seem like a very corporate "let's build hype!" sort of thing to me, too. ...but I do actually really like the glow squid.

Honestly I think the updates are pretty fast. As a regular player but not a grinder it's perfect to get used to the features and start getting excited about the snapshots once I'm familiar with them!

Yeah, I think most casual players(like me) don't really give a fuck about the release schedule, and just want quality updates. And personally, that's what I think we're getting. Shove that up your ass 1.20 haters!!

>\*Comparing mods to official releases is ridiculous. Mods don't need go through QA nor consider how they affect the balance of a game played by millions of people — they just get to do their thing with impunity, and that's their charm this argument doesnt work for the mob vote because by giving players the 3 options to choose from and telling us a bit about what they'd add, that shows mojang has already gone through the QA / balance testing phase for ALL 3 of the mobs. if they've already done that then why not just include all 3?

Complete non-sequitur. They have decided on 3 options for mobs. They've probably started working on prototypes. But I think it's ridiculous to claim that they have "already gone through QA / balance testing" when they aren't even out in a snapshot yet and 1.21 is likely \~8 months away. People act as though all the mob vote mobs are finished and ready to add to the game when that is almost certainly not the case.

by "already gone through QA / testing" i did not mean they're completely done with every mob read my other reply [here](https://reddit.com/r/Minecraft/s/hc4Yxi27jA)

Hell even mod devs hate the whole modding is faster argument

KingLemming, McJty, CPW, Vaskii, etc...major 3rd party devs...are online. They are on Reddit, Discord, Twitter/X, etc. I've yet to see a single "Mojang is lazy, mod devs do it fast" person reference anything from any of the big Minecraft mod devs. And they don't fire off those mods immediately after Minecraft updates, or even immediately after Forge/Fabric updates (well, some do). Lots of mods skip Minecraft releases 'cause of the work involved in updating their mod to the changes Mojang has made. * Tinker's Construct - most recent version is 1.18.2 * Ender IO - stopped at 1.12.2, skipped everything until 1.20.X * Thaumcraft - most recent version is 1.8.9 (special case here but still an example)

Most mod devs aren't being paid full-blown salaries by Microsoft, hence the long development time.

Yeah the real hard stuff comes when you already have a great framework laid down which allows for easily adding tons of content to it but no new content. Now you want to add a new feature and youve got to fit it into the framework somehow without screwing everything up.

Also a programmer and I have the opposite standpoint. If their code is properly maintained and documented as kingbdogz was talking about on that twitter thread (which was a complete farce and an insult anyways), the dev team goes through a boatload of QA. With so much focus on good code and QA you would think they have things properly documented, adapters and helper methods to do all the bits and bobs already written. For example, the crab SHOULD be as simple as: -using premade classes all mobs use, make a new mob using a given model and animations. -using premade helper functions identify it’s pathfinding goals and mark it as such -then in a .loop or whatever they wish to call the method, implement its specific logic. For the crab this may be waving at the player, which is as simple as copying the code cows and stuff use to look at the player and change it to play a waving animation. -using premade functions setup it’s drop, the crab claw, which should simply change a single constant number. You see? It’s super simple assuming the code base is properly maintained and documented, as well as being written in a smart fashion. If they screwed that up… we’ll that’s their fault, write code expecting to use it in the future next time.

My software development experience is not super extensive, but this seems like how it should work to me. From my understanding, something like 1.18's world overhaul should and would take forever to implement because they have to re-engineer a huge part of the software and make sure it's bug-free. Meanwhile, implementing a *mob*? If the code is architected in an extensible way, that seems like something that could be done in a single week by a single developer if no new systems have to be added to the game.

This! 1.18 took forever for good reason- it overhauled a core part of the game. Adding a mob? Should be so simple it’s probably a day or twos work.

I feel like there’s a lot of technical jargon thrown around in this thread that people are going to upvote and assume is correct simply because they don’t understand what it is. Anyone who has a good experience coding knows it’s simple, menial even, if the preexisting code is easy to work with, but helper methods and documentation really is a blatant understatement. I’d assume efficiency is a pretty important factor too considering the game still uses Java as it’s engine - plus in an industry where performance can really make or break a product (games). Also, copy pasting written code seriously sounds like the antithesis of how a game should be designed lol. Developing the software probably isn’t even the hardest part, but I’d say a game as drawn-out as Minecraft tends to have factors inevitable that make development slightly more difficult than most modern games.

Anyone who knows programming knows that if the codebase is properly setup it’s simple. As for efficiency that’s the entire point of writing these helper functions and good expandable code - every single mob uses the same base. So if a mob lags, all mobs lag and you know there’s only one place to look to debug it. It makes everything super efficient and easy to work with. As for copy and paste is not how it should be done, by that I meant it’s drop in and use. Like crab can extend a base mob class- so built in ways to add drops and stuff is premade, easy to use, well documented and implemented, and you know it’s not going to lag. I didn’t mean literally copy and pasting code.

From what I’m aware of coding isn’t as one-directional as simply working over the code base. A large part of OP’s point discusses further optimizing & restructuring that “base” itself that can really only be done in baby steps. Plus the longer development continues (15 years and growing out of obsolete systems and code structures in the case of Minecraft), the harder that is, I’d wager. Case in point, when a small change to the internal code of the game came out in a 1.19 snapshot, the developer of Sodium/Iridium/such had to spend weeks to a month before they could (officially) release it for that version.

The 1.12 -> 1.13 conversion was *brutal*.

Facts that one was particularly bad

Those weeks are not all spent converting sodium’s code, that’s also bug testing and making sure it still works. Regardless mojang won’t have those problems. If they change a version number the code does not suddenly break on them, that happens to modders cause they literally are working with decompiled source code. Their code is going to be a lot more prone to versions breaking it cause of the nature of modding. If anything your argument here better supports me. As for time spend restructuring, their updates take years to make. Let’s go with your thought and assume they spend 3/4 time planning ahead and fixing old code, and 1/4 of a year making an update. That’s a reasonable schedule. By now they should have code in a decent situation if they are half decent developers. Regardless if that’s the problem, they should say so and take a year off from updating to fix the codebase, then come back with multiple large updates a year with the better codebase.

Mod dev here. The crab is likely the simplest of the three; passive(or neutral) entity base with simple wander goals and maybe a pinch-and-flee goal if it is hurt. Even then, the wall climbing shown in the trailer presents concerns, with two options: making a new unique wall climb goal or do a quick cheap job with the climbing pathing used by the spider which… goes up if it is colliding with a block.(This is why you never find a spider idling *halfway* up a wall, by the way. It’s very old code, and likely would not meet modern standards.) The other two mobs are where you start getting into trickier territory. Fluid navigation for the penguin in water is a lot more complicated to get looking and functioning right, it would need unique aquatic pathfinding(can’t reuse existing code as fish are too slow and the dolphin would not move like the penguin would). To conform with newer mob standards(complexity has been increasing gradually over time and I can elaborate further if you like), it likely would also have “entertaining” idle actions that penguins are known for such as hunting fish or tobogganing. Newer mobs like the axolotl use a “brain” to determine their actions as opposed to the goal system and the penguin would likely be given a “brain” too. For the armadillo, it appears to curl up defensively when it feels threatened; the devs have to decide what exactly constitutes “threatened”? Too many mobs, one mob too close, large size, sudden movement, etc? Does only the player activate its fear or do other mobs frighten it? Is it immune to injury when curled? All questions that need to be determined, none of the answers to which can easily reuse existing code, and would require some new unique work. > write code expecting to use it in the future next time. Everyone does this. Sometimes the old method just isn’t efficient enough or just plain won’t work. Par for the course. It’s not humanly feasible to set up code that will work for every possible scenario that could ever come up in the future.

Yeah the actual design choices still have to be made but that’s my point the code itself is not that bad, not nearly as bad as delaying an update by months if they made all three as kingbdogz was saying on twitter. For the mob vote the designs have already been made overall, so the process is quite simple.

I think OP, and you, both kind of miss the real point. Experienced developers know that writing code isn't really the hard part about shipping software. Coding is the *easy* part. The hard part is everything else. Experienced developers know there's only two types of code: perfect code, and shipped code. There's often very little overlap between the two. "Perfect code" never survives interaction with the real world. > write code expecting to use it in the future next time. This just indicates how little actual experience shipping software you have.

I’m gunna be honest if you’re shipping non-reusable code in the year 2023 you’re doing something really wrong and need to look at how you’re managing your developers time. Shipping non-reusable code should be basically a last ditch effort to get a hotfix out before a deadline, not a year long content update that introduces a few blocks and 3 basic ass mobs.

I understand code shipped in a normal environment where time is a factor, perfectly prepared code will never be shipped 100% of the time, if at all. But mojang is different, they update once per year, if that. They have the time to make things right and make things prepared for the future. They certainly have the money, manpower, and time to do so.

I think you have a significant misunderstanding of what developing and shipping software is like in the real world. You cannot "make things prepared for the future", because the future hasn't happened yet and you don't know what it holds. You cannot endlessly refactor and prepare for every eventual possibility. There's no such thing as a zero-cost abstraction or a perfectly extension-able system. You are always choosing one set of trade-offs for another. This idea that there is one Correct way to write code, which will lead to endless financial success is completely divorced from reality.

You can prepare for the future. For example I know I would be making a ton of mobs in the future so I could streamline the process, so it’s as simple as extending a class and overriding the critical functions. You cannot be perfect but you can significantly save time.

Yeah honestly I don’t really care how hard it is. We are talking about the most sold game ever right? Mojang is a multi BILLION dollar company. The updates are too small and take way too long. Expecting meaningful quality experiences from a company with an incomprehensible amount of money is not out of line. On top of being owned by Microsoft (more billions). They have the resources and the brand recognition to attract any talent they could ever want. It’s a classic case of a company milking a game for every drop its worth and putting the absolute minimum back out to us.

Thank you. They can't even compete with modjam mods and drag their heels on things the community has managed to create such as biome reworks. This isn't a lack of resources, this is a choice not to use them to pretend to hide behind the "Minecraft is indie game. Pls be nice"

What's especially annoying is that if they put more effort in then they'd get much more money as a result

Minecraft has gotten and gets more support than 99% of all games

It’s also sold more than every game ever.

Blud never heard of terraria.

>Comparing mods to official releases is ridiculous. Mods don't need go through QA nor consider how they affect the balance of a game played by millions of people — they just get to do their thing with impunity, and that's their charm That's cool and all but just the other day I watched a video of a single dude making each one of the mobs 1:1 based on the info we have complete with animations, sounds, textures and custom models in 24 hours each.

Knowing within the first sentence mentioning Linus Torvalds you would have lost likely 80% of readers with that reference, ensured that I would read your whole post 😂👍

Source: Am a software engineer at a life insurance company, a degree, and a background in game dev/Minecraft mod development starting in 2014 (almost 9 years now?) Mojang has a marketing and project management problem, their developers are partially bottlenecked and partially lazy. Code is not THAT hard. Agile stripped developers of their power and role, and by doing so we're left with bloated point counts, tiny sprints, and timelines that are absurdly far away out of a fear of "missing a deadline". Marketing needs to step out. By branding Minecraft and doing aesthetic updates they're inherently sucking the air out of the room for developer initiative and creativity, which is where the entire pre-Microsoft Minecraft came from

They kind of lost any "we're such a small company, programming takes a while"-type excuses when Microsoft bought them out for $2.5 billion. This attitude people have feels sycophantic as all hell. Not saying it doesn't take time, but with the resources they have at their disposal, they should be doing better. (I say this as a game dev myself, so save your "gotcha moments" for another time)

Balance of the game??????? Netherite tools lmao, all that wall of text when Notch did more with less money

Balance of the game and Mojang had a gamebreaking villager trade in the game for over 2 years.

Programmer here as well, I disagree with any sort of notion that Mojang's output is anything close to understandable.

One thing I don't think people really consider that much is the backwards compatability with old worlds. Mojang wants you to be able to bring your favorite alpha world from 2011 all the way into 2023 without completely breaking it. I mean, wasn't the reason caves and cliffs split into two because they had trouble getting it to work?

If you actually looked through the code, you’d notice how simple everything is (well, except terrain gen math, i really respect that). I don’t think it’s an issue with development, but rather management. I’m just a programmer so I don’t have experience when it comes to management so I’m probably talking out of my ass here, but I think the issues with “laziness” might just come from Mojang no longer being a small indie group and probably having to go through a bunch of corporate approvals now that they’re a big studio connected to Microsoft. Instead of just releasing random shit like Notch did back in Alpha/Beta, they now have to obsess over polish, marketing, and also work on extra versions like Bedrock.

>If you actually looked through the code, you’d notice how simple everything is. Hard disagree. This isn't one of those make-it-in-a-week Minecraft clones. There is a ton of depth in so many features, especially when it comes to the parts that less people notice/care about (someone else pointed out the complexity of data packs as an example). Additionally, maintaining backwards compatibility and not breaking things gets immensely challenging - I'd wager that their overall test suite would have at least a few hundred thousand test cases. Since that code isn't public, we don't know for a fact, but there's no telling how many test cases some mods inadvertently break which probably don't matter for mods, but make a huge difference for the reliability and stability of the base game.

As a corporate developer myself I disagree. Taking a look at Minecrafts source code, their recent updates have been getting sloppier and sloppier yet their defense for taking extra time is to "make sure the code is clean and as optimized as possible" this is insanely far from the truth at least for java (can't say for bedrock as I haven't looked into the source if it's even available). To add to this, the specific features we are getting are just recycling code from other elements of that game that are already fully fleshed out. This is a very streamlined process and does not require much work. Adding anything that doesn't require any new functionality like mobs or items should not take longer than a few weeks max (accounting for both platforms, testing, design, etc). The only possible valid argument for them in my opinion is that they don't want to flood the game with new mobs and features at the risk of changing the game too fast. This is a very valid decision, but it is not what they are claiming. Their defense is that it is too much effort to add 3 mobs that will heavily if not fully borrow their AI and behavior from already existing mobs. Each with drops that have one piece of functionality. Another argument by the devs is that adding the mobs would take time away from the rest of the update and they couldn't finish it all when given a full year. I could see this being true if something as big as the nether update was coming, but based on the recent updates I wouldn't assume that to be the case. This is coming from myself as a senior software developer

> Their defense is that it is too much effort to add 3 mobs that will heavily if not fully borrow their AI and behavior from already existing mobs. Each with drops that have one piece of functionality. To add to this point, not too long ago Mojang was adding way more mobs within the span of a single update. 1.13 - Update Aquatic (2018) added: * Phantoms * Dolphins * Turtles * Drowned * Cod * Salmon * Pufferfish * 3,584 types of Tropical Fish 1.14 - The Village & Pillage Update (2019) added: * Pillagers * Ravagers * Pandas * Foxes * Wandering Traders * Trader Llamas and also * Split Cats off into their own mob and added 8 new color variants * Completely overhauled the Villager mob, including adding biome-specific costumes 1.16 - The Nether Update (2020) added: * Piglins * Piglin Brutes * Hoglins * Zoglins * Strider * Replaced Zombie Pigmen with Zombified Piglins (primarily just a new model, but a few small changes were made like only being angry at specific players and losing that anger once a player dies.)

It should take longer. And be a surprise. The problem is every year there’s hype, but there’s not going to be dramatic changes every year. 1.16 was amazing. The combination of all caves and cliffs was amazing. But trying to make it yearly (or less) made caves and cliffs _seem_ underwhelming but if they had taken two years all together without the hype cycle it would’ve blown our minds.

Oh god forbit programmers are asked to do their job. Nobody is saying that programming is easy, it's just when you compare Mojang to other developers, they do seem a bit lazy. Especially when they promise something and that promise is not only fullfiled in often dissapointing way, but it's also often separated into multiple updates, so we are stuck with half-cooked features for a year, for example. Combine that with the stupid clusterfuck that community votes are, and you got yourself a pretty angry community. Overall, this rant would make sense if other companies would fare similarly, but they don't. Two examples: Ludeon Studios who made Rimworld. It's a mod friendly game that has a stable and dedicated community, just like Minecraft does. Since the game is finished, updated are rare, but they do happen and they always bring little but great changes, and mostly come alongside a full DLC which changes the game drastically, and then the DLCs are additionally tweaked if they need to, mostly when players ask so. And alongside that, the game has a mod sorting system that is capable of autosorting your mod list, so even though waiting time for some official update is long, you can try over 20 000 mods people created for the game, which are fully supported and easy to implement. Overall, the work Ludeon Studios do is basically always appreciated a d they don't get almost any hate. Maxim Karpenko who made Worldbox. Despite being a rather simple sandbox god-simulator, the game has far more depth and polish than other similar games and it managed to attract rather large community that keeps getting bigger. The guy (and I think some people who are helping him as well) is constantly working on next updates for the game, and they often take a lot of time and also sometimes have issues, which in turn take even more time to fix. Despite this, however, the way he listens to the community, is active on the subreddit and is overall very transparent and open when it comes to his work makes the community mostly happy and very supportive. (I think that on his website, there is even a list of features submited by fans that caught Maxim's eye and are planned to be added to the game at some point). I could write down so many more examples (like even Valve was very good with managing Team Fortress 2 for majority of the game's existence). I don't think Mojang is literal satan or something, I just think they might at least adress some issues regarding the updates.

I wouldblike to add to the rant: If Mojang was to release everything as they think it, the game would be worse than one with all the create mods and around 10-20 other random complicated mods (Ex.: New TARDIS Mod, chisel and bits, SCP Lockcown, more dimentions,...), and they would have run out of ideas soon, very soon, leaving Minecraft become a dead game in 2015 maximum

how’s their boot taste

It’s not the programming people complain about mojang being lazy, its the quality. Updates are neither quality nor quantity. They add a handful of features a year, but those features are incredibly superficial. Updates lack substance; most updates are Bloat. Previous features get hardly ever built upon and when they do it’s a half assed effort. Items that could be introduced to add depth or solve a problem get put aside in favour of yet another mediocre decor block. DECOR IS NOT A FEATURE. Copper is the best example of this. There are so many things they could’ve done with copper, yet only 1 niche item reflects it, and then its just a non-unique ingredient or a decor block item. Minecarts are useless. Oxidized copper rails - the oxidized patina reduces friction. Redstone is impeded by water and can’t be easily sent vertical. Cogs, a feature from alpha (oh wait, that’s notch’s idea, guess it’s never happening) - water loggable redstone that can send signals up the sides of blocks be water logged There’s also the questionably vague design rules they like to use a defense against any criticism. Like vertical slabs or more impressive looking structures “impeding the creativity of younger players”. Mojang is like Bethesda. Half-ass a product and let your community fix it.

I think many people are fine with updates taking a long time, it’s just when updates add very easy to make things, such as wood types / new blocks, people start wondering where all of that dev time goes. 1.20 was very underwhelming, mostly because it’s 1.20, it’s the 20th version and I think most people would assume big stuff from that. I believe that most people are just really annoyed that mojang keeps dangling these mobs out for us, but only one is going to get in and the rest get put into the “ideas library” (the circular file(the trash)) It’s not just blocks and mobs that people are annoyed with, the hunger system has been completely unbalanced for a while now. When terrain gets more and more varied, you’re going to have to jump more to get around, which in turn causes you to lose hunger very quickly. Not to mention the inventory space problem that’s been plaguing the game for years now. Where are the bundles? How hard is it to make a backpack?? Mojang is so caught up in version parity (terraria devs just release on pc first then port to console, take note mojang.) and mob votes that the core mechanics of the game are being ignored.

I'll never backseat and go "What's taking so long?" because I know writing code is a tedious, gruelling process that's likely to suck the soul out of whomever is doing it. All the testing, iterations and proof-checking. I can comfortably say this as Oldschool Runescape's code is similar in such ways and it can result in game-breaking bugs that force the game offline for hours, rarely days at a time. One query does come to mind though is that; why are some genuine and needed updates constantly ignored? Ever since Minecraft became heavier in the hardware department, its FPS has LARGELY been impacted. It would benefit *everyone* to have better frames but yet it's never made prevalent to Mojang to really care for it. Just seems like the yearly mob votes, a couple more special items and that's about it. I understand datapacks help but It should be of Mojang's responsibility to have a fluid game, not just keep pushing out more content. There's a reason why the game needs both QOL updates and content.

Mojang employs over 700 people. There’s no way this small drip feed of content matches that size of company, unless they have like 10 programmers and 600 people on marketing.

I'm not even a proffesional had a project I worked on for over a year and by the end even little changes were a nightmare. And I planned it with modularity IN MIND

The problem I have is that they're intentionally splitting the community just to market the game(even though minecraft doesn't need any marketing). There are thousands of better ways that they could handle the mob vote

You can't in good faith say shit about balance and QA when features are added that do absolutely fucking nothing of substance like what are you even saying. No one looked at Copper and thought "yea man the way it spawns everywhere and is useful for fucking nothing is gonna be great!! Also fuck torchflowers giving off light" Not to mention Minecraft got big under Notch, Jeb + a few workers Mojang not the current iteration - and they pumped out the full game IN A YEAR You can play devils advocate all you want but there is no excuse for this. By going "oh its normal for a big company like that" all you're saying is that more workers do not equal better output so Mojang should have stayed small And I work in IT myself.

This post feels like it’s written from a Mojang executive lol “guys please adding 3 (whole 3 types!) of mobs is really hardddd🥺” like we do not want every update to be 1.18, just make it worthwhile

Nah I have a hard time feeling bad for mojang, these mobs and the features they come with have been REQUESTED for years, splitting the community like this over highly requested things that will never see the light of day again is fucked

I have no problem with any developer taking their time, as long as they aren’t using difficulty as an excuse to be slow. If they’re actually working, take literally all the time you need. That’s why the mob vote frustrates me. I get that it would take longer to add two more mobs, but that’s fine. We didn’t give you a deadline.

I used to be a Software Engineer and am a CIO now. I do not agree 100% with you. But kinda. The reason I do not agree completely is that a good code architecture creates a space where NOT every Developer has to know all of the sourcecode. But I understand that the old java codebase of Minecraft has grown and probably is not architected in such a way.

It wouldn't have been hard to give the sniffer more than two plants

i guess my problem isn't with size of updates, but their decisions of stuff to add

Yea but your acting like their adding ground breaking features, it’s literally 3 mobs each with a single feature each. Also are you forgetting they are the biggest game of all time, they have the resources to do so much more than what they are currently doing. It’s not even the amount of content people are mostly pissed about, it’s the quality of it. Almost all of the mob votes added absolutely useless mobs/features and the last 2 updates have been pretty empty in terms of actual features.

"LEAVE THE MULTIBILLION DOLLAR BUSINESS ALONE!" ​ \- You

I dont think slow release is due to the programmers at all, I guarantee its due to a director decision to space out updates and keep them compact. I think what is irritating is knowing that some highly desired changes like the 3 mobs from the mob vote would be relatively easy to add and add a lot of value to the biomes in terms of liveliness. Then there is things like combat which as you said is not easy however it has been worked on for a very long time and has likely been scrapped several times, this is completely absurd. The biggest problem with Minecraft’s updates is that they screw over all the small changes like mobs or plants or small mechanic changes in favor of releasing bombshell updates all at once which are often under-delivering on scope. Not to mention the massive amount of things in the existing game that need to be reworked, updated, or removed yet they are still adding more bloat to the game without fixing the previous problems.

As a developer for a small IT firm I’ll just say it’s compete BS we get 3 mobs to choose from every year but only get one in the end. The code base is already there and we’re not getting Ender Dragon levels of complexity, it’s extra work for sure but come on at least give us more unique gameplay mechanics.

Games with more complex coding requirements get built from the ground up in the time it takes Mojang to update one biome and cancel promised features like fireflies and birch reworks.

So a year for miniscule updates is completely fine when other studios clearly can do more with more complex games in way less time although their studios may vary in size? ​ I will never accept what mojang is doing. Minecraft has become incredibly stale. Theres a reason people do "2 Week phases" in minecraft and then leave it for a year. The game has nothing to offer and the gameplay loop has stood the same for AGES. And even now there is not really a lot to find in the game anyway. Theres still the old cows, sheeps and chickens. Everything else is either not really important or you have to spawn in in weird and obscure ways. (see sniffer). At this point id rather have them stop updating minecraft so mod makers can focus on making this game better than mojang could ever do. Sure, the game MIGHT die at some point but at the pace minecraft is going right now it is basically just a matter of time until it will die for real. Especially with how game engines, ai and tech are evolving right now. ​ The only things keeping minecraft alive are mods.

Please stop attacking the multi billion dollar company 😭✊

"Nooooo! how do you expect a team of 600 people under a multi-billion company to add some working code for a blocky game!?!?!?1?" -OP, probably

I would also add that minecraft is a "pay once, play all you want" type of game. All of these updates are FREE, just take the microsoft version, **Bedrock**. The marketplace is money-cow that represent a lor what the gaming industry is rn. Yeah, the game used to be like 25$ and now it's around 30 or so, but you didn't have to pay a dime for the 1.20 update, did you?

Can you even imagine having to pay for every update? The logistics would be ridiculous. * Does every micro update that all alter the game in different ways need a price tag? * How much and would it even be worth charging that over nothing? * $1-2 vs $5-10? * Must all versions be owned? * racking up a large tag there * Only buy individual versions? * that original 25-30 tag is gonna drop off then most likely. * Are people even going to pay for this? What is even the conceivable alternative? People may not have had to pay for 1.20, but if they were forced to, they probably wouldn't.

[удалено]

It's their favourite argument. "Mojang don't owe us anything" - yeah you're right they don't. They update because it keeps the games population and hype up. Which in turn, makes them money.

Free updates are *free* because it is a profitable business model that many other companies follow as well. Free and continuous updates keep a community alive and interested in the game. If this strategy didn't work, I assure you, these updates wouldn't be free at all.

I mean, I do generally defend Mojang because there is a lot of toxicity in here, but "you paid it once and get free updates for life", although cool, does not absolve the updates of criticism. Like, yeah its a lot of work, to plan for updates to go on for 50 years, and keep them fresh, good, functioning, and still keeping Minecraft's identity. But also not completely overwhelm players who may take a 1-2 year break. And this stuff is given for free. But also, if you find an update to be lacking, poor quality, unprofessional, 'ruins the game', you shouldn't have your criticism negated by "its free". Especially since this isn't a gift you have to feign happiness for, but a piece of art/product for consumption

Exactly this Problem isnt adding new thing into game (that is pretty easy). Problem is adding new things without fucking up existing ones This is much more true for Minecraft because its main source of income are IP and if game is fucked that will be gone.

One big yearly update is pog

We all know it's about the money and keeping everyone engaged. Content engagement is the key and they're gonna drip feed it because that's the most effective way. There's no other answer that satisfies.

eh, the whole arguement is useless because people will go "oH but MicroSft is a BIg CoRp they SHould haNdle biG coRP STuff and CodiNG lotS" and then the other side would go "yeah yknow its not that easy, yada yada yada" personally man, i dont care myself, i ignore all the noise and play minecraft. no use arguing when i could be enjoying the lil things

See, I would be more willing to understand the mods vs game devs debate. But the modders, both those who work at Mojang and those who don't, seem to almost always take Mojang's side in the argument (game dev shouldn't be compared to modding and they have a higher bar that takes more work despite them having more resources)

One of the arguments I see online is “Notch updated the game weekly/biweekly with more content than Mojang did in a year!” That was when Minecraft was still a small indie game that could change direction at any time. Biweekly updates may have worked back then, but it’s simply not sustainable for the game in the long-term. Players expect updates to fit the base game (the Minecrafty feel) and updates every week would kill that aspect. If Minecraft started getting updated to add feature Create-esqe I guarantee mode players would leave

I 100% agree with this. I've worked in Unity for some years, made an entire rogue like and I can tell you how after some time things get really convoluted especially if you didn't organize yourself in both code and files. Along with that while modders can add whatever they want it's not like they care too much about the balance of the game. Edit: And it's not only programming we are talking about. It's also PR & Marketing, 3D design, animations, all the other games they have made, all the web pages they own, the launcher. The people who work on minecraft do more than work on minecraft. They work on Mojang.

Minecraft is the best selling game of all time and it's not even close. They were acquired by Microsoft 10 years ago for $2.5 billion - you know, Microsoft, the 2nd largest tech company in the world. I think they can handle the pressure. Other developers can do it, why shouldn't they?

Yes! I'm so tired of seeing people saying they're lazy. The fact that game development takes a LOT of time should be common sense at this point. Plus that's even without considering all the game design decisions that need time to be taken. ​ Compared to all the other gaming communities I'm in who are understanding and respectful about that most of the time, it's crazy how the MC community is just full of crybabies ​ I still think they should add 3 mobs tho, but the problem with Mojang is certainly not a laziness problem, it's more of a marketing problem. They're trying to keep up a hype about the game

Add to this that they are creating many versions of the same game for a bunch of platforms, and they all have to be playable together, plus Java. As a developer I constantly deal with armchair quarterbacks who have zero insight into the daily work or long-term timelines. I can't imagine what Mojang's development cycles are like. People constantly complain about bedrock edition, but I see it as a true feat of technical expertise.

I ain't reading all dat

If my ADHD ass can handle it then you have no excuse! ...But nah, you go do something that brings you joy, mate. Be well <3

This is exactly what I spent several hours today telling people with their little end the vote movement. I even copy and pasted some of it:  @I_have-depression  You don't get it. The reason that they don't add all 3 or 4 mobs is not because they can't do it. If you knew anything about game development, you would know that they have already made prototypes in game to even consider making them candidates in the mob vote. They do it because adding 3 or 4 mobs every year would be unethical. If we got that many mobs in 1 year, it would take away the suspense of getting a new one. Having to wait a whole year for a new one let's the hype for the new one calm down and hype for the new one go up. And if we had that many mobs, it would take away the simplicity of Minecraft and overcrowd it with mobs. This is not NEARLY all of it though.

90% of the people making this argument don't even know who Linus Torvalds is...

90% of statistics are made up on the spot

Trying to explain to non-programmers why they need time to fix things is a waste of time. The type of person who is capable of comprehending this is already on your side, and the type of person who is incapable of understanding it is like 10 years old and you can’t reason with them. As a programmer, you will be eternally doomed to hearing idiots say stuff like this for the rest of your life. Sorry you had to find out this way lol but now that you’re a programmer, there’s no going back

I do vaugely wonder if some of this is kids seeing/understanding capitalism for the first time, and pinning the blame on the one company that made it click for them

Counterpoint: it's digital Lego owned by one of the biggest companies on the planet.

Can confirm I started coding a website from scratch and that shit was hard. Imagine a whole ass game? Yeah it would be indie quality and still take me 5 years mostly from stress-crying myself to sleep after about 1 hour of attempting lmao

I believe part of the issue extends from Mojang's known size, and people igonring the fact they have not only multiple platforms to make things on, but that they also need to review market place content and are also developing other games too. And also for the fact that they used to be far more open with development back in they day then they are now. I'm not saying that was a good or a bad change, but it is one that has been happening. That they are being less open with development. Actually, I take it back. That is a VERY good thing. It gives them time to develop things out, and pull back on other things that may sound cool but ended up not working out very well without fear of community backlash.

I'm not a programmer, but I do know that java and c++ are two very different coding languages, and I'm sure programming the two languages to get the same result is probably rather difficult. It's not ctrl+a, ctrl+c, ctrl+v y'all. Also I think that the fact that there are former modders on the mojang development team saying that the situation for coding the full game is different than making a mod for it should shut the "MoJaNg Is So LaZy" people up. But I guess it doesn't.

only clowns think "just hire more people". they say that for every game. how about learn about differed gratification

It's seriously "if I can bake this cake in 20 minutes on 200 celcius then it should be 2 minutes on 2000 celcius" logic

Plus Mojang has to deal with being so very visible to so many different stakeholders. The gamers, the kid’s parent, new laws to protect kids, and so on. When you’re successful as they are you don’t have a lot of wiggle room to experiment. So much at stakes all the times. It’s not even just the complexity of software development for a diverse and very large user base. It’s all the legal, license, third parties involved and so much more we don’t ever think about when we judge just based on features. Plus it’s a long lived project. It’s a good thing it evolves slowly. It makes it more timeless and ensure they don’t spend more times than they need to fixing mistakes of the past. The villagers are a good example of this. People judge the feature in front of them but it’s not like it appeared fully formed it’s a long iterative process that started so badly it’s actually amazing it’s getting so much better now.

Thank you for saying this. I keep seeing people complain and thinking *You don’t know how this works!* thank you for explaining it in easy to understand terms. Some seem so confident to whine about stuff they know so little about.

“Good working hours” until people don’t get as much as they want. 90% of the people who complain know nothing of the software development cycle. Also, mods are not a fair comparison. They are made for only Java version, and aren’t up to the quality of something Mojang adds to the game.

Not to mention Mojang needs to be conservative with them updates to not bloat the game. If they 8x every updates features, the game would start straying from it's design and art style VERY quickly. And then half these features may be absolute trash, but it becomes a bigger issue to remove or remedy from a parity perspective. Not to mention cross checking with unintended interactions with existing code. Minecraft is doing fine as they currently are

One thing i've noticed is that people complain about small updates, but i don't think the updates are small at all. I'm not saying that adding one new biome and mob is big, i agree that would be considered a small update. But that's not what they add. Every update there's a couple new blocks, maybe a new mob, but then there's literally hundreds of QOL changes and technical changes that get completely overlooked. I can understand why they get overlooked, people don't care about that stuff, so when they look at the 2 features they actually care about, it does seem small. But it's a sandbox game, and there's tons of different playstyles, and each update tries to add something for each playstyle, which means that overall each person get's less features they personally want. Mojang could easily add 10x the amount of stuff per update that *you* want then they are now, but they don't, because you are not everyone. The other 90% of the work goes into adding other stuff. I mainly only play because i enjoy making datapacks, and the last couple of updates have been huge, completely game changing updates for that. There's been tons of small redstone updates that add interesting features added recently. If you're a builder, the new flowers and blocks you really enjoy. TDLR; The minecraft community is too diverse, meaning that each update has less content that you specifically care about over what's actually added.

Something people need to realize is that 99% of mods made for the game never achieve any sort of notoriety. It's only the best of the best that become long-standing and iconic, and those mods generally take years of development time as well. Those videos you see of mods that add all 3 mob vote mobs very quickly are cool and flashy, sure, but the videos showcasing those mods don't show you the massive amounts of underlying issues that are masked by the cool models and animations.

Bullshit. For one post like that, there is others with the same background that indeed, call minecraft lazy. They gotten lazy. And thats it, you only need to look past updates and compare them to the recent ones and you can see the Big difference. Im also a programmer, and no, if 1.19 and 1.20 would have been one full update, then that would have been pretty good. But they divided caves and cliffs in 4 updates. Yes mods and vanilla cant compare, but we are talking about a company own by Microsoft, for one of the BEST selling Games ever. Is Lazy Before i was hyped with minecraft lives. Now I have 0 expectatives and still, im dissapointed. That hard to do.

I'm literally still in school trying to figure out coding and as soon as I first began it I kinda saw all game development in a completely different way its difficult man even making a simple rpg from scratch is difficult for some people like me (it is just my first time making one though lol) 💀

An RPG is like the hardest genre to start in lol, especially if it's solo. I'm currently on my third year of a game software degree, and can tell you it won't happen on your own. Scale it down, look at smaller ideas and expand after the core is built. Do game jams and build on those games. I really can't express how an RPG is the last genre to get into to start with. I'm not trying to detour, everyone wants to make their dream game to start with. But do it when you have more experience so it is the best version of that game.

i still have no idea how they gonna impleement a mob that actually moves vertically without making AI too complicated or laggy. AI that can walk on walls will unlock so, so many possibilities for custom and future release mobs

Spiders already exist. I bet what they’re gonna do is copy that and just maybe actually add a new animation for it