I’m a fan who has just had enough.

We were all pretty much funding the development of a game based on a rather large scaled tech demo back in alpha and beta. The only problem I could foresee was that, depending on when you purchased Minecraft, your expectation of where the game was headed would differ from person to person.

I often joked that we were never guaranteed the Minecraft we were playing in beta would be the Minecraft we’d play on release. Mojang could’ve released a driving simulator! And we’d have to be cool with that.

1.8 for me was a particularly negative turning point in Minecraft’s development for me.

The clue as to what Minecraft is all about was in the title. Mining and Crafting. Once upon a time this was true. These days, not so. EnchantFarm would make more sense as a working title now.

Making farming (or atleast the requirement to eat) a necessity took away the one thing Minecraft offered me as a gamer. Complete freedom. I could go mining for hours and be excited about all the cool new things I’d find. Who can forget the first bit of lava they came across. Or diamonds! GLORIOUS diamonds! Nowadays unless your packing a lunchbox that Rosie O’Donnell would have trouble seeing the end of you’ll be starved to death before the end of an ingame day. Add with that the manner in which food recovers lost HP and even the complete re-working of the combat system and you’ve pretty much altered some of the more solid elements of the game.

Gaming history has proven that sometimes simplicity is the key. Adding a literal new dimension to the Sonic series for example pretty much signed the blue, spiked ones death warrant. So why would the tried and testing method of ‘ingest this = heal this’ need to be revamped in Minecraft?

I’ve had countless friends write off Minecraft because of it’s simple, outdated looks. But this is really the biggest juxtaposition ever! Minecraft isn’t simple. At least, not anymore.

I know full well that there are fan boys and girls out there incapable of diverting from the sheep mentality and actually critiquing Minecraft (and even critiquing Mojang / Notch for that matter – but I will come to that in a moment), but why does liking a game make you stupid? How can you defend the choice of having to spend time chomping on a piece of bread, to recover 3 hearts, which will then go down a few moments later, that you first had to create a wheat farm for in order to even acquire the wheat, that you then made the bread out of, over: kill the pig, eat the bacon, profit… Honestly, how?

Then there’s the addition of enchanting and potion crafting that left me thinking that Minecraft has gone quite schizophrenic. We’ve pretty much started with Lego and ended up with D&D.

More effort has been put into the implementation of updates and extras like these, then fixing outstanding bugs, issues, errors and necessities in the game.

Ingame server lists? Sprinting potion!

Wooden slabs act like stone? Have a ‘creepy’ new mob!

That light emitting from those staircases wrong? Enchanted pickaxe!

It’s as though something will be added to appease us all and hopeful make us forget these outstanding problems instead of doing the possibly more difficult task or turning out a complete, bug free game.

Mojang is a now a multi million pound company thanks to the Minecraft community. I personally would like to see this fortune (derived from Minecraft) spent on the completion of Minecraft.

How many of you have purchased a boxed game, from a store, took it home and then bitched, whined and moaned about how the game is broken because of one or two glitches? Glitches which really aren’t the be all and end all of the game. It’s just aggravating that we’ve spent our money on a released game that isn’t yet finished.

And then there’s Minecraft.

There’s currently one guy working on Minecraft at the moment. And since the official release date we’ve had one update which has caused as much joy as dismay.

I know people look to the Mojang staff as being super god like humans. But in my opinion. They ain’t. They’re ordinary people. People capable of doing their job well and doing their job poorly (MineCon-gate). At the moment we’ve given them all a free pass for far too long. Minecraft has been a game created with the community at the forefront so why now are we getting done over?

The endermen was a mob taken from Reddit suggestions.

The piston update was derived from a user mod.

Near on all great updates have been from the minds of people outside of Mojang Studios.

Minecraft’s success owes us more than this. It owes us more then a game which in my opinion will never feel truly complete. Not atleast until the core elements of the game are grounded, it’s errors and bugs fixed and its key focus (mining and crafting) once again highlighted and improved on.

I mean fuck it. Everyone loves suggestions for the game. How about this:

Have EXP for things other than killing mobs. Why not have mining or digging EXP. The more you mine the higher the stat. The higher the stat the better the items usable or the durability or efficiency of an item. This would offer an alternative to mindless mob EXP grinding and enchanting.

THAT as an implemented update would be welcomed across the board and I know it. It’s a nod to the original direction of the game and it will offer, as I said, an alternative to enchanting etc.

…

Minecraft has so much potential. I just don’t like feeling that we’ve been used. Tonnes of money has been made from this game and yet it seems to have been forgotten the second it was officially released.

Have we been screwed over here? Or am I just thinking too much into something I shouldn’t be.

…

tl;dr

Fix the problems before making new ones.
Skill based EXP (mining, digging etc) as well as enchanting.
I have an opinion that might not match yours.