Yep.
One look at the Minecraft forums and its Reddit page shows a mix of people celebrating and criticizing the game. The internet has served as a sounding board for an unprecedented massive Alpha and Beta test since 2009. Millions of people have purchased the game and many are content to play and explore the procedurally generated worlds. Others are taking it upon themselves to act as Mojang’s unofficial co-designers. Fans have suggested new friendly and hostile creatures, and new items. They've criticized everything from the game’s retro-styled textures to how items behave. Sometimes, user-made mods have inspired the designers to implement similar features in later updates, such as in-game maps and pistons (used for making automated secret entrances and more). And then recently, fans joined together on Reddit urging Minecraft’s creators to add snouts to the game’s pigs. No, really. And Mojang fulfilled their request.
I'm sure your Fun Factor is significantly higher now.
That’s where we start to see Minecraft’s fans and their sense of entitlement. Even now as I write this, players like myself have gotten their hands on a test version of the 1.8 update, which adds a ton of new features, including better terrain generation and a sorely-needed combat mechanic upgrade. 1.8 is easily the most feature-heavy update so far. But it took fans less than a day to return to requesting new features. This wasn’t the reporting of bugs in a pre-release version of an update, but asking for literally brand new features despite the sheer amount of changes they had yet to experience. As Louis C.K. said, “everything is amazing and no one is happy”.
I understand that some players don’t understand the complexity and hours of work required to add new mechanics to a game’s overall design and still somehow keep things balanced (or how new features might render fundamental code utterly broken), but I put myself in the developer’s shoes when I see fans receive new material that took weeks or months to perfect. When they respond with a “Meh, here’s my idea for PONIES!”, I die a little inside. Feature-creep is already an issue internally when developers sit down to discuss a game’s design. If unchecked, a game can die before it’s made by high aspirations and a lack of perspective. Content is cut for a reason. I would rather have Mojang’s programmers spend time cleaning up their code to make things run smoother than spend time making sure pigs get snouts that look right in a blocky world. And it gets even scarier when fans start calling developers in the middle of the night because they think they should.
My beef is separate from the times that Mojang’s developers publicly suggest changes to the game or ask for opinions, which is a great way of crowd-sourcing what the team should focus on improving. The designers have generally been urging community feedback and response. And while many games (especially in the PC realm) blur the line between product and service, the fact remains that Minecraft was sold as a product to be serviced in a limited scope until its "final" release later this year (though Mojang will be making tweaks afterwards). In a world where nerds get upset when George Lucas continues to alter his films with each subsequent re-release, it appears that the reverse is expected of games, assuming it’s the players and not the creators who decide what to change.
As games continue to grow as an entertainment medium, developers need to start clearly defining when their game is a product with basic service for technical issues, and when it’s a service (like World of Warcraft or Team Fortress 2). It’s often both, but the customer isn’t always right. I think bigger developers know this, but the start-up that is Mojang is slowly learning this. When the feedback is open to the general public, some fan’s good suggestion could easily get drowned out by countless people clamoring for pig snouts.
And fans? I'm sure our enthusiasm is appreciated, but maybe we could all just slow our roll a little bit. That Technodrome isn't going to build itself.
