Community**: Should Minecraft developers get involved in the community?
One developer's statement: The conflict between game developers and players seems to be getting bigger and bigger lately, which made me want to talk about what I encountered during TF2 development 10 years ago. This led me to quit game development for 6 years and even had to go on medication** because of it.
At that time, Value asked me to start making our plans and vision for this project public open. Therefore, I set up a social network to share the entire process from project initiation to development with the community in the form of a blog.
It all went well until.
On that day, we talked about a topic of making a new **. Personally, the new ** doesn't mean much to me because it's only a very small part of the whole game session. But the community is very invested in this, so I pushed for it.
In my wording to the community at the time, I kept reiterating that things are not guaranteed.
But this quickly turned into a "promise"!
That's when I started being threatened between anonymous inquiries between email accounts and other social platforms. My address and bank details are always sent to me regularly over the next year of development.
On the web, I received a lot of attention. Whenever I try to take a break or play a game, I get tracked.
And threatened to "keep promises" and eventually I had to create a new account to try and dodge these things.
I tried to get away from it all, leave it behind and focus on the whole project. But in the later release, we didn't release the "new **", so we received more threats.
It was around that time that I finally began to admit what I had just been through, starting to have regular panic attacks and fainting, which made me wake up in an ambulance for the next 3-4 years. I was given the medication** and eventually these symptoms stopped.
For those wondering why I quit game development for up to 6 years, here's why.
Helen Zbihlyj is a former Minecraft community manager at Mojang Studios. He joined Mojang full-time in September 2014 and left Mojang on August 27, 2020.
In this regard, Helen Zbihlyj said: This is one of the reasons why good community management is essential in the development of the game. One should never expect to ask game developers for community management, which is also a huge failure in game studio management.
PS: So Helen's departure, is it because she encountered something similar at Mojagn?
In fact, a similar problem arises when a developer takes on the center midfield role. Developers are harassed and even threatened, which leads to burnout over time, which in turn affects game development and underoutput. The lack of output will again usher in more harassment, and so on.
Over time, more and more developers will hold back due to stress, mental health, and other issues, and the most immediate consequence is that developers are less and less willing to participate in community feedback. The more serious consequence is leaving the entire development team.
And the community's complaints never stopped, "The studio doesn't need feedback anymore!" "What's the use of feedback, horizontal and vertical will not be added! ”
Should Minecraft continue to follow the path of community?
Minecraft's success comes from the community, and Notch, the father of Minecraft, started its development with a strong connection to the community. However, the road to the community of Notch has not been so smooth.
A typical example is when Miclee came up with an idea for a pig man, and Notch finally decided to make a "bacon cape" and give it to Miclee. However, when many people objected and asked Notch to provide them with a similar personalized cape, the bacon cape was withdrawn by Notch.
For another example, after Notch completely built Minecraft, sales increased day by day, and the limelight was strong, but Notch gave the position of chief developer to Jeb. The reason behind this was actually told to us in 2014.
In 2014, after handing over Mojang and the company's assets** to Microsoft, Persson mentioned in a long blog post explaining why he made the move, "I've become a kind of icon. I don't want to be a sign, and I don't want to be responsible for something too big for me to understand, something I don't want to do. And so on and so forth.
So between the lines, Persson couldn't balance game development and community management and felt pressured to quit. Essentially, Persson started out as a developer who loved games. So after leaving Mojang, Notch said that he wanted to participate in the Dare tournament and do some little experiments with web games.
In the same way, Jeb also chose to retire from the background after several years as the chief creative officer of Minecraft, and has rarely appeared in the community over the years. The developer we are familiar with, Dinnerbone, was also harassed by the community when there was a lot of noise about the account migration a few years ago, and came forward to clarify that he had been sick and had not participated in Minecraft development for many years.
Another example is Minecraft account migration, reporting system, glowing squid, and splitting into 117/1.18 caves and cliffs, poppy fireflies, pristine birch forests, new creature polls that have been asked to be canceled, and so on, the community today is truly "silent" for Minecraft developers.
However, the road of Minecraft's community still has to continue, how to find a balance between player expectations and game updates, and look at this year's 1How will 21 be updated?
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