OVER 9000!!!

<rant>

Well, the long-awaited Minecraft 1.6 “bugfix” patch is now out.

It’s kind of amazing that after three “long” weeks of testing, the patch was supposed to fix an incredible amount of bugs… which it did.

Unfortunately, it also introduced a lot of new bugs, some of which are amazingly ugly, including but not limited to:

• item duplication issues
• item durability issues
• lighting issues

I understand the model Minecraft has been developed on so far – frequent, small updates, which fix things and introduce new features rapidly (almost on a weekly basis).

However, such obvious flaws at this point in time make me question the “retail/finished” future of that game, which is supposedly coming in a few months.

I don’t think it is fitting for the community to continue to be the actual beta testers of this game – a job which they are currently doing.  I seriously can’t believe that this patch was actually played, never mind tested at all before its release.  I can understand how the item duplication bugs could be missed, but something as obvious as the lighting issues and the server CPU issues?  Come on…

In my opinion, Mojang needs an actual process for testing the patches quite badly, if not dedicated “testers” (I understand the studio is ridiculously small and new), at least a small dedicated group of people who actually play the patches for two or three days before they are released for everyone.  I don’t think this “release broken patch to everyone, let the entire community give feedback on the obvious issues, quick-hack-patch the issues, rinse and repeat” cycle is healthy for this game at all.

Well, at least to Notch’s credit, he actually listens to the community and fixes the most obnoxious things fairly quickly – usually the same day – something which can’t be said for most developers these days.  Unfortunately, he never really quite fixes everything before moving on…

</rant>