Sunday, January 26, 2014

A purge of Minecraft modders

I am not making this up.

The friction between modders and players has escalated into war. From a post on the Minecraft Forums:

The community seems to be losing sight of what I have started our path on. We are getting caught on petty things like open source or closed source, weather sub programs count as a mod, and EULA being unclear. These are not the issue we are facing.

The main issue is the toxicity of the modded community. It needs to be purged. Some modders are feeling over privileged due to their mod(s) taking off, leaving others of equal if not greater quality in their wake. They feel too entitled and have to be knocked from their high horse. For some of them, if they don't get their ego stroked regularly they throw a fit, and the scenario Neko outlined could become a real event. If that happened what would Mojang do? Go on, speculate.

We are going to lose some of our best mods. I am sure of this. Which ones is difficult to say, but their will be a loss. These loses should not be mourned like RedPower was, they should be celebrated! Every mod that steps down is a mod we don't have to fear. Same goes for the mods that leave us forever.

Our modded community has been labeled as one of the worst game community's out there. That is not because of a ton of bad modders, but because of a few. These rotten apples need to be expelled or cured before something happens that all of minecraft feels the repercussions.

And in another post:

We are going to lose mods, and in the short term this is going to hurt the modded community but in the long run, it will be better as new mods come out to replace the lost. We are losing some of the creative minds, but their ideas will always linger and eventually be replaced. It's going to take time, but make no mistake, the community will recover and be better off. [Emphasis in original]

A purge? Seriously? Modders quitting should be celebrated? This person comes off as a two-bit tyrant. Have they been going to dictator school? Who put them in charge?

The above was posted today by the user lukeb28 in the topic To Mod Creators: Copyrights and Malicious code which was started a few days ago by the same person. This is the topic that helped set into motion what has become the latest Minecraft modding ruckus as played out on the Feed the Beast forums, Reddit, and Twitter.

Unfortunately the purge has had some success as a number of modders have announced their departure from modding in the last couple of days.

The answer to fixing a toxic community is to lobby Mojang to address it, not to engage in a power struggle to purge the people you don't like.

Update [2]:

In Minecraft's EULA gets less hazy I describe the miscommunication from Mojang's Marc Watson that misled people on the EULA's terms for modding.

Thus it's much more understandable how lukeb28 could wander so far off into fantasyland regarding Mojang's mod policy. He was misinformed.

This doesn't excuse anyone who supported the idea of purging modders from the community, however.

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