So I’ve been running a public SMP Minecraft server since the day Notch added multiplayer and I feel like venting. Brace for nerdrage.

• Notch is a terrible programmer. I don’t mean that he can’t write code, or that Minecraft is a bad game. Clearly neither of those are true. The issue is that Notch seems to have no idea about how to manage an actual project instead of some hobby toy. At the beginning of SMP, most updates broke about as much (or more) as they added, Things that worked fine would get broken and Notch would actually not know what was wrong or how to fix them. Leaf decay was the worst example but definitely not the only one. This along with the twits about trying git or Subversion suggest that he hadn’t been using some kind of VCS for a while there. I’m not suggesting that anyone who doesn’t use Subversion is terrible, especially not right at the beginning of a project when you would be commiting huge changes that would make no sense to revert. But when you’re accepting money from people for something and don’t take even the most basic of steps to fix your own screw-ups… I don’t know what to say. I would be fucking ashamed of myself. Then there’s that whole singleplayer and multiplayer use different code-bases so every feature you add gets to be coded twice (double the bugs at no extra charge!) thing, this should probably be pretty high priority to reduce the work load in the future but I guess when you take 3 week vacations every other month you just don’t have time for fixing real problems. The vacations bit wouldn’t even be that big a deal if it didn’t feel like he was practically bragging about them all over the only real official news sources for the game, his blog and twitter account. It’s hard to imagine that he can’t see how players go to either or both of those hoping for some news on the game they enjoy so much and instead see “LOL JUST GOT BACK FROM GDC, GOING TO VEGAS NOW” or other inane drivel that gets posted on Twitter and not feel like they were cheated out of their $15 bet on future updates. It just boggles my mind how utterly unprofessional he treats the whole thing. Getting back on track here, the SMP server software is technically multithreaded, but in practice only a single thread is actually doing all the real work. This is a massive problem mostly because it completely kills any benefit of multi-core/multi-processor systems (you know, like pretty much every single modern server) since the current trend is more cores at a lower clock speed. This means there is basically a hardware enforced limit to the number of players a server can support, and you will very quickly run into the end of your hardware upgrade path because Intel and AMD are not really competing over gigahertz anymore, there simply won’t be a faster CPU to get, and there is nothing you can do about it. The SMP server also hits the disk, a lot. Like it was competing with a heavily loaded database server for who could do more random reads. This was helped significantly by the new region format, but the fact that the region format was lifted from the MCRegion mod nearly unaltered speaks volumes. Not because a mod was incorporated into the game, no (that was actually great), but that they did it instead of fixing the real problems with the chunk format. That mostly being that the NBT files are gzipped, which is all kinds of stupid (“Let’s add even more overhead to each read operation to an app that is already read intensive!”). There’s also the fact that it seems like there’s approximately zero testing done before a release. I’m not saying I expect bug free software, it’s in beta after all. I’m talking about, why in the flipping fuck would you push out an update that has major game-breaking shit-obviously-doesn’t-fucking-work bugs? Oh yeah, and the update is mandatory! Fuck you Notch, maybe you could try actually playing this game you’re being paid to develop for 5 minutes before forcing an update on everyone. Or not, I guess that would really be the I’m-not-a-giant-prick thing to do. Oh yeah, and when does SMP get the nether? You know, from that whole HUGE HALLOWEEN UDPATE? I guess I missed the “except for SMP players” fine print. It’s amazing that Bukkit got the Nether added before the people WITH THE ACTUAL NON-OBSFUCATED SOURCE CODE TO THE FUCKING SERVER SOFTWARE. Guess Notch was too busy adding beds that don’t even work. I’d also like the official mod API we were supposed to get back in like December, so I wouldn’t have to deal with the stupid inter-mod incompatibility crap.
• The SMP server software is shit. This is partly an extension of the first one, but one I used to be able to mostly forgive since it’s quite possible that Notch didn’t have any experience running a server before. Used to, now it’s 6+ months later and very little has changed. How is the server shit? Let me count the ways: 1) When the server crashes (as in SEVERE exception thrown) it often doesn’t really crash, just happily chugs along doing absolutely nothing, so I get to wake up in the morning and find out the servers been down for 6 hours. 2) The server maintains a session lock file on the world you start it on. But you say “that doesn’t sound so bad…” oh yeah, and it checks that session file for updates every second… in an already disk intensive app. Why does Notch think it’s the server’s responsibility to stop the admin from being an idiot and running two servers on the same world? If you do something that stupid, you deserve the world corruption you get. 3) The bullshit “Did the time change or is the server overloaded?” message gets logged. Over and over. This is a minor nitpick and trivial to work around, but still annoying. 4) stdin and stdout/stderr are not separated. This one is hard for me to describe exactly, but when you’re typing in the console and the server prints something to stdout it hides whatever was being typed. Bukkit finally added a better console to recent versions but the fact that they needed to is fairly retarded.
• The community is retarded. No, I’m being serious here. I mean these people are pants-on-head, how-do-they-manage-to-walk-and-breath-at-the-same-time retarded. Go to the Minecraft Forums and read the first 5 threads. If 4 out of 5 aren’t something like “how i port 4wd on my comcast” I would be shocked. Shocked.Sure, parts of the community are pretty cool and contribute really awesome tools like Minecraft-Overviewer, pigmap, c10t, and the various server mods, but then you have the rest of it full of mind-numbing stupidity. This also extends to the actual players as well, of course. I’ve met some cool players, but there’s so many assholes and retards that I sometimes wonder why I even fucking bother with this shit.

In conclusion, I hate this game and don’t know why I play it or run a server. Also, fuck Notch.