Oh please, what's the drama? You just don't build or dig in that area. That's all. Just for roleplaying, and getting away from the repetitive and boring minecraft gameplay. It's a sandbox game, there's no laws that we can't make our own games from it. You would be respectful enough of not modifying it in the first place anyway.

I tried that, and someone littered my lawn with torches.

We had a nice discussion last night. In short, only one or two people agreed with me that moving from alpha to beta should result in a feature lock, and as such, notch should fix bugs instead of introducing more. bamccaig said he would rather have new, broken features, rather than having basic things like minecraft_server work without lagging [i actually think it's hitting some sort of deadlock or something, just based on the logs] to hell every 20 minutes.

Anyway, at the current rate development on minecraft is going, I don't hold out much hope. Notch should stop treating it like a hobby, and become more professional. It is, after all, a very well paying full time job for him. It shouldn't be labelled beta if they are still trying to design the thing.

Customers tend to have this erroneous belief that they should get their monies worth.

Obviously businesses know better.

The reason we're all OPs is because we can't use commands that should actually be available to normal players(like /list).

Hey0 has that. We should really get hey0 and see if we have better luck. Maybe the MinecartMania plugin and such will reduce the lag too. I'm believing those boosters and redstone circuits are the reason lately.

• The server is more than usable, and a beta isn't supposed to work perfectly.

• As we discussed last night, beta isn't a well defined development stage, and can be interpreted however the developer chooses. It sounds to me like beta for Minecraft means "start moving in the direction of actually adding a purpose and then stabilize".

• I experience just as much lag (sometimes more) in mainstream published games that have been around for years, like Counter-Strike: Source. The servers also regularly crash, etc. Game servers are generally non-trivial software, contrary to your personal beliefs.

• Since there really isn't even a purpose to Minecraft yet, a feature freeze would be pretty disappointing for all of the many users that enjoy experiencing the game before release and want to see what's next. The client and server both work more than well enough to experience the game near perfectly. I don't mind the occasional crash or lag spike. I want to see where Minecraft is going. He can worry about making it stable when he's finished figuring out what it is going to be.

• I personally don't notice very much lag. Maybe it's you.

Customers tend to have this erroneous belief that their $10 is worth a gigantic mansion, 4 Italian supercars, and a pool full of Playboy bunnies.

If you haven't gotten $10 worth out of Minecraft already, let alone with what's to come, then you're doing it wrong. I've gotten a ton more out of that $10 investment then I've gotten out of $60 investments in mainstream published games.

This isn't the place for this discussion. I do have a retort, but yeah.

Sure it is. The only topic that we can't discuss in this thread is...

Disaster at the Sky Tower!
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I built a cobblestone generator which ran great for a while. It passed nearby some wood and after a while it caught on fire and quickly spread to the whole tower!

I dowsed water everywhere to save what was left.
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A minecraft thread isn't really the place for a meta discussion on business practices.

And a direct quote from you shows that you were starting it?

I've heard iffy things about hey0, not to mention the questionable stability and the fact that it won't be in development for much longer. Bukkit was brought to my attention, and I'm looking into that.

Heh, I typed my above reply to you before I read that post.

Sure, it's usable when it isn't lagging. A beta isn't supposed to work perfectly, no, but a beta is when you fix major issues!

And I still disagree with that completely. There is a loosely defined standard for these things, you know.

Well, that's your fault for playing crappy games. I've played my fair share of mainstream games, and minecraft is the first to have these major issues. Then again, that's to be expected, considering it's obviously still being developed as if it's alpha.

I don't see why minecraft server needs to be very complex. Also, a lot of the bugs I've seen are so bizarre that one can only wonder what kind of mess the code is.

No it wouldn't. You need a solid foundation to build a nice, long-lasting house. Save "what's next" for when you have something stable to build on.

It randomly happens, and it most certainly isn't just me. The whole server program stops responding for a few minutes, and won't resume until a connection times out and it drops everyone offline. Oh, and when you connect and occasionally can't do anything for a few minutes. But there definitely is some sort of issue.

First of all, it's 10 euros, not 10 dollars. Also, it's funny to see you assign such value to a game that you repeatedly claim is boring to you and has no point.

Finally, someone else who actually knows something about software development.

Not built near anything flammable. Things near lava can catch fire easily. Even cobblestone.