I attended the panel with Owen, Chris, and Patrick discussing the future of minecraft.net and took copious notes. I'm not sure if/when Gamespot will post a VOD of this session but here is the complete rundown.
Text between [] represents my own thoughts.
Questions are paraphrased, not quoted.
-------------------
- Owen thinks the website is a bit dated. It was hastily put together by Notch and has not kept up with Minecraft's explosive growth.
- Owen would like to make Minecraft.net into an aggregator of community content related to Minecraft. [Like what steam has added for TF2]. The goal is to make it easy to find the best community content.
* Mods will be a type of content aggregated. Owin stated he wants to highlight fresh mods as opposed to the big name mods. This will not be an official list.
* The new site will take submissions and in time, Owin wants the community to vote on what will appear on the site.
* Implementation to begin next year.
Q: Changing your Minecraft username?
Chris wants to allow for name changes. The largest roadblock at the moment is that things in the game rely on your mc username as a unique identifier such as white lists. Accounts will need to be decoupled from their displayed names in game. Profile IDs will be used for white lists in this new system. Coming next year.
Q: Will the content hub integrate with the Mod API repository.
Owen can't make promises on this one. He stated they will probably be separate with the aggregator linking to repository.
Q: Will more social interaction be added (Friend lists, chat, etc).
Chris stated that a friends list is planned that will be shared between games published by Mojang. It's in the works but no ETA was given.
Q: Will a skin editor be added to minecraft.net?
Mojang considers 57digital's editor to be their official skin editor implementation [so says Owen]. Chris said they have the technology to add an editor to the website but no plans no implement it.
Fun fact: Skin changes account for 70% of the hits minecraft.net receives. The website receives one million hits daily related to skin changes.
Q: How will the community content be indexed on the new minecraft.net?
Owen recognizes this is a difficult problem and selection will be a challenge. To start out, Mojang will screen [and hand pick] the content. Going forward a voting system is planned. Owen stated that lot's of people who don't play the game still enjoy the community content.
[I did not understand the question.]
[i]EDIT: Snowman (who asked the question originally) has clarified the question.[/i]
Chris appreciates and is very grateful for the community feedback about problems with the servers.
Q: Any plans to allow logging into 3rd party sites with Mojang account?
Chris thinks it is very important to stop fraud sites and shared that problems with account hacking generate a large share of support tickets. Chris wants to allow 3rd party apps to integrate with Mojang accounts.
Q: Will Mojang place ads on, or pursue other monetization methods with minecraft.net?
Definite NO from Owen. No ads on Mojang sites.
Q: Any fixes planned for recent problems with skins not loading (sometimes)?
Work has been done to improve the servers but Chris said they are still improving their systems. Recent problems were due to the addition of a caching layer. Chris also wants to do new things with their upgraded systems. Birthday capes were mentioned as a possibility.
Q: Will there be an index or easy way to download snapshots?
Owen plans to add an easy way to find and download snapshots.
Q: Will the new minecraft.net support sharing maps?
Owen would rather have minecraft.net link to the map creator's site or another map hosting site. Mojang does not want to host community content.
Q: Any upgrades planned for profile pages on minecraft.net such as previewing friend's skins?
Owen thinks this is a neat idea but nothing is planned.
Q: Any plans to display user stats on minecraft.net?
Right now all the stats are held by the game client so this data would need to be collected by Mojang first. It's not a priority.
Q: What about adventure maps sending scores and stats for display on minecraft.net?
Owen thinks that this kind of information would be better suited for display on the website for each map.
Patrick would like to collect stats related to vanilla Minecraft (ex: number of times you killed the end dragon). Display of these stats is better suited for individual server websites.
Q: Will Mojang be posting more surveys on their website. Perhaps to gauge community feelings about a planned feature?
Patrick is a fan of surveys and wants to run more of them [He is Mojang's data analytics guy FYI]. Patrick mentioned the reddit surveys but stated that reddit surveys are not an ideal source of information because reddit users a disproportionately American.
[This then turned to a discussion about the survey Mojang posted a few weeks back].
Owen wants you all to know that the survey was not serious at all (seriously).
Most people who took the survey:
...thought a pony was in Jeb's ponytail.
...thought that under Notch's hat there is the brain of a genius... and a lack of hair.
...responded with "pizza" by a massive margin for the food question.
...trust Jeb & Dinnerbone's decision making regarding mob additions. Other people wanted robots.
Q: Any plans for translations of minecraft.net?
Mojang was amazed by the community effort to translate the minecraft game. Patrick brags about this often. Patrick wants to provide translations of certain pages starting in 2013.
Owen stated that translating the community portal of the minecraft.net would be difficult. Minecraft.net may just link to community pages targeted towards each foreign language.
Patrick provided some stats about conversion (people who try then buy the game) by country:
* Japan has a 78% conversion rate.
* The UK has a 44% conversion rate.
* Brazil has a 6% conversion rate.
Owen also mentioned that updating minecraft.net is difficult at the moment.
Q: Have there been any problems between Mojang and AWS (Amazon Web Services)?
Mojang is happy with AWS currently and Mojang and Amazon talk frequently. Chris stated that they are always evaluating other hosting options but there are no plans to switch hosts and he mentioned that such a change would require a tremendous effort. Chris also mentioned that a new backend API is in the works that will tie into all of Mojang's games. Parts of it may be opened up to 3rd parties.
Q: Will Mojang ever publish an official guide to Minecraft and its updates?
Owen stated that Mojang may eventually publish a basic guide but likes having people turn to the community for assistance. He thinks the community tutorial videos and guides are part of the "magic" of Minecraft.
Q: Why not rely on Google translate for translating minecraft.net?
Owen does not want to force foreign visitors to use it. He has a poor opinion of its quality.
Q: Does Mojang plan to purge inactive minecraft user names?
Yes. Chris wants to finish up transitioning everyone to Mojang accounts and release the minecraft user names from all of the non-premium minecraft accounts. Mojang has been working over the past year to improve the accounts system.
Fun fact from Patrick: There are 4500 notch inspired user names (no details on what this means).
Q: What are the play statistics by region?
According to Patrick [from memory btw, he has these memorized]: 40% of players are from the US. Canada, the UK, and Germany rank next in that order.
Q: Will the planned social integration include an activity indicator (what servers your friends are on)?
Patrick stated that they first need a way to get all the active players, not the just the logged in ones.
Q: What is the office environment like at Mojang.
Owen stated that Mojang works mostly on short term roadmaps (though they don't use that word). There are many meetings, lots of panic and 1 on 1 visits at each other's offices.
Chris likes to keep to-do lists and is constantly reorganizing those lists.
Patrick stated that Mojang has prioritized areas of development.
According to Patrick, migration to Mojang accounts is a high priority and something new (involving email) is coming out THIS year. It will be fun!
Q: Will 0x10c require a Mojang account.
Yes. [Owen then provided some backstory about Notch's secret code]
After hitting eight million sales, Owen emailed Jeb and Notch asking for a statement to publish. Jeb gave a comment but Owen did not receive a reply from Notch. When he walked into Notch's office, Notch was furiously tapping away at his keyboard and after a moment, handed Owen his "comment".
Owen also shared that Notch is a fan of augmented reality [the Valve kind] and he likes merging difficult puzzles with his game related work.
Patrick then mentioned that if you have an old, blue, 0x10c tee-shirt, there is a number on it... "That's it".
Q: Will skins be preview-able on the new website?
Probably not, Chris said it was not a priority.
Q: Can Mojang provide any details about how its backend systems work?
Owen stated that he'd be happy to do a writeup if enough people ask. Chris would need to give him the info.
Q: Does Mojang plan on overtaking planetminecraft and other community aggregators with the new minecraft.net?
No. Owen is very happy for the success that community aggregators have achieved. His goal for the new minecraft.net is to help people enjoy the game.
Q: Plans for cloud sync'd achievements?
Chris says its possible and has been discussed. [No plans were mentioned]/
Q: How will cheaters and cheating be handled if Mojang pursues cloud sync'd achievements/scores?
Chris stated they would need to investigate so he could not provide details. He did say that Mojang would "...Never release something so vulnerable that people could hack it."
Ah, I asked the question you did not understand. I'll explain it a bit. I was talking about how the backend and website development is a thankless job. Unlike Jeb and Notch, they only get contacted when stuff breaks, hardly anybody notices how much work they actually do.
This "lack of fame", however, does allow them to have a more useful and honest interaction with community members, they don't immediatly get swarmed by everybody when they post stuff on twitter or something.
I asked how valuable this direct user feedback was to them, and whether or not they may want a bit more fame themselves.
Nice, thanks, is there a video of the panel anywhere?
There was a camera in the back of the room and Lydia stated at the closing that every panel was recorded, yet I can't find a video on Gamespot's coverage page.
Text between [] represents my own thoughts.
Questions are paraphrased, not quoted.
-------------------
- Owen thinks the website is a bit dated. It was hastily put together by Notch and has not kept up with Minecraft's explosive growth.
- Owen would like to make Minecraft.net into an aggregator of community content related to Minecraft. [Like what steam has added for TF2]. The goal is to make it easy to find the best community content.
* Mods will be a type of content aggregated. Owin stated he wants to highlight fresh mods as opposed to the big name mods. This will not be an official list.
* The new site will take submissions and in time, Owin wants the community to vote on what will appear on the site.
* Implementation to begin next year.
Q: Changing your Minecraft username?
Chris wants to allow for name changes. The largest roadblock at the moment is that things in the game rely on your mc username as a unique identifier such as white lists. Accounts will need to be decoupled from their displayed names in game. Profile IDs will be used for white lists in this new system. Coming next year.
Q: Will the content hub integrate with the Mod API repository.
Owen can't make promises on this one. He stated they will probably be separate with the aggregator linking to repository.
Q: Will more social interaction be added (Friend lists, chat, etc).
Chris stated that a friends list is planned that will be shared between games published by Mojang. It's in the works but no ETA was given.
Q: Will a skin editor be added to minecraft.net?
Mojang considers 57digital's editor to be their official skin editor implementation [so says Owen]. Chris said they have the technology to add an editor to the website but no plans no implement it.
Fun fact: Skin changes account for 70% of the hits minecraft.net receives. The website receives one million hits daily related to skin changes.
Q: How will the community content be indexed on the new minecraft.net?
Owen recognizes this is a difficult problem and selection will be a challenge. To start out, Mojang will screen [and hand pick] the content. Going forward a voting system is planned. Owen stated that lot's of people who don't play the game still enjoy the community content.
[I did not understand the question.]
[i]EDIT: Snowman (who asked the question originally) has clarified the question.[/i]
Chris appreciates and is very grateful for the community feedback about problems with the servers.
Q: Any plans to allow logging into 3rd party sites with Mojang account?
Chris thinks it is very important to stop fraud sites and shared that problems with account hacking generate a large share of support tickets. Chris wants to allow 3rd party apps to integrate with Mojang accounts.
Q: Will Mojang place ads on, or pursue other monetization methods with minecraft.net?
Definite NO from Owen. No ads on Mojang sites.
Q: Any fixes planned for recent problems with skins not loading (sometimes)?
Work has been done to improve the servers but Chris said they are still improving their systems. Recent problems were due to the addition of a caching layer. Chris also wants to do new things with their upgraded systems. Birthday capes were mentioned as a possibility.
Q: Will there be an index or easy way to download snapshots?
Owen plans to add an easy way to find and download snapshots.
Q: Will the new minecraft.net support sharing maps?
Owen would rather have minecraft.net link to the map creator's site or another map hosting site. Mojang does not want to host community content.
Q: Any upgrades planned for profile pages on minecraft.net such as previewing friend's skins?
Owen thinks this is a neat idea but nothing is planned.
Q: Any plans to display user stats on minecraft.net?
Right now all the stats are held by the game client so this data would need to be collected by Mojang first. It's not a priority.
Q: What about adventure maps sending scores and stats for display on minecraft.net?
Owen thinks that this kind of information would be better suited for display on the website for each map.
Patrick would like to collect stats related to vanilla Minecraft (ex: number of times you killed the end dragon). Display of these stats is better suited for individual server websites.
Q: Will Mojang be posting more surveys on their website. Perhaps to gauge community feelings about a planned feature?
Patrick is a fan of surveys and wants to run more of them [He is Mojang's data analytics guy FYI]. Patrick mentioned the reddit surveys but stated that reddit surveys are not an ideal source of information because reddit users a disproportionately American.
[This then turned to a discussion about the survey Mojang posted a few weeks back].
Owen wants you all to know that the survey was not serious at all (seriously).
Most people who took the survey:
...thought a pony was in Jeb's ponytail.
...thought that under Notch's hat there is the brain of a genius... and a lack of hair.
...responded with "pizza" by a massive margin for the food question.
...trust Jeb & Dinnerbone's decision making regarding mob additions. Other people wanted robots.
Q: Any plans for translations of minecraft.net?
Mojang was amazed by the community effort to translate the minecraft game. Patrick brags about this often. Patrick wants to provide translations of certain pages starting in 2013.
Owen stated that translating the community portal of the minecraft.net would be difficult. Minecraft.net may just link to community pages targeted towards each foreign language.
Patrick provided some stats about conversion (people who try then buy the game) by country:
* Japan has a 78% conversion rate.
* The UK has a 44% conversion rate.
* Brazil has a 6% conversion rate.
Owen also mentioned that updating minecraft.net is difficult at the moment.
Q: Have there been any problems between Mojang and AWS (Amazon Web Services)?
Mojang is happy with AWS currently and Mojang and Amazon talk frequently. Chris stated that they are always evaluating other hosting options but there are no plans to switch hosts and he mentioned that such a change would require a tremendous effort. Chris also mentioned that a new backend API is in the works that will tie into all of Mojang's games. Parts of it may be opened up to 3rd parties.
Q: Will Mojang ever publish an official guide to Minecraft and its updates?
Owen stated that Mojang may eventually publish a basic guide but likes having people turn to the community for assistance. He thinks the community tutorial videos and guides are part of the "magic" of Minecraft.
Q: Why not rely on Google translate for translating minecraft.net?
Owen does not want to force foreign visitors to use it. He has a poor opinion of its quality.
Q: Does Mojang plan to purge inactive minecraft user names?
Yes. Chris wants to finish up transitioning everyone to Mojang accounts and release the minecraft user names from all of the non-premium minecraft accounts. Mojang has been working over the past year to improve the accounts system.
Fun fact from Patrick: There are 4500 notch inspired user names (no details on what this means).
Q: What are the play statistics by region?
According to Patrick [from memory btw, he has these memorized]: 40% of players are from the US. Canada, the UK, and Germany rank next in that order.
Q: Will the planned social integration include an activity indicator (what servers your friends are on)?
Patrick stated that they first need a way to get all the active players, not the just the logged in ones.
Q: What is the office environment like at Mojang.
Owen stated that Mojang works mostly on short term roadmaps (though they don't use that word). There are many meetings, lots of panic and 1 on 1 visits at each other's offices.
Chris likes to keep to-do lists and is constantly reorganizing those lists.
Patrick stated that Mojang has prioritized areas of development.
According to Patrick, migration to Mojang accounts is a high priority and something new (involving email) is coming out THIS year. It will be fun!
Q: Will 0x10c require a Mojang account.
Yes. [Owen then provided some backstory about Notch's secret code]
After hitting eight million sales, Owen emailed Jeb and Notch asking for a statement to publish. Jeb gave a comment but Owen did not receive a reply from Notch. When he walked into Notch's office, Notch was furiously tapping away at his keyboard and after a moment, handed Owen his "comment".
Owen also shared that Notch is a fan of augmented reality [the Valve kind] and he likes merging difficult puzzles with his game related work.
Patrick then mentioned that if you have an old, blue, 0x10c tee-shirt, there is a number on it... "That's it".
Q: Will skins be preview-able on the new website?
Probably not, Chris said it was not a priority.
Q: Can Mojang provide any details about how its backend systems work?
Owen stated that he'd be happy to do a writeup if enough people ask. Chris would need to give him the info.
Q: Does Mojang plan on overtaking planetminecraft and other community aggregators with the new minecraft.net?
No. Owen is very happy for the success that community aggregators have achieved. His goal for the new minecraft.net is to help people enjoy the game.
Q: Plans for cloud sync'd achievements?
Chris says its possible and has been discussed. [No plans were mentioned]/
Q: How will cheaters and cheating be handled if Mojang pursues cloud sync'd achievements/scores?
Chris stated they would need to investigate so he could not provide details. He did say that Mojang would "...Never release something so vulnerable that people could hack it."
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Curse PremiumThis "lack of fame", however, does allow them to have a more useful and honest interaction with community members, they don't immediatly get swarmed by everybody when they post stuff on twitter or something.
I asked how valuable this direct user feedback was to them, and whether or not they may want a bit more fame themselves.
Thanks, I've added a link to your post in place of the question.
There was a camera in the back of the room and Lydia stated at the closing that every panel was recorded, yet I can't find a video on Gamespot's coverage page.