New Minecraft.net, Part 3: So... about that.. | Hacker News Reader

New Minecraft.net, Part 3: So... about that..

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23 pointsdesigooner20 comments

He changed his mind? How dare he!? /sarcasm

He was above-board the whole time, and never said anything bad about their work. He made it very clear that it was his choice, and not something they did wrong.

What more can you ask for? This is -way- better than the customer that doesn't pay or rejects it 800 times to change little things.

As far as clients go, Notch still paid them for work they are not going to use. That's still pretty good. Notch could have communicated better, but nonetheless that doesn't excuse the unprofessional tone of the OP. I don't feel there was any need for them to go public like this unless they were specifically asked.

Yeah, at first it seems a little disappointing, but he got paid.

I guess he doesn't have a continued job, and he won't get the fame of designing the minecraft site, but he's certainly not a loser.

Maybe. Maybe for a job like that they may have charged X for the work.

But since it would give them visibility they agreed to charge X/10

i don't know, you don't know.

I think he would have disclosed that if he were unhappy about that, given the already very public nature of the post

I think the most interesting debate in this thread is the tone of the OP.

I've had some much worse experiences with certain clients, but I wouldn't mention them online with such specificity, let alone in the alcove of fervent followers.

Yeah it doesn't set a good precedent for future customers.

"Oh that is the team that ragged on the Minecraft guy when he payed them off but didn't use their code"

Certainly would make me think twice about working with them.

Exactly, but think twice? More like not think at all, skipping right past them and find someone else.

Yeah, even if a client didn't pay I don't think I would go this route... but since he did pay, this is just plain dumb. I've seen a company spend 3+ million on switching to an ERP system only to switch back. Things change and that is just how it is.

They do say they are just trying to get people to stop emailing them about the site being fucked up, but they went way the fuck off the deep end with the tone and insinuations contained therewithin.

I work in the contract development field. This post is extremely unprofessional. You did work and you got paid, job done, STFU. This makes all of us who do this kind of work look bad.

It may be frustrating to lose a cool project/client like this but in the end it was just a job and they got paid to do it. Not a big deal IMO.

Apparently the client is too lazy to remove their names as the creator of the website (which is supposedly crashing often). So their reputation is being irrevocably damaged.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/dui6d/new_minecra...

They are not mentioned anywhere on the official website [1] and never were because it’s still the same old website with the same old database (or at least with the same old database without any changes from them).

They are mentioned three times on the personal blog of the developer of Minecraft [2] but there is never any uncertainty about whether they are responsible for the website. It’s always clear that they are not, at least not yet. I don’t know what they expect their client to do. Should he delete old blog posts?

[1] http://minecraft.net/

[2] I believe this is the complete list:

August 12, for reporting a bug (http://notch.tumblr.com/post/943303185/security-server-updat...)

September 20, announcement that TkTech will rewrite the database, quote: “I don’t know when it will be finished, but the plan is to cut over to the new code base when it’s done.” (http://notch.tumblr.com/post/1157267535/longest-free-weekend...)

September 22, update on the database rewrite, announcement that it is nearly finished but will go only live after further testing (http://notch.tumblr.com/post/1166302589/this-is-what-im-doin...)

There have been no further updates on the database rewrite since then, with reference to TkTech or without. Please note that the plan for the rewrite arose in a time when the Minecraft server simply couldn’t handle the load.

His reputation is certainly being more damaged by his tone in that reddit thread than by any offhand mention on a broken site.

nothing unprofessional about not implementing a contractors work; he paid them quite promptly and gave them a fair explanation.

sounds like they had their feelings hurt more than anything. which to be fair, is understandable. but i would say given the circumstances notch couldn't have been much more professional.

meh, that's nothing. i can do one better (in the small gap of paid, but also screwed).

had a client pay me for work, be very happy etc, take the project away (after promising continued business), and had the new "developer" take all credit for developing it. trumpeted on the landing page for both the client, and the dev shop.

it's their app after all, so i was pretty cool with it, assuming it was some other basement dwelling schmoe who they found to work for less.

turns out it was a manhattan creative firm with offices consuming the floor of a tower, who no doubt charge double my rate. they can be fucked in the ear.

by the way, i'm not stupid enough to out them, unlike the OP.

p.s. it was an iphone app, so i contacted mobile orchard about the shenanigans. they replied that it was too common to even bother commenting on.

Posts like this are a sure-fire way to guarantee that my company would never hire said contractor to work on one of our projects.

He wants something he can debug.... JSP!?! Jesus shitting christ!

God forbid I ever have to debug something in a language that reads like fucking pseudocode!

The game is written in Java. I think he'd be familiar enough with it to debug it.

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