Another Minecraft Live has come and gone—and what a showing it was! With a nifty new dungeon structure and a redstone autocrafter that will likely revolutionize the game, 1.21 looks like it’ll have some great features.
However, you wouldn’t guess that if you looked at the Minecraft community right now.
Anywhere you look for Minecraft on social media you’ll see a fanbase in revolt. The Minecraft Live stream chat was filled with demands to ‘#StopTheMobVote’, people are mass-disliking clips from the event, and… are those propaganda posters? Over a mob vote? Yeah, something’s gone terribly awry between Minecraft and its players. Frustration around the annual mob vote and a string of lackluster updates has led to an outrage over Minecraft lacking fresh, sizable new content. Are these complaints justified? To an extent, yes—but there is some nuance around Mojang’s ability to meet demand and whether these requests are reasonable.
If you’re new to the discussion, the above might be a tad confusing so let’s establish some history around the mob vote. The mob vote is an annual community event in which Mojang gives the players the chance to vote for one of three (or four, in the case of 2017) mobs, with the winner getting implemented in the next update (after the update announced at the time of the vote). Sounds fun, right? Well it’s often led to more than a few proverbial pitchforks, torches, and mobile guillotines.
The original vote in 2017 led to the inclusion of the Phantom, which (unknown to voters at the time) spawns in endless, dive-bombing swarms, effectively forcing the chore of sleep (as if this game isn’t freaky enough at times). 2018 and 2019’s votes then passed without incident, but 2020 proved to be a powder keg. The Glow Squid won but fell far from expectations, lacking the moving light source that was hoped for. Add in the fact that we lost out on the miniboss-adjacent Iceologer (which I was particularly gutted about) as well as the Moobloom (which promised a symbiotic relationship between itself and bees that hasn’t been seen before in the game), and you’ve got the mob vote that made the event infamous.
Chief among the problems with the above votes was the lack of information, something that also came in 2021 and 2022. The former saw the Allay win, a fine mob that’s weighed down by being pretty rare, while the latter vote had the Sniffler take home an immediate majority—only for the seeds it’s able to discover to have no mechanical use outside of aesthetics. This lack of information hit a breaking point with the 2023 vote, where the main contenders (Armadillo and Crab, sorry Penguin) were the subject of huge debates surrounding the extent of their announced features. How much would the Crab’s claw extend reach by? Will it break as well as place? How much defence would a dog gain from the armor made from Armadillo scutes? A lack of specifics has led to disappointment towards many mobs.
Getting teased with three mobs only to have only one (potentially underwhelming) new addition to the game also adds onto Minecraft’s content problem, something that’s been an issue with the last few updates. The Wild Update lacked hyped features such as fireflies (removed due to them being toxic to real frogs) and the birch forest (which was actually just concept art mistaken for an upcoming feature). Trails and Tales then came out earlier this year to an underwhelming reception. The update was pretty sparse with content and was tacked onto the disappointing Sniffler debut. All this context paints a pretty good picture as to why a large portion of the fanbase is taking a stand and demanding an end to mob votes, wanting all three mobs to be put into the game.
However, if I might play devil’s advocate, it is more complicated for Mojang to add a mob than you might think. It doesn’t come with the expectations of an independent modder but those of paying customers—these mobs have to be fine-tuned, approved, and tested over and over. In-game text mentioning them or any items they drop has to be translated into dozens of languages. They have to meet the requirements for both Bedrock and Java versions. I’m glad that the health of everyone working on Minecraft is being considered first and foremost.
With Microsoft money and reign over one of the biggest games ever at Mojang’s disposal, however, they could probably afford some extra hands to lighten the load while producing more complete updates. Moreover, there’s also the possibility that spinoff projects like Legends and Dungeons are stretching the team thin, though there’s more to debate as to whether Mojang should focus its resources exclusively on one game.
What Mojang really needs to do, if it wants to keep the mob votes, is for the developers to communicate everything about their plans in great detail. If players are adequately informed about behaviors and item properties, the vote will go down much more smoothly. I’d also argue that they could focus on existing features. Combat, farming, fishing, The End, etc., could all benefit from some more mechanical depth, which would make the game much richer than introducing a new, similarly shallow system. I doubt Minecraft will regress back to its lowest point in popularity (c2016-2018), but I’d love to see it try new things and, in all honesty, 1.21 gives me a lot of hope.