I bought Minecraft on September 1st. It was excellent – a fresh, new gaming experience. You’ll have probably read about it already, so I won’t labour the point.
The Halloween update was announced and my excitement grew. What was lacking from the multiplayer game was that piquancy of danger available in the single player in the form of zombies, skeletons and giant spiders that appeared at night and in the dark mines you had to dig – the Halloween update would set about including them in the multiplayer game. “Hurray!”, I thought. “This is fast becoming the game I’ve always wanted to play.”
I was busy around Halloween so only got a chance to boot-up Minecraft a few days after the update but my password didn’t work with my username. I tried all the combinations of passwords and usernames I most often use. None worked. Curious.
I told the password recovery to send a reminder using my account’s username. But it wasn’t recognised. I tracked down my Paypal receipt to Mojang – the Minecraft people – to my Hotmail account and told the password recovery to send a reminder to this address, which would definitely be the one I used to register. But it wasn’t recognised.
My account had disappeared.
I searched Minecraft’s website and found a link to the email address support@mojang.com. “If you’re still having trouble accessing your account, please dont hesitate to send me an email” It said. I didn’t hesitate, and I sent an email and waited. Four days past and no response appeared. I checked the email address registered with my Paypal payment, it was the same: support@mojang.com. I searced the Minecraft website for another email address, came across markus@mojang.com (otherwise known as Notch, the game’s creator), and fired an email there. And waited. No response.
Perhaps they have a spam filter for Hotmail, I thought. A lot of places do. For that reason, and for the meagre weight my Gaming Daily email account might perhaps possess, I used that instead to resend two emails to new addresses I’d tracked down: payment@mojang.com and notch@mojang.com.
And waited.
And waited.
Silence.
In the meantime I had been complaining about my dilemma to Craig who tweeted Notch, receiving no reply. I emailed another, desperate, subject-line-in-capitals email to payment@mojang.com. No Response. I’d run out of email addresses at which to send my requests for a fix.
I tweeted Notch myself. Again, no reply, but someone did pick up on it and posted my question at GetSatisfaction.com which serves in part as Minecraft’s online community.
They couldn’t help.
I still can’t play Minecraft. I paid €9.95 for a premium Minecraft account – I haven’t been able to play it for about a month now.
As a last resort, an attempt to get attention more than anything, I billed Mojang for €9.95 from my Paypal account, too much time having passed to reverse the charge:
“For unusable Minecraft account. Will accept a refund or rectification of unusable account as detailed in previous emails.”
Can you guess what happened? Nothing happened.
Last week, Notch tweeted that any Minecraft account problems should be sent to payment@mojang.com, the address I’d emailed at least twice before. I’ve emailed it again. No reply just yet, but fingers crossed! He also said “I get a LOT of emails. You might have luck bugging Daniel, too..” I asked Daniel, my housemate from three years ago, but he didn’t know anything about it. I don’t know who Daniel is – I can’t find his contact details.
Today, while writing this, Notch tweeted:
“I intended to work on my 4k game today after work, but added pointless candy stuff to Minecraft instead! So much fun!”
So that’s my situation. Sure they’re an indie that have achieved massive, massive success and thus you’d expect a bit of a delay with after-sales support. But to have received nothing from Mojang after sending numerous emails over the course of a month during which I cannot play the game I paid for at all? It’s a bit much.
UPDATE: At 12.32pm today (8/12/10) Notch emailed me to say that he was made aware of the problem. Everything’s now sorted and I can play Minecraft again. Hurrah!
I like how on the front page the thumbnail says “mage not available”. They’re never around when you need one.
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It’s a good song, but what does it have to do with his comment?
I thought this would be a scathing “emperor’s new clothes” style article where you express complete disillusionment with the game itself.
Incidentally, I don’t know whether or not my account still works, cos I haven’t played it in a month.
I know that my account still works, but I just don’t fancy playing Minecraft. Overexposure a cause of that, maybe?
It’s more a case of having done everything I’ve wanted to do with it at the moment. I can easily see an update or a change of mood bringing me back into the fold.
Notch is aware now: https://twitter.com/#!/notch/status/12474839482769408
And Daniel is his Business-Manager. You can mail him at daniel@mojang.com (every Mojang Employee’s mail adress consists of their first name).
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I’m glad you got it all sorted out.
But just take a moment. Mojang has sold 700.000 ‘copies’ of the game. There are only a handful of people working there and that just for a week now. Up till then Notch was working at it all (mostly?) alone.
Also, you bought a pre-order of the game (can’t access the site now to read the details). And you yourself appear to have forgotten your username.
Yes, Notch could perhaps have done a little better job. But to assign a whole blog about it seems like you had a grudge to clear and doesn’t show you understand the situation.
I can only assume that you posted that here because each comment saying similar on Notchs blog has been shot down as missing the point.
And what grudge could Paul have to clear? He obviously likes the game otherwise he wouldn’t have spent a month trying to be able to play it again.
Then again, if you’re commenting without actually reading the post then there’s little point in arguing.
“But to assign a whole blog about it seems like you had a grudge to clear and doesn’t show you understand the situation.”
What grudge?
I really like Minecraft and simply wanted to be able to play it. This post is no extension of the truth, it’s something that happened to me. And To think that me writing here is in any way going to damage Minecraft’s success is beyond laughable.
Notch agrees that there is/was a problem in this case. I think it’s you who doesn’t understand the situation.
I did read the whole post. And I can understand it is frustrating to not be able to contact someone to resolve the situation.
The blog just reads like you stand powerless while someone took your money and ran away. That while Notch seems like a very nice developer to me.
So, using the word ‘grudge’ is probably too harsh. And it doesn’t show any respect of me towards Notch to go on and on about it. So let me just apologize for thinking badly of you and feel free to remove my post(s).
Well there’s a pretty simple math to this.
Developer creates product expectation > User purchases product based on expectation > Product does not meet expectation > User tries to resolve > Developer does not attempt to resolve > User is unhappy that product did not meet expectation.
I mean this happens constantly across many games, big and small, whether it be bugs or oversold features and so on, so when you can’t play, and you can’t get an answer going on, wouldn’t you feel a tad powerless?
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image not avalible O_o
because he couldn’t take screenshots. It was a joke like.
Kind of sence of humor?
We should probably acknowledge that Notch went out of his way to publicly apologise for the lack of support on his blog which was pretty nice.
And as a general note to anyone complaining about Paul complaining – if you couldn’t play Minecraft for a month even after continually chasing support, I doubt you would be so eager to get those talons out.
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Iv have the same problem and just sent an e-mail yesterday….exact situation but haven’t waited as long..hope they get my e-mail
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Well consider that he has put a lot of work into updating the game. And until recently he was a one man team. I’d suggest he has put plenty of effort into the game. He’s publicly acknowledged that the support needs to improve, so there’s plenty of time until the finished product is released before we start judging the game as we would with other more established games.
I think all this misunderstanding can be solved with the fact there is no Minecraft game yet. The code hasn’t even made it to beta yet. Most games at this stage get trashed, we’re lucky to have screenshots!
Did you copy and pasted your password in the confirmation box rather then typing it out twice?
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The point was that the account itself had disappeared, It was not a case of forgotten login details.
That was in reply to the three-timed reincarnated body of jesus.
I understand the frustration your feeling, but I also understand Notch’s situation. He was working on it alone for a while, and tons of people play the game, more then any one human can deal with by himself. He has staff now, but even then, he probably still receives thousands upon thousands of emails. They have to bite the bullet and try to divide their time working on the game or handling support issues. With the amount of emails he gets, support would be a full time job for his entire team. He probably isn’t at a point where hiring a dedicated team of support specialists is warranted as of yet. I realize that you were frustrated, but your post sounds incredibly unsympathetic, and while Notch does agree their is a problem, you shouldn’t have come across the way you did. You sounded extremely self-centered What I mean to say is that you acted as if Notch had the capability but wasn’t asserting the effort. He knows he had a problem, and it was a legitimate one, and your post unfortunately has the tone of “Terrible customer support, don’t play.”. You should really reconsider the way you come across when you write stuff like this. Notch needs our feedback, and our support, and you brought a major issue to his attention… but not without sacrificing your own integrity.
Just so there’s no confusion, I agree that there is a major problem, I just disagree with the way you came across and am trying to warn you to avoid this tone unless its truly warranted. In this case you have a valid case to publicize your trouble, therefore bringing the problem into greater view, but you didn’t have to do it while painting them in an entirely negative light. It just seems like you preemptively assumed people were being ignored and they were doing nothing to remedy the situation. Pretty stupid approach if you ask me.
You seem to forget that Mojang is a business that is selling a product, for money. As plenty of comments have said, when you take someones money that person then has expectations that they can use the product they have bought.
Notch has make a ton of money – he’s not just a bedroom coder making a game on a shoestring now. As a business with an office that is turning a huge profit – clearly money should have been invested into support sooner.
Paul reported what happened. The facts. That’s all.
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So if I go in your wallet and steal $10 you wont mind then?
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