

Show HN We just launched forking for your Minecraft worlds - chrislloyd
http://blog.minefold.com/post/16987166800/gorgeous-maps-cloning-worlds-pro-accounts

======
citricsquid
hey, I've seen your project around a few times and at Minecon. I love the idea
and I think you have a lot of potential and while I absolutely love your
interface I don't think you'll have much success with "normal" users when they
use it. The reason your service is absolutely fantastic is because it
addresses the biggest problem Minecraft servers have right now (it's not plug
and play -- daunting to inexperienced users) but your interface, although
pretty, feels... confusing. It feels like it's designed for people who
understand Minecraft, which is not your core audience!

Still, great work, good luck :-)

~~~
chrislloyd
Hey Sam! Great to talk to you finally (we had an awesome time with @wedtm at
Waza). We're primarily targeting existing Minecraft users at the moment
because there is less teaching needed (and therefore less work). However we
know that there's still a _massive_ potential in reaching people who have
never played (or even heard of) Minecraft before.

I'm really curious to hear specifically how you thought it was confusing.
We've spent a lot of time trying to make the interface as simple as possible
and would appreciate all the criticism we can get :) Fancy shooting an email
to chris@minefold.com?

~~~
citricsquid
Yes, Miles mentioned he had spoken to you at the conference he attended,
although Miles is no longer with the company and has no involvement with MCF
or MCW any longer, just so you know.

The confusion I had came from the lack of hand holding. The individual pages
(well most) make sense and are well designed and explained, but the process of
using them feels disjointed. I'm not sure how much sense that makes, but I'm
trying to imagine it from the point of view of someone who only understands a
basic idea of how to play Minecraft.

For example, after signing up I click "create a world" and I'm presented with
a well designed screen with lots of configuration options, but at no point
does it explain what a world is. It's devoid of any information, it assumes I
understand what you mean by world. Some sort of introduction on this page that
says something like "A Minefold world is a minecraft world that you can invite
your friends to, once created you add our server address to your multiplayer
server list and add your friends to your access list and you're ready to play"
would do wonders.

Next: the individual world management page. If I create a new world it shows
"playing here" greyed out, what does this mean? After investigating the system
I've worked out that you can only play on 1 world at a time and "playing on a
world" is which world you've configured via the control panel to be accessed
when you log in to pluto.minefold.com, not the world you're _actually_
connected to, this isn't explained anywhere and I believe it will confuse
users. If I click through the the "members" page there's no explanation here
of what these people listed mean, I added my other account "samuel" and there
was no explanation of how they can now join my world, or what the account
needs to be (minecraft? minefold?). It makes sense they'd need a Minefold
account when thinking about it and how the service works but users don't
think, they expect the service to do that for them.

I could go on and on, although the interface is very pretty and simple which
is what you aimed for, it is not straight forward, you need to hold your users
hands and let them know exactly what to do and provide examples of exactly how
to achieve the most popular use cases (creating a server for a friend and then
getting a friend into the server is the main one).

edit: my comment seems a bit abrasive, apologies, tired, mean well :-D

~~~
chrislloyd
No, this is awesome. Everything has been duly noted! We definitely owe you a
beer :)

------
drblue
Has some bugs.

So I was wowed by your maps and signed up to try the free account. I uploaded
my world (I had to do it twice because the upload timed out once, and the
second time it took several minutes). After logging in to pluto.minefold.com,
it didn't put me in my world (My world's seed: -6543031652815246039 vs what
the seed on pluto is: 1328309103 if you want to follow up)

Also, I'm hesitant to play on anything that doesn't have bukkit/WorldGuard.
I'm not sure what your access control/griefing rollback mechanisms are. That
should probably go in your FAQ.

~~~
chrislloyd
Addressing a couple of your issues:

1.) Our uploads go straight to S3, so the first one timing out may (?) have
just been a connection problem? We checked our logs and we didn't receive
notification of the upload finishing. If you upload more worlds in the future
and they keep failing, email them to support@minefold.com and I'll hook you
up.

2.) The seed changing is a bug. We're working on fixing that now, but in the
mean time if you send your username and the world to support@minefold.com I'll
manually fix your seed for you.

3.) We've had lots of requests for Bukkit but were hesitant to support it
because we thought it would be replaced by the Mod API. Now that it looks like
the Mod API will just be Bucket, well… I don't want to commit to anything but
it's something we're "investigating" :)

4.) At the moment griefing is controlled as all worlds are whitelist only.
Only let your friends play in a world :) We're also saving snapshots every 10
minutes exposed a mechanism to rollback yet. I might sound like a broken
record, but if you email support@minefold.com we can manually rollback your
world for you.

------
palish
This is a stroke of genius: <http://screencast.com/t/v2e0i31sAC> (Pro
accounts)

You nailed it. Perfect value-add, perfect price point.

------
bri3d
I like it! Just one thing: a more prominent (header?) link to your main site
from your blog and a sign up link within the blog post (since it talks about
accounts) would probably help convert HN/Twitter viewers into customers. Maybe
I'm just blind, but I had to navigate manually to your homepage and again to
see plans, and the only links I saw in the blog post were to individual maps.

I noticed that the "pricing" screenshot links to the pricing page, but there's
nothing there to indicate the screenshot is a link.

~~~
chrislloyd
Hey thanks for the feedback. We haven't spend too much time on the blog yet
(building!) but I just added a signup link to the end of the post.

------
villagefool
Sorry I don't really know minecraft, but it isn't open source right? if so how
did they manage to technically do this

~~~
citricsquid
The Minecraft Server protocol has been documented by the community since 2009,
there are a wide variety of custom servers in existence today, for example
Myne which is open source: <https://bitbucket.org/andrewgodwin/myne2/src>

------
robbiet480
Tweeted at you guys, but this is absolutely amazingly awesome. I used to
own/run MinecraftServers.com and I thought that was awesome but this blew me
away, especially since this is all running on node.js, eventmachine and redis!
Keep it up!

------
joshu
Wait, each person pays individually?

~~~
ugh
Looks like it: <https://minefold.com/help>

That’s $17 per month for a 4 people server (with the $25 plan, $15 per month
with the $45 plan). I don’t think that’s a competitive price (but don’t quote
me on that, I have zero experience setting up or shopping for Minecraft
servers). They also don’t support any plugins. It, however, looks like the
service is incredibly easy to set up and use.

Just like with Dropbox, you pay more but you (are supposed to get) ease of use
in return. I think that can work if done correctly. (There are also other
advantages: You don’t need one gracious person to set up everything and pay,
you don’t need to collect donations, …)

Edit: Wow, the experience really is smooth. It took me not much more than a
minute from their homepage to running around in my own multiplayer world. I
have never set up any Minecraft server anywhere and zero experience with all
of that. Nice work!

------
mrspeaker
Fantastic work guys... can't wait to see what you craft next!

------
swang
Wow the maps are indeed gorgeous! Makes me want to play.

------
mattallen
Kickin' ass fellas. What's next?

------
quackingduck
Well done dudes

