Dear Minecraft Community,
The year 2014 might not have been the easiest. It had a lot of bumps: the rather long 1.7 update process, the Wolverness DMCAs, the Microsoft buyout, and that "drama" thing which never seems to truly leave us alone. It also marks the first full year of me as a part of the Minecraft modding community - I began my adventure with Minecraft in July 2009 and I still fondly remember the days of 0.0.23_01. Those were simpler times. I began my adventure with mods in early 2012 and those, too, were simpler times. Back then, we only had about ten or fifteen mods that truly mattered - now, we have hundreds.
I began my adventure with modding Minecraft itself in late 2013, with the advent of EnderNet. It was a good idea, but sadly too far ahead of its time and misunderstood by people. Later on, I created Computronics (now maintained by Vexatos), started porting mods to 1.7 and eventually climbed the ladder all the way up to become the lead maintainer of BuildCraft, one of my once favourite mods, and get a chance to bring it back to stability and give it wonderful new features.
In the meantime, I was involved in quite a lot of drama. I am a person who strongly believes in values he perceives as right, and sometimes this got too far on other people's nerves (most importantly jadedcat's and KingLemming's). I learned from that, and toned down my whining a bit, focusing on hard work as a way of showing andproving my vision of the modding community to other people.
Now, as the year 2015 approaches upon us, we stand upon new challenges: the advent of Minecraft 1.8, which brings many serious changes; rising tension between the Forge development team and modders; the growing disinterest of users and modpack authors in upgrading to future releases; finally, the need to replace a hole left by Cauldron. How will we handle them? I'm not a prophet, I can't tell you; I can merely hope and contribute my opinion to it.
I don't have any true wishes, as I know changing the situation we are in is not going to be done by a different attitude. All I can dream of is that we become more open and cooperative, but great progress has been happening in the way of that.
Personally, I decided to make my own modpack, which I hope will be unique and restore the reasons I joined Minecraft for, so highly forgotten in the age of HQM, microcrafting, power creep and grindy crafting recipes designed to try and slow down the evermarching Tetris game of modpack progression ever so slightly. Expect a beta release of Magnum Opus sometime in January 2015.
~ asie