This is a post written with clarifying how exactly my change of modding scene happened, because I believe that my previous blog post didn't put it in the right way, as evident by some of the comments.
First of all, it is untrue that my only reason for quitting was meeting a few negative people in the community and it is definitely untrue that I wanted to start with a blank slate. I stand fully by the issues I covered and my opinions and I would do the same things again... Perhaps in a slightly different way, but that is just a result of having more experience.
My quitting started after I read the logs between Arcanis and Grum that I posted earlier. I realized that Mojang is not taking Minecraft in a direction I preferred anymore, so I did two things:
- I posted the logs on Reddit, because I believed other people might find this information important,
- I started looking for alternatives to Minecraft that would let me go in a direction I enjoy.
The first part went okay, although a few people consider the log posting to be very negative and "causing drama". It has to be pointed out that drama became a rather abused term in the Minecraft community, referring to pretty much anything that has strong, vocal minorities.
The second part... I ended up with either Minetest, Terasology or making my own voxel game. Doing it from scratch was not something I was terribly keen on doing, so I looked into the two alternatives. The fact that Terasology crashed on all my attempts of running it quickly narrowed the choice down to one winner: Minetest.
The first thing I did is go on their IRC channel and check out the mods. To my surprise, they were quite well-made, although their graphics department is a tad lacking. I started talking to people there and looking into their Lua modding API. It is nice, although obviously more limited than hacking into the game's engine directly like we did with Minecraft, but most importantly, it is server-side. That means all information related to block types and similar things is sent from server to client and no modpacks or launchers are necessary on the client. (Great! No more launcher pains!)
Also, the community was different. A few people, dedicated to the game; everyone sharing their work, everythin being so much more open. It reminded me of the golden days of Minecraft Classic back in late 2009. So did the game, in fact - the default gamepack felt similar to early survival, and the game didn't really feel... bloated? It all just felt fun again, perhaps due to the simplicity, perhaps due to the small, surprisingly drama-free community of passionates who don't care about silly fights.
At that point, I was essentially hooked. I knew where I want to stay. I decided that an easier to mod, open source game is the better choice for me.
And that's how I quit Minecraft modding.
If you want me to write a short tutorial-like explaining how to play and mod Minetest, please tell me in the comments below.
EDIT: Corrected many spelling mistakes. So many it's not even funny. Reminder - never write blog posts at 1 AM.