[rozab]

If the reasons they give for this were honest, you'd think their time would be better spent building the kind of extremely basic integration tests that would detect if, say, their world generation broke making the game unwinnable.

https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MC-236618

Inflammatory zingers aside, I don't mind telemetry in a product like this and I'm sure I'd want it if I were working on it. But I'd want automated tests first. Factorio's approach seems enlightened, but very rare in the industry.

[diegoperini]

No amount of integration tests can replicate millions of players, organically interacting with a video game. The state space is too large for that.

[codetrotter]

Yeah I thought so too, but reading the ticket they linked it looks like in a specific version of Minecraft, strongholds we’re not being generated at all?

I only recently started playing Minecraft again after years. Last time I played it, The End did not exist yet in Minecraft. Back then we used to joke about “winning Minecraft”. Also, lava used to be an infinite resource if you built a cross and filled each corner with lava, you could then take infinite lava out from the middle which was neat. But they decided to remove that for some reason.

Anyway, bugs happen and I think the GP is wrong to suggest that telemetry is not helpful. Being able to see how people actually use the software is how Microsoft has done it since many many years AFAIK. And it helps Microsoft to develop better software.

There are many things I don’t like about Microsoft and I don’t use their Windows operating system almost at all. But I think they still got a lot right about how to develop software.

[reificator]

> Yeah I thought so too, but reading the ticket they linked it looks like in a specific version of Minecraft, strongholds we’re not being generated at all?

That "specific version of Minecraft" being a weekly development snapshot and not a point release, to be clear.

[alexander-litty]

Not a great example. This bug was in one of the weekly snapshot releases, which regularly and knowingly have some unplayable element to them.