A cake for Notch
Posted: 02 May 2011, 23:09
As many of you know, I try very hard to make our server run at 100% uptime with no bugs. Due to the beta nature of a game, and not a really released server plugin system, its a challenge to keep things going. On top of that, everything is buggy and this game really wasn't designed for large multiplayer servers.
In my quest to make things better, I figured that I needed to have a meeting with Notch, and attempt to show him the challenges that server owners have, because, our long term goal, is to be a large community, with 500 people online all the time. The server doesn't scale well on new hardware, and at these rates, I'll need 10 servers to do 500 people, which is not cost effective.
I had tried to email and twitter him, but I'm sure the poor guy gets a ton of that. He recently mentioned that he filled up his gmail and had to write a script to auto-delete it, his browser kept timing out while trying to delete large chunks of email.
Pinmissile mentioned to me that its common knowledge around Stockholme (where Notch lives, and so does Pin), that to get his attention, you use cake. So my quest for a bakery began, looking for a good one that had a webpage, and would take my American credit cards, either through their website or over the phone, well, ended abruptly. I couldn't find one. Pinmissile came to the rescue again, he agreed to let me paypal him the cash, and he went and ordered the cake, as well as arranging the delivery of it and a letter from me.
Here is the cake we sent: On the day it was delivered, this is all we saw publicly:
http://twitter.com/#!/carlmanneh/status ... 7836220416
http://twitter.com/#!/mollstam/status/60652044448579584
No word from Notch. I waited impatiently, for days, then weeks, twittered him a few times, nothing. Today, on a whim, I emailed him again, hoping it would catch his eye.
It's been a fun adventure and I can't wait to see where it goes
Also, one last thing, obviously, the cake is not a lie!
In my quest to make things better, I figured that I needed to have a meeting with Notch, and attempt to show him the challenges that server owners have, because, our long term goal, is to be a large community, with 500 people online all the time. The server doesn't scale well on new hardware, and at these rates, I'll need 10 servers to do 500 people, which is not cost effective.
I had tried to email and twitter him, but I'm sure the poor guy gets a ton of that. He recently mentioned that he filled up his gmail and had to write a script to auto-delete it, his browser kept timing out while trying to delete large chunks of email.
Pinmissile mentioned to me that its common knowledge around Stockholme (where Notch lives, and so does Pin), that to get his attention, you use cake. So my quest for a bakery began, looking for a good one that had a webpage, and would take my American credit cards, either through their website or over the phone, well, ended abruptly. I couldn't find one. Pinmissile came to the rescue again, he agreed to let me paypal him the cash, and he went and ordered the cake, as well as arranging the delivery of it and a letter from me.
Here is the cake we sent: On the day it was delivered, this is all we saw publicly:
http://twitter.com/#!/carlmanneh/status ... 7836220416
http://twitter.com/#!/mollstam/status/60652044448579584
No word from Notch. I waited impatiently, for days, then weeks, twittered him a few times, nothing. Today, on a whim, I emailed him again, hoping it would catch his eye.
I danced a jig when I saw the response today, now I'm waiting on another reply to my answer.Notch wrote:Hi!
We got the cake, and we loved it!
I told the other people in the office "Now THAT'S how you get a
meeting with us!", but I guess it kind of fell between the chairs.
Sorry about that!
I'll CC Carl (our CEO), Jakob (the guy making Scrolls, and another
co-founder) and Daniel (our bizdev).
When would you like to visit? I'll be gone most of June because of E3
and a trip to Italy. And what would you like to discus? =)
/ Markus Persson
No response as of yet, but I did want to share it with our community.I would like to bring to your attention the needs of your SMP community, performance of servers, multi-threading and scalability. I'm not a programmer, I'm a network engineer by trade, so I don't know the challenges you face.
...
That cake was a challenge, I couldn't find a bakery in Stockholme to take an American bank credit card over the net or phone, luckily I have a community member that lives there that let me paypal money to him to order the cake. It was a challenge, but fun. Did you guys get a picture of it by any chance? I'd like to have it to share back with my players.
It's been a fun adventure and I can't wait to see where it goes
Also, one last thing, obviously, the cake is not a lie!
