Lets talk about the Mob Vote
The Mob Vote is over, the winner is the Armadillo, and a lot of people are mad about it. (Me included)
Understandably so. This is the fifth time that the community was split on the vote and the winner was not the one that a lot of people wanted.
NOTE: This is NOT supposed to be a bashing fest on Mojang, I just want to talk about the Mob Vote and why I think it’s flawed and does not work.
What is the Mob Vote?
The Mob Vote is a vote, on which mob should be added to Minecraft. It is held on the official Minecraft website, in the official Launcher and the Bedrock Edition of the game. There are three mobs to choose from, each with their own unique abilities and features, and only one of them will be added to the game. In this Year (2023) Armadillo won said vote, but this did not satisfy a lot of people.
Why is the Mob Vote flawed?
There are a lot of reasons why the Mob Vote is flawed, but I will only talk about the ones I think are the most important. Starting with:
Wage mob descriptions
Mojang is showing off the mobs, which are the next candidates for the vote, in an animated 2D video, which is supposed to show off the mob and its features. But this way of presenting the mob is flawed. They show off the features, but don’t tell you how they work exactly, or how they will be implemented. This creates a lot of confusion and room for speculation, which makes it harder to decide which mob to vote for.
Will the mob really glow or is it just a visual detail of the animation? What exactly will the armor do? Will it protect against all kinds of damage or just direct hits?
Questions like these don’t get answered, which allows for a lot of misinformation and assumptions to be made. This results in people voting for a mob, which they think will have an interesting feature and then being disappointed when the mob is not what they expected it to be.
Dividing the community
The Mob Vote is supposed to get the community excited and hyped for the update and bring the community together. Sadly, it does the exact opposite. Almost like a political election, the community gets divided into different groups, all worshiping their own “savior”. This creates an environment of hate and toxicity, which makes discussion almost impossible and keeps the hatred at an all-time high. If you only dare to talk about the disadvantages of a mob, you will be attacked by the mob’s fan base. (This mostly happens on Twitter, but it’s still a problem on other platforms.) Lastly, the majority of the voters are against the winner, because there are three mobs to choose from, but only one can win. Resulting in the disappointment of the majority of the voters. Take, for example, the Mob Vote from this year (2023). The Armadillo won with 42.3% of the votes, but that means that 57.7% of the voters voted for mobs, which lost. [Source]
But Minecraft is not the only game with a community divided by a vote. Nintendo’s Splatoon has a similar system, called Splatfest. Splatfests are an (almost) monthly event, where players can vote on a topic and then play matches to support their team. While this also attracts some toxicity, it is not as bad as the Minecraft Mob Vote. So what makes it different?
Minecraft’s Mob Vote vs. Splatoon’s Splatfest
Splatfests are quite similar to the Mob Vote, but there are some key differences, which make Splatfests a lot more enjoyable. First of all, normal Splatfests don’t impact Splatoon as much as the Mob Vote does Minecraft. The winning team gets a few bonuses, but that’s it. Additionally, the Splatfests, which impact the (future) games in a big way (like the final Splatfest in Splatoon 2), don’t lock the other options. The losing idea will still be added to the game, just not as the main story.
This leaves us with a big question:
How to improve the Mob Vote?
I’ve talked a lot about why the Mob Vote sucks, but how can it be improved? A lot of people have suggested to just add all three mobs, but others argued that this would be too much work for the developers, and I agree with that. The mobs, which we are presented with are just concepts, which have yet to be implemented into the game. The amount of work, which goes into adding a mob, is a lot, and adding three mobs at the same time would be too much. So adding all of them at the same time is not an option, but what about adding them one by one? This would allow for all three mobs to be added and leave the developers with enough time to implement them. Though we have to acknowledge that this would be a lot of work for the developers, which would result in an even slower update cycle. The only other options, which I can think of, are to either remove the Mob Vote or to completely rethink it.
Conclusion
The Mob Vote is a nice idea, but it just doesn’t work in the current state. It divides the community and creates a toxic environment, which is not good for the game and the community. I hope that Mojang will rethink the Mob Vote and improve it, so that it is not as divisive as it is now. I also would not mind if it was removed completely, since it does not achieve what it is supposed to do.
Thanks for taking the time to read this. If I made any mistakes, please let me know.
[Update] There is a discussion about this topic on the Minecraft Lemmy Community.