>It's only selfish if they had the resources from the beginning which they didn't.

As the post mentions, early versions of Minecraft allocated significantly less garbage. You know, the versions programmed by one guy, before they had millions and millions of dollars and a whole team working on it.

Yes, Minecraft has changed quite a bit since 1.3, when Notch abdicated the development throne, but really not that much considering it's been over 2 years and that Minecraft is a generation's Mario. Most of the "slew of new features" came from mods (still no official modding API, either!)

>Maybe not enough people cared about the lag vs new features? It's not like Minecraft is a competitive FPS where lag matters a lot more.

You don't understand. The "lag" you described is a constant delay between input and response. An example would be vsync, which in most PC implementations trades an extra frame or two of latency for smooth, tearless video. The problem I was describing is jitter, which is variable delay. One frame may take 10ms, the next may take 100ms+, due to the garbage collector. This is extremely noticeable and annoying when playing Minecraft, because the game locks up temporarily every few seconds and makes even simple actions like walking in a straight line extremely choppy and disorienting. Aside from being unpleasant and breaking "immersion," it's even gotten me killed when a GC cycle kicks in just before a jump and the game misses the jump input. It absolutely affects the experience.

>First the Minecraft still doesn't have heavy hardware requirements.

It kinda does, if you want smooth performance. You can play it on a toaster, sure, if you ratchet the draw distance down and are ok with sub-30 FPS and lots of GC-induced jitter.

My point was simply that if you make your game perform worse than it could, you're pushing the cost onto the players, and while this is a normal part of the march of computing, at some point it stops being acceptable and you're hurting the experience for the average player. IMHO, considering how ridiculously profitable Minecraft is and how little the fundamental gameplay has changed over the years, it stopped being acceptable a long time ago.

>Second the cost of computing has been trending downward for decades.

That's nice, but little kids from all backgrounds love Minecraft. You can't just ask an elementary school kid in the projects playing Minecraft at his community center on a donated computer past its prime to upgrade.

>Programming Java isn't easy especially when you have an existing code base. It's even messier when you give precedence to performance.

Again, the code performed reasonably well before. The new devs "cleaned it up" without measuring the performance impact of their style changes, and now everyone is paying for it.

>If this is so easy, why not just make a better clone to fix the problem?

Ah, the old "you can't complain because I don't see you doing any better" schtick. Take it easy, I don't think it's so controversial to be perplexed that one of the most successful video game franchises of all time is managed so poorly; for example, you'd think hiring the Optifine guy would be a no brainer.