''I’m leaving on a two week vacation tonight, to celebrate my mother turning 60.''
From Notch's Blog, is this normal behaviour? He seems to have allot of long breaks for practically no reason.
Judging by the last five months since I bought the game and started paying attention, yes. He takes off a week every six to eight weeks. (Estimate.) He seems to like longer, uninterrupted periods instead of a weekend.
And how is it possible that the more people he hires the less work seems to be done on the game.
In my limited experience, this is normal for adding staff to any software project. There's even a famous book about it,
The Mythical Man-Month.
I'm starting to really wish I had donated the money I paid for minecraft to Toady...
I mean I did get my moneys worth from minecraft already but this is still kind of annoying.
I hear that, but it looks like besides the create-a-new-company delays, the team is working on
refactoring and on infrastructure improvements like a new savefile format and optimizing graphics-card performance.
Which is great, and totally necessary, but is boring. It doesn't lead to clever tweets or interesting blog posts, or to small but fun new additions to the game.
I counsel patience, things will start moving quickly again.