Minecraft fans will be well aware that this year’s mob vote hasn’t gone down well as mob votes in the past. Being made to choose between a Penguin, a Crab, and an Armadillo that drops an item that lets you create Wolf armor seems to have broken the community. They’ve been up in arms ever since the announcement of the mob vote last week, but things escalated greatly over the weekend, as fans are now creating petitions and Soviet-era propaganda in an effort to stop the mob vote entirely.
We’ll start with the propaganda, as Minecraft fans have been creating a range of posters and sharing them all over social media, most of them calling Mojang lazy and asking fellow players to rise up alongside them (thanks IGN). The posters are all extremely revolutionary in nature, and all of them are calling on a mob vote boycott in an attempt to get all three of this year’s mobs added to the game instead of just one.
In addition to that, a petition protesting the mob vote was set up on Change.org just a few days ago, but it’s already managed to amass over 250,000 signatures at the time of writing, and looks well on its way to hitting its 300,000 signature target. To put this number into perspective, a petition for the UK government to call a General Election and a petition for the protection of hedgehogs don’t have enough signatures than the Minecraft petition combined. That’s the power of Minecraft fans that Mojang is dealing with right now.
Of course, we won’t see the UK government debating the pros and cons of a Minecraft mob vote any time soon, but petitions like this are one of the few ways that fans of a certain game can potentially have their voices heard. This particular petition also seems to be acting as a gathering place, as organizer Holly Mavermorne is planning on setting up a livestream to watch Minecraft Live in hopes that the community’s protests are acknowledged.
Mojang doesn’t appear to have responded to any of the ongoing protests, which is stunning considering how much they’re growing as Minecraft Live draws ever closer. It has to be one of the bigger Minecraft controversies in recent years, and it would be surprising if there aren’t people at the studio trying to figure out what to do to avoid a full-scale revolt.
For now, all we can do is wait for the vote. It’s very possible that Mojang could buckle to public demand and break tradition, adding all three in the near future instead of tossing two of them into the void. The results of the vote are revealed during Minecraft Live on October 15, so if the Internet still exists on October 16, we know that Mojang will have done enough to satisfy fans.