Minefold (YC W12) launches mods with more games coming soon

Minefold is something you wouldn't assume would be hugely lucrative <i>unless you are the parent of a 10-13 year old kid</i>, in which case you are kicking yourself for not putting sane pricing on top of on-demand Minecraft servers that don't require you to tech support a colo machine.<p>I'd be a customer right now, except that the boy has learned more Unix and scripting in 2 months of running a Minecraft server than he did in 5 years of me pushing stuff on him. But for the problem that colo solves for him, it's <i>hellaciously</i> expensive.

I was thinking of signing up for this for my nephew, maybe as an Xmas gift but the pricing scheme I find kind of confusing, especially as I'd be turning this over eventually to my brother (his dad) who isn't really familiar with web hosts and might be offput by the fact its rated in terms of minutes of playtime<p>Seeing as this is kind of geared towards kids wouldn't a much more simplified pricing scheme make more sense?

Pretty awesome, seems Minefold is evolving from a Minecraft specific service to a heroku-like platform for games (and Heroku started with just Rails, of course).

It's not obvious from the page, is it 5 coins per minute (for a normal server) while someone is online or is it 5 coins per minute 24/7? If it's while online only this could be an incredible cost savings relative to a $5 a month server that a handful of friends sign on once in a while.

I like the idea but the coin pricing kills it for me.<p>I can't figure out what it really means exactly. Maybe put an example up of what it would look like to run a few hours on the weekends? Just a thought.<p>The idea is still a good one.

Looks like a nice, lean service, kinda reminds me of iWantMyName's approach to domain names: clean &#38; straightforward.<p>If you guys are interested in hosting CraftStudio servers (my Minecraft-inspired collaborative game-making platform for gamers), I'd be happy to provide some guidance. You can hit me up at elisee@craftstud.io - <a href="http://craftstud.io/" rel="nofollow">http://craftstud.io/</a>

Two things.<p>In the settings "Link your Minecraft account for 400 coins" is ambiguous. Am I spending coins or getting coins?<p>Also, look into Feed the Beast, it's a mod pack (like Tekkit) except built and supported by the developers of the mods. Many of whom feel Tekkit used their mods unfairly without their permission.<p><a href="http://feed-the-beast.com" rel="nofollow">http://feed-the-beast.com</a>

I'm interested to see how this is going to work when you start throwing other games into the mix. With Minecraft, updates are fairly straightforward. With some other games (CSS, TF2, etc) the update process is pretty complicated. You've got to either roll your own updater, or have a unique steam account per server. Then you've got to run the updater, and hope it doesn't crash midway through or hang indefinitely. Once you update a server, you then need to check that all the plugins installed aren't breaking the server (or need updates themselves).<p>It's pretty straightforward to run thousands of stock servers, the difficulty comes in when you've got thousands of different combinations.<p>Edit: I'm also noticing DayZ on that page. They're perhaps the most commercial hosting unfriendly game I've ever encountered. Good luck getting instance IDs from them.

The pricing looks a bit confusing now (the straightforward $x/person before was much better imo), but I look forward to the CS:GO servers :)

It would be interesting to learn what hoops you needed to jump through to be a BF3 host. I know there are only "partners" allowed to do it; I would have hosted my own at the colo otherwise. (having &#60;5ms ping times and decent peering or transit to everyone in the Bay Area on comcast and sonic and webpass...)

on the settings page (<a href="https://minefold.com/settings" rel="nofollow">https://minefold.com/settings</a>) there's a curious display issue. Not sure if it's the fault of Chrome (on Windows 7) or a style setting, but I'm missing the bracket opening for my username and the coin amount for Facebook invites: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/lOJH5.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/lOJH5.png</a>

Would love to hear Dave's experiences with moving the backend from ruby to golang, can you make sure he does actually publish those blog articles?

The coin based pricing is weird, but my god! It's Heroku for gaming servers! Why hasn't someone thought of this before?!

I love the minimal design of this, reflects what you are offering so well.<p>Well done, I wish I played Minecraft :)

Funpacks sound awesome, I'm looking forward to reading about them and the new backend services.

Love the new website