Why Minecraft has such a terrible backward compatibility? For every release of Minecraft, even a minor release, is almost guaranteed to break some plugins or mod. Why is this so? I am asking this so that we could avoid the same architecture problem as Minecraft. I mean, why can't the upgrades also support previous version of minecraft? Minecraft requires an EXACT version number match in order to connect. I am pretty sure the protocol can be designed so that clients should ignore unsupported commands. For example, if there is new block introduced and the client doesn't understand it, they can just fall back to default dummy block so that players can still play but start seeing dummy wireframe block or so. Once they start seeing too much of wireframe blocks they know they should upgrade.