Is about time Mojang took Minecraft in a new direction? To redevelop rather than patching in small increments?

Alright, let's go through your question line by line because it's more like five or six questions:

however multiple servers has come and gone over the years due to drop offs in player numbers. Servers closing and opening does very little to determine how many people actually play a game. Minecraft's userbase continues to grow at an exponential rate. Some servers close because they annoy players into leaving, others because the fees get to high. A server closing is in almost no way indicative of how well a game is doing.

that is still being updated however it is being done in small increments and so it takes a few updates for there to be any significant change to the game Many of the new features are released in large updates. The only reason that there's more small updates (bug fixes) than major feature additions is that: 1. New features take significantly longer to develop than making fixes to known problems. 2. Many bugs aren't even known about until these updates go live to literally millions of people. They simply cannot test all of the games features themselves in a reasonable amount of time.

is it about time Mojang took Minecraft in a new direction by re-developing it into Minecraft 2? Why? They can add/remove things as they want right now. There is no true reason for them to do this other than to re-write the code in more efficient way. But then they'd lose all of that cross-platform support they have. Very few games work out of the box on Windows, Mac OS, and the majority of Linux distros straight out of the box.

make it easier to mod, take on the ideas of the best mods and add them to the game, add allot more mobs, more block types, add more default graphic choices so texture packs aren't needed so much etc The mod-ability is being worked on right now (Called MC-API) by members of the Bukkit team (Almost all servers run on their software) that were brought in-house specifically for that reason. As for the rest, They can do it now and have been, under this title, one that's literally Globally Recognized by millions, possibly even billions, of people.

It would be very exciting to see what they would do with it rather than the current set up of Jeb being pretty much the only one working on the games to patch it But he's not. He took over as lead developer, He get's final say as to what makes the cut and what doesn't. Otherwise, not much has changed. The aforementioned Bukkit team is and has been working their asses off, some of them literally 24/7, to fix existing bugs, work on the MC-API, and add additional features pending Jeb's approval.

Minecraft is what made Mojang what it is and i think it's about time to pay it more attention. It is their primary focus and always has been. Until the Bukkit team was brought in recently, the team was very very small. Even Jeb's personal endeavor (Cobalt, good game despite being in Alpha) has taken the back seat (scratch that, the seat behind the back seat) to Minecraft's development.

It would create allot of buzz among current players, bring back allot of people who stopped playing and engage an even wider audience. There's still a huge amount of buzz around this game. How many games do you know that have their own conventions that sell out? Name three for us. As for the people getting bored with it, there's far more people actively getting it then there ever have been leaving it.

And the biggest factor that everyone, yourself and the community included, seem to forget is that Mojang isn't even required to keep providing us with updates! How many games do you know that continue getting updates this far into their release cycle? Answer; Very very few.

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Becoming an old game? Uhm 1.3 just came out with a lot of new stuff sparking new ideas in the community and with the LP'ers. X from X's adventures in Minecraft even restarted his series just a couple of weeks ago!

Server always drop off in visitors because the servers are LP or modded servers and people need constant new and exiting stuff to do. They aren't leaving Minecraft, their switching servers.

There is no reason for Mojang to rebuild Minecraft for a Minecraft 2. Minecraft is a one in a million fluke as qouted from Notch on his AMA on Reddit this week. There is no way possible that it will be even just as big as Minecraft currently is.

Jeb the only one working on Minecraft? What about Dinnerbone? He's constantly working on Minecraft along side him. You've obviously haven't done your homework on this subject.

They currently created so much hype over Minecraft 1.3 that they had to release it before they intended! There's no need for a Minecraft 2 to create more buzz.

With Minecraft being written in Java which is Object Oriented it's possible to make even large changes without a complete rewrite. I would imagine that the bulk of the updates and added features are implemented in inherited code as opposed to the source. Of course that's just speculation because Notch isn't open with the development of Minecraft; not in a technically comprehensive manor anyway. There's no way to know if there is a lot that he would have done different in the source in retrospect.

Notch has been considering opening the source since Minecrafts popularity inflated. A Mindcraft 2 would essentially mean buying another copy. I can't claim that that would be a bad thing because good sequels tend to go over well. I think if he opens the source; he will be offering something much better. In that case it would be moddable to it's core components.

Were in Version 1.3 and you want something new? I like Minecraft the way it is. And Under ClosetFuturist's answer you say you want it to be open source, they state on the website when Minecraft stops getting developed, they will release it.

I'm going to be very Blunt here. You say in the question you want to rebuild from the ground up?

It took a long time to create Minecraft. Ground up build will take a long, long time. Consumers don't understand the struggle and just want more more more. You want a build from the ground up? You do it then.