Minetest is probably the best Minecraft alternative; it's free and open source software, which avoids the danger associated with centralized retaliation systems like the one Microsoft is operating. Also, it's easier to write mods for, partly because mods are written in Lua, and you don't have to install mods on the client, just the server.
The video's author doesn't mention it by name, but the quantum computing tutorial game he's playing in a couple of the clips is called QiskitBlocks; it's a series of puzzles designed to teach you how quantum computing works.
As someone who used to be a part of the Minetest scene, it's not even remotely close. While it's low-end requirements are better, it runs remarkably poorly for what it is. It's (default subgame is) a decade behind Minecraft in terms of usability/features. It's barely maintained, especially after one of the big modders and graphics developers died to a heart disease.
And with the mods, it's only "easier" at the very surface level. Unlike the Java-edition of Minecraft, where anything can be changed, you are limited to their modding API in Minetest. And this API is thin.
No dynamic skyboxes, no full entity rotation, no way to handle subgrids. Entities have huge pop in/out issues and forget about anything crazy like having animal heads rotate to face you. No custom keybindings, no overriding mouse controls. Forms have terribly poor ergonomics and it's taken a few years now to have elements displaying at the correct coordinates (for a while, different elements had slightly different interpretations of the grid). Tons of stuff is hard-coded, like how tools work, damage calculations, HUD. And none of this can be added or changed without a fork of the underlying C++ engine codebase.
For the longest time they had no client-side modding and when they added it, they ended up barely having anything in it. So if you want a mod with some kind of vehicle, it is a complete hitchy mess since the client-side's would interpolate wrong and need to be forcefully corrected by the server dozens to hundreds of milliseconds later.
I spent a lot of time making mods for the couple folk I played with. I eventually quit because it was so frustrating trying to work with that engine and constantly jury rig and compromise solutions. Went back to Minecraft for those times I want to play a block game.
I know I'm being a bit brutal, but Minetest doesn't stand a chance when the expectation is set that it is/will be in the same ball park as Minecraft's level of quality or moddability.
> It's (default subgame is) a decade behind Minecraft in terms of usability/features. It's barely maintained,
This is intentional and the default game will be removed by default. Users will instead be directed to the built-in content downloader to install a game. The default game is designed to be modded, and you're also encouraged to install other games. Minetest is a game platform and a game engine, rather than just a game
> especially after one of the big modders and graphics developers died to a heart disease.
We have a new graphics developer, they've added dynamic shadows and a post processing stage. This improves the performance of tone mapping, and allows for effects like godrays, bloom, and depth of field. They've also worked a fair bit on performance improvements and bug fixes, like better depth sorting
> No dynamic skyboxes, no fulrotation
Both of these have been supported for years
> no way to handle subgrids
This is mostly out of scope, Minetest is a block voxel game engine. But you can do this anyway, see the go mod - it allows you to place pieces on a board
> no overriding mouse controls.
You can rebind mouse controls using the config file. There's a settings redesign coming soon as well, the plan is improve the keybindings menu there too
> Forms have terribly poor ergonomic
This is one of our roadmap goals. One of our developers is working on a new UI API, there's also work on a new mainmenu and maintenance on the existing API
The current UI API has improved a lot in the last couple of years
---------
You are right about a lot of the limitations though, such as custom keybindings. We are working to improve this - we have adopted a roadmap to provide focus. You can keep up with development on our blog: https://blog.minetest.net/
> No custom keybindings, no overriding mouse controls.
You can, but you have to change it in the config file. Instead of resolving this limitation, they documented it on the wiki: https://wiki.minetest.net/Controls#PC
I don't understand how things can be this mediocre for so long; other open source implementations of popular proprietary games aren't like this. OpenTTD, OpenRCT2 and OpenMW are all more feature rich and polished than the originals, so I don't think it's a fundamental limitation of volunteer projects. I think maybe, Minetest deliberately keeps the edges rough to stay off Microsoft's turf.
I suspect Minetest's status owes a lot to its name that sort of implies being a test implementation rather than a game proper.
Any MC alternative will becomr popular when MS removes or closes down MC JE, which is imminent because presumably without it people can publish patches that bypass protections as described in the linked thread
I don't know about the others you listed but as OpenTTD is a logistics management simulation, it surely draws a more mature target audience than Minecraft does. An audience that is more likely to possess the necessary expertize to further its development.
That's an interesting hypothesis, I'm not sure about it.
OpenRCT2 is a re-implementation of Roller Coaster Tycoon 2; a business simulation game in which you build theme parks. It's similar to TTD (which was a predecessor from the same developer), but with much less focus on logistics and more focus on artistic creativity. OpenMW is a re-implementation of Morrowind, a fantasy roll-playing game that, by modern standards, is a bit unforgiving to beginners and doesn't have much hand holding. All three are from the 90s and arguably nerdy.
On the other hand, it's my perception that minecraft has a mature and nerdy following too. Lots of kids play it as well, but there seems to be no shortage of tech workers who are into it. I think minecraft's redstone has more to offer a nerd than any of the three above games. And there is a mature modding scene for minecraft, making the game even more technical. I think/hope throwaway290 is right, that minetest will get much more attention from capable developers once Mojang strangles the life out of Java Edition.
Could it be that network effects are much stronger for Minecraft? Morrowind is a single-player game. OpenTTD has network play but I have always played it solo and I suspect many others are the same. I don't play Minecraft but from what I have seen, cooperative play is a big part of it. Players may be less motivated to work on a FOSS alternative when they know that they would then also have to convince the community to move to it, which is much harder. Same way it's difficult to build a real FOSS alternative to WhatsApp, for example.
MineClone5 is a fork of MineClone2, but both are popular and in active development, and because they're GPLed they can freely gank features from each other. They just have slightly different development priorities.
I think even the base Minetest Game is pretty Minecraft-like, though. Out of the box it doesn't have mobs, the Nether, portals, magic, or redstone, but you can add those a la carte to Minetest Game as mods, and there's a cooler redstone alternative called mesecons. You can see the mods at https://content.minetest.net/packages/?type=mod; most of them are applicable to Minetest Game. And in Minetest Game you can mine a lot deeper than in Minecraft. (You kind of have to, which might be better or worse.)
I prefer open-source Veloren instead since it's built in Rust, has far better performance and functionality, and has a more RPG-like focus similar to Cube World.
I do love veloren, but regrettably they have no interest at present, in the building aspects of the game. There is only extremely limited block copy and paste if an admin.
It's not going to replace something like Minecraft+Create any time soon.
Right, but neither will have large worlds if you explore little, and both will have large worlds if you explore a lot. The file size of the fully explored world doesn't seem relevant, because neither game fully generates the world.
It's apparently a minority voice opinion here on HN, but I for one appreciate what Microsoft is trying to do. As a parent of a 6 and 9 year old who have really gotten into Minecraft during COVID, I appreciate them basically deciding "We want Minecraft to be a game for kids and an online community that is nice." I get why people are frustrated, but I also like the idea of a global decision that forces servers open to "the public" to have an enforced global standard of behavior. Correct me if I'm wrong, I don't see anything in their process that suggests that a group of adults playing with their friends are at risk of having their chat audited in the absence of a complaint?
I think the issue is the ease of getting users banned, and the lack of actual moderating at all that is the problem. It literally is as easy as fill out the form, user is automatically banned, no verification required. Microsoft is not actually enforcing anything.
My son is 10 and has been playing Minecraft for most of his life. I would consider him quite good at it. I sometimes watch.
Every couple of months one of his friends will get banned for no reason. Usually the reason is profanity in the chat, even though they play with the chat off and are FaceTiming on the side with each other. It turns out that the system is so easy to manipulate that other users (kids) will report them just because they don’t like how the game went.
Basically spoiled kids will say if you don’t do what I want then I’m reporting all of you and getting you banned. And they do. Microsoft doesn’t actually verify the claims, just blanket bans all of them.
So the kids create a new account, and keep playing. It just seems like something that is perfectly natural to them. It does mean that I would never spend a dollar on anything Minecraft related though.
> Every couple of months one of his friends will get banned for no reason.
I know you want to trust your child’s friends, but “it happened for no reason” is exactly what kids say when they don’t want to own up to the consequences of their actions. Obviously, you can only monitor your own child’s gameplay and not what their friends are doing on their own time. I strongly suspect there’s more going on than you realize.
> It literally is as easy as fill out the form, user is automatically banned, no verification required. Microsoft is not actually enforcing anything.
I highly doubt this. The Minecraft FAQ has this to say about it:
> Will I get banned without my case being reviewed by a human?
> No. Our team of human moderators handle player reports. This team is dedicated to Minecraft, and familiar with the community, platform, and lore. Our team reviews every report before any action is taken.
I have a group of 30+ friends who play minecraft, use a separate TeamSpeak server and they also regularly talk about getting banned without obvious reason.
And I was once banned from Dota2 for "intentional feeding" which I guess is just a fancy way of saying that the others in my team expected my skill level to be higher than it was.
These online ban systems really are random. And typically the "moderation" is fully automated. I predict soon GPT3 will write the message to inform you.
I have spent more than 10’000 hours in DotA 2. You do not get banned for a single game no matter how bad you perform.
It has to be on a very regular basis, and even then you probably first get put into low priority matchmaking as your behavior score drops. Banning accounts usually only applies to cheats or buying and selling accounts.
You are technically correct. I got limited into a different matchmaking system than my friends. But the end result was that I couldn't play with them anymore.
My son was banned by Sony for 2 months, there were a few things Sony did wrong so they are now on my shit list
1 the bastards did not send me the parent any detaisl about the ban, just a extremely vague reason so I have to guess all possible reasons (maybe chat, maybe screenshots shared in chat, maybe Sony devs fucked up with native languages, maybe my son tells the truth and it was that guy that demanded Fortnite gifts otherwise they will report them and get them banned
2 Sony did not let me appeal, or ask for details, fuck you Sony, you lost a customer
3 at that time I had a 12 months subscription that is required for online play, so the banning robbed me for 2 months subscriptions.
IMO, I believe my son , that it was a troll, Sony lost a customer , they could avoided this if they could show me exactly the "crime", I could then educate my son if he used some "bad word" (we are not native speackers so he might not know that some word is dangerous, soem can use it but if you get reported you are screwed)
And yet far less naive than believing a group of 10 year-olds are being repeatedly banned for no reason with their chat off, instead of the obvious that when parents aren't looking they're being abusive to others in chat.
Reminds me of the classic:
> No, I wasn't looking at dirty websites, it was a virus!
Can you name a single moderation system that operates on this scale that will not automatically ban someone for getting mass reported? This is a fairly well known phenomenon.
That's obviously not what's happening here though. I have plenty of adult friends who go on public and private servers and actively trash talk during games and have never been banned. And none of their friends have been banned. A small group of 10 year-old children aren't having a coordinated attack of hundreds to thousands of reports against them repeatedly over many months.
Not to mention tacking on the requirement that instead of a bunch of 10 year-old children being - as they tend to be - offensive/testing limits when adults aren't looking, Microsoft is publicly lying to their customers (creating liability) and implementing an automated system so poor it doesn't so much as check if the reported user even uses chat.
EDIT: To further substantiate what I'm saying, I just checked and you cannot submit a report without selecting the specific messages that relate to it. The UX requires that the individual messages are selected and cannot be submitted empty. The parent is at least being misled in thinking their child or their friends don't use the chat feature.
> A small group of 10 year-old children aren't having a coordinated attack of hundreds to thousands of reports against them repeatedly over many months.
You know they are likely playing with a large group of other 10 year old children right? There’s going to be at least a few amongst them that just think it’s fun to mass report everyone that says anything marginally inappropriate.
Imagine you buy a Monopoly, D&D or MtG set. You don't have room to play it at home so your child goes to a game cafe to play it with friends. A sex offender is trying to cozy up to them. Who would you blame for that, Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast? Is allowing them to confiscate a game set (or cripple it so it can't be played with other people) the right solution?
As a side effect, if you or your child are a bit inconsiderate during a tense moment of the game and someone gets mad back, with a press of the button they can block you from ever playing by reporting select words to game publisher. You will not be entitled to refund. Would you say that if this was not abused in a couple of months then it's definitely OK and we shouldn't worry about it?
Minecraft was sold as a game set. There are paid official places you can go play it now, but buying the game set does not require you to use them. Do not mistake it with Roblox, that one is both a game cafe and a game set.
People are recounting actual real instances of abuse. Both here and youtube creators. And it seems pretty plausible. This is basically enabling online bullying and lynch mobs. You only have to join one negative server to get banned from everything everywhere. I think this would be more forgiveable if it was an autoban from the place you were misbehaving, or if the bans were default limited in length without a detailed appeal process involving the person whose account was being stolen servers could opt out of the ban process so at least you could still play with friends at home.
If a company is repeatedly banning 10 years old without explanation, in a game where they know that 10 years old are common, then obviously the company is at fault. Kids are not adults, they are not responsible for their fails, and they can't learn without explanation. It doesn't matter whether they did something ban-worthy, they are kids..
Having experience with all of following three: kids, minecraft online, kids playing minecraft online, no. If someone get banned unfairly with such frequency, they are either super extraordinary unlucky or just some of those kids do mess and trolling on the side.
The most plausible scenario is that they are. It is not like it would be difficult or required special knowledge to open minecraft and play with the chat on. 10 years old are fully capable of playing without chat with one friends group and with chat an hour later.
A 10 year old can easily outsmart a cororation's bureaucratic, mostly automated chat reporting system. And once they have, yeah, fake reports will probably outnumber the real ones.
Genuinely, nah. They are not that smart. Kids are not dumb either, but their are not sophisticated at all. They can lie, but very very few of them in any sophisticated way.
I had a spare minecraft account I migrated a while back. As an experiment, I had three friends of mine report the account for profanity. Any text field that could be filled was filled only with garbage or the name of the account
This is an account that hadn't logged on since verifying that the account got moved over, and that was long before the global moderation tools were made.
Within the hour, it was banned. When I tried getting to support, I gave up.
> Our team of human moderators handle player reports.
I have exactly 0 trust in such statements after Amazon's "New world" fiasco. I mean, it technically might be processed by human, hired from 3rd world country and paid next to nothing but it doesn't change the result: large number of reports was enough to ban people, no one check if those reports made any sense. Nor if they were all made by enemy clan.
Minecraft does not ban users for profanity. The list of ban offenses is currently:
Hate speech, sexual content and soliciting improper contact, real life threats, exposing the personal information of others, posting links to malicious software, impersonating staff, cheating/exploits (this includes anything that would negatively affect another person’s gameplay experience), general commercial spamming
Profanity is considered the responsibility of specific server moderators since it's a low-level offense that's virtually impossible to police in a game like Minecraft. They're trying to avoid the notoriety recently obtained by Roblox for being a place for adults to exploit children.
If my own experience years ago is any indication, this would create so many ban options it’s not funny. 10 year olds love pretending to be more than they are.
> Every couple of months one of his friends will get banned for no reason
Are they seeing the exact same screen as the one in the original post? There are two separate systems at play, each individual server has moderation by those who host the server (wherein they can ban anyone for any reason) and there is now a global moderation system introduced very recently, which is run by paid moderators hired by Microsoft.
You said "every couple of months" but this system did not exist before last month, at least on the Java edition of the game.
>It literally is as easy as fill out the form, user is automatically banned, no verification required. Microsoft is not actually enforcing anything.
This hasn't been my experience. I've had friends reporting each other for fun across a ton of servers I'm in and haven't seen anyone banned on any of them, presumably because nobody has used any of the profanity that a report would actually ban for.
> It literally is as easy as fill out the form, user is automatically banned, no verification required.
Hahahaha. No. Eventually, mass reporting could make it happen, but a single report does not cause a ban. If that's what your kid or his friends have told you, they're lying to you.
I have no issue with Microsoft setting community standards for the online spaces they run, or anybody else for that matter. But Microsoft is setting community standards for places they do not run here, just because these spaces use their software. This is ridiculous, and sets yet another dangerous precedent.
What's next? Maybe Office 360 profanity filter, where your Office 360 account gets banned for writing about the Austrian Village formerly known as Fucking[1] in MS Word? Maybe the Windows 12 won't let you access your perfectly legal porn anymore? Or any files related to Scunthorpe. Or Edge refuses to stream Game of Thrones for you because of nudity and profanity... and then goes on to delete all your data and ban your MS account?
>> But Microsoft is setting community standards for places they do not run here, just because these spaces use their software. This is ridiculous, and sets yet another dangerous precedent.
I agree with what you are saying but of course somewhere Microsoft is probably hoping to convert Minecraft from a game anyone can host to a game that is always connected to some service of theirs. That way they can collect data or sell ads or maybe subscriptions.
I don't like the idea of open source games because you can't crowdsource editorial decisions. But I think gamers are going to be ready for a game that is made by a team, but owned and maintained by the gamers. Probably through a DAO or something like that. How else can you maintain a game for years in the best interest of people who bought it? Just making a game open source isn't enough imo.
The road to hell is always paved with good intentions and naive ideals.
I’m trying to imagine having to explain to a 6yr old why they can’t play Minecraft until Dad creates another account and hope they can afford another license. And hope it doesn’t happen again the next time a troll joins their server.
It also seems to be incentivizing people to not have any chat reports at all.
I guess I don't understand - the troll will report your 6 year old for dropping f-bombs? And the chat logs (which MS will now have) will back then up? And why are you inviting trolls to play with your 6 year old?
(We're somewhat new to Minecraft, so I may be missing something here.)
It seems that anyone can report anyone else, on any server, even tiny private ones. They have to say what kind of complaint it is from a list, but a disingenuous actor can find ways to stretch the definitions or just outright lie about the incident. Whichever person or whatever machine is in charge of reviewing these complaints decides the report is valid, that person is banned from all online play. I'm not seeing from this thread any info on what the appeals system is like, but I would be completely unshocked if it were, once again, a system where people who aren't highly invisible on social media will end up SOL.
There was a vulnerability in the past that 2B2T users discovered, which enabled them to essentially track any player's activity and find the IPs of private servers, even ones run by family. They used it to grief even a server where only one person was logged in, AFK, at the time. Though unlikely, a hacker with a new vulnerability helping them to discover this kind of information could hypothetically find anyone's private group, drop in, and report.
EDIT:
The griefing tool is called Project Copenhiemer, and the user named orsond who is a member of the Fifth Column which created Copenhiemer, made a post about it here on this comment section page. Refer to their comment.
> I'm not seeing from this thread any info on what the appeals system is like, but I would be completely unshocked if it were, once again, a system where people who aren't highly invisible on social media will end up SOL.
I totally get this. My support is for the sentiment Microsoft is expressing. As with so many things online without the actual commitment of real people who are culturally connected (e.g. Daniel and Scott for HN), it will likely go south.
> I guess I don't understand - the troll will report your 6 year old for dropping f-bombs?
They'll report for no reason, that's the point of trolling.
> And the chat logs (which MS will now have) will back then up?
I have not played Minecraft, but I'd be surprised if the server admins of any game of such scale acted on logs.
Also, I wouldn't want my kids to be logged on a corporate server.
> And why are you inviting trolls to play with your 6 year old?
Are the rooms invite only? Then what's the point of Microsoft's draconian measures here? I thought the point was to censor public servers, but again, I haven't played this much.
In any case, this situation already looks like defeat for an online community.
We've done limited server play with friends. As far as I understand, anyone can download and run the server software (literally - it's a free download). To log into a server, you need the IP address (and need to understand how to port forward if going outside the home etc etc). P
I think my broader point is that I appreciate Microsoft saying they want Minecraft to be a profanity -free zone. There are plenty in the "online community" that seem to be quite happy being G-rated. My 9-yeae old has watched about 100 hours of YouTube from "Pixlriffs" and its been wonderful despite random zombie attacks or whatnot.
From what Microsoft's said, it's less about profanity and more about taking down things like serious threats, doxxing/stalking, etc. I have no issue with moderating that, and I'm glad it's (at least in theory) not being used as a filter to keep everything that happens in Minecraft G-rated since a lot of more mature people play it. I think implementing a game-wide ban on a community that's spread across thousands of individual servers has the potential to cause so much harm if someone makes a mistake or there's a glitch, not to mention trolls gaming the system to get people they don't like banned. Content moderation at scale is impossible, and considering Minecraft's still one of the biggest games in the world, mistakes will be made.
As an aside, have you looked into putting a whitelist on your server? It could provide a lot of peace of mind, especially when you're trying to keep it to just your kids and friends.
I see, I imagine the server you put on is by default public and joinable by anyone. This kind of stuff typically has some form of whitelisting or password protection to keep the server semi-private.
> And why are you inviting trolls to play with your 6 year old?
Public servers with hundreds of players and little to no barrier to entry - they'll be full of "trolls". All the 6 y/o has to do is join one, which takes about 5 seconds.
> I guess I don't understand - the troll will report your 6 year old for dropping f-bombs?
Yes.
> And the chat logs (which MS will now have) will back then up?
Why do you think anyone will check the chat logs? That's too expensive at MS scale, it's an automatic ban. Only admins of private servers actually check the chat logs :)
> And why are you inviting trolls to play with your 6 year old?
There are thousands of public player run servers. Some are quite fun. Whatever your idea of fun is, there should be at least a hundred that match.
> (We're somewhat new to Minecraft, so I may be missing something here.)
You're missing all the communities that were built before MS tried to turn it into software as a service to justify their billion spent on Minecraft.
Battle.net communities and makers thrived for 15 years with zero moderation and a laissez-faire approach to peer to peer hosting. Entire game genres were invented (MOBA, TD). Imagine if Blizzard had cracked down in its infancy because of a few mostly satirical Nazi maps?
Good intentions among corporatized and safety oriented developers will certainly prevent another such golden age and maybe already has - considering the recent state of gaming.
If that was their motivation then why not simply offer an opt-in to heavily moderated servers? And a toggle to make it where that's all you see (if you want). This would not only make their job much easier, since presumably relatively few people want this sort of moderation, but would also increase the overall satisfaction of their entire userbase. People who want moderation for whatever reasons, can have it. Those that don't - don't have to.
---
A tangential, but related, issue I've observed is that there seem to be an increasing number of measures being carried out in society that, in effect, drive widespread self censorship. Any interesting conversation, regardless of how otherwise sanitary, may be likely to motivate somebody to want to "report" others. See any thread on, for instance, dark matter. An esoteric scientific concept, yet one where emotions run wild.
The only choice, in scenarios where reporting is likely to lead to penalties that are intolerable, is to simply not say anything at all that might cause even a single ripple in the water. And that is, in effect, not especially different than life in all of these unfree societies we were supposed to have learned from. The fact that we now seem to be becoming one of those societies, even if by a more novel path, is becoming increasingly apparent.
Since I am not a parent, my opinion doesn’t count for much—but when I imagine myself one, I wish me and my kids could have an open-source sandbox game that is fully owned by us and is playable on our own infrastructure without any further involvement of game publisher.
No marketplace with coins, no microtransactions, no mining my child’s PII before you allow to play a game I bought, no online login screen, no platform or “community” of any kind (not even if it’s “for kids”, Roblox is an example of what kind of people it becomes a magnet for), no unknown corporate moderators for my family server, nothing but a fun game.
(And because dedicated developers who actually listen to player feedback must be paid appropriately, definitely take my money for every new major update.)
Minecraft used to be a great example of such a game, until it got bought by Microsoft.
It fails on some points. There is a login screen (you must periodically connect to Microsoft’s servers), and accounts are reportedly locked until players provide Microsoft their phone number. The chat reporting feature being discussed here is a further example of restrictions on what you can do with the game you bought.
If the free-to-play microtransaction-supported model is more financially appealing than allowing customers own a product, then anything that allows to enjoy and extend the game without Microsoft overseeing it and getting a cut (like open-source Java versions of the client and the server) is a liability. Chat reporting is to me clear evidence of Microsoft trying to justify further lock-up and ongoing subscription model. Next they will say because OSS allows bypassing or cheating the reporting they must close the source and limit mod API.
I would be fine if Microsoft continued to release the game as a separate, adult-rated but unlocked product for gamers who care (and charged for major updates, they will absolutely pay), while separately providing a locked platform stuffed with coins, marketplaces, walled garden for mods, corporate moderators, safety guarantees and whatever else for those who want an easy solution safe for children without adult oversight.
> Next they will say because OSS allows bypassing or cheating the reporting they must close the source and limit mod API.
Not exactly on topic but what you say is funny. Minecraft Java has never been open source. Mods are done by decompiling the official jar, applying patches and recompiling back. I'm sure it's not explicitly allowed by whatever legalese surrounds MC.
This all goes for the one true Minecraft version, Java. Bedrock... they can keep it.
This decompiling stuff is new. Back in the 1.7 days I helped my daughter understand how to unpack jars, add stuff by hand from the mod authors and pack them back. Now it's automatic.
There are even mods that provide some sort of API and plugin system for other mods to use :)
>Correct me if I'm wrong, I don't see anything in their process that suggests that a group of adults playing with their friends are at risk of having their chat audited in the absence of a complaint?
There is nothing letting the group of adults easily opt out of the system.
Someone is mischievous and decides to report someone else? Permanently banned.
Someone has a falling out and decides to try to piss off their friend by reporting them? Permanently banned.
Someone thinks they're funny and report as a joke? Permanently banned.
Not to mention that Microsoft has repeatedly failed to actually implement this correctly so far. I wonder if all the people who have gotten banned by this will ever get unbanned.
If you want Minecraft to be a game for kids, why don't you parent your kids? Minecraft is not your daycare. Minecraft is a portal to the internet (the world), if you wouldn't trust your kid to go on an international trip on their own without any supervision then stop letting them get on the internet without supervision.
Want your kids to play with friends? Pester Microsoft for an easy way to set up a server that YOU can control and manage and they can connect to (I believe realms already did this).
I promise you that Microsoft's changes won't keep your kids safe, they won't prevent them from dealing with adults in Minecraft, they won't prevent them from being exposed to ideas which you might see as too adult for them to thoroughly understand.
You have fallen into the PR trap that Microsoft created. They WANT you to feel like your kids are safe and WANT you to feel like they're making responsible decisions. This doesn't actually create a safe environment, and more likely is just a way to stimulate more sales by permanently banning accounts for a game which parents just can't help to buy their kids copies of.
IMO the best way would have been to enforce it for realms, maybe have a way for privately run servers to opt-in, and let parents toggle some switch that only lets their kids play on moderated servers. but microsoft was completely unwilling to make any sort of compromise in that direction.
Adults tend to generally prefer to play with other adults, and they might also use profanity on adult-only private servers. Unfortunately adults can also be just as petty as kids and may report other adults just to get back at them for something or other. plus we know any moderation system run by a megacorp will inevitably result in some percentage of completely random bans.
I'm going to use profanity wherever the fuck I want. Especially on a fucking videogame. You are not entitled to have the rest of the world stop saying fuck because you don't want your child to hear it. Moreover, Microsoft doesn't have the right to impose this restriction on the "license" I purchased from a different company a billion fucking years ago. Malleable licenses shouldn't exist. We need real consumer protection.
I'm not threatening you. I'm not degrading you. I'm not doing anything to you except making you read the word FUCK. You, on the other hand, are actively trying to insult me. I feel like this undermines your argument.
I really just want a f---ing password protected "play offline" button.
I've been trying to keep the kids off the internet, but Minecraft somehow created some bulls--t backdoor social media account for my kindergartner without prompting (let alone asking for consent before making it public!). On top of that, microsoft can trivially tie it to my github and linkedin.
I've been playing Minecraft for quite a while. Not from the beginning, but from before Notch even started considering selling. If the old Mojang had created anything but a Mojang account, it would have been news and it wasn't.
At first I found it frustrtating, but I've grown to really appreciate Nintendo's approach to this problem. Their multiplayer games (like Splatoon) have no in-game chat or VOIP.
It definitely makes it harder to make friends in the games, but it also completely eliminates any and all potential for toxicity and other miscreant behavior. As a result, I'd have no problem letting my hypothetical children play these games online even at a young age.
This solution is obviously untenable for a cooperative and creative game like Minecraft, so it seems Microsoft is stuck in a real hard place here.
Have people found creative ways to communicate, or solicit/"bootstrap" further communications?
If you can send someone a bit, you have enough to send them your endpoint at another service to communicate. In a multiplayer game, where presumably you can see the decisions of other players, the prerequisites are met.
(I am by no means a gamer, but have witnessed how creative young humans can be at defeating the restraints imposed upon them --- and also how they can quickly learn such things from others.)
> Have people found creative ways to communicate, or solicit/"bootstrap" further communications?
Not so much bootstrap other communications... but I remember how many penis emblems I encountered on Mario Kart DS despite Nintendo banning them very rapidly.
Nintendo hasn't done a draw-your-own-emblem since, I don't think.
For stuff like this, I honestly wonder why it would be so bad for kids to see badly drawn penises painted on virtual racing cars. Statistically, half of them could just look into a mirror ...
>Have people found creative ways to communicate, or solicit/"bootstrap" further communications?
In Splatoon you can "post" [1] which displays this image above your character in the lobby and the main hub of the game. Most of the time people will draw using the in-game interface and the touch screen/buttons on the switch, other times people use a well known exploit to recreate images from your computer in the game using a specific type of controller [2].
After the post is created, it typically gets published to some social media account you have linked to your Nintendo account.
These posts are usually jokes, memes, or some silly throwaway pop culture line or reference but more often than not you see individuals promoting their own discord servers, twitter accounts, twitch accounts, and other social media platforms. Unfortunately you also get a few individuals who will post about LGBT related stuff, often with a sexual angle to it. No issues posting that on Twitter but I feel it's inappropriate for what is essentially a game for children.
The good news is you can report these posts to Nintendo, the bad news is I have no idea if they are moderated or not.
Rocket League has an option called quick-chat. It's only canned messages. And in QC mode you only see or reply QC messages. Make being real toxic difficult.
In Magic the Gathering: Arena, player chat messages are limited to 5 predefined words. Of those five words, the only one that isn't considered toxic is "Hello". It turns out that banning words doesn't stop people being awful.
Interestingly, there was a period of time where spamming "Hello" in Hearthstone (using a very similar system) was considered particularly toxic, especially while running out your timer every turn.
Dota 2 uses a very similar system (in parallel with several other ways to communicate). It works really well: "chat wheel" communication is significantly more efficient than typing, or even talking, and always on-topic. There are a lot of games where I'll immediately ignore/mute all players' text- and voice-capabilities and solely leave canned chat wheel pings for communication.
You've got it backwards. The value I see in other people is talking and communicating. I have zero doubt that a sufficiently advanced bot would pass a video-game opponent turing test long before the original turing test.
In League of Legends you can disable chat and still kinda strategize with your team using minimap pings. You can still communicate, but limited to bare essentials.
If you abuse pings too fast, you will get stopped after five seconds (which still allows for a good 20 pings to be sent, that all make sound and bleep on your minimap). But otherwise, you can just stay and do it slowly, and there's no limits.
You should not let you children play with random 30 year olds, if you do not want them to see/hear profanity.
You have the option to install your own chat moderation tools, client-sided, there is not need to force every to "be nice" just because there _might_ be children playing.
If this was just for their own Realm Servers, that would be fine, it is their server, they host it. But why does Microsoft suddenly feel the need to moderate MY server? (public, but only used by friends of mine)
All the big public servers, such as Hypixel, have had their own moderators and they do a fantastic job.
> I don't see anything in their process that suggest that a group of adults playing with their friends are at risk of having their chat audited in the absence of a complaint?
The thing is that we have NO IDEA how much it takes to be banned.
- Will an actual human look at the reports? Doubtful.
- When a ban is to be issued, who will decide when to do that? Some guy who has to follow a script that reads "3 profanities, max" and click the boot button?
The Minecraft community is one of the largest gaming communities, and I have seen very little controversial about it. I do not see the need for Microsoft to suddenly step in and decide to moderate it.
> You should not let you children play with random 30 year olds, if you do not want them to see/hear profanity.
Kind of a losing battle anyway. Not quite sure why we care about profanity at 10 years old when we do not care about the same profanity from the same person 10 years later.
The problem is not that the feature exists - the problem is that you are locked into it, can’t easily opt out, and if it goes wrong you lose access to a product you’ve paid for.
A good system would cater for everyone adequately.
I dunno, I can just imagine new age of cyber-bullying when a bunch of kids just mass-reports some poor kid (hell, even provoke them on chat so if detached moderator sees that they think it's legit) and sends their account to shadow realm.
Having a closed set of realms servers can opt in with more stringent moderation might be a good idea, but forcing it globally is just entirely stupid; there are things inappropriate for kids that are just fine for teenager audience, and adults play the game too.
If I was in your spot I'd honestly either set up, or rent them a private minecraft server, then they can invite their friends there and you have full control on what is happening with it.
> Correct me if I'm wrong, I don't see anything in their process that suggests that a group of adults playing with their friends are at risk of having their chat audited in the absence of a complaint?
Just need one person taking a piss. And it pretty much means no server with strangers is safe as you could be reported by anyone for anything completely benign in context of the server
I do support more moderation and controls over chat, because god knows when I played Minecraft as a kid I saw so many conversations that weren't exactly appropriate. Kids on servers that aren't specifically kid-friendly worry me a lot, knowing how my friends and I banter and shit-talk. This is super heavy-handed and centralized moderation though, the consequences for mistakes or errors are huge. As far as I know, getting banned also prevents you from even playing singleplayer on Xbox and there's no appeal process. I understand and support the new chat blocking settings, and maybe even something like an official ban list that applies to Realms and servers that decide to use it, but being able to permanently ban someone from an entire game is too much power.
I also have the same question. In my limited experience as the father of an eleven year old, it has continued to be much more productive to redirect profane or vulgar expressions of frustration away from people and towards problems ("Swear at problems, not people.") than to bubble-wrap their vocabulary.
Very genuinely, if your 11 years old need to redirect swearing to things and is unable to cut it in social situations, then he needs quite a lot of help with impulse control.
Because most of them, overwhelming majority actually, are easily able to not swear. They do swear when among peers only, but cutting it off when needed is really not an issue for them.
Everyone's different and harm/severity here is gonna be a wide range, but there's a lot of stuff I saw online as a kid that, as an adult, I really wish I hadn't.
I don't think it's a bad thing, either. People who buy proprietary software know what the deal is, and anyone who didn't know what the deal was knows now. It's not your game, you've just got a temporary license to it. Kind of the consumer's fault beyond anything.
That's not the deal with proprietary software. The deal is that you buy a license to software, the terms of which can be altered at any time.
It's fundamental to the model of proprietary software.
It's not theirs. It's the company's, and the company can do what they want with it.
There's no reason refunds should be offered, as the consumers got what they paid for: A license to software, with certain conditions for termination and conditions allowing the company to alter the terms of the arrangement.
It's like saying that a person should be able to get a refund on an ice cream cone that melts: The deterioration is part of the standard deal, and you know it's coming.
How is buying a copy of software which runs on my own computer different from buying a physical machine that runs on my electricity?
If this were using a company's servers, then fine. More power to them. In fact, that's a very fair way to do business. You're stepping in their own backyard and so they get to set the rules of the "house".
But when I run the software in my own machine, using my own processing power, while not using any online services that belong to them, how is it different than just buying a physical thing?
Your cone example is misleading because the melting is a natural consequence of the object existing at room temperature.
Software stays the same unless someone updates it. The copy of the software that I own (emphasis on "copy") does not naturally go through anything besides what the user does to it. If I disconnect from the internet, nobody can touch it.
Microsoft should have the full right to deny service to anyone, I don't think anyone here disputes that. But Minecraft is not a service, it is a good.
Minecraft is transparently not a good. You get a license to it, you don't own it. You don't buy the copy, you buy the license to the copy.
You go to the video store, you get a VHS tape. You don't own the media on the tape. You can use the tape.
That is the deal for proprietary software. That's what you agreed to with your purchase. You consented to the model. You agreed to the terms of the license.
There's nothing misleading about software licensing. You buy a license, that the company and you agree before you spend money on it, that the company can change at any time. There's nothing unconscionable about that. You knowingly went into the deal, and so you should have to deal with the consequences of it.
Governments need to stop babysitting people who make stupid decisions unless it's genuinely urgent; markets don't work when consumers can yell at legislators and judges enough to invalidate the mechanisms of them. It's getting a bit ridiculous.
Should have grabbed a copy of software with a better license. Better luck next time.
You should check out Andino v. Apple, an ongoing lawsuit in which the plaintiff alledges that the use of the "Buy" button is fraudulent if content is truly not bought.
I feel like you are confusing copyright law with contract law.
I can purchase Minecraft without agreeing to any EULA. It only appears after you download the launcher.
Here are the two types of unconscionability:
The basic test applied for unconscionability is “whether, in light of the
general background and the needs of a particular case, the clauses
involved are so one-sided as to be unconscionable under the
circumstances existing at the time of the making of the contract”.
Substantive unconscionability looks to the actual terms of the
agreement, while procedural unconscionability focuses on the manner
in which the contract was negotiated and the circumstances of the
parties at the time of formation. Procedural unconscionability may be
shown by either an inequality in bargaining power or unfair surprise.
This may be evidenced by terms that are unreasonably favourable to
one party, terms hidden in the contract, or where one party has
substantially lower education levels. Substantive unconscionability
may be shown by an overly harsh allocation of risks or unjustifiable
costs or a great price disparity. Where a court finds that a contract or
clause is unconscionable at the time it was made, it can refuse to
enforce the contract or limit the application of that clause to avoid an
unconscionable result.
It is not the EULA that allows me to use the software. The software can be naturally executed and used. The EULA then comes around and coerces me to agree to it if I want to get past an install screen. While the actual software is already in my posession, which is the only thing copyright law regulates. Copying and redistribution.
* It is not the EULA that allows me to use the software.*
ProCD said it was way back in ‘96. It’s still good law isn’t it?
As to unconscionability, the subject matter is relevant. In other words, there aren’t any video game cases in the unconscionability section of the typical contracts textbook.
As long as it says "buy a license to use Minecraft" and not "buy Minecraft" then yes. If it just says "buy" without telling you what you're buying them a reasonable person would assume it was a good and not a license. You want to sell me a license to some unspecified-until-after-sale access to a good, then don't obtain my money by deceiving me, tell me up front ... then yes, you win at capitalism, go you.
But that truth impacts sales as people want ownership without companies being able to rug pull. We want to be able to load up Minecraft in 30y regardless of whether Microsoft decided they're done with it.
I pointed the Andino lawsuit out as context on why this isn't a "me spewing crazy shit out of my mouth" type of thing.
Also, what "wider US society" are you talking about? Most people who use software don't ever read any terms or EULAs, let alone know the implications. And the shenanigans that they bring to the table would be laughed out of the room in any physical setting (in fact they already have been laughed out of the courtroom, see the first sale doctrine)
"Here's a machine. You're responsible for keeping it. You must use it with your own electricity and resources. But you don't own it, it's more like a lease. Oh but we advertise it as a purchase and call it that in every public display we make of it, except in our hundred-page legal terms document, which (we know) nobody reads."
> Once sales start dying and a minimum time has passed, I will release the game source code as some kind of open source. I'm not very happy with the draconian nature of (L)GPL, nor do I believe the other licenses have much merit other than to boost the egos of the original authors, so I might just possibly release it all as public domain.
This did not happen yet, Minecraft is still selling really well.
It was also a personal (and opinion) statement from Markus Persson (notch), who fully owned the game at the time, predating the formation of Mojang, let alone Mojang's acquisition by Microsoft.
I'm disheartened also by the fact it'll never become open source, but the statement was never legally-binding and never part of the terms that a purchase of Minecraft (in alpha, at that) entailed.
Is that even relevant when not given any timeframe? I can and did believe Notch back when he said it, I don't think he was trying to be misleading, but with no timeframe and the game being the size that it is now microsoft might as well release the source code, yes, 500 years from now.
Can we please get some sort of code escrow system going, similar to how the national libraries collect all published works in a country? Video games are culture too.
>The deal is that you buy a license to software, the terms of which can be altered at any time. //
Bollocks it is. The deal is you buy the software, it says "for sale" or "buy $app" [0]. I will never give my informed consent for unilateral pushing of changes to software I purchase.
Under UK law pushing a change without informed consent would appear to be unauthorised access under the Computer Misuse Act, and if features are changed is a reason for a refund under the Consumer Rights Act.
If the ice-cream melts because a company broke into your home and turns off your freezer then damn straight you should get a refund (Consumer Rights Act) and they should be criminally punished for B&E (Computer Misuse Act).
> That's not the deal with proprietary software. The deal is that you buy a license to software, the terms of which can be altered at any time.
You're acting as if Microsoft developed this game. They didn't. I bet most people posting here bought it at the time the license "made lawyers very nervous" according to Notch himself (even after he said that, he only changed the license very slightly).
They consented to the terms when installing, and the license that says they had to accept the terms at purchase, so them not knowing is entirely on them.
I'm not pro-Microsoft, but it's really on the consumers, here, if they didn't know what they got themselves into.
> I also like the idea of a global decision that forces servers open to "the public" to have an enforced global standard of behavior.
A decision made by a bunch of suits; a standard of behavior informed by corporate office spaces, ultimately vetted by the private moral prescriptions of a few HR officers and shareholders.
The children need to know that a negative outlook has no place in the world. Have a positive attitude, play by the rules, and you can have a lot of fun. Start trouble and we'll excise you like the cancer you are.
I get where you're coming from and I'm in the same boat. I play Minecraft and some of the media I consume are Minecraft SMPs and Let's Plays. My soon-to-be-7-year-old has picked up the game and now regularly plays in my world (not that is issue free, but that's a different article :-) )
I understand why Microsoft is doing it and I even agree in part with Microsoft's measures in some ways. Aside from the direct protection of kids, they're also probably trying to be pre-emptive... forestalling the day or already complying with the day when the government says they have to do this sort of thing.
What I disagree with is that it's all or nothing. Public servers that wish to not participate should be allowed to not to. Sure have the client give a warning that you're logging into the wild west, even have it give a warning every time you log into the same server. But don't force all servers to do it. Microsoft also has parent controls which allow me to determine if my kid can use his account on any public server (by default nope)... finesse that a bit to let me choose only Microsoft moderated public servers. Even maybe give me the ability to whitelist servers for my kid's account. And then let everyone else that doesn't want to comply with Microsoft's vision of civility online to enter those servers that don't comply at their discretion, risk, or peril.
This would achieve the goals that your after (and me too for my kid) while not forcing society down the path of conformity.
The problem arises when one of said adults playing with their friends decides to be a sourpuss and report the chat, in which case microsoft moderators have absolutely no context on the server's group culture nor what was really going on, and they won't bother digging deeper.
At the end of the day individual servers are completely separate worlds that you cannot moderate as a whole due to differences in rules, expectations of their members and culture. You cannot moderate all of that by throwing a blanket rule system over it. Even the unofficial global ban system before this, mcbans.com, had a system to allow servers to only honor bans from specific other servers who they aligned with.
As for children I recommend keeping a mildly distant eye on what servers they visit, and this doesn't just apply to minecraft. As a kid I had a rule with my dad to consult him first about any terms of service I wanted to accept (for example for forums), so he could make sure it was safe. This worked until I became a teen and specifically started seeking out the bad things about the internet, but at that point no public ban system is going to help.
I feel ya, but at the same time access to an online game is almost equivalent to unfettered access to the Internet these days.
Even with Microsoft's watchful eye, it still won't solve all the problems. Roblox was already poorly moderated. Club Penguin was meant to be well moderated with all sorts of mechanisms to ensure child safety but it was still used as a hangout for all sorts of adults as well.
Realistically there's no solution that will 100% solve the stranger danger that comes with access to the Internet. The only way is for parents to take on the responsibility - have children play on a server that only them and their friends have access to. Any Internet server that randoms can join will always come with a risk and it's up to parents to quantify that risk.
> Correct me if I'm wrong, I don't see anything in their process that suggests that a group of adults playing with their friends are at risk of having their chat audited in the absence of a complaint?
That sounds like "why want the right to privacy if you have nothing illegal to hide".
Do you guarantee that if your kids end up on an adult server (yes, there are 18+ private servers) you will just get them off there instead of complaining that the chat is full of adult conversation and getting the entire community banned? Considering you want Microsoft to "protect your kids" i strongly doubt it.
And yes, the 18+ server I play on is access restricted, but you can get in (but not build) to evaluate if the server suits your play style before applying. You may get in in the middle of a discussion laced with politics and sex because THIS IS AN ADULT SERVER.
Also, complaints can be malicious. Do you really think MS is willing to put in the resources to evaluate a complaint properly?
By trying to make Minecraft servers a safer place you have made it worse because people are now trying to "kill" each other through the reporting system.
servers I'd consider "kid friendly" already have their own chat moderation so it's a non-issue if you restrict your kids to playing only on those servers (if you don't chat reporting solves nothing since anarchy & co will disable chat signing server side).
If I set up a server I should be allowed to disable any form of MS moderation.
By all means, set up a kind of method where public servers that are child safe/friendly (e.g. opt in to MS moderation) are advertised as such. But do not mess with my stuff without my permission.
Why not just police what servers your kids join and choose ones that are kid friendly? I don't see why those of us that have been playing Minecraft since before your kids were even born should be forced into the same restrictions as kids.
Wow, this is the most entitled attitude I've seen in a long time. You let your kids play online, where they can communicate with basically anyone. So the solution is to grant a central authority total power to ban anyone who doesn't comply with the standards you want for your children.
This is the online equivalent of a homophobe complaining that two men holding hands in the park will turn their children gay.
Minecraft wasn’t built as a kids game. It was a neat indie game that let you build stuff.
On kid-specific servers that might be an apt analogy, but adult-owned, adult-populated servers shouldn’t have to worry about malicious trolls ruining their experience with a ban.
Nope, not at all, because it applies to privately run servers. It's the equivalent of breaking into my house and stealing my Legos, based on somebody's statement that I swore around children who happened to be near Legos.
I bought Minecraft in 2011. Every few years since then, I would get friends back together, host a new server, and catch up while playing. I bought the software, I host the server, I ban people if need be, and how dare Microsoft treat it as their walled garden.
I understand your point, but I would be upset if I took my family to Chuck E Cheese's and there was a table full of adults loudly talking about their raunchy escapades from the night before. I think it is a fair assumption that a child's game will have clean chat.
1. A cool game comes out.
2. I love to play the game with my adult friends.
3. as the game gets more mainstream attention, more and more kids join in.
4. I have to moderate myself because some stupid parent determined that it's now a "kids" game and everyone should cater to their crotchrats.
Why does this keep happening to all games i like?
I know minecraft might be an extreme example because it has simple graphics and no violence but it happens even on VR Military Shooters.
No. just be a decent parent and don't assume that the internet is a free daycare.
Sorry,
i just hate this "its a game tho it's obviously meant for kids" attitude
> 4. I have to moderate myself because some stupid parent determined that it's now a "kids" game and everyone should cater to their crotchrats.
I'm sorry, but I can't imagine being this upset at children. If I'm at a bar and I see a kid walk in, yes I will act differently because they are in earshot. It doesn't matter that the child is in an adult space.
"Well I was here first" is such an immature dismissal of acknowledging how your community is changing.
A more apt comparison would be you enjoying a drink in your own home (your server) and then because kids starting playing outside you'd be banned from your home for drinking there. Forever.
It's Chuck E Cheese's. Pretty sure that is a private business. They can mostly do what they want in most jurisdictions. If you want to censor communication in your own home, go for it.
If I paid for a license for Minecraft Java edition, why can't my friends and I play and communicate as we see fit?
Interesting that you specify "urban youth" when rural youth is no less violent, actually. Rural tough guy being rough is an euphemism for "violent". That being said, businesses pay security that exists for that purpose. Either they have own employees or they pay fee to a company to provide it as service. All the fast food worker has to do is to call.
The genuinely, the original situation does not sound like involving violence.
There seems to be a big misconception here that minecraft started with a focus on young kids, when it started with a focus on teenagers/young adults, 4chan for one was an absolutely huge part of its audience during its early days, we are not talking about a mlp situation here.
I think with Minecraft it's closer to the difference between a Chuck E Cheese and a barcade. Both are arcades, but one is specifically for kids and families while the other is an explicitly adult space.
Except the child audience didn't appear until 5 years into minecraft's life, so it'd be like your local barcade deciding they're pivoting to targeting kids now so please get out
The Fifth Column is a Minecraft hacking and griefing group. We created Project Copenhiemer which is a Minecraft server scanning tool. Copenhiemer scans the internet every 20 minutes for minecraft servers, logs players, server versions, mods and more.
Originally we had created it to find players and grief their server worlds, highlighting how much information about players is leaked from Mojangs default server configuration. They have put some features into the game to stop this information from being leaked but have made it an opt in system which no one uses or is even aware of.
We have become increasingly worried about the direction of Mojang's safety policies and we believe they are just playing lip service to the actual problems at hand.
Online gaming and gaming coms has a seriously unaddressed problem with child safety.
Mojang's reasoning for chat reporting is to protect children. Chat reporting does absolutely nothing to solve this problem. You can report people for swearing, drug/alcohol references, etc. You cannot report a player for child exploitation unless they use the chat system to do so.
As an example, I know one server admin that disabled chat entirely on his large server only to have pedophiles use in game signs to message and groom children over Skype and Discord.
If Mojang were serious about protecting children, they would stop developing their paternalistic chat surveillance system and split multiplayer children and 18+ play from each other.
For example, children should only be able to join under 18's Mojang hosted servers (realms) where conduct can be heavily monitored and 18+ players join multiplayer servers where children cannot play.
It is clear they have thought about this problem for a total of 5 minutes and have shut down healthy & reasonable debate about their solution to avoid embarrassment and scrutiny.
How do you propose MS/Mojang determine who is and is not an actual child? Require parents to provide legal documents of their children? Photographic confirmation? Time and time again it has been proven that attempts to segregate the internet into adult/child zones will fail.
opt-in "self flagging". Logic is a parent can report the date of birth of the child at time of purchase (maybe set up an email to receive a confirmation in case you want to disable the kid mode).
Anyone who has played anything in the MMO genre over the past couple of decades can tell you that most moderation systems are a joke and as automated as possible, with very very few moderators looking at reports.
If that system can actually be implemented, it would make playing minecraft as a non-groomer adult so much more fun, too. Child players on these public servers tend to beg hard for valuable in-game items, and frustratingly though understandably, they complain a lot about chat posts above their reading level. If Microsoft/Mojang made an adults-only Java version to solve this problem and I had to use my ID to prove who I am, I would buy the game again, at double price. Worth every penny. And they'd save resources by not trying to boil the entire in-game communication ocean.
> For example, children should only be able to join under 18's Mojang hosted servers (realms) where conduct can be heavily monitored and 18+ players join multiplayer servers where children cannot play.
Underappreciated aspect is that quite a lot, most actually, 18+ don't like unmoderated spaces either.
The absolute worst people in the gaming scene (griefers) complaining about this must mean it's a good thing. Why do you enjoy ruining people's servers?
So that analogy makes absolutely no sense considering they grief and ruin active servers, and destroy people's hard work. I don't understand how they can live with themselves. The careless attitude to this fact by the poster, casually mentioning they are part of the group like it's something normal, makes it even more unempathetic.
Kids can be mean to each other too; so I do support some sort of parental control (OS level) which Minecraft, software generally, should interact with. Also servers which provide parents with tools to better monitor the interactions.
I disagree about splitting up families, but do agree that a safety mode where children are in more heavily allow-listed environments should be standard.
I strongly disagree with Microsoft's stance. But I also think the issue is way overblown.
You can simply mod servers so that they don't have this chat reporting. If everyone in the Minecraft community is so opposed, just create and exclusively join modded servers. Does not matter if they get labeled "Not Secure" if 90% of well-known popular servers have it, and there are tools and tutorials everywhere which make it so easy to set up even a 9-year old can do it.
What if Microsoft tries to force servers to enable chat reporting in a future update? Nope, not going to happen. Minecraft is nearly open-source and the amount of modders who care about this is huge, the technical and legal resources to do so are just not worth it.
I do get that Microsoft is obnoxiously tone-deaf with this, and I believe it's a terrible idea which is barely legal (revoking people's access to what they bought on shoddy evidence - if this actually starts happening to a lot of people I hope they get sued). But it's just - people are saying "Minecraft is dead". Minecraft is not remotely dead.
>barely legal (revoking people's access to what they bought ...)
Kind of like when Microsoft bought Mojang and locked one of the world's most popular online experiences behind talking to M$ servers? There is no way to play the game you paid for - even offline - if you are not interested in creating a Microsoft account. They don't seem too concerned with the whole "terrible idea which is barely legal" thing when there's an opportunity to force people into giving them data.
my mojang account was not banned for alleged ToS violations which i can buy myself free from by providing them with a phone number they promise to only use for "validation"
(this is not related to bans for chat, this is about MS just arbitrarily banning accounts)
> revoking people's access to what they bought on shoddy evidence - if this actually starts happening to a lot of people I hope they get sued
I wouldn't put my money on them winning that one. It's wrong, but the laws were written by and for companies. I don't think a judge is going to say that a company who runs an online service can't ban users for violations of their policies. Hell, if the law cared about making sure companies couldn't arbitrarily cut off people's access to their purchases DRM would be outlawed.
Microsoft's service is the account system that they also forced everyone to sign up for. They took a popular product that didn't need them and inserted themselves in-between the game and the players so they could collect the players money, take their data, and control their behavior.
Minecraft always had accounts, and you always had some amount of communication with mojang servers for authentications (otherwise anyone could spoof usernames and get other people banned).
If you are banned, it also reasons that you would no longer be able to authenticate to 3rd party servers either, and it would be most likely an infringement of DRM to bypass, if not simply against TOS.
> You can simply mod servers so that they don't have this chat reporting. If everyone in the Minecraft community is so opposed, just create and exclusively join modded servers.
This only applies to people who own the JAVA version. People who only own Bedrock/Windows 10 version do not have this option.
Note that you can't mod Bedrock servers (which is the remade, not-running-like-dogshit Minecraft. For now, they are at feature parity, but nothing guarantees that Java edition stays for long)
Sure, but there's a second order issue -- what's overblown is the extent to which "misinformed John Q. Public backed by scary Microsoft" is going strongly argue absurdities like "this is against Minecrafts intellectual property" or some nonsense and fight against it, or say it's bad or naughty or something.
Does anyone have any insight into why Microsoft thought this was necessary? Minecraft has been server-moderated for years now and has been wildly successful. I've never heard of any hate groups or even hateful servers (I'm sure they exist, but they don't make the news in a way that would harm Microsoft).
Is there some legislation that would make it a liability for Microsoft to not moderate all the chat? This move just seems so strange
You may underestimate how truly horrific some of the online communications are in any non-trivial service. Especially when kids are involved.
Having been exposed to some of the stuff going on at other companies communication systems, I have total sympathy for mojang wanting some people off of all their platforms, forever.
Most any system is built like this from the ground up, it’s rather surprising it took them this long.
Is it "their" platform if the server is hosted by people who are not them on hardware that is not theirs? They are just selling a license to use their executables, no? Or should be (I don't play Minecraft)
In the event of abuse, parents won't draw that distinction and neither would a Twitter mob. Microsoft needs to be able to point to something concrete they're doing to keep kids safe or they're risking a scandal.
And who has been the greatest cheerleader of this totalitarian corporate control, where nothing happens on a platform without the blessing of its corporate master? MS have only themselves to blame, for they did everything in their power to erase that distinction.
Maybe in addition to educating users on inclusive language in MS Word [1], they could educate users about the very basics of how computers work. But that would go against MS's interests.
Doxxing and raids on individuals, targeted sexual harassments, there are all kinds of online actions we keep away from adult oriented internet services too.
A Twitter mob should not have that kind of power and if parents don't understand how Minecraft, the most popular game of the last decade+, works by now, they never will. It's appeasing a crowd that cannot and should not be appeased.
Twitter mobs have gotten people fired, ostracized from society and the cops called on them. Twitter mobs are extremely powerful, but many don't see that because they agree with the mob.
Your opinion on what power twitter mobs should have is pretty irrelevant. The reality is that they do have power, and game developers have to deal with that reality.
If it’s entirely self-hosted servers on the user’s own hardware, then how could Microsoft ban them? What would that even mean? Microsoft’s systems must somehow be involved for a ban to have any meaning.
> Having been exposed to some of the stuff going on at other companies communication systems, I have total sympathy for mojang wanting some people off of all their platforms, forever.
Be my damn guest, as long as it's operated by Microsoft (their public vetted list of servers, realms and so on). However, Minecraft has a jar server that you can download and run yourself, which Microsoft has no business interfering with. If I want to i can setup a "Minecraft against humanity" server and invite my friends, nobody should give two shits. Just monitoring speech at all on a private server makes no sense, and should 100% be opt in.
More generally, the solution to moderation is often private or semi-private groups. There's no one size fits all moderation rules, so as far as possible let people moderate their own spaces. Otherwise you're just renting you speech permissions from a corporation.
> You may underestimate how truly horrific some of the online communications are in any non-trivial service. Especially when kids are involved.
Then parents should take care of their kids.
This is like dropping them off on a random street corner and then complaining someone is fucking in an adjacent alley. The world isn't kid safe and it shouldn't be.
I don't know The Reason (probably child exploitation), but it's telling that within the first few comments people are discussing how to abuse the system to get Minecraft YouTubers deplatformed.
The culture of our timeline is based around disliking someone online and bringing real world consequences to them. Whether that is by getting them fired or getting them banned from services its the flavor du jour.
To quote the big short - "They arn't confessing, they are bragging."
Some people dislike what Microsoft did with Minecraft online and want to make it so the service is shut down and perhaps costs jobs!
How the turn tables.
I guess people who like to use language that’s “bad” by traditional standards will have to build something new.
I see a difference between bad acts and bad language alone; people are trained to hate certain words but are powerless to prevent certain acts so low hanging fruit is over policed. It’s an outcome of human memory which is a feature of reality we can’t do much about to soothe those who fee oppressed by loss of a bit of figurative self (Minecraft no longer being “for them”).
I can kind of see their point however, those youtubers are the ones that made the game popular with kids and got the game as massive as it is today in that demographic, get them banned and suddenly you have pressure on the direct connection to those people, at least in theory.
Granted, that's probably being too charitable for probably 90% of them are most likely driven by trolling/hurting the influencer I dislike, but there certainly is some space there to abuse the feature to make a stand. Unsure if there is any value to accounts now, last I played was over a decade ago, but I assume there are special account bound things now right? otherwise said influencers would just make another account and would be pointless.
...in the context of "the only way to get Microsoft to roll this back is to show how abusable it is".
> Actually, fun project. The sooner it's done, the more likely it will result in this getting pulled back:
> 1) Identify a popular Minecraft YouTuber's UUID
> 2) Make a report JSON object absolutely filled with gamer words
> 3) Be sure to mention multiple times that "I have the no reports plugin so you can't report me"
> 4) Join as many accounts as you have to a private server
> 5) Sign and submit the report JSON as each of those accounts
Roblox has been mired in controversy for years for failing to keep their platform safe enough for the kids they target. I'm not familiar enough to comment on the details of that controversy, but I would be surprised if that didn't feature prominently in Microsoft's decision here.
I'm fairly convinced that some of the Roblox controversy is a witch hunt. I have no knowledge of whether there have been legitimate issues, but the outcry I've seen on social media discussing Roblox and child safety often looks like a concocted story, and last month my social feeds were flooded with parents encouraging you to spread the word that Momo[0] is now spreading through Roblox and causing large groups of kids to kill themselves.
Watch both People Make Games video about Roblox and try to argue that the company should not deserve all the public controversy it is getting. They are actively stalling any moderation and protection because their profit margin would be severely diminished. Children's safety versus money, the choice is oh so simple.
What if they ran official Microsoft servers with moderated chat, but also let you join custom servers after showing a scary warning message (and maybe checked your account birthday or something too). Would that not be enough to free them of liability?
Why the assumption that they care only about liability? Minecraft is now a multi-decade game and they want to keep it as the #1 king of it's domain to sell copies for many more decades.
That will be hard if parents see headlines about "Minecraft" (no, the specific server host won't matter) being used to exploit or otherwise prey upon children and stop buying it.
> if parents see headlines about "Minecraft" (no, the specific server host won't matter) being used to exploit or otherwise prey upon children and stop buying it
You make it sound like it's an alien concept that only us techies understand, but it is actually quite a mainstream understanding that once you legally buy a thing then whatever illegal stuff you do with it is a responsibility of law enforcement and not whoever made and sold you that thing. What is alien here is this belief that intentional remote crippling of a product with no court order or anything is somehow even legal
Anyway. If you follow the money real threat to MS bottom line is not losing a 30 bucks one time per household but having people prefer the more moddable, unlockable OG version that the cool kids are playing (JE) over recurring revenue cash cow (bedrock).
That controversy is kept only inside certain circles. I think that "mired in controversy" is too strong expression for what is going on there. And also, roblox is actually banning people right and left too.
This has been coming ever since they bought Minecraft.
On one end is control, and on the other end is freedom from responsibility.
Since MS wants to continuously increase control (for example: by providing a version of Minecraft with a marketplace that they take a cut of), they must also take on increasing amounts of responsibility. Continuing far enough down this path means that every safety and security concern becomes theirs to deal with.
In contrast, Notch originally did almost nothing to control what players did and only trivial amounts of responsibility were placed on him.
The same piling on of responsibilities happened to Apple when they started selling Music.
1. Minecraft has a lot of kids playing it, particularly kids whose parents blame Microsoft for poor behavior rather than learning to parent.
2. California recently passed a bill which would fine companies which fail to prevent kids from accessing features which are "detrimental" to children's health [1]. Naturally, Microsoft doesn't want to get fined for what edgy gamers say online.
3. (speculation) The censorship police that have infected every other major online platform have now reached gaming.
My 12 year old has been bombarded with the message this is coming and will be the end of HyPixel/SkyBlock from many of the prominent Minecraft YouTubers he watches.
Let me tell you: if my money is down the drain because some little jackwagon mass-reports some random server and my kids’ accounts are locked, I’m gonna be fucking furious.
If the hoopla around this is true, Microsoft is going to relive its 1990s level hatred from the nerd community—just as parents instead of dorky teens and twenty-somethings running Linux.
Microsoft profits off Bedrock ("Minecraft for WIndows") because they can charge for basically everything, because there are no mods (addons). Java edition is where the mods are. Which is why hypixel/skyblock are on java edition.
Ive seen speculation that Microsoft is adding this to have a process for banning java edition players. And then they just... stop selling java edition. Then there are no new java players ever again, and the existing player pool slowly dwindles because they either get banned, or their friends get banned and they don't want to play java alone, and the only option is to go to the microtransaction-fest that is bedrock. And now you live in their walled garden.
I would say that this is pure conspiracy level stuff, but that would be literally the final step of a EEE plan. Microsoft has done this before and there would be no surprise if they actually did that. Will they? I dunno, but it's overall a heavy handed bad move. Everything I've heard about the system is that it's not a great idea.
Ah, yes. Slowly ban the 30 million Minecraft Java owners by... letting users report them ? Goes right in line with removing all cars by increasing wind speed by 5% to increase gas consumption and frying every electronics by outputting 231v instead of 230v. Should only take about 50 years.
They aren't targeting all 30 million java owners. They are targetting the ones who are most likely to make microtransaction purchases, ie the people who are playing on heavily populated multiplayer servers (single players don't use chat so it wouldn't matter, etc). And from what I've seen, the report function is pretty easy to manipulate, so if you can't renew your account (granted, right now you can, but with microsoft, you never know), a large portion of that player base might wind up off java quickly.
Find the whales, force the whales to move to walled garden.
Granted that's still a dumb idea, because those people want to be playing Hypixel, which isn't on bedrock. So maybe this is just microsoft's move to say "See, no one is playing Java as much" so they can just stop doing java dev.
No, there are glorified command blocks for Bedrock. No actual mods exist anymore. At the beginning, MCPE had a handful of proper mods, but Microsoft after the acquisition did everything they could to kill those.
Speaking of Apple, this reminds me of the story that when Microsoft bought Bungie Studios in 2000, they got an angry phone call from Steve Jobs, since Bungie were the last big game studio that made games for Mac computers.
Because Microsoft sees what's happening to Roblox and what has happened to countless children-oriented online game platforms and wants to make absolutely certain they don't have headlines about adults abusing children, exploiting children, taking children off-site, or so on from "Minecraft". Because you can be damn sure the parents won't read the nuances of what server it was.
I'd say this is to appeal to parents, who buy Minecraft and authorise associated micro-transactions for their Minecraft-playing children. It's a much easier sell if MS can "guarantee" that little Timmy won't hear bad words.
At the end of the day it's a big market, one to which Minecraft is heavily targeted, and parental paranoia is very profitable.
Because a new Minecraft account costs $30, and they know people will just make a new one if permabanned. It's an extremely scummy way to squeeze out more money from existing customers.
You staff a company with the kind of people who think this sort of crap is a great idea and that's what you get. Clamping down on people just saying whatever they want, good or bad, true or false, is going on literally everywhere. This is just yet another instance of it. The majority of it comes from tech companies. This should come as very little surprise.
Are you seriously arguing that Microsoft is intentionally trying to "extinguish" it's own IP? I realize that "Embrace, extend, extinguish" is a hopelessly tired and outdated meme, but trying to freshen it up by arguing they've now reached a level where they are intentionally trying to kill their OWN products as part of some grand and 30-year-in-the-past EEE "plan" is simply absurd.
I don't follow Minecraft or this issue closely, this is pure speculation, but MS could be trying to extinguish self hosted servers and would prefer all players playing on official Mincraft servers.
Yes, self-hosted servers, hypixel, etc, and java edition are clearly the target.
It was bad enough having to pay twice for the same game (java edition, then bedrock edition, as some of their friends could only play the microsoft edition on their Nintendo Switches, etc).
But if microsoft cause the 3rd party ecosystem of servers and mods to close down forcing everyone onto microsoft servers, I will ban my kids from playing at all. Quite sad, they and their friends have grown up with minecraft, it's almost the lego of our times, with a dose of capture-the-flag, though my kids also have lego and play skirmish irl.
I support your decision to ban it in your household under that circumstance. If Microsoft gets to carpet-ban us and our kids from the game, we can carpet-ban them from us and our kids. Take your responsibility as a parent seriously, spend time and engage and take care of your kids, don't depend on big centralized computer systems to keep your children safe. Teach them why it's important, and they'll grow up to value individual freedoms.
They are perfectly happy playing in the current open ecosystem, why should they be forced to change?
I'm maybe being a bit dramatic by saying I'll ban them, but they will certainly be given a lesson on taking a stand, and if necessary making sacrifices, to defend freedoms and not give in to coercion.
It's not at all 'microsoft bad', except in this case, it seems they are.
Precisely, it's a teaching opportunity. My parents denied me certain things, and while I "hated" them for it sometimes, I have grown to understand why. It did have the very real cost of making socializing more difficult, and yet precisely that prepared me for this kind of sacrifice. Long term, I'm grateful for that, they were real, actual parents.
If Microsoft wanted to extinguish self-hosted servers, all they would have to do is stop releasing the server jars and/or turn off authentication for non-Microsoft servers. They wouldn't spend so much time and energy pushing a controversial chat monitoring feature.
Java doesn't make them money outside of an initial purchase. Subscriptions to realms do. So, yes, EEE to an offering that was free to play after initial purchase.
This doesn't make sense. They bought Minecraft 8 years ago, and it's grown by an order of magnitude since then. It's a huge cash cow for them. In what way is that consistent with the "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy from 26 years ago, when they had an entirely different leadership team and business model? How is this not just a dumb move on their part, and actually part of some master plan to ... what... lose money?
Nah, this take it just conflating unrelated historical talking points about Microsoft without regard to how specific things actually happen. A better question is: what incentive does Microsoft have to alienate its playerbase this way?
The answer is much more mundane corporate decision making dynamics: an online game played by children is ripe for abuse by predators, and someone representing PR or Legal won the argument that this functionality is necessary. It would have been great if someone representing Community, UX or Engineering could have won the argument, but sadly those arguments are harder to make in today's political climate, so that's where they landed.
> A better question is: what incentive does Microsoft have to alienate its playerbase this way?
It does continue to condition the peasant-consumer class, especially the young ones, that the products they pay for can be taken from them on the whims of their corporate overlords. That they should expect to censor themselves and each other to appease their betters. Xbox users learned this already (https://www.ign.com/articles/2018/03/27/microsoft-can-now-ba...), now minecraft users will lean their lesson, and tomorrow it will be Windows users (and therefore 80% of the worlds computer users) who will learn to obey Microsoft's will. Software is a Service and no matter what you paid or how long you've used it, that Service is still only a privilege. Displease your masters and that privilege can and will be taken from you.
Okay, that is an exaggeration, but not nearly as much of one as I'd like.
I'm not endorsing the decision, I'm just saying this is how things happen in the corporate world. It has nothing to do with embrace/extend strategy, and it's not a product of Microsoft acquisition per se, it's just the way corporate decisions are made.
Keep in mind the people involved are no less smart than you or me, but they are responsible for single concerns, and the winning concern will be the one with the best narrative and metrics to back it up, because the tie-breaking executive will not have bandwidth to understand either side deeply. If we want to effect change, we first must understand this dynamic.
Microsoft customer service is abysmal everywhere. I’m currently battling a $20 azure bill that I’m unsure how to pay, customer support keeps directing me to the billing section, which, as I’ve told them, tells me I’m not authorised to access, despite being the subscription owner.
Microsoft UX everywhere I’ve seen is horrible and I feel ripe for disruption. Given the shit they’ve put me through with azure the past 18 months, I hope they lose money when that happens.
The Minecraft account migration process was awful too. It's a mishmash of Microsoft, X-Box, and Outlook/Live branding all with sites that work differently and options are spread around them seemingly at random. By default you can't even play online, you have to track down an obscure option in X-Box chat preferences to allow you to join servers.
It was even worse for me because some bot registered for a Microsoft account using my email address ages ago. I recovered the account using the "forgot my password", link, but the bot set it up in German and I can't seem to get it to change the language everywhere. So while most of the menus are in English, I still get confirmation emails in German.
... I cannot use my Microsoft account because it was hacked and stolen. I would get emails several times each year saying that there's suspicious activity but I can't log in. When I try to log in then Microsoft sends me through account recovery and asks questions about my real life that were never associated with the account.
So I'm royally pissed that Minecraft has migrated to it. I've lost all of the time and the little amount of money spent.
Honestly, starting a new block engine from scratch with the lessons learned from Minetest and Minecraft would be a better idea. Minetest is just too far behind to catch up, on a dilapidated tech stack with a far worse modding layer than Minecraft.
No. Not yet. First we must(!) address the incentive problem in free software (and society) then things like minetest will outcompete things like minecraft naturally. The only reason it doesn't already is because developers can only get paid working on less valuable (read: closed) software. See: https://datalisp.is.
I'm a huge advocate of free software, but I've never actually seen a _true_ solution to the incentive problem when it comes to developing free software. Sure, there are ways to monetize free software projects, but honestly, if you want to make a lot of money, grow a company, hire developers and grow a huge user base, then closed source only benefits you (unfortunately).
I'm not really sure how we can change that, specially because of the already widespread perception that free software must also be free as in beer (which I guess will always be true, and it's exactly the reason so many companies choose closed source).
Money is a social construct. Public goods are traditionally funded by taxes. Dual to taxing someone would be to print new money for everyone except that person. We need to pay ourselves and take ourselves seriously.
Huh!? Is this some sort of Peter Pan solution where we stave off starvation by simply imagining real hard that we're eating a big meal? What on Earth are you attempting to even suggest here?
What has starvation got to do with it? You can't eat money.
If you want to persuade someone to give you food for some kind of token then that token has to be meaningful enough that the person with the food can use it to get something else for it... social construct.
I am just saying that governance is inefficient due to poor incentives and that we are free to do whatever we want in cyberspace, including experiments on how we can align incentives better in the real world. If those experiments prove successful then the tokens will prove persuasive.
I feel like this is pretty shitty. Me and my friends were playing minecraft before many of the children that supposedly need to be protected now were even born. I'm sure server owners will work around this, but I feel like the well is poisoned now, some amount of innocence has been lost. Hosting a minecraft server has always been administering your own little kingdom, it's where me and many others got our first experience self-hosting services. Now Microsoft is squarely inserting itself in what used to be a relationship directly between server admin and player.
Of course part of me also thinks that handing out the occasional game-wide permanent ban that can be quickly circumvented by buying another $25-or-whatever-it-was license is good business for a game that everybody already owns, but that's probably too cynical.
I couldn't even complete the Microsoft account migration without encountering a data-mining attempt (they wanted my personal phone #). [1]
I can no longer justify this kind of privacy invading anti-user behaviour for a silly block game, so I've chosen to just quit Minecraft after ~12 years of playing.
At Assembly, I discovered that Minetest (with the mineclone 2 gamemode) is a very passable clone of Minecraft, with an open protocol and game source code.
If I want to play a game like that again, I'll just go for Minetest.
Seeing how my wooden signs and item names containing perfectly safe Latvian words have been brutally disappeared and censored in Minecraft Bedrock, this seems like global disaster about to happen. In my experience, Microsoft is incompetent to correctly enforce this.
I think at this point it's best for us to just let minecraft die.
I haven't played a single hour of the game since they shutdown mojang accounts. There's just no way in hell I'm paying for a realm where I can't say naughty words in chat.
Notch introduced a whole new genre of gaming - let's look towards new games in this category rather than trying to inhabit the corpse of Microsoft Minecraft 365.
There's a special kind of irony in putting the text of one's blogpost in a noscript tag for the sake of people who disable JS, but then setting a CSS class on body to make it invisible that is only removed by JS.
Wow, I saw the blank page and just closed the tab. These days I rarely even bother to view the source to look for readable content. Too often there's no content at all, just ads, tracking, and JS. I went back to read what they had. It's not often I'm amused and disappointed at the same time!
One of these days I'm either going to find or end up writing a CSS blocker.
(To be clear, you're not missing any content by being unable to read it because of the CSS. The noscript text is a long joke that ends with telling you to enable JS. I'm just amused that the joke doesn't work because the author used CSS to hide the body.)
Of all the bad things that happened with minecraft, chat moderation seems pretty far down the list. The endless complications with licenses, authentication systems etc were a massive frustration. To this day I still don't know whether to use a nintendo account, a microsoft account or a mojang account when signing into the game on Switch.
Who moderates the chat seems like a pretty minor issue in comparison. I think people (As in, majority minecraft players) care about decentralized game hosting and chat moderation to about the same extent that they care about email hosting: they don't.
Unbelievable how many people here are defending the centralized chat moderation a priori. You would think that HN would support the ideal of distributed server administration.
On HN defending the corporation seems to be the default. It looks like an American mindset to me, but I've seen some of my (I'm from Europe) friends do it as well.
I'm an American. I'm a capitalism respecter and corporation enjoyer. But I don't see the value in having a central decision maker take over all the peer-to-peer dispute resolution which was working fine previously. One very bad and inefficient dispute resolver is not preferable to decentralization. That's also a fundamental American norm which MS is flouting here.
I guess the general consensus is that the coolest part of Minecraft is you play it how you want to. This time there is a global restriction on what you and cannot do, reducing this sense of freedom from the sandbox. It's hyperbolic, although I have to admit centralized _anything_ for a sandbox such as Minecraft is pretty lame.
My kid and his friends are all eschewing 1.19.X and sticking with the 1.18.2 release specifically because of this issue. And they know this because they all watch the Youtube videos that are saying the same thing, that this "feature" is garbage.
I'm doing the same, but it won't last forever. A forced update, or some kind of retro-active system is inevitable. The product owners really want this feature.
This is clearly how Microsoft is finally going to rid itself of Notch’s original $20 to play forever deal. Bedrock edition didn’t get enough people off Java edition, micro transactions didn’t lure enough people away, so now they’ve just implemented a really loose report-to-ban system and let the online community tear itself apart.
When you’ve invested multiple billions in a property, these are the sorts of choices you make to protect that investment.
Microsoft have realised their investment has a limited number of years of life left in it. The main audience has grown up. To keep the brand alive they need to aggressively pursue the younger generation and tailor the game to them. Hence the safety features which the older audience don't care for.
I still maintain my stance that Microsoft ruined Minecraft by turning it into an investment.
This is really a result of "you shall hurt no one's feelings" that has permeated through out our society and part of the broader top down push for Economic Social Governance. This is going to be major disaster like all central social governance, it will be brought via tyranny as it always must be, no matter how well intentioned.
I know the business need but I've been very bothered by the fact that online gaming for kids has defaulted to mmo-style open servers.
My daughter asked to play Roblox and after looking into their system I said no.
I'm more than happy to let my kids online... to play with their friends, with content that was created by their friends or curated by professionals. Not to play with strangers in a slushpit if user-contributed content curated by an algorithm.
So I get why Minecraft is doing this, but imho it's the wrong approach. Make it easier for parents and kids to run a private server. Publish curated plugins for kids to load into said servers.
Let us parent, and let the pubs be pubs.
Instead MS seems to be following the Roblox approach of "trust our algo and our banhammer". Which, no.
> So I get why Minecraft is doing this, but imho it's the wrong approach. Make it easier for parents and kids to run a private server. Publish curated plugins for kids to load into said servers.
That exists. That's what Realms is. A moderated, private server, for your kids. It's existed for years.
I've been mulling over your desired situation which is probably shared with plenty of parents.
I think you want a system with a walled-garden with a "friend code" like Nintendo has, that can be physically shared through a scanner. You want to be able to supervise who your kids are friends with, and you want it to be extremely difficult to share that information online. Then the kids are strictly, systematically only able to contact and play with each other if they are friends. Maybe friends of friends. Parents get to review content, or professionals are paid to curate content that is allowed in this system.
When someone new becomes friends with your kid, you are notified and can ask who that is. If they seem to not be any of your kid's IRL friends, then you, as the parent, have the power to block that person from your child's games, report them, and notify the other parents of any of your children's friends that you have done so to this user.
It's local, involves the parents' supervision at a higher level. It can probably be abused by kids getting their parent's supervision module and blocking one of their friends and notifying all the parents as a mean joke or something. Or by parents who want to exclude certain children based on not liking their parents, and wanting to make an example of them as a "bad influence". It's also vulnerable to the child lying and saying a stranger is one of their IRL friends. The friend code "badge" getting lost is another serious concern.
A tool to use the friend code scanner at events like birthday parties to get surprise packs could be a "fun" thing that serves a double purpose of displaying each kid's profile, to help keep an offline list that verifies each kid's online identity to their parents, by pairing it with a photo (which never goes online) taken at the time of scanning. And there could be a tool to let you quickly scan that list and compare to the friend network of your kid and their friends. Maybe if there's somebody who consistently never shows up on the "party lists", flags could be raised and the parents could be notified to separately ask their children who that is - if answers are inconsistent, something's probably wrong.
Now, this system would take effort to implement, and effort to get existing games to agree to integrate - and they do need to integrate. Trying to create games to fit snugly into this system from the ground up would be insanely difficult. Maybe it absolutely must run servers of popular games in a "black-box", with this security system on top of it. To the kid's perspective, it needs to feel like barely an extra step to sign in and play through those servers, and on the computers they have access to, the vanilla version of the game needs to be thoroughly inaccessible. Parents would need to be willing to pay significant money into this.
I think having an opt-in (on by default in Realms) universal bans system is a good idea and something only Microsoft can properly provide. Can you really not turn this off per server?
As far as I know there is no way to disable the reporting, nor is there any way to request a review after you are banned. It is a system set up to enable abuse even more than Youtube's content ID and demonetization bans, and that's saying something.
Spigot/Paper servers can disable chat reporting with plugins, clients can disable sending signatures with forge mods, and servers can be configured to allow clients which don’t sign their messages with the setting enforce-secure-profile.
Yes - but that doesn't work on Realms and requires the server to trust a 3rd party for the bans list and only works if you use Bukkit. Those problems are solved by Microsoft running the program. But it needs to be optional - ideally opt in. Since Realms is mostly for kids I think it makes sense for this feature to be opt out, or even always on, in Realms.
I don't understand these people down here who appreciate Minecraft for what they are trying to do. In cs:go there is a way better system. If other people mute you (because for whatever reason) too often, you become muted by default for every game you join. People can unmute you on their behalf. Thats a reputation based system. And banning someone from a years old account, memories attached etc. will just get people mad at you. There's better systems.
"You can be banned for anything" here means "I couldn't just be a jerk whenever I want, so I'm upset".
None of the ban reasons are particularly egregious for a game a lot of kids play.
It's a social event, there are social norms, not sticking to them will get you ostracized. This is how society works and enforces sustainable and mutually beneficial interaction patterns.
Servers are a social event - that should be where the social norms apply. Different servers have different social norms. I should be able to use non-child-friendly language on a private server with adult friends (and friends of friends) without worrying about someone reporting me for it.
Imo they shifted from teen-adolescent semi-hackers to kids as the target group. It's always annoying when something you love pivots to target another group of users. As someone who is often an early adopter I went through this a couple of times. The end of era.
This article just grinds my gears. It is terrible what Microsoft is doing by forcing us to migrate our accounts, but I am powerless against it. All I can do is to shake my old angry fist in the air and curse profoundly. But I will still play the game.
Modern-day MC is a bit out of my depth but are these bans enforced in a similar mechanism to online-mode checks? (which validates that the username attempting to connect to the server has authenticated against the Mojang login servers?)
More importantly could it be possible for a modified client or server to 'spoof' reports against an arbitrary user to 'frame' them? Disturbing possibilities here.
> More importantly could it be possible for a modified client or server to 'spoof' reports against an arbitrary user to 'frame' them? Disturbing possibilities here.
Yes, the developers of Nodus have demonstrated this over and over again that they can spoof messages.
Sort of. (I think you know this but I'm adding context for others unaware of how the system works). The design intent of the chat reporting system is that chat messages are signed by the client with a key associated with the account, so that you can't just conjure up a message of someone saying a slur and send it to microsoft. Someone has to have actually typed something for it to appear in the report. So far I don't think anyone has demonstrated spoofing a message signed by someone else which they didn't actually write (which I think is what OP was asking).
Of course just have the message with no context is not enough to go on in a lot of cases, so they also made a system to try to have a verifiable chain of context to go with the offending message. This is what the system above is exploiting, since it basically allows a malicious actor to have one message appear in the chat reports but another appear to the player (which is also spoofing a message), allowing manipulation of the context of the message and thus a false report that appears legitimate as far as Microsoft can verify.
There's a relatively simple but limiting way to avoid this: just never say anything in chat. It's also possible to mod the client to never sign messages (and the server to strip signatures from message), but this may result in your chats being dropped by some clients and servers (I think it's an option, not sure if the default has changed to on).
> Modern-day MC is a bit out of my depth but are these bans enforced in a similar mechanism to online-mode checks? (which validates that the username attempting to connect to the server has authenticated against the Mojang login servers?)
yes
> More importantly could it be possible for a modified client or server to 'spoof' reports against an arbitrary user to 'frame' them? Disturbing possibilities here.
Gee guys, where are the dipshits to remind us MicroSoft <3 open source and totally isn't just opportunistically fucking it over again? It's not as if they took a game that worked everywhere and have increasingly restricted it for no reason. No, wait, MicroSoft is a big corporation, so this is just a different department, right?
I knew Minecraft was effectively dead the moment Microsoft sank their teeth into it, and I've barely touched the game since. They did their best to cut out Linux support. All hope of it being open sourced is lost, so expect it to go into disrepair the moment it stops making them money.
Reading this is a very very different experience when you are actually reading the noscript text due to non-js feed reader. I read the whole thing before realizing that all the Alex Jones stuff never mentioned Minecraft.
I'm not super familiar with Minecraft but isn't it more usual to communicate with other players over discord? And you get voice chat that way? Sorry if I'm being dumb, would love a link to an intro to how Minecraft works.
A two month old post on a hacking forum complaining about chat moderation in a game for kids, from a user running cracked servers. Apparently enough for HN to pick up the pitchforks because, you know, Big Tech Bad.
Adults play too. Imagine you are an adult Minecraft player who plays in a popular private server with only other adults (e.g. any of the big popular YouTube Minecrafters). You then play on a public server and someone reports you and gets you banned. You now cannot play on that private server or any other multiplayer world, even if it is just you and a friend.
It does matter what exactly it is that you done on that public server. Some swearing? Yeah you are right. The other stuff like "serious threats, doxxing/stalking"? Nah, other adults dont have to have to put up with you either.
I would describe messages on a private server as private chat. No-one has any issue with Microsoft moderating Microsoft's servers, they have an issue with Microsoft moderating their servers.
Many useful server plugins use chat commands for certain features. The in-game whisper chat feature might also need more configuration to emulate it in the external chat.
A Discord server would probably be the best solution.
Microsoft lost my copy of the game during the account transfer.
Despite me having an account, that had both re-downloaded the game and played it just a few weeks earlier, had a custom character skin stored in it, and other stuff - they claimed I didn't actually ever own Minecraft, and demanded I provide proof of purchase.
I provided as much as I could - including security questions+answers (which I had stored in my KeePass database, together with the password) - but I could not provide the original purchase email, since I lost access to that email years earlier.
Their support was quite hostile with just the thinnest veneer of superficial politeness on top. They refused to tell me why they believed I don't own the game. They refused to tell me what I could do to get my copy back (other than providing that email, that I no longer had).
Basically I was considered guilty unless I could proof my innocence - and they wouldn't accept any other proof than the original confirmation email.
And that's how - after nearly 10 years - I stopped being a Minecraft player. There's no way I'm going to repurchase the game and play again - not after being treated like that.
-> Basically I was considered guilty unless I could proof my innocence
imho this is not comparable. You are considered unknown (account-wise) until you can prove that you are known.
That's how a login system works.
Now why Microsoft didn't see your account, didn't accept your "proof" and left you in the rain, that's another story. A bad one. Big tech should care about the small man, they are their income after all.
Same for an account I bought via PayPal. I even did still have the PayPal transaction id since PayPal was connected to another email. But the email the account was linked to was lost.
Reply: "sorry we lost payment data for this time period. Fuck off"
Since that day my server allows cracked logins. Didn't migrate my main account to Microsoft either. I bought the game from Mojang, not Microsoft. Since from my pov, the online services of the game shut down, it is at least morally ok to pirate the game now.
IMO, if you bought the game it's morally OK to pirate it. I bought Bioshock 1 on steam and it required Games for Windows Live to play, so I just pirated it and played that instead.
Steam did the same for me. They wanted the first email of the account, which was like some hotmail.de throwaway. Except that they didn’t care that I were able to show them hundreds of purchases with several payment methods which were made over the years.
The account works and is connected to an email address I own.
I can login, I can reset the password, I can change the email. They never deactivated the account, or contested my ownership of the account or anything.
Only the game was gone - but evidence of that account having actually played the game in the past was still there.
Support refused to help me, unless I first provide that confirmation email, which I no longer had (the email provider went bankrupt, servers disappeared over night).
They never outright stated any reason for what happened, or answered any of my questions - but it would seem that they intentionally disabled all copies of Minecraft they thought might have been pirated, only re-instating them if the account holder could provide proof of purchase.
That seems to be the only plausible explanation for why they would refuse to look into my ticket or try to help me or even just answer my questions.
Uh, no. They have the account, which wasn't even under debate - they are missing the copy of the game. And no login system works by asking you the registration mail, ever.
Correct. I do have the account, the password, the security answers. I can login, I can see my skin, I can change my password, I can change my email. The only thing that is gone, is the game download.
I wrote support, asking them to look into this. They demanded that original confirmation email, and since I wasn't able to provide that - they refused to look into the problem, or answer any of my questions.
I agree with this sentiment a lot. I only make the exception here for this game specifically because:
- He has already bought the product
- It works offline and you don't need to ever update
- The game is fun as hell and there's really nothing like it
If this was the case with some other piece of software such as Windows (which funnily enough is also by Microsoft) where I do have alternatives, instead of pirating I just use Linux/Mac/BSD/whatever_else instead. I should note my personal experience with the game has been very pleasant specifically because I choose to play it "pirated"/"offline" even though I've purchased a copy of the game a long time ago, it's just more convenient, safer, and more private. If MineTest or something else ever gets to a state where it's as polished and fun as Minecraft 1.0.0 I'll certainly migrate.
I think this is probably an autistic take on this, but I think we care way to much about exposing kids to mean words and mean people. Again, perhaps an autistic take, but being bullied (badly) as a kid was easily the best thing that ever happened to me in terms of mental resilience.
Imagine we got into an argument and I got angry and called you a "smelly poo poo", you'd probably just laugh because despite what I'm saying being mean and profanity it's also such an insignificant insult that it borders on comical. But to a kid that might actually be quite offensive and hurtful and that's because they haven't built a tolerance.
I suspect this might be why a lot people today feel that words can be violent - they simply haven't built up a tolerance for offensive speech. And sometimes in the real world people can be offensive and mean.
Another thing I'll add here is that in the UK working class guys really like to insult each other. Given the types of individuals who browse HN I know most here won't relate to this, but it's actually kinda fun to be a dick to your friend. And further I'd argue that guys actually bond in part by playfighting and teasing each other. I get that what I'm saying here is very context dependent, but some of the best times of my childhood was playing video games with my friends and saying all kinds of horrid stuff to them. If I had to guess 80% of the stuff we'd say to each other on voice chat was insults but it was hilarious.
Kids are way stronger than we tend to think. If you teach a kid they're a victim because someone said something mean then they'll probably believe it and see themselves as a victim. On the other hand, if you act like mean words are no big deal and that sometimes people can be mean then they'll probably grow up much better prepared to handle the real world. At least in my experience / opinion.
I agree with most of it. Insult are forbidden/taboo, that's also why kids use and abuse them when they can (like in a game).
It just crossed my mind : we should be teaching kids how to handle insults and toxicity in life. Non-violent communication principles, and "don't take things personnaly" from the four agreements of Don Miguel Ruiz.
It is likely that the toxicity kids put into game is to help themselves learn how to handle toxicity/insults in life. Can I hurt somebody with words and actions (hello griefing) ? How much ? Can he retaliate ? Do I gain or lose something by being a dick (or victim) ?
Think about it, testing that out in real life is much more dangereous and costly. At worse, in game you may get banned.
My point is that I suspect online toxicity to be a ground for learning some valuables lessons. If we want to reduces online toxicity, we should be providing theses valuable lessons elsewhere (in school for example).
People will be offensive in the real world but I don't think we should encourage or accept that kind of behavior. If we build a society where people are shamed and shunned and not allowed to participate (whether it's a short timeout or a longer ban) when they behave poorly then hopefully we can reduce this kind of behavior in the world and instead of accepting it, people will be more comfortable fighting back in a positive way instead of simply flinging insults back which was how many of my childhood bullies behaved.
Playfighting is a different topic and typically even when you play fight, you set certain boundaries and there are things that you don't say/do. Good friends will recognize those boundaries and not cross them. You wouldn't call your friends soft and say they lack mental resilience for having boundaries, would you?
The problem with this take is that it deals with imaginary situation of someone being banned from Minecraft for life due to saying "smelly poo poo". Which is not what is going on at all.
I mean, people in this situation are overly trustworthy toward what is said bae.st by that commenter. Two screenshots somehow prove he was banned for using profanity. But I complain to you specifically, because you kind of took it on the next level.
> And further I'd argue that guys actually bond in part by playfighting and teasing each other.
Some do. And plenty of guys are verbally bullied by guys and they are not ok with it at all. Quite a lot, it is not bonding, it is just hostility and bullying.
It's a big deal because Minecraft's server system is traditionally very decentralized. However, this change suggests that Microsoft now wants to increasingly centralize the game. Microsoft seems to be going against the game's original ethos.
There’s no going back though, is there? Once Minecraft is playable over LAN without internet connection, there’s very little to nothing that MS can do to police speech, right?
I don’t mean to be dismissive but the censorship is virtually opt-in at this point, no?
The MS controversy is that they implemented a centralized chat signing feature that is not opt-out. Most of the fun Minecraft servers are using a kind of server-side modding, but their users are playing with "vanilla" clients. So if you get banned by MS, you can't join those servers. MS is now the gatekeeper of offensive chat, not the individual servers.
You’re saying the servers are fun and that’s fine. However, I’m of the opinion that it’s the players who make the game fun and if the players choose to play on virtual LAN servers, then they, in essence, opt-out of the censorship.
Even the LAN servers are still part of this censorship model. The only way to avoid this censorship is to crack the game and run the server in cracked mode.
Imagine if suddenly the web changed so that it was possible to be banned from every single website (you can't even look at them) for your behavior on a single site by a moderator with incomplete context even if it was done in private.
This is a big change to how things work and it was forced onto the community.
If you are playing in a private server it should be up to that server to ban or not ban people, the same way if you are in a private bar it should be up to that bar to ban you from it because you use profanity.
No, the ridiculousness is the deep centralization. Whether it's Minetest OR cracked Minecraft, it's clear that Microsoft is an irresponsible, or more importantly, unnecessary steward/middleman here.
Those who want Microsofts vision, I suppose that's fine -- but I see no good reason to require or respect it. On with the mods.
Any attempt to understand "the users here" as a unit is misguided. Hacker News doesn't have a single opinion on anything. You get a different sub-community showing up for each thread depending on topic and time of day, so the sentiment will always fluctuate from thread to thread.
It's the only perfect system that is achievable and can be what it claims, a space free of censorship. There is no 'only the bad things' that can be censored, as you've illuminated here, different people will have different sensibilities.
In the mean time, however, we can educate ourselves and steel our nerves as we may come across ideas and content we don't agree with or care to be exposed to. As responsible netizens we shouldn't let it affect us to hysterics and cries of censorship, and instead stay away from the places that do. It starts with personal agency and responsibility for yourself and those you're charged with rearing.
I'm glad I got to hear your opinion but the only reason you were able to make it here is because this place is heavily moderated. No popular forums can survive a lack of censorship in any form.
> I remember when the idiots here were congratulating Uber for killing that woman, because her death wouldn't be in vain; it would improve their self-driving software.
We will reach Peak Scientistic Neo-Liberalism on the back of such sacrifices. Progress, profits, enlightenment, efficiency and safety, at any cost.
Cloudflare banned Kiwifarms (this ban is not justified), and Kiwifarms is still running their own servers. Which are ddos'ed by people who don't want others to hear what they say. Some people are thankful that they were able to convince a corporation to remove its fire protection from a server so it could be burned down in peace.
Look, Microsoft is just trying to protect you from bad actors and bad words. Imagine if someone was trying to use minecraft chat to spread the same message that was in kiwifarms. Without Microsoft regulating speech, then those bad actors words may get out to the public. You "can still run your own servers, if you'd like" - but instead of getting ddosed you just will be listed as unsafe.
Kiwi Farms went into the realm of swatting people and trying to get people to kill themselves (with one or two successes).
Of course that being said I fail to understand why more normal remedies couldn’t apply there. Swatting is a felony and hounding someone to suicide is at least very civilly actionable. Why did Cloudflare need to be the police here when regular police or the “Sandy Hook solution” seemed warranted?
Re speech - The government typically does not fare well when they try to restrict a persons speech.
Re Swatting - because there was no proof. The forums actually had a pretty hard policy about anything that appeared to be swatting related and banned users immediately for it. With the forums taking a hard stance against swatting, with proof, why would they have been found liable.
So because nothing was provable or illegal, the internet begged a corporation to remove its fire protection service. Once it was done, to the surprise of literally noone, someone burned it down.
I have trouble reconciling when the community supports corporations policing speech and also complains about it. In my opinion, its based on whether the people like the speech or not. It makes me concerned that the concept of free speech, at least that which I grew up with on the early internet, is no more.
It does not surprise me that the right wing channers who started bae.st after getting banned from Twitter dislike the increase in moderation on other platforms. I'm no fan of Microsoft, but on the theory that you can judge a person by the quality of their enemies, Minecraft comes out looking positively beatific here.
I mean, when it comes to actual trolls complaining about getting kicked off of the platform, I have to conclude that Microsoft is at least doing one thing right.
I have not used the official Minecraft client since they change it over to the new one. I advice everyone to never use it. Use one of the meny alternatives that lets you easily set up different versions of the game, with mods, profiles, and easier to change RAM allocation. Never download that piece of human garbage that is version 1.19.
https://www.minetest.net/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6Fyav6FiIs
The video's author doesn't mention it by name, but the quantum computing tutorial game he's playing in a couple of the clips is called QiskitBlocks; it's a series of puzzles designed to teach you how quantum computing works.
The (public) games that run on the Minetest engine are listed on https://content.minetest.net/packages/?type=game. QiskitBlocks in particular is https://content.minetest.net/packages/JavaFXpert/qiskitblock....