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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
> 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 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.
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
> 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/
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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).
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.
>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)
> 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)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 319 ms ] threadIs there some legislation that would make it a liability for Microsoft to not moderate all the chat? This move just seems so strange
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.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/30/californoa-childrens-onlin...
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.
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.
https://www.macrumors.com/2010/10/26/apple-history-jobs-rage...
But this sure is a walled garden extension I don't like.
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.
The haters are in plain sight.
To quote the big short - "They arn't confessing, they are bragging."
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”).
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
> Famous people losing their accounts will work.
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.
Yes.
The vast majority of dedicated players, common sense, and history.
But the mob comes for everyone.
Game developers don't have to do anything.
They choose to, and the Twitter mob grows more powerful as a result.
It's my opinion that they should stop doing that, because, as they say, the mob comes for all.
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.
[1] https://www.windowscentral.com/new-microsoft-word-feature-wi...
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.
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.
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.
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).
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/02/momo-...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTMF6xEiAaY
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.
I’d guess that Microsoft gets subpoenas for that stuff and felt it was a risk to be unable to respond.
At the end of the day it's a big market, one to which Minecraft is heavily targeted, and parental paranoia is very profitable.
Imagine getting banned from your own realm…
There are already some mods available, but it would be great to see more ported.
[1] https://www.minetest.net/
In all seriousness though, this isn't likely to happen, so let's not let perfect be the enemy of good.
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).
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.
Minecraft has been open for some time, and that has an effect counter to the control that MS seeks over its products.
"Embrace, extend, extinguish" has been the strategy for decades.
Seems like the beancounters won this one.
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.
That being said, if you're banning your kids from playing Minecraft because Microsoft Bad, that's just shitty.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Just to add onto this rant against Microsoft...
... 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.
https://wiki.vg/Microsoft_Authentication_Scheme
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.
We will reach Peak Scientistic Neo-Liberalism on the back of such sacrifices. Progress, profits, enlightenment, efficiency and safety, at any cost.
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 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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Thanks.
Because it was fiction.
The issue here is that Microsoft bans you from playing even on your own, self-hosted server you're running in your home serverrack.
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.
A Discord server would probably be the best solution.
Its soo much easier to not get banned from something than is to.
Literally just don't be an idiot. Its not that hard.
Kids are often antisocial and exhibit poor behavior. Kids also love Minecraft.
Permanent, Microsoft-account level bans for questionable chat text is ridiculous.
But I very highly doubt the ones doing all this complaining are actually kids.
I don’t mean to be dismissive but the censorship is virtually opt-in at this point, no?
This is a big change to how things work and it was forced onto the community.
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.
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....
https://content.minetest.net/packages/kay27/mineclone5/
https://content.minetest.net/packages/Wuzzy/mineclone2/
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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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/
https://veloren.net/
It's not going to replace something like Minecraft+Create any time soon.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31892395
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860168
Microsoft will start banning players from all private Minecraft servers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31892395 - June 2022 (15 comments)
Online Minecraft Bans Will Be Able to Block You from Private Servers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860168 - June 2022 (23 comments)
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.
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.
This will keep people from getting banned on your server, but it doesn't do anything to help all of the people who have already been banned.
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.
(this is not related to bans for chat, this is about MS just arbitrarily banning accounts)
This only applies to people who own the JAVA version. People who only own Bedrock/Windows 10 version do not have this option.
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.
skip to time index 0:30
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okt9GcWiWmE
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, a server with `online-mode` turned off does not use any authentication and will let anyone (banned or not) play.
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.
no
Yes, the developers of Nodus have demonstrated this over and over again that they can spoof messages.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pz5iGzuNnNU
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).
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.
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.
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.
Destroying someone else's castle and enjoying it is called "being a psychopath".
Underappreciated aspect is that quite a lot, most actually, 18+ don't like unmoderated spaces either.