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It seems that the good times for online Minecraft play are over

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Re: It seems that the good times for online Minecraft play are over

#111

Post by zbird »

caslon wrote: post #105
StanislavPetrov wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people bought the game before these draconian policies were implemented? They should offer refunds.

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 te…

Why is this downvoted? This is literally the TOS of much proprietary software out there. People don't read the TOS?

Re: It seems that the good times for online Minecraft play are over

#112

Post by JetAlone »

ckemere wrote: post #103
dmix wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: It seems that the good times for online Minecraft play are over

#113

Post by JetAlone »

baskethead wrote: post #77

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.

Re: It seems that the good times for online Minecraft play are over

#115

Post by vermilingua »

orsond wrote: post #88

Hi, orsond from the fifth column here. 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 lea…

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.

Re: It seems that the good times for online Minecraft play are over

#116

Post by jaarse »

ckemere wrote: post #94

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…

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.

Re: It seems that the good times for online Minecraft play are over

#117

Post by bolt7469 »

jimbob45 wrote: post #96
bolt7469 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: It seems that the good times for online Minecraft play are over

#119

Post by kQq9oHeAz6wLLS »

TobyTheDog123 wrote: post #66
lolinder wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But the mob comes for everyone.

Re: It seems that the good times for online Minecraft play are over

#120

Post by Spooky23 »

8jy89hui wrote: post #2

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 jus…

Game chats have been used for all sorts of criminal activity.

I’d guess that Microsoft gets subpoenas for that stuff and felt it was a risk to be unable to respond.

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