Minecraft to add telemetry • Hacker News Board

Re: Minecraft to add telemetry

#71

Post by filoleg » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 6:36 PM UTC

falcolas wrote: post #64

belval wrote: post #7

Eh Minecraft is a video game, I just don't see the privacy risk with "typical" Windows-level telemetry happening there. At some point we have to accept that this data actually helps them fix real issues too, they're not monetizing their players directly with it.

> they're not monetizing their players directly with it How do you know? Did they pinkie swear on it? Did they add any kind of T&C around their use of Telemetry specifically? Telemetry that can be used to identify frequently used game functionality could equally be used to identify game functionality that can be monetized. Identifying how a user dies is a fantastic way to identify items which can be sold to prevent t…

>Identifying how a user dies is a fantastic way to identify items which can be sold to prevent those common deaths.

Just as commonly, it is done to identify bugs and issues, tweak the game balance to get it to a better state, or to see which things players like to do (as opposed to what they say on forums and in focus groups) in order to provide more of similar features.

It is no different from engagement logging in a lot of applications. It is far from always being done for the purpose of monetization. If my business application has a lot of users stuck on a particular screen for prolonged periods of time due to the UX being confusing, I would want to know about it and address it. A lot of times it is hard to gauge how bad it is, because users might just tolerate it if it is ok, or maybe it is something users attribute to their own fault (i.e., they might feel it is just them being confused about it, not that the UX is confusing for everyone). Engagement logging would help me identify that problem and pinpoint it very fast.

>How do you know [they are not using it for monetizing]?

How do you know they are? I am more surprised they didn't have that type of telemetry already for a while, because that's one of the most common ways to identify pain-points in the gameplay balancing, which features might need more attention/rework, identifying potentially very tricky to catch bugs, and come up with ideas for new feature ideas that users might like based on actual data (as opposed to hearsay and public feedback, which can get significantly skewed by selection bias and other factors).

Re: Minecraft to add telemetry

#72

Post by gtirloni » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 6:38 PM UTC

ashton314 wrote: post #59

tomc1985 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I (like most here) have personally benefitted from extensive software telemetry but am generally against it in my personal life. But I also write business software where the expectation of privacy is already moot. Gaming is a weird point though, telemetrics are already in heavy use, the privacy risk is indeed minimal, and gamers don't seem to care anyway though. I can't tell you how many GDC talks I've watched that d…

> freebsd on a new server It always makes me happy to see how short the list returned from `ps aux` is with FreeBSD. Whereas if you go onto a typical Linux box (even just a raspberry pi!) and run that, you get at least a screenful of processes doing who knows what. (Just my small experience.)

If you install a server distro, the number of default processes is pretty minimal. Run GNOME on FreeBSD and you'll get the same huge list of processes.

Re: Minecraft to add telemetry

#73

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 6:41 PM UTC

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #68

FinalBriefing wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about performance issues and silent errors? Finding areas that need to me optimized because a lot of users have subtle issues kinda needs passive data collection. As long as it is anonymous, it's a good thing, IMO.

Yup. A previous company I worked at used assert calls in the code. In a debug build of the firmware, if an assert failed, it would crash the device and on the display it would show the file and line number of the assert call. In production firmware, it would silently ignore it, and if you had opted in to sending usage data, it would phone home and report the failed assert, though I don't know what extra data was incl…

The key still being "if you had opted in".

Re: Minecraft to add telemetry

#74

Post by TheFreim » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 6:42 PM UTC

vitejose wrote: post #63

xahrepap wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's actually C++. And it's the same codebase for all the consoles/mobile devices https://minecraftbedrock-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Minecraft > This version is programmed in C++ and is available for a multitude of platforms including iOS, Android, VR, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. Since the Bedrock engine is a full rebuild different from the Java Edition, there is a noticeable difference between Bedrock and Java edit…

I’m sure there are real performance improvements by moving to C++, but at the same time, I cannot believe how long this list of differences is. https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Official_pages/Parity_issu... It also doesn’t help that the two versions are separate purchases.

> It also doesn’t help that the two versions are separate purchases.

Didn't bedrock edition come for free with windows 10? I have it but I am sure I never paid for it.

Re: Minecraft to add telemetry

#75

Post by tialaramex » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 6:46 PM UTC

rndinternetguy wrote: post #29

supperburg wrote: post #21

I really want to see a Minecraft that’s written in a fast language and also takes advantage of the huge amounts of storage and memory that we have now. The main problem with Minecraft is that you can see the end of the blocks even on high settings. Would also be cool to see slightly smaller blocks

They did that - it's called Minecraft Bedrock and is written in c#. The problem is that it's not a 1 to 1 copy of Java edition and much of the functionality differs, so most PC players prefer the Java edition as it reflects the original gameplay.

Far more importantly than "original gameplay" although there are deviations that would matter enormously for e.g. speed running, you can't mod Bedrock.

I don't actually play vanilla (unmodified) PC Minecraft more than perhaps a few minutes every year to see what's new or test something in the vanilla program.

But I spent hours every month playing packs like Compact Claustrophobia (a pack where you spend all except the last section of the "plot" trapped inside Compact Machines, pocket universes which don't exist in the vanilla game at all but are fairly popular in modding). Or say Seaopolis which starts out in a vast world-covering ocean but eventually allows you to do space travel.

Mojang and then Microsoft did some basic work to enable this, but a huge part of it comes from the core being Java, and so once modding is allowed it's possible to reach inside an object and replace parts of the game wholesale. And from the contingent popularity and huge community that took this and really ran with it.

Modding enables people to focus on the type of play they most enjoy. If you wish the game had more tricky combat and needed survival skills, you can have that. If you'd rather become a God-like being and form the world as it should be, you can have that. If you like problem solving, you can spend all your time building complicated machines to solve increasingly dubious problems (e.g. don't think "automatically farm carrots" think "automatically farm dragon eggs").

Re: Minecraft to add telemetry

#76

Post by dandotway » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 6:47 PM UTC

ashton314 wrote: post #59

tomc1985 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I (like most here) have personally benefitted from extensive software telemetry but am generally against it in my personal life. But I also write business software where the expectation of privacy is already moot. Gaming is a weird point though, telemetrics are already in heavy use, the privacy risk is indeed minimal, and gamers don't seem to care anyway though. I can't tell you how many GDC talks I've watched that d…

> freebsd on a new server It always makes me happy to see how short the list returned from `ps aux` is with FreeBSD. Whereas if you go onto a typical Linux box (even just a raspberry pi!) and run that, you get at least a screenful of processes doing who knows what. (Just my small experience.)

This is also the experience with Ubuntu on Windows WSL:

  $ ps aux
  USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
  root         1  3.5  0.0   8944   332 ?        Ssl  11:38   0:00 /init
  root         7  0.0  0.0   8944   228 tty1     Ss   11:38   0:00 /init
  dando        8  1.7  0.0  16804  3396 tty1     S    11:38   0:00 -bash
  dando       32  0.0  0.0  17392  1916 tty1     R    11:38   0:00 ps aux

A strange irony that the most purist Unix-like Linux is to be found in the belly of the Windows beast, for the equivalent of those hundreds of processes doing who knows what on a typical native Linux install are instead all in Windows Task Manager.

Re: Minecraft to add telemetry

#77

Post by yuuta » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 6:48 PM UTC

The key problem is that Mojang does not allow users to disable it.

Re: Minecraft to add telemetry

#78

Post by II2II » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 6:48 PM UTC

DHowett wrote: post #15

foepys wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was "game crashed, here's the stacktrace" before and now (or later) it's "player put 20 blocks of gold on server IP 127.0.0.1 with players foo, bar, baz present", it's a difference.

“At this point the only implemented event is world load.” Are you certain about your assertion? Can you link to the document where you found it?

It is a direct quote from the article:

https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/minecraft-snapshot-2...

Re: Minecraft to add telemetry

#79

Post by zimmund » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 6:50 PM UTC

yuuta wrote: post #77

The key problem is that Mojang does not allow users to disable it.

In previous versions it was enough with snooperEnabled=false

Re: Minecraft to add telemetry

#80

Post by delroth » Thu, Sep 30, 2021, 6:54 PM UTC

hulitu wrote: post #53

conradev wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree. Telemetry is invaluable to making software better. Transparency is key here. If projects explained the steps taken to anonymize the data (either provably using Differential Privacy, or approximated via some other means), I feel like people might trust them more. Even with DP, though, the server does see IP addresses, even if it doesn't know what the telemetry is, and that alone might cross the line f…

> I totally agree. Telemetry is invaluable to making software better. Can you give 1(one) example of a program which was improved by using telemetry ? And no, trashing the UI in the name of change or modernism does not count. Thank you.

We introduced some opt-in telemetry in dolphin-emu.org several years ago. I remember several times we discovered things we would likely have completely missed otherwise:

- We found out by looking at the distribution of software version that we had a strong holdout on one specific revision. It turns out we had a regression in a niche feature which was very important to a sub-community of our users, and users were basically telling each other to just use that old version. No bug report was filed until we found out via analytics and asked.

- We have a "game quirks" mechanism where the emulator reports weird edge cases that happen very rarely. Current list: https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/blob/master/Source/Co..., example usage: https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin/blob/ffdc8538a162b1ca... . We used this to find games that use currently unimplemented or stubbed features.

- The list of popular games being played on the emulator was extremely surprising because it turns out there's a huge disconnect in what most NA/EU players are playing and what JP players are playing. This led to us adding a bunch of new games to the list we regularly test for performance and stability regressions. Would you have guessed that Inazuma Eleven GO: Strikers 2013 is in the top10 of emulated games on Dolphin?