7 ms·

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'

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

ceeplusplus 4y ago
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. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/30/californoa-childrens-online-privacy-protection-act/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/30/californoa-childrens-onlin...
- garciasn 4y ago
  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.
  - bisby 4y ago
    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.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      They just gave java edition to every bedrock owner, so I'm not very concerned about the "stopping sales" idea. But this sure is a walled garden extension I don't like.
    - kimmeld 4y ago
      Sounds like they learned from Apple pretty well.
      - dane-pgp 4y ago
        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. https://www.macrumors.com/2010/10/26/apple-history-jobs-raged-over-microsofts-2000-acquisition-of-halo-developer-bungie/ https://www.macrumors.com/2010/10/26/apple-history-jobs-rage...
      - dijit27 4y ago
        What did Microsoft learn from Apple here?
    - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
      Point of order - there are plenty of mods for Bedrock. Foxynotail has some great ones.
      - kuschku 4y ago
        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.
        kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
        Semantics. They still modify the gameplay from vanilla, ergo they fit the definition if a "mod".
jstarfish 4y ago
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 haters are in plain sight.
- OrangeMonkey 4y ago
  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."
  - evr1isnxprt 4y ago
    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”).
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
  Just like red flag laws for firearms. Reporting systems will be abused, thus the importance of backend processes to sort it out.
- philippejara 4y ago
  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.
decremental 4y ago
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.
ninth_ant 4y ago
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.
- Georgelemental 4y ago
  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)
  - api 4y ago
    Software that you run that is under your control? How quaint.
  - ryeights 4y ago
    >They are just selling a license to use their executables, no? Yes.
  - lolinder 4y ago
    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.
    - TobyTheDog123 4y ago
      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.
      - 4y ago
lolinder 4y ago
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.
- TakeBlaster16 4y ago
  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?
  - nightpool 4y ago
    They tried that in 2020, but it didn't seem to work effectively enough.
  - tarakat 4y ago
    Liability? Has a game developer ever been held legally liable for not policing their community hard enough?
  - RUN12 4y ago
    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.
    - throwaway290 4y ago
      > 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).
fnordpiglet 4y ago
Because the tears of online asshats are super tasty.
sudosysgen 4y ago
There has been increasing abuse with gambling and predatory Minecraft servers marketed towards kids.
- pbhjpbhj 4y ago
  And Microsoft doesn't want others getting in on its financial predation. /snark
joshspankit 4y ago
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.
Spooky23 4y ago
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.
- ShowalkKama 4y ago
  no they don't. Microsoft doesn't have access to chat logs of 3rd party servers (read: all multiplayer non-realm servers)
synicalx 4y ago
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.
RUN12 4y ago
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.
Kiro 4y ago
What? Minecraft is notorious for being one of the worst platforms in this regard. Imagine unmoderated Roblox.
weberer 4y ago
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.

ceeplusplus 4y ago

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. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/30/californoa-childrens-online-privacy-protection-act/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/30/californoa-childrens-onlin...

garciasn 4y ago
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.
- bisby 4y ago
  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.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    They just gave java edition to every bedrock owner, so I'm not very concerned about the "stopping sales" idea. But this sure is a walled garden extension I don't like.
  - kimmeld 4y ago
    Sounds like they learned from Apple pretty well.
    - dane-pgp 4y ago
      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. https://www.macrumors.com/2010/10/26/apple-history-jobs-raged-over-microsofts-2000-acquisition-of-halo-developer-bungie/ https://www.macrumors.com/2010/10/26/apple-history-jobs-rage...
    - dijit27 4y ago
      What did Microsoft learn from Apple here?
  - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
    Point of order - there are plenty of mods for Bedrock. Foxynotail has some great ones.
    - kuschku 4y ago
      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.
      - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
        Semantics. They still modify the gameplay from vanilla, ergo they fit the definition if a "mod".

jstarfish 4y ago

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 haters are in plain sight.

OrangeMonkey 4y ago
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."
- evr1isnxprt 4y ago
  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”).
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
Just like red flag laws for firearms. Reporting systems will be abused, thus the importance of backend processes to sort it out.
philippejara 4y ago
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.

decremental 4y ago

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.

ninth_ant 4y ago

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.

Georgelemental 4y ago
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)
- api 4y ago
  Software that you run that is under your control? How quaint.
- ryeights 4y ago
  >They are just selling a license to use their executables, no? Yes.
- lolinder 4y ago
  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.
  - TobyTheDog123 4y ago
    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.
    - 4y ago

lolinder 4y ago

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.

TakeBlaster16 4y ago
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?
- nightpool 4y ago
  They tried that in 2020, but it didn't seem to work effectively enough.
- tarakat 4y ago
  Liability? Has a game developer ever been held legally liable for not policing their community hard enough?
- RUN12 4y ago
  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.
  - throwaway290 4y ago
    > 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).

fnordpiglet 4y ago

Because the tears of online asshats are super tasty.

sudosysgen 4y ago

There has been increasing abuse with gambling and predatory Minecraft servers marketed towards kids.

pbhjpbhj 4y ago
And Microsoft doesn't want others getting in on its financial predation. /snark

joshspankit 4y ago

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.

Spooky23 4y ago

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.

ShowalkKama 4y ago
no they don't. Microsoft doesn't have access to chat logs of 3rd party servers (read: all multiplayer non-realm servers)

synicalx 4y ago

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.

RUN12 4y ago

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.

Kiro 4y ago

What? Minecraft is notorious for being one of the worst platforms in this regard. Imagine unmoderated Roblox.

weberer 4y ago

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.