I feel like this is pretty shitty. Me and my friends were playing minecraft before many of the children that supposedly need to be protected now were even born.

I feel like this is pretty shitty. Me and my friends were playing minecraft before many of the children that supposedly need to be protected now were even born. I'm sure server owners will work around this, but I feel like the well is poisoned now, some amount of innocence has been lost. Hosting a minecraft server has always been administering your own little kingdom, it's where me and many others got our first experience self-hosting services. Now Microsoft is squarely inserting itself in what used to be a relationship directly between server admin and player. Of course part of me also thinks that handing out the occasional game-wide permanent ban that can be quickly circumvented by buying another $25-or-whatever-it-was license is good business for a game that everybody already owns, but that's probably too cynical.