4 ms·

Mojang seem to be forgetting that it costs money to operate a server, and a "freemium" model is a completely viable and legitimate way to fund that operation (o

Mojang seem to be forgetting that it costs money to operate a server, and a "freemium" model is a completely viable and legitimate way to fund that operation (other ways such as accepting donations and paid-players only exist). Some may say you are in essence paying a third party for Mojang's work, when in fact you have already done so by purchasing the game in the first place. What position do Mojang feel they are in to dictate how people play the game? Ultimately it comes down to what players want, players are not afraid to vote with their feet and abandon servers which operate in this way; as of yet there seems to be no widespread trend in abandoning these servers. As an aside, I believe this is more likely a push by Mojang to shut down paid servers and move people onto their Minecraft Realms product which does exactly this.

valarauca1 12y ago
The problem is a lot of server admins claim it costs $1000-2000+ a month to run a unmodded minecraft server (with ~100 players). And a lot of players simply accept that as true.
- pascoej 12y ago
  To be fair, it would take a very beefy server to run the vanilla server with 100 players. When dealing with a high volume of players, using mods like spigot is essential.
- jamescun 12y ago
  Depends on your country but I was involved in the running of a Minecraft server a couple of years ago with about ~100 simultaneous players and our server costs were about £400 ($650?) a month in a UK datacentre; so $1000/month wouldn't be impossible. We could have saved some money by using a cheaper European provider (iirc OVH had a similar spec'd server for £200), but we were all based in the UK so the low latency was a major benefit. The UK server provider market really needs some disruption.
- wfn 12y ago
  Yup. Both vanilla minecraft and bukkit are terrible at multithreading. Bukkit's plugin API doesn't use locks (iirc), so having the plugins be able to run in a safe multithreaded fashion is a clusterfuck. It's possible to do that, it's just a lot of tedious work, rewriting essential parts of the code, etc. Mojang ain't helpin' here. If you run a server and have lots of players on, or whatever, you'll see all but one of your server's cores idling by. 'tis sad. ..so lots of things will be cpu-frequency-bound. Memory consumption is another thing, but if you have lots of memory and SSD, your server will be able to do things. Still though, I believe the way everything is written, it's a very uneconomic use of hardware resources. Instead of focusing on core code and overall quality and performance improvements, Mojang just keeps shitting out new game features. I see their rationale (short term $, etc.), but when they then go about talking about how they don't like large expensive server operators taking money, it kind of puts me into an angry mood.
- pktgen 12y ago
  Large Minecraft servers generally need sizable DDoS protection, so $1k is possible.
  - valarauca1 12y ago
    Larger, when you start to get into 100-200+ concurrent players I can start to understand but when you have about 100 total users its around 3/4 to half that cost.
jebblue 12y ago
>> What position do Mojang feel they are in to dictate how people play the game? https://account.mojang.com/documents/minecraft_eula https://account.mojang.com/documents/minecraft_eula "you must not: give copies of our Game to anyone else; make commercial use of anything we‘ve made; try to make money from anything we‘ve made; or let other people get access to anything we‘ve made in a way that is unfair or unreasonable."
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

valarauca1 12y ago

The problem is a lot of server admins claim it costs $1000-2000+ a month to run a unmodded minecraft server (with ~100 players). And a lot of players simply accept that as true.

pascoej 12y ago
To be fair, it would take a very beefy server to run the vanilla server with 100 players. When dealing with a high volume of players, using mods like spigot is essential.
jamescun 12y ago
Depends on your country but I was involved in the running of a Minecraft server a couple of years ago with about ~100 simultaneous players and our server costs were about £400 ($650?) a month in a UK datacentre; so $1000/month wouldn't be impossible. We could have saved some money by using a cheaper European provider (iirc OVH had a similar spec'd server for £200), but we were all based in the UK so the low latency was a major benefit. The UK server provider market really needs some disruption.
wfn 12y ago
Yup. Both vanilla minecraft and bukkit are terrible at multithreading. Bukkit's plugin API doesn't use locks (iirc), so having the plugins be able to run in a safe multithreaded fashion is a clusterfuck. It's possible to do that, it's just a lot of tedious work, rewriting essential parts of the code, etc. Mojang ain't helpin' here. If you run a server and have lots of players on, or whatever, you'll see all but one of your server's cores idling by. 'tis sad. ..so lots of things will be cpu-frequency-bound. Memory consumption is another thing, but if you have lots of memory and SSD, your server will be able to do things. Still though, I believe the way everything is written, it's a very uneconomic use of hardware resources. Instead of focusing on core code and overall quality and performance improvements, Mojang just keeps shitting out new game features. I see their rationale (short term $, etc.), but when they then go about talking about how they don't like large expensive server operators taking money, it kind of puts me into an angry mood.
pktgen 12y ago
Large Minecraft servers generally need sizable DDoS protection, so $1k is possible.
- valarauca1 12y ago
  Larger, when you start to get into 100-200+ concurrent players I can start to understand but when you have about 100 total users its around 3/4 to half that cost.

jebblue 12y ago

>> What position do Mojang feel they are in to dictate how people play the game? https://account.mojang.com/documents/minecraft_eula https://account.mojang.com/documents/minecraft_eula "you must not: give copies of our Game to anyone else; make commercial use of anything we‘ve made; try to make money from anything we‘ve made; or let other people get access to anything we‘ve made in a way that is unfair or unreasonable."

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]