14 ms·

Literally worse than EA

262 points by itafroma 12y ago

awjr 12y ago
Yes Minecraft is awesome, however the selling of addons is just one more revenue stream to keep a server alive and the user base engaged. There has to be perceived value in having the addon to make the user experience better. I think this sums up the sentiment from a server's point of view: http://sterlingplays.com/ http://sterlingplays.com/
- dingdingdang 12y ago
  Good article, just goes to show that best sentiments from the maker doesn't necessarily add up to best solution for the end users - hope these people will end up in dialogue, seems worthwhile since their goalpost (getting people to enjoy, and keep enjoying, Minecraft) is pretty much the same.
- shadowmint 12y ago
  However, that is EXACTLY what you’re encouraging here. Now not only will players who don’t want to pay not be able to have access to every custom-built feature or gameplay experience, they won’t have access to any of them because they won’t be able to get into the server in the first place. What kind of strawman arguement is that? Players unwilling to pay for feature X (previously unavailable to non paying customers), will now not be able have access to it as it wont exist at all. What a compelling argument. I suppose they wont have the luxury of watching other people having more fun than them now. How terrible for the players. (I suppose there are some valid points in there, but after reading that I found it hard to take seriously)
- networked 12y ago
  If the players come to those server networks looking for the custom gameplay experiences they provide and every network stands to lose a lot of money from the EULA change what prevents them from hiring developers to replace Minecraft with a custom client? I mean this as a genuine question.
  - Negitivefrags 12y ago
    You are falling in to the very trap that this entire article is about. Nobody is losing money from this EULA change. The EULA already forbade this and always did. The EULA is only more liberal than it was before. If they were willing to flout it before than there is no reason they shouldn't be willing to continue to flout it now.
    - networked 12y ago
      In the post that awjr links to above the author claims that a Mojang employee has interpreted the previous EULA for them as allowing this ("I personally discussed our rank system with a member of your business team at Minecon last year and he confirmed we were in compliance with the EULA. The only rule was to not sell Mojang IP [...]"), although it does not make it clear as to how official their discussion was. With my question I didn't mean to imply that I have an opinion on this matter either way. I'm mostly wondering if the big server networks could try to cut out Mojang based on their shared (I assume) interpretation of how to the EULA has changed over time, whether it be right or wrong. Edit: clarified last sentence.
soup10 12y ago
Seems like reasonable player-friendly rules, I think minecraft has a ton of servers and sub-communities though so it will probably be quite hard to police. The idea of individual server ops creating mini-businesses seems a little odd. They could probably do more to streamline the multiplayer experience for players and server-ops.
davidbanham 12y ago
Hosting game servers is hard, expensive work. Hosting Minecraft servers is even tougher since the hardware requirements are pretty steep and the main userbase doesn't have much money to kick into the pot. Minefold was a YC company that tried to make a go of monetising Minecraft hosting in the Right Way. They were smart guys and built a great platform, but they're not around any more. I believe it's because it was just too hard to get Minecraft users to pay anything for their servers. We looked into ways to incorporate advertising into Minecraft in a player-friendly way. Mojang weren't interested in helping, but it wasn't the technical barrier that stopped us. It was inability to find buyers for the ad slots given the perceived demographic of the game. Online multiplayer doesn't happen well without servers to mediate the experience. Those servers cost money. This remains a massive unsolved problem in the gaming industry.
- espadrine 12y ago
  > inability to find buyers for the ad slots given the perceived demographic I would love for you to expand on that. Is there an age range that no buyers in the ad business are interested in? What aspect of the demographic was toxic to them? How do they measure how effective a demographic is?
  - JoachimSchipper 12y ago
    I'd imagine that you're selecting for gamers (often young people with little money) playing a nearly-free game (further selecting for "little money") that they usually keep playing for a long time (so even if they had money, they're not looking to spend it).
  - ableal 12y ago
    We're talking ten year old children, in my experience. I'm slightly amazed at how much they love playing Minecraft. With home WiFi they can run their own servers in their touch devices, and run around in each others play areas. P.S. I greatly appreciate Markus Persson's integrity, and consider this game one of my best purchases ever.
    - 12y ago
asiekierka 12y ago
What about functionality added by mods which are not directly made for Minecraft? Spout used that loophole (where Spout was a voxel mod API and SpoutCraft was a Minecraft implementation of it) to allow selling mods.
- amaranth 12y ago
  Since Spout never really existed as a working Minecraft server and SpoutCraft was a vanilla client mod I'll assume you mean they were doing selling while being vanilla mods. In that case, the most likely reason they got away with it isn't because it was a loophole but because it was so under the radar Mojang didn't notice or care.
delucain 12y ago
Maybe this is a little off-topic, and I don't want to sound like an ungrateful player of minecraft. I actually really love the game and have put more hours into it than just about any other game but a few key titles like the Diablo, Elder Scrolls, and Fallout series. But, can someone explain to me how a game that has grossed roughly half a billion dollars (based on estimates I've read for all platforms) is still so feature bare compared to other games in its financial ballpark? I am honestly curious, because it doesn't sound like Notch is cruising the Caribbean in a 175' yacht or anything.
- easytiger 12y ago
  Think Lego. I think estimates are that notch personally pulled in about $100m a year during the initial boom. I guess he just doesn't like boats. Which is understandable for a guy who grew up in front of a keyboard
- dagw 12y ago
  because it doesn't sound like Notch is cruising the Caribbean in a 175' yacht or anything. He did however recently make news by buying the most expensive apartment in Stockholm.
- watwut 12y ago
  It is strategy, they want to use money to finance other future projects. According to one interview I have read, money from Minecraft are used to pay bills and development of other games until they luck out again and have another hit. Developing games is risky and there are no guarantees of success. So, the successful projects have to pay for unsuccessful ones.
  - wldcordeiro 12y ago
    Just to add to your last sentence, successful projects have to pay for projects not yet ready to release as well as unsuccessful ones (whether due to them flopping or lack of critical mass.)
- pjc50 12y ago
  There's a lot of luck there, but it's a good reminder that features don't sell games. "Fun" sells games, and it's very hard to quantify.
shadowmint 12y ago
One price for all player teirs seem pretty reasonable in my oppinion. The freemium business model is really only viable if you can hook the few so called 'high payer' users and everyone else gets a rubbish experience. Notch is notoriously anti '"free to play" ... with in app purchases', and keeping that away from minecraft will ultimately benefit the players. There's been some pretty heavy vitriol from seever hosts about this, but honestly, when you play in someone elses playground, its their way or the highway. Thats what you get.
throwaway_yy2Di 12y ago
"The EULA for Minecraft says you can’t make money of Minecraft. If you make mods, they have to be free." I don't understand the legal theory behind this. Is this contract law? If a programmer wrote a third-party mod without buying the software (say by reading an API description), would they still be bound to its terms? Also, does restricting modification like this infringe on "first sale" rights?
- tptacek 12y ago
  You're asking if there's such a thing as an enforceable noncommercial license?
  - throwaway_yy2Di 12y ago
    Well there are well-known noncommercial clauses about redistribution of software. But this license is about restricting third-party modifications, like plugins, which don't contain copyrighted code, but do link to it and target its API. So yes I'm asking if that's enforceable, and what type of law allows for that (contract or copyright?). Or did you mean noncommercial use, as in evaluation licenses? (edit: several edits because I am confused)
    - avz 12y ago
      I think the recent Oracle vs Google case is relevant here as it involves the question of whether APIs are copyrightable. The case is about a subset of Java APIs included in Android. Note that the Android implementation exposed by those APIs is new and did not involve copying code from Java standard libraries (modulo rangeCheck()). The district court ruled that so long as implementation is different you are free to provide the same API. A federal circuit court reversed this ruling this year. The case is now back in the district court for consideration of whether the use of the API falls under the fair-use clause. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_v._Google http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_v._Google
      - throwaway_yy2Di 12y ago
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
nl 12y ago
Oh wow. Minecraft. I have an 8yo boy, so I spend a lot more time thinking about this than I would like. I think Mojang has it's priorities slightly wrong here. At the moment much of the interesting stuff in Minecraft is done via mods. But the user experience for that is pretty close to pre-Google search: browse through random forums to find links to dodgy download sites that attempt to push malware or porn to you. Then when you find a working download, you have to install. Inevitably that means clashes with existing mods, and hours trying different versions of things that some random person on a forum claims work. FFS, I'm a Java programmer, and I can't work out how to make this shit work most of the time. In my view Mojang should do the following: Build a working, stable official Mod API, which at least attempts to make it possible to determine if different mods will work together Implement an in-game app store, and let mod authors sell their mods. I'd much prefer to spend a dollar on a new mod rather than the horrible, horrible experience it is now. Rant over..
- arrrg 12y ago
  Huh? Again, this is the misconception that game developers can only ever do one thing at a time. True for one or two person developers, not true for Mojang. They can afford lawyers. Developers will have nothing to do with the implementation of this policy. They are working on the modding API, just as before. Also, this was triggered from the outside. Someone asked for clarification on the policy, Mojang looked over all the feedback and came back with this response. It’s purely reactive, not an initiative. You are talking nonsense. Plausible sounding nonsense, but still nonsense.
  - nl 12y ago
    It's good that they are (allegedly) working on a plugin API[1]. That is necessary but insufficient to fix the problems I outlined. Additionally, the plugin API is clearly a low priority: it was supposed to be released in 2010, then spoken about in 2012, and now the website and github page have been taken down (according to [1]). At the practical level "working on it for over 4 years with signs it might not be shipped" and "it doesn't exist" are pretty close to the same thing. But hopefully my pessimism in this is misplaced and it ships. I haven't heard anything about Mojang implementing an app store model. Unless I've missed something it seems to me you are talking past me, since that was basically the whole thrust of my comment. I didn't say anything at all about their statement - my post was an offtopic rant about other problems in the Mincraft ecosystem. Specific to the statement, I think it sounds good but shows misguided priorities: keep it cheap rather than fix problems. If you could point out specifically which parts of my post you believe are nonsense that might be useful. [1] http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Plugin_API http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Plugin_API
spain 12y ago
Following the link on that page to the "translated" version of the new EULA, their reasoning seems to still be "we don’t want our players to be exploited or to have a frustrating time unless they pay." [0] I find a lot of things wrong with this mentality, mostly in that it assumes that the servers that charge for gameplay have some kind of monopoly over the servers. If you don't want to pay for gameplay, just visit another server. You don't have to put up with them. Heck, if you really wanted to you could host your own. The bottom line is you don't need to pay anyone, they're not exploiting you. If you're getting frustrated because they're charging you then that's your own dumb fault for visiting that server and putting up with it. If you want to pay, go ahead, support the server hosts. All of this is under the false assumption that people are being forced into paying, which simply isn't true. [0] https://mojang.com/2014/06/lets-talk-server-monetisation/ https://mojang.com/2014/06/lets-talk-server-monetisation/
- Tyr42 12y ago
  One of the problems with that is that people have friends. That can cause some stickiness in server choice.
  - spain 12y ago
    That's still their problem, not the servers.
SteveC 12y ago
As someone who actually runs a Minecraft server and has developed several mini games and around 50 plugins, I'd like to clarify a few things to people who aren't involved in Minecraft. * Minecraft is pretty expensive to host. The top servers are paying tens of thousands a month in hosting. Only a few servers make enough to cover wages. Most just barely scrape by. DDOS protection is pretty much essential to any server over a certain size, which increases costs significantly. * Most Minecraft servers are no longer vanilla Minecraft servers. The Minecraft server software is pretty bad in both functionality and performance. Most servers use Craftbukkit or Spigot, which has a plugin API (Spigot is a patched version of Craftbukkit with mostly performance fixes). Craftbukkit is open source, but is a legally gray area as it contains the decompiled code from the Mojang server. There is an API for writing plugins called Bukkit which is totally separate from the craftbukkit server implementation. * The large servers have tried to work with Mojang to get a set of rules they can work with. Mojang listened to them and actually added clauses prohibiting some of the things they said they needed to even have a chance of this working for them. * While Mojang claim their EULA never allowed servers to make money, their first one actually did. They've also granted written permission to some servers. Last year they had a panel at Minecon were top server owners actually talked about how their server makes money. Despite what their EULA says, Mojang has been basically telling servers it was fine to monetize up until now. * Their new terms force servers to remove perks that have already been sold to players. Many server owners are objecting to this as it forces them to "steal" things that players have bought. * Bungeecord is a proxy system that allows players to switch between multiple servers without logging out. The Minecraft clients multiplayer server list support has barely improved since Alpha. Mojang's new EULA treats a bungeecord proxy as a single server. This means that although they allow owners to charge players to access a server, it's pretty much impossible to do without inconveniencing players. * The Minecraft network protocol is not patented. A number of open source server implementations exist which do no use any Mojang code. Since these changes have been announced these projects have become much more active with disgruntled developers starting to contribute. It is believed that the EULA cannot legally be enforced on these servers, although one Mojang developer made a statement to the contrary. * No final draft for the new EULA has actually be made available, but a date for compliance has already been set. 1st August 2014. * Mojang released their Realms hosting service worldwide just before making these changes, prompting many to accuse them of trying to eliminate the competition. However, they could simply stop releasing their server software if that was their intention, so most people don't believe this to be true.
davidgerard 12y ago
Herobrine isn't real? BAAAAASTAAAAAAA
devicenull 12y ago
So, the question becomes who is going to enforce these rules? If you have these rules in your EULA, but you aren't enforcing them, you might as well not have them. Are they going to start suing people? I can't see a whole lot of alternatives here.
wtbob 12y ago
They still don't get it. There is absolutely nothing wrong with server owners offering improved gameplay in return for financial support. Minecraft allows griefing (destruction of another player's work); there is nothing wrong with a server owner enabling an anti-griefing mod (incidentally, not offered by Mojang: literally the only thing which makes public servers tolerable is 100% not Mojang's work) only for paying players, but not for non-paying players. The alternatives would be to offer it to everyone—meaning that folks could cause trouble with the anti-griefing features, requiring admin time (and hence money)—or to not allow the general public on, meaning that prospective players would be unable to evaluate the server, or to turn off anti-griefing and leave the server public, meaning that everyone would have to have hidden bases and live in perpetual fear of griefers. That doesn't sound like an improvement. Skyblock is a style of gameplay made possible by modmakers (not by Mojang); there is nothing wrong with offering additional starting resources in exchange for financial support. Mojang have made approximately half a billion dollars from Minecraft; society has rewarded them well. How 'bout they start giving back, rather than seeking to exploit their monopoly position? (No, I don't run a public server, but I do play on them, and it sickens me to see their business model destroyed by a monopolist)

262 points by itafroma 12y ago

awjr 12y ago

Yes Minecraft is awesome, however the selling of addons is just one more revenue stream to keep a server alive and the user base engaged. There has to be perceived value in having the addon to make the user experience better. I think this sums up the sentiment from a server's point of view: http://sterlingplays.com/ http://sterlingplays.com/

dingdingdang 12y ago
Good article, just goes to show that best sentiments from the maker doesn't necessarily add up to best solution for the end users - hope these people will end up in dialogue, seems worthwhile since their goalpost (getting people to enjoy, and keep enjoying, Minecraft) is pretty much the same.
shadowmint 12y ago
However, that is EXACTLY what you’re encouraging here. Now not only will players who don’t want to pay not be able to have access to every custom-built feature or gameplay experience, they won’t have access to any of them because they won’t be able to get into the server in the first place. What kind of strawman arguement is that? Players unwilling to pay for feature X (previously unavailable to non paying customers), will now not be able have access to it as it wont exist at all. What a compelling argument. I suppose they wont have the luxury of watching other people having more fun than them now. How terrible for the players. (I suppose there are some valid points in there, but after reading that I found it hard to take seriously)
networked 12y ago
If the players come to those server networks looking for the custom gameplay experiences they provide and every network stands to lose a lot of money from the EULA change what prevents them from hiring developers to replace Minecraft with a custom client? I mean this as a genuine question.
- Negitivefrags 12y ago
  You are falling in to the very trap that this entire article is about. Nobody is losing money from this EULA change. The EULA already forbade this and always did. The EULA is only more liberal than it was before. If they were willing to flout it before than there is no reason they shouldn't be willing to continue to flout it now.
  - networked 12y ago
    In the post that awjr links to above the author claims that a Mojang employee has interpreted the previous EULA for them as allowing this ("I personally discussed our rank system with a member of your business team at Minecon last year and he confirmed we were in compliance with the EULA. The only rule was to not sell Mojang IP [...]"), although it does not make it clear as to how official their discussion was. With my question I didn't mean to imply that I have an opinion on this matter either way. I'm mostly wondering if the big server networks could try to cut out Mojang based on their shared (I assume) interpretation of how to the EULA has changed over time, whether it be right or wrong. Edit: clarified last sentence.

soup10 12y ago

Seems like reasonable player-friendly rules, I think minecraft has a ton of servers and sub-communities though so it will probably be quite hard to police. The idea of individual server ops creating mini-businesses seems a little odd. They could probably do more to streamline the multiplayer experience for players and server-ops.

davidbanham 12y ago

Hosting game servers is hard, expensive work. Hosting Minecraft servers is even tougher since the hardware requirements are pretty steep and the main userbase doesn't have much money to kick into the pot. Minefold was a YC company that tried to make a go of monetising Minecraft hosting in the Right Way. They were smart guys and built a great platform, but they're not around any more. I believe it's because it was just too hard to get Minecraft users to pay anything for their servers. We looked into ways to incorporate advertising into Minecraft in a player-friendly way. Mojang weren't interested in helping, but it wasn't the technical barrier that stopped us. It was inability to find buyers for the ad slots given the perceived demographic of the game. Online multiplayer doesn't happen well without servers to mediate the experience. Those servers cost money. This remains a massive unsolved problem in the gaming industry.

espadrine 12y ago
> inability to find buyers for the ad slots given the perceived demographic I would love for you to expand on that. Is there an age range that no buyers in the ad business are interested in? What aspect of the demographic was toxic to them? How do they measure how effective a demographic is?
- JoachimSchipper 12y ago
  I'd imagine that you're selecting for gamers (often young people with little money) playing a nearly-free game (further selecting for "little money") that they usually keep playing for a long time (so even if they had money, they're not looking to spend it).
- ableal 12y ago
  We're talking ten year old children, in my experience. I'm slightly amazed at how much they love playing Minecraft. With home WiFi they can run their own servers in their touch devices, and run around in each others play areas. P.S. I greatly appreciate Markus Persson's integrity, and consider this game one of my best purchases ever.
  - 12y ago

asiekierka 12y ago

What about functionality added by mods which are not directly made for Minecraft? Spout used that loophole (where Spout was a voxel mod API and SpoutCraft was a Minecraft implementation of it) to allow selling mods.

amaranth 12y ago
Since Spout never really existed as a working Minecraft server and SpoutCraft was a vanilla client mod I'll assume you mean they were doing selling while being vanilla mods. In that case, the most likely reason they got away with it isn't because it was a loophole but because it was so under the radar Mojang didn't notice or care.

delucain 12y ago

Maybe this is a little off-topic, and I don't want to sound like an ungrateful player of minecraft. I actually really love the game and have put more hours into it than just about any other game but a few key titles like the Diablo, Elder Scrolls, and Fallout series. But, can someone explain to me how a game that has grossed roughly half a billion dollars (based on estimates I've read for all platforms) is still so feature bare compared to other games in its financial ballpark? I am honestly curious, because it doesn't sound like Notch is cruising the Caribbean in a 175' yacht or anything.

easytiger 12y ago
Think Lego. I think estimates are that notch personally pulled in about $100m a year during the initial boom. I guess he just doesn't like boats. Which is understandable for a guy who grew up in front of a keyboard
dagw 12y ago
because it doesn't sound like Notch is cruising the Caribbean in a 175' yacht or anything. He did however recently make news by buying the most expensive apartment in Stockholm.
watwut 12y ago
It is strategy, they want to use money to finance other future projects. According to one interview I have read, money from Minecraft are used to pay bills and development of other games until they luck out again and have another hit. Developing games is risky and there are no guarantees of success. So, the successful projects have to pay for unsuccessful ones.
- wldcordeiro 12y ago
  Just to add to your last sentence, successful projects have to pay for projects not yet ready to release as well as unsuccessful ones (whether due to them flopping or lack of critical mass.)
pjc50 12y ago
There's a lot of luck there, but it's a good reminder that features don't sell games. "Fun" sells games, and it's very hard to quantify.

shadowmint 12y ago

One price for all player teirs seem pretty reasonable in my oppinion. The freemium business model is really only viable if you can hook the few so called 'high payer' users and everyone else gets a rubbish experience. Notch is notoriously anti '"free to play" ... with in app purchases', and keeping that away from minecraft will ultimately benefit the players. There's been some pretty heavy vitriol from seever hosts about this, but honestly, when you play in someone elses playground, its their way or the highway. Thats what you get.

throwaway_yy2Di 12y ago

"The EULA for Minecraft says you can’t make money of Minecraft. If you make mods, they have to be free." I don't understand the legal theory behind this. Is this contract law? If a programmer wrote a third-party mod without buying the software (say by reading an API description), would they still be bound to its terms? Also, does restricting modification like this infringe on "first sale" rights?

tptacek 12y ago
You're asking if there's such a thing as an enforceable noncommercial license?
- throwaway_yy2Di 12y ago
  Well there are well-known noncommercial clauses about redistribution of software. But this license is about restricting third-party modifications, like plugins, which don't contain copyrighted code, but do link to it and target its API. So yes I'm asking if that's enforceable, and what type of law allows for that (contract or copyright?). Or did you mean noncommercial use, as in evaluation licenses? (edit: several edits because I am confused)
  - avz 12y ago
    I think the recent Oracle vs Google case is relevant here as it involves the question of whether APIs are copyrightable. The case is about a subset of Java APIs included in Android. Note that the Android implementation exposed by those APIs is new and did not involve copying code from Java standard libraries (modulo rangeCheck()). The district court ruled that so long as implementation is different you are free to provide the same API. A federal circuit court reversed this ruling this year. The case is now back in the district court for consideration of whether the use of the API falls under the fair-use clause. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_v._Google http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_v._Google
    - throwaway_yy2Di 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

nl 12y ago

Oh wow. Minecraft. I have an 8yo boy, so I spend a lot more time thinking about this than I would like. I think Mojang has it's priorities slightly wrong here. At the moment much of the interesting stuff in Minecraft is done via mods. But the user experience for that is pretty close to pre-Google search: browse through random forums to find links to dodgy download sites that attempt to push malware or porn to you. Then when you find a working download, you have to install. Inevitably that means clashes with existing mods, and hours trying different versions of things that some random person on a forum claims work. FFS, I'm a Java programmer, and I can't work out how to make this shit work most of the time. In my view Mojang should do the following: Build a working, stable official Mod API, which at least attempts to make it possible to determine if different mods will work together Implement an in-game app store, and let mod authors sell their mods. I'd much prefer to spend a dollar on a new mod rather than the horrible, horrible experience it is now. Rant over..

arrrg 12y ago
Huh? Again, this is the misconception that game developers can only ever do one thing at a time. True for one or two person developers, not true for Mojang. They can afford lawyers. Developers will have nothing to do with the implementation of this policy. They are working on the modding API, just as before. Also, this was triggered from the outside. Someone asked for clarification on the policy, Mojang looked over all the feedback and came back with this response. It’s purely reactive, not an initiative. You are talking nonsense. Plausible sounding nonsense, but still nonsense.
- nl 12y ago
  It's good that they are (allegedly) working on a plugin API[1]. That is necessary but insufficient to fix the problems I outlined. Additionally, the plugin API is clearly a low priority: it was supposed to be released in 2010, then spoken about in 2012, and now the website and github page have been taken down (according to [1]). At the practical level "working on it for over 4 years with signs it might not be shipped" and "it doesn't exist" are pretty close to the same thing. But hopefully my pessimism in this is misplaced and it ships. I haven't heard anything about Mojang implementing an app store model. Unless I've missed something it seems to me you are talking past me, since that was basically the whole thrust of my comment. I didn't say anything at all about their statement - my post was an offtopic rant about other problems in the Mincraft ecosystem. Specific to the statement, I think it sounds good but shows misguided priorities: keep it cheap rather than fix problems. If you could point out specifically which parts of my post you believe are nonsense that might be useful. [1] http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Plugin_API http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Plugin_API

spain 12y ago

Following the link on that page to the "translated" version of the new EULA, their reasoning seems to still be "we don’t want our players to be exploited or to have a frustrating time unless they pay." [0] I find a lot of things wrong with this mentality, mostly in that it assumes that the servers that charge for gameplay have some kind of monopoly over the servers. If you don't want to pay for gameplay, just visit another server. You don't have to put up with them. Heck, if you really wanted to you could host your own. The bottom line is you don't need to pay anyone, they're not exploiting you. If you're getting frustrated because they're charging you then that's your own dumb fault for visiting that server and putting up with it. If you want to pay, go ahead, support the server hosts. All of this is under the false assumption that people are being forced into paying, which simply isn't true. [0] https://mojang.com/2014/06/lets-talk-server-monetisation/ https://mojang.com/2014/06/lets-talk-server-monetisation/

Tyr42 12y ago
One of the problems with that is that people have friends. That can cause some stickiness in server choice.
- spain 12y ago
  That's still their problem, not the servers.

SteveC 12y ago

As someone who actually runs a Minecraft server and has developed several mini games and around 50 plugins, I'd like to clarify a few things to people who aren't involved in Minecraft. * Minecraft is pretty expensive to host. The top servers are paying tens of thousands a month in hosting. Only a few servers make enough to cover wages. Most just barely scrape by. DDOS protection is pretty much essential to any server over a certain size, which increases costs significantly. * Most Minecraft servers are no longer vanilla Minecraft servers. The Minecraft server software is pretty bad in both functionality and performance. Most servers use Craftbukkit or Spigot, which has a plugin API (Spigot is a patched version of Craftbukkit with mostly performance fixes). Craftbukkit is open source, but is a legally gray area as it contains the decompiled code from the Mojang server. There is an API for writing plugins called Bukkit which is totally separate from the craftbukkit server implementation. * The large servers have tried to work with Mojang to get a set of rules they can work with. Mojang listened to them and actually added clauses prohibiting some of the things they said they needed to even have a chance of this working for them. * While Mojang claim their EULA never allowed servers to make money, their first one actually did. They've also granted written permission to some servers. Last year they had a panel at Minecon were top server owners actually talked about how their server makes money. Despite what their EULA says, Mojang has been basically telling servers it was fine to monetize up until now. * Their new terms force servers to remove perks that have already been sold to players. Many server owners are objecting to this as it forces them to "steal" things that players have bought. * Bungeecord is a proxy system that allows players to switch between multiple servers without logging out. The Minecraft clients multiplayer server list support has barely improved since Alpha. Mojang's new EULA treats a bungeecord proxy as a single server. This means that although they allow owners to charge players to access a server, it's pretty much impossible to do without inconveniencing players. * The Minecraft network protocol is not patented. A number of open source server implementations exist which do no use any Mojang code. Since these changes have been announced these projects have become much more active with disgruntled developers starting to contribute. It is believed that the EULA cannot legally be enforced on these servers, although one Mojang developer made a statement to the contrary. * No final draft for the new EULA has actually be made available, but a date for compliance has already been set. 1st August 2014. * Mojang released their Realms hosting service worldwide just before making these changes, prompting many to accuse them of trying to eliminate the competition. However, they could simply stop releasing their server software if that was their intention, so most people don't believe this to be true.

davidgerard 12y ago

Herobrine isn't real? BAAAAASTAAAAAAA

devicenull 12y ago

So, the question becomes who is going to enforce these rules? If you have these rules in your EULA, but you aren't enforcing them, you might as well not have them. Are they going to start suing people? I can't see a whole lot of alternatives here.

wtbob 12y ago

They still don't get it. There is absolutely nothing wrong with server owners offering improved gameplay in return for financial support. Minecraft allows griefing (destruction of another player's work); there is nothing wrong with a server owner enabling an anti-griefing mod (incidentally, not offered by Mojang: literally the only thing which makes public servers tolerable is 100% not Mojang's work) only for paying players, but not for non-paying players. The alternatives would be to offer it to everyone—meaning that folks could cause trouble with the anti-griefing features, requiring admin time (and hence money)—or to not allow the general public on, meaning that prospective players would be unable to evaluate the server, or to turn off anti-griefing and leave the server public, meaning that everyone would have to have hidden bases and live in perpetual fear of griefers. That doesn't sound like an improvement. Skyblock is a style of gameplay made possible by modmakers (not by Mojang); there is nothing wrong with offering additional starting resources in exchange for financial support. Mojang have made approximately half a billion dollars from Minecraft; society has rewarded them well. How 'bout they start giving back, rather than seeking to exploit their monopoly position? (No, I don't run a public server, but I do play on them, and it sickens me to see their business model destroyed by a monopolist)