As someone who has enjoyed Minecraft for many years, running servers for friends and friends of friends since high school, this is quite disturbing.
Simply put: I do not care what someone else thinks about someone's behavior on someone else's server. Regardless of the nature of their behavior.
If someone says something nasty on someone else's server, and that player gets reported by another player on that server, and this results in a ban, now the 'offending' player cannot play on my server. Even though I could not care less what they said in that other server!
I've always moderated my servers as I see fit. But now the code my servers execute will betray my wishes? Thankfully, private servers are often running modified code supporting plugins, and I am hoping that the community further subverts this process with things like this: https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/no-chat-reports
It's pretty sad, but frankly expected given Microsoft's goals in the market with regard to authoritarian ('parental') controls in their investments.
I will never again join any other server except those I run myself, because I don't want to end up banned from joining my own private server. This does still leave a slight risk of being reported on my own server. But at least it is far less likely, since we're all friends and like each other. We all interact how we want and we love each other for it.
If all else fails, I will have to switch my servers to online-mode=false, and add an authentication plugin to verify usernames 'manually' (instead of my server asking auth servers upon player login). This may require my players to use 'cracked' clients that will masquerade as any chosen username without consulting auth servers. It's a last resort for sure.
> If all else fails, I will have to switch my servers to online-mode=false, and add an authentication plugin to verify usernames 'manually' (instead of my server asking auth servers upon player login). This may require my players to use 'cracked' clients
For what it's worth, cracked clients are not presently required to join a online-mode=false server. Maybe they'll change this too, but presently legit clients can join cracked servers without trouble.
Well, there's always MineTest I guess (edit: a high-quality free and open-source and nearly identical alternative to Minecraft). Microsoft infects everything it touches. I am reluctant to use .NET Core stuff over JVM stuff solely because of things like this and [insert latest .NET Core proprietary code fiasco here].
> Well, there's always MineTest I guess (edit: a high-quality [...]
Minetest has a lot of potential, but presently it is very rough around the edges. As it stands, Minetest is for hackers to roll their own minecraft, not a ready-to-play game polished up for a general audience. Particularly, the in-game menus are generally quite poor and incomplete; you can't even rebind your mouse keys in-game, you have to edit your minetest.conf for that: https://wiki.minetest.net/Controls#PC
The proof is (relatively) trivial, since MS rolled out a chat-signing feature a while back. Basically all chat messages go through a similar handshake to the user-server-auth one when users first join a server. So if a chat message gets reported, MS can be pretty certain who did the reporting, and that the reported messages were, in fact, made by the reported party.
The real problem is the direct attack on the autonomy of server operators. Each Minecraft server is a separate community, and they should be left to their own devices to form their own internal expectations of behavior and speech. If Microsoft wants to moderate behavior on the servers they own (Realms) or actively advertise (Whatever's going on over in Bedrock), that's fine. But when I'm paying the server bill, the only interaction with MS I want is authentication (and maybe the skin server).
I think/hope any server running in cracked mode (online-mode set to false: https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Server.properties) won't have this chat reporting. At least, it would surely be broken for anybody joining a cracked server with a cracked client. Maybe legit players on cracked servers could still be reported, if their client and the server both pass through the chat signatures.
As of right now, the chat signing (which was only used for blocking certain players' chat from appearing to you) can be disabled by the server alone, or in conjunction with the authentication.
It is unclear whether that will remain the status quo.
Why not? I think Microsoft would love to have every computer user be uniquely identifiable. Writing was on the wall a long time ago. Or windows in this case.
The fuck up is not the feature, but how this is all being communicated, executed.
You could be banned even from your own private instances, and as far as we know maybe even from running the game offline. And I say as far as we know because the rules are not explicit. It's a communication disaster.
Especially because Mojang says all the time how they respect the community and ask for their input before implementing any new features and this comes in a silent minor update (1.19.1).
Bonus points for the product team that gave a gift for everyone to transition for a Microsoft account with the promise that nothing would change. Just a year ago.
The way this is all being handled feels like a privacy invasion.
And this is not even criticizing the quality of the moderation, because nothing was shown, the rules aren't clear.
The chances of you losing literally years of a personal game with some friends on a private server, that some people even create content from, is a real possibility and Mojang is acting like this moderation should be a black box.
I can see there is a need for this, if its implemented well i think it could help a lot of people, moderators, and servers. But I cannot see how i could be implemented well? which is worrying.
Isn't the whole point of the new Microsoft account system that Microsoft now more or less knows who is actually behind each Minecraft account? I refused to migrate my account, but some of my friends have reported being made to hand over their phone numbers to Microsoft to continue playing on their legit accounts. To most of the population, handing over a phone number might as well be their government ID.
My daughter is 8 and a) has a Microsoft account, b) doesn’t have a phone. It’s been long enough I don’t remember what we needed to establish her account but it wasn’t onerous.
Why would you need to repurchase? I play with my daughter and we log in each other’s accounts. The login to the Microsoft account is inside the game - it’s not associated with the launch.
Simply put: I do not care what someone else thinks about someone's behavior on someone else's server. Regardless of the nature of their behavior.
If someone says something nasty on someone else's server, and that player gets reported by another player on that server, and this results in a ban, now the 'offending' player cannot play on my server. Even though I could not care less what they said in that other server!
I've always moderated my servers as I see fit. But now the code my servers execute will betray my wishes? Thankfully, private servers are often running modified code supporting plugins, and I am hoping that the community further subverts this process with things like this: https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/no-chat-reports
It's pretty sad, but frankly expected given Microsoft's goals in the market with regard to authoritarian ('parental') controls in their investments.
I will never again join any other server except those I run myself, because I don't want to end up banned from joining my own private server. This does still leave a slight risk of being reported on my own server. But at least it is far less likely, since we're all friends and like each other. We all interact how we want and we love each other for it.
If all else fails, I will have to switch my servers to online-mode=false, and add an authentication plugin to verify usernames 'manually' (instead of my server asking auth servers upon player login). This may require my players to use 'cracked' clients that will masquerade as any chosen username without consulting auth servers. It's a last resort for sure.