People don’t even want you to play a video game in private now.
"Gibbons cut in: “They’re illegal. They are not in any way affiliated with Microsoft. Microsoft, for Minecraft, has gotten a lot of criticism because of those community servers not employing the same safety standards that Microsoft does on their Minecraft servers.”
This is why people that are in no way familiar with how games work should not be allowed to say a single word for and against gaming but idiots are more easily manipulated to say dumb shit like this.
this but replace games with any consumer regulation and gaming with pedophilia/terrorism
I…what?
What a complete fucking moron of a representative. They straight-up said the quiet part out loud. They just want to control everything.
Correction:
They want their handlers to control everything. As long as their check cashes out, they’ll do whatever it takes.
I thought Microsoft itself provided the means for the players to host servers.
You can host through Microsoft, using a service called Minecraft Worlds, but the license agreement also entitles you to host your own server using whatever infrastructure you like, with certain restrictions on content and monetization (most notably, you aren’t supposed to include things like gambling and lootboxes using real-world money or MTX currency that can be purchased with real money).
I’m all for piracy, but hosting your own Minecraft server isn’t even piracy, it’s explicitly allowed!
They do.
However there are a large number of servers that utilize plugins to strip out Microsoft’s invasive chat monitoring where you can get banned from all online play for saying no no words, regardless of the rules of the actual server you’re on. There’s more nuance to it than that, but there are a lot of ways the Microsoft chat reporting system is being abused right now. There was even an exploit recently that allowed people to send fake chat message data back to Microsoft to get arbitrary users banned for things they never said. So Microsoft says “we’re doing this thing to address concerns about online content and predators” and major servers go “Microsoft you’re just making things worse”.
Additionally, there are “offline servers” that use mods to patch out all communication with Microsoft/Mojang/Minecraft systems, and various other pieces of code that attempt to enforce only paid players joining a server, ultimately allowing people to connect without having actually purchased the game.
While this politician is full of shit, I can understand the fervor. Especially if they have a Minecraft playing kid.
To give an example of the state of some of the most popular servers, there is one heavily customized server that allows for effectively any client-side mods to be run on it. It has one of the largest developed maps of any server ever, and effectively allows hacking. There are entire sub-sub-sub communities making mods just for this server to help streamers hide details of how the block textures are randomly rotated that could give away base locations. It’s absurd.
Anyway, someone recently did a massive coding project figuring out how they could back up the whole map as a regular user. They also did some data analytics on the map. One of the data points was amount of “5x5 obsidian pinwheels”, better known as swastikas.
Sure, it’s edgy internet assholes, but it’s definitely an image issue that Microsoft would love to have useful idiots like this guy paper over.
Additionally, there are “offline servers” that use mods to patch out all communication with Microsoft/Mojang/Minecraft systems, and various other pieces of code that attempt to enforce only paid players joining a server, ultimately allowing people to connect without having actually purchased the game.
Not sure if this is still the case, but at least a few years ago, it didn’t even require any mods. It was just a boolean toggle in the standard config file.
https://minecraft.wiki/w/Server.properties
The
online-modekey controls whether players without a Minecraft account (i.e. paid for the game) can join. It looks likeenforce-secure-profilehas something to do with chat messages getting sent to Microsoft. The history section doesn’t mention either of these ever getting removed.online-modewill become important when the devs decide Minecraft has reached end of life and shut down the authentication servers. Players who have a copy of the game client will still be able to play together by connecting to a server withonline-mode=false.online-mode=trueserves the purpose of limiting players to those who coughed up money for an account, helping to protect the server from ne’er-do-wells.
Super interesting. Thank you for the detailed response!
THE OLDEST ANARCHY SERVER IN MINECRAFT!!!
They do. As the article says, you can download a .jar file from Minecraft’s official website to host your own server
Not only did 5 small monkeys in a trench coat make this ludicrous statement, but the ESA doubled down and embarrassed themselves and Microsoft in the process later on with a written statement that sounds even dumber, and even more like a threat towards anybody running private servers than anything else.
In a statement to PC Gamer, the ESA wrote that, so far as it’s concerned, “Private servers infringe on the intellectual property (IP) rights of game publishers. Publishers reserve the right to exercise their rights against them.”
I guess we need to take down Microsoft now. You see, they’re using their site to distribute pirated games, constituting clear copyright infringement. You can get the server .jar from their minecraft.net site.
I’ve never wanted to self-host a Minecraft server more in my life than I do right now.
Here’s to Luanti!
