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Comment by cookiecaper | Hacker News Reader

Were people able to play during this outage? My understanding is that you must log in to notch's servers to play and I find that really asinine. I am not exactly clear on the point, however, because he claims that there is "no DRM", but obviously requiring approval from his server is a pretty draconian form of DRM in effect, whether he is actively deploying DRM-like functionality at the time or not.

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you can play single-player and on non-authenticated multi-player servers without the central authentication server being up.

You can play single-player as long as you've logged in at least once ever. I think it's a very reasonable security scheme, and it allowed me to play for a month or two while I didn't have internet access at home.

What's the difference between an authenticated and non-authenticated multiplayer server?

One requires authentication from Notches sever.

Uh, right, but why would you run an authenticated v. non-authenticated server? Just to prevent pirates from connecting to your server because you support notch? Is it like Battlefield or those other games with ranked v. non-ranked where ranked offers persistent stats? I am curious if there is any benefit in running an authenticated server other than moral support for appearing on notch's list of approved players.

Because it offers a centralised way of nuking players off your server. And if they want to play again, a new copy of the game is 15 dollars more expensive than refreshing your IP address.

From what I understand the non-paid users have a much higher probability to be "griefers" or those that destroy buildings/piss off other users.

If the server is down, you can play offline, but disables updates and custom avatar skins.

This is the sort of design I like in a game; losing access to the central servers only stops features that need a central server (patches, authentication against a central account for multiplayer) and everything else keeps on working just fine.

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