Java Edition is moving house | Hacker News Reader

Java Edition is moving house

minecraft.net

67 pointsmarkjgx51 comments

They tried to be funny but it just came off as condescending. This is honestly more annoying than the oculus account switch to Facebook for me because it’s mostly my kids that play offline and the MS accounts ask for a crapload of information.

I’m starting to think ms should be forced to spin Xbox and gaming out to a separate company (along with azure and all the big three Public clouds honestly) so they can’t do this kind of harmful unified account thing to increase their data harvesting.

> MS accounts ask for a crapload of information

You can set up children accounts, linked to yours. This is nice because it requires minimal information and allows you to set parental controls.

It seems to me that linking accounts provides a lot of information, especially special children accounts.

Well I guess I can do that now that I have to get a new account... I don’t really use parental controls. I just block their devices entirely when they don’t listen and right now they use them in public space of the house since they are pretty young. Might experiment with the safe dns stuff from cloudflare at my router.

I recently found out that to enable screen time features in Win 10, each of my kids need their own Microsoft account. A tad bit annoying, imho.

Windows 10 home is so annoying. If you accidentally connect it to WiFi first when setting it up and click through the wizard it won’t let you proceed/go back without a ms account unless you block the network connection at your router.

Yep, now I have to unplug my computer everytime I install Windows.

Thankfully Proton is removing my requirement to use Windows.

Yeah wow that does not come off well at all.

It's not good but MS allows to have multiple MS accounts meanwhile FB obviously bans. It's still far better than FB. FB also requires to upload personal info.

> MS accounts ask for a crapload of information.

The only information you need to provide for a Microsoft Account is recovery email or phone, name, and birthday if you reside in a country with a law governing minors on the internet.

What information are you referring to?

Perhaps it’s been a while since I signed up for a Microsoft account. Sounds like it’s changed... before they wanted full mailing address etc.

That takes me back, I remember trying to switch my (then) Windows Live ID to the United States so I could test Skydrive. In doing so I was locked out the the account since I didn't have a US postal address, with no way to revert my actions. I don't think I was even a teenager at the time

Please don't rewrite titles to editorialize. This in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(Submitted title was "“will require a Microsoft account to play – including Minecraft Java Edition.”)

If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but please do so in the comments. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

To me this would be unacceptable, but hopefully I don't play Minecraft.

Just imagine that one day it will happen the same way with Github. You will get the condescending bullshit explaining why it is a gift and so much better to you that you have a MS account... The truth is that Microsoft makes it clear that: "all your data belongs to us"!

I mean they're all Microsoft accounts at the end of the day and it's naive to assume that just because the accounts are "separate" that there's no cross-pollination with data. It's not that hard to match accounts up when you generate reports.

Internally this kind of stuff is always "why are we maintaining X different login systems?"

I think that it is more complex than it looks. First, separated dedicated account reduce the possibility to match it with other activities.

And with a real Microsoft account you have no choice than being forced subscribed to a dozen service that you don't care like email and co, and so easily being bounded with a lot more data points, privacy and terms conditions.

But also you will be forced to login and remain logged with such an account to play. You can not anymore throw and change your Minecraft account at will. Now this will be related to your whole Microsoft account that could be harder to change because you depend on it for other things. Think of the poor souls that do login on Windows with their Microsoft account to be able to use their computer!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Games_for_Windows

Microsoft’s incompetence when it comes to building brands tickles me to no end. They tried this back in 2006 and it worked as well as you’d predict this new attempt to work. I like to imagine that it’s the same lifer bringing up this same idea every 10 years in some back Microsoft boardroom.

Microsoft Passport was their first single-sign-on back in 1999. It might have been the first on the internet. Even then there was a huge backslash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_account#History

This may just be an autocorrect gone wrong, but FYI, you mean "backlash". "Backslash" is the character "\".

Honest question - have you played a windows game in the last 3ish years? GFWL was utter shit, but the current XBL integrations are pretty painless, well integrated, and even ask permission on a per-game basis.

Am I correct in saying that if I don't migrate my family's Mojang accounts to Microsoft accounts that I will lose all ability to play the game? How the hell is this legal? I would have no problem being limited to playing the last released version of the game and not being allowed newer updates, but to lose all access to the game is unacceptable. They are effectively retroactively revoking the right for me to use my purchase and keeping my money.

Also, I will absolutely not be creating Microsoft accounts for my kids. I want them as far from these centralized identity providers as I can keep them.

>How the hell is this legal?

Mojang ToS clearly states they can delete accounts for any or no reason.

Has anyone made a build of Minecraft with stripped networking? I never use the online features when I play. I know this is basically asking about piracy but I bought the game so I wouldn't feel bad about using it.

I have not yet tried https://www.minetest.net/ but this provides some motivation. Do others have experience with it?

My kids play Minetest daily and love the game and community.

I'm looking to teach them coding and graphics with Minetest's approachable lua API so I'll be diving in to that side of things soon.

The Minetest team has purposely focused on keeping bloat in the way of excessively pretty graphics/shaders out of the game engine making it playable on old machines and requiring less bandwidth for community play.

Here is a great recent article https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Open_source_game_developer_Pert... interviewing the Minetest creator and leader, Perttu Ahola.

- I can vouch for two community kids-safe servers: (1) The Epic Server (regular survival game) and (2) Capture The Flag.

- Great Youtube Minetest channel => https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdiuryhdSBUxQse2rarVqPg

From the POV of a long time minecraft it seems to be close to the earliest versions of minecraft, and not really the game I love. It's simply missing to many things, and has a massively smaller community.

I tried it but the issue is that is not Minecraft, the kids will want to play the game their cousins and friends play and the game the youtubers play. But a few years back when I checked Minetest it had some nice features and cool mods so if you don't care about the Minecraft community end ecosystem then you might enjoy it.

I think I'll give Minetest another go the next time I want to play Minecraft.

Minetest is a good base for someone with the skills and will to make a Minecraft-esque game or to do something with interactive voxels. It's a long, long way from a replacement for Minecraft. And that's before considering the creative community around it.

Have they gotten rid of the 65k^3 map limit?

So sales of the Oculus rift have already been banned in Germany due to requiring a Facebook account.

Does this move mean that Minecraft will also be banned in Germany?

I wonder if there will be other legal challenges from other places (mainly looking towards the EU). When I bought Minecraft in 2013 I never agreed to making a Microsoft account. I really hope some organization with a big stick stops moves like these.

Not banned. Facebook hasn't released Oculus 2 in Germany and paused the sale of Oculus 1 due to "ongoing talks with government agencies". The relevant (it's per state, so Hamburg) data protection agency says there are no ongoing talks and the competition authority (I hope that's the correct translation) denied there are talks, too. So technically Facebook voluntarily doesn't sell them. https://www.heise.de/news/VR-Headsets-von-Oculus-werden-nich...

Potato, potato.

What a load of shit

Where can I request a refund?

My understanding is basically: "We'll contact you by email or through the launcher at an unspecified time to tell you how to migrate, but you'll lose your account if you miss it."

Which is fantastic. Time to look into Minetest.

Good. My kids got me into minecreaft recently. The concept of bedrock, windows10 java. Was a really stupid concept.

Figuring out how to buy the right one, and then getting frustrated with cross-platform.

Note that I had a beta minecraft account years ago... but I never used it. They did a similar thing a few years ago and people had to migrate their accounts.

Let's hope they don't fuck it up like league. Their account conversion changed my username because I had another account with same login in a different region.

This concept doesn't change. If anything it gets more confusing as you need a Microsoft for both editions.

Ah the sweet sound of regulatory action coming.

In-game name collisions between Mojang and Microsoft accounts will be a problem. They say you still keep your Mojang name in-game, but you might have to change your MS account username if it is already taken. As soon as people realize this there will be a run on registering popular names to try and squat on them on the MS side. There will be problems.

The names for Microsoft accounts actually are using Xbox Live. Names no longer need to be unique on the platform, instead the are suffixed with a unique descriminator such as appears on Battle.net

What's the friction to this from? They have your account data already...

I have a Microsoft account for OneDrive, and if that account ever gets banned — say, a defective algorithm thinks I've uploaded pirated content when I haven't — I don't want to also lose access to a game I've already paid for. Right now, the accounts are separate.

It reminds me of people who lost access to their e-mails and photos for making YouTube comments (a completely unrelated service).

So far this is the most convincing argument to me. This is why unified accounts are problematic. If you get banned in one place, you get banned in all completely unrelated places too.

1.) Not wanting them to link another of my email addresses to them 2.) I don't want or need a Microsoft account just to play Minecraft

But the mojang account was fine? That's my point, they already have your email address.

A lot of us(longtime motivated Minecraft players) bought our first accounts when we where fairly young, and often used emails from parents/school, which we no longer have access to. Another reason why this is a huge deal is that this means Microsoft terms of service apply. Also this means that the random account banning that can be experienced with Microsoft accounts will come to Minecraft.

Not only that. I had used a normal email address and still had to contact support multiple times for that account transition a while ago. (Or where there even two?)

Goodbye, Minecraft

Off topic: Does ZGC/Shenandoah improve minecraft fps/frame time?

In my experience no, if you are encountering issues with garabage collection stutter, you should try tuning -Xmx

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