Microsoft will start banning players from all private Minecraft servers | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft will start banning players from all private Minecraft servers

arstechnica.com

18 pointsleksak15 comments

is there a word for a big company buying a small company and then turning it into shit?

Microsoft

EAtrophy

Why would chat moderation make Minecraft shit? Literally every game with a large player base does this already. The only people impacted by this change are the people that type terrible things in chat and haven't learned about discord.

Show me another game with 100K concurrent users that doesn't employ chat filters, ban systems, or have moderators. We'll wait...

This issue is that this affects private servers. Since Microsoft is trying to make Minecraft a kid-friendly environment, their chat moderation is going to be aimed at protecting 10 year olds from profanity.

Imagine you have a private server where everyone is required to show ID and prove they're over 30 before joining and profanity is explicitly allowed. Maybe it started with a small group of friends and then expanded to include friends-of-friends, so there are some people who don't know each other IRL. With this new change, player A could get mad at player B. Player A then waits for player B to send a totally-inoffensive message that includes profanity (ex: "holy shit the new house you build it awesome") and report it. Because of this new system, player B now gets banned from playing multiplayer Minecraft despite properly tailoring their language to the server they're playing on.

So what, this is how every multiplayer game works. I don't think it has anything to do with being kid friendly, it's just common sense. Banning racism, threats, bullying, hatred, and cheating are completely fine by me, in fact, I want those players to get banned even if they're doing it on a private server.

In rust people get EAC banned and the community has good methods for tracking those users, including ban evasions and hardware id. You break the rules you suffer by losing access to the game and if you think you'll be safe using an alt account think again, you'll get caught and be out even more money.

If you've ever used an xbox and played a multiplayer game you know people aren't getting banned for just profanity. I've had a steam account for 18 years, not a single ban and I've talked a lot crap in game, I just don't cross any lines or make it personal. Crazy how that works...

In rust you can get EAC banned from official servers and private servers with EAC enabled. But you can always join private servers with EAC disabled even if you have a EAC ban on your account. So players are free to make whatever rules they want on non-EAC servers including allowing cheating.

In minecraft many servers allow and even encourage cheating. They are called anarchy servers and they are actually the source of a lot of interesting minecraft content. Its really cool to see what play styles people come up with when they are allowed to cheat.

EAC is also loaded client side. Try loading Rust in Linux without connecting to a server and watch your account get insta/perma banned.

Yeah, places like 2B2T are full of racists, super interesting content...

Here is a screenshot of a rust QA explaining that on linux you can run rust fine, you just cannot join any servers that have EAC enabled.

https://i.imgur.com/drSwiZ3.png

Which is all of them. Official servers, community, and modded all run EAC. Maybe something changed with steam deck but trying to connect to an official server and getting permabanned seems fairly unplayable in my book.

any server which shows up in the server browser has EAC. To connect to non EAC servers you have to directly connect with a f1 command `client.connect <hostname>`.

The title is presently misleading. For now, Microsoft is adding the capability to ban players. Some examples of why someone could be banned would be due to toxic online behavior.

Microsoft is adding the capability for their moderators to completely ban you from multiplayer minecraft. Why do they think they should moderate who gets access to my servers?

And you won't be able to control the "why"

It could be that you have the wrong politics, or wrong anything else that is arbitrary and capricious. We've see exactly this occur in the last decade so NO ONE can be trusted to have centralized control like this.

It does make me glad I never jumped onto the Minecraft bandwagon - I have no investment of time or passion to lose from this.

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