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Comment by crocowhile | Hacker News Reader

It gets much worse than this if you think about what they decided to do with Minecraft. They obliged millions of kids - literally, kids - to have a microsoft account to play a game that has nothing to do with any other microsoft products. They apply sub-standard and child-unfriendly security measures and when armies of kids get hacked (mostly phished) every day the only thing they do is to close down their account and FORCE them to buy the game again.

I still have to understand whether it's incompetence or a business model.

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If one company becomes massively profitable despite offering literally zero consumer level support, then why would any other company, that covets the same scalability, make any attempt at consumer level support at all?

Google has not scaled it's services, it has ignored hard problems of scaling in favour of solving (relatively) easy technical problems. It has not been punished in any meaningful way for this unbalanced approach, and so "the norm" shall it become.

To the detriment of us all.

Had one of the first 10k Minecraft accounts or so. Never changed the name or anything. When Microsoft bought it they spammed me that I would loose my account if I don't transfer it. So after the 3rd email or so I did. It got hacked a few days after that, took several weeks to resolve for whatever reason. Ive had the account a few months after that until it was "hacked" again.

The very few times I played Minecraft since then I just used a hacked client.

I have a friend who bought Minecraft for the full price of 30 USD, and one day microshit decided "hey you know what? fuck you, we're deleting your account". so he went to a 3rd party site and bought a 2nd hand account, sketchy as fuck but it worked and this time he didn't have to pay full price again; but the fact that he had to pay *again* is simply outrageous.

On the other hand, last time I got actually hacked was in 2015, when I intentionally shared the password for a popular kids game that I used to play back then. And I'm not a cybersecurity expert at all, I don't follow the best security protocols, heck I don't even have good passwords, but I have never been hacked in 9 years.

As a bonus, you can can get completely stuck if you made the mistake of creating a MS family when signing into Minecraft. In the forums there are hundreds of problems like mine where the family becomes completely uneditable and Minecraft offline-only.

But I should've never attempted anything that complicated with MS. They can barely manage simple cases, groups of users is way too hard.

Just going through that myself. My son's Microsoft account was hacked, we contactes customer service and all they did was acknowledge the account was compromised, close it indefinitely asking us to buy the game again, and locked my account as the family manager. Fortunately I am a Linux guy and the last Microsoft thing I've touched was windows xp some 20 years ago. But imagine thinking this is acceptable?!

I guess they still suffer from monopoly syndrome. The EU should get them again.

And for us schmucks who bought Minecraft licenses long ago, hope you created MS accounts for them all or they’re gone.

The business incentive is funneling new users into their walled garden. If they could, they would assign a MS account to every newborn. There are still loopholes to protect your children from Minecraft's new "features" (at least for Linux users, ask privately), but it's only a matter of time until they are closed to appease the gods of enshittification.

The problem is that my kids want to play on online servers and for as much as they are learning to hate Microsoft, they still love Minecraft. I don't think loopholes can help with that, can they?

Unfortunately not, if you need their service you must play by their rules.

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