Hacker News Reader

Comment by acedTrex | Hacker News Reader

Whats wrong with Minecraft, that seems like an odd inclusion in the list?

Minecraft by itself is benign, but online servers? Oh boy.

Full tilt P2W servers, ran by low key cybercriminals, with I Can't Believe It's Not Gambling mechanics targeting children. And Mojang itself is adding fuel to the fire by selling paid mods - for Bedrock only, which is the version most children play.

Then there's the usual boon of online gaming - getting to interact with the shadiest characters you've ever met online.

> And Mojang itself is adding fuel to the fire by...

You mean Microsoft.

What's wrong with paid mods?

Not OP, but for me I'm wary whenever I see in-game currency (Minecoins). Thankfully there are no gambling mechanics tied in to Minecoins directly, but the server ecosystem is still rampant with gambling just the same[0].

[0] https://feedback.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/community/posts/3600...

I agree regarding in-game currency. I find it distasteful. But in my mind, paid mods are a different thing that can exist independently. I don't find those distasteful. I find their existence slightly positive.

For sure. But the unofficial non-paid mods for Bedrock allow for gambling mechanics, so long as it's not linked to real world currency, which I still find problematic for a game marketed towards kids. Link I posted is from years ago claiming that featured servers in Bedrock almost all have gambling, and nothing has changed since then.

Java edition is a lot more wild west and next-to-impossible to enforce their EULA due to the nature of distribution and installation of Java edition mods.

> Any Mods you create for Minecraft: Java Edition from scratch belong to you (including pre-run Mods and in-memory Mods) and you can do whatever you want with them, as long as you don't sell them for money / try to make money from them

https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/eula

Is that legally enforceable? If a mod doesn't contain code / assets from the game itself, what legal rights does Microsoft have over the distribution of that mod?

Yes courts have found that game mods, even if they don't directly include any content from the original game in their distributable, count as derivative works under copyright.

> The ruling continues to apply to the legal status of video game modding, with mods viewed as derivative works that require the consent of the copyright holder. While this may legally limit the creation of mods, machinima, broadcasts, or even cheats, many game developers have authorized and encouraged some of these activities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Star_v%2E_FormGen_Inc%2E

It's copyright infringement by being a derivative work. Maybe. I don't think it's ever been tried in court. They can still blacklist you.

If it's made by randoms, then Microsoft is barely better than a rent-seeking middleman. If it's made by Microsoft, they should just put it in the f-ing game or move on to making something new to get more money.

Neither of those really sound like a problem with Minecraft for my purposes.

It feels like monetizing something that used to be free and built by passionate tinkerers for its own sake. It's destroying yet another part of that hacker culture some people so very often reminisce about on this site.

Me personally, I absolutely hate it. I got into programming to mod my favorite games of the time, Minecraft among them. My first exposure to actual code was through reading open source mods and trying to modify them to achieve my own ideas.

As far as I know, you can still write free mods outside the mod store to your heart's content, just as you ever could. The existence of paid mods doesn't seem to limit your ability to do that.

> with I Can't Believe It's Not Gambling mechanics targeting children

I don't really understand why those things are bad? Making your server executable available for dedicated servers is common (and good!) and selling paid mods just seems like selling software to me

edit: the private server operators might be bad, but I don't see how this is Minecraft's fault (or how it doesn't apply to every game that allows dedicated servers)

> Minecraft itself is benign

So, I dont think anyone said it was their fault, just that it's being exploited.

There is Minecraft the standalone game that you play either by yourself or on a private server with friends you know IRL. That's totally fine.

Then there is the wider Minecraft community based on a constellation of public and semi-public servers. This is a lot more like Roblox.

The Minecraft you know and love is a fantastic game, especially for kids. Top 10 all time, IMO, in terms of creativity and education and development. And you can easily set up a personal friends and family server/realm, and there are tons of free mods and maps.

The problem is that malicious actors can build Roblox in anything. It's not hard to get kids hooked and begging their parents for lucrative in-game gambling currency.

I am probably not the right generation but all attempts to engage with Minecraft with my children have always ended badly. It seems very tedious and clunky. The learning curve seems steeper than playing factorio casually.

Yeah, I tried playing it with my son, but I've never quite understood what you're supposed to do.

I grew up on RPGs and adventure games where you usually had an objective out there in the world. In comparison, Minecraft is extremely solipsistic; there are no structures in the world to meaningfully interact with, and it seems one is supposed to simply treat the world as a sort of Lego set.

You're supposed to build a place to live and sleep, and then you find some magma and water and create a portal to a less friendly place. Eventually you find the bad dragon and murder it.

That was added to the game after its creator got cynical about it. He said it needed an ending to justify being 1.0, then he sold it to Microsoft because he hated being popular and wanted the game destroyed, as well as money. The actual goal of Minecraft should be whatever it was in Alpha 1.1.2_01.

There are several ways of enjoying Minecraft. I play it a lot with my kids (5 and 10) at the moment. They love creative mode, spawning mobs and just building strange houses. When I played with my friends, sibling snd parents, it was all about survival mode everyone would create their own huge buildings and connect up via railway, visit each other and make fun stuff. Then there was the whole red stone rabbit hole…

It's a cultural thing. The learning curve has always been bad but it was bypassed by the initial cultural penetration of people playing it on youtube and now the learning curve is a thing learnt through prior knowledge instead of trial and error

Microsoft forces login these days for single player play, and jams ads, social networking crap.

As a parent, I don’t have time for this bullshit, and assume they have malicious intentions. Also, at least once, there was some warning about a profanity filter that my kid dismissed without reading. It’s tied to my MS account, and only a matter of time before that is tied to github and linkedin.

So the kid says “doodie head” one too many times, and what, I lose my windows login / bitlocker key, gh repos and professional network?

Screw it.

Exactly, everything wrong with Minecraft started with Microsoft. They took a fun, harmless, and free game so that they could profit from it and they've been working at making it increasingly harmful ever since.

Have you considered not tying your encryption keys to your child's online activities? I can understand the thrill of danger, but I'm not that much of a gambler myself.

I was fine with Minecraft until the kids started wanting to install all kinds of mods, which as far as I know are random executables you download from shady websites.

As someone who grew up on Industrial Craft 2, you can really miss out on a lot of incredible, free, content if you write off minecraft mods entirely.

And many of those mods at worse might have a donation link if any kind of monetary discussion at all.

Mods are the lifeblood of Minecraft though, they are incredible.

just another surface for predators to access underage targets. I guess one thing with Minecraft specifically is there’s a veneer of positive / educational content to smuggle that access beneath - schools have lessons that include Minecraft play, you don’t get that with Fortnite or Roblox, so it seems more ‘innocent.’

Fortnite is about killing eachother, Roblox is about literally anything, Minecraft is about… well, mining and crafting, mostly.

But really, with mods, it can be just as ‘anything’ as Roblox, only with possibly less scrutiny.

Idk. I love Minecraft, for the record. It’s just the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and the popular online game that provides access to kids gets the creeps.

Most people on this website can run a Minecraft server themselves for their kids and their kids' friends. That seems to be the way to go tbh.

where would creeps even contact kids on Minecraft? the only officially sanctioned servers are on Bedrock and tightly moderated, everything else is plastered with Microsoft-sanctioned warnings about unmoderated play

And the one things kids avoid, without prejudice, is unmoderated play.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com