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ulaan1 · 2 years

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On Minecraft’s Report System

In the past few months there was a bit of an uproar in the Minecraft community over the 1.19.1 update-- which, besides being the latest lackluster and disappointing content addition, also introduces a controversial global ban system based on in-game player reporting.

Unfortunately, the discourse surrounding this change has been extremely dishonest. I will be fair and say both sides are guilty of this; many who are opposed imply that a Bedrock-style profanity filter is included in this update, which isn’t true. But on the other side, those in support constantly and disingenuously insinuate that all criticism of this system originates from a tiny minority of toxic edgelords and bigots, and that all reasonable people support this system, or are ambivalent towards it.

This is so blatantly false and cynical that I felt compelled to write a post about it. Politically, I am closer to an SJW than most, and as such I would have absolutely zero problem with Minecraft introducing a profanity filter that outright refuses to send messages containing the n-word and other slurs (that means only hateful slurs, and not a massive list that contains many innocuous words, such as “BAMF”, "gay" and "sofa king").

In fact, even if the report system in its current form specifically targeted extremist bigotry like racism, white nationalism, transphobia etc. and nothing else, I would not be writing this post. As far as I'm concerned, bigots don't deserve to have fun.

The reality

Unfortunately, the system reaches much, much farther than the above examples. We can call it a small victory that the category "swearing and profanity" was removed from the list of reportable offenses, but the fact that it was ever included to begin with shows how badly Mojang is missing the point.

And yes, it is indeed Mojang doing this. During this debacle, many people on social media have shown an inclination to blame Microsoft for this decision, absolving the poor, wholesome, relatable Mojang developerinos of any blame for a system clearly "forced upon them" by "out of touch corporate boomers".

Unfortunately, this is probably not accurate. First off, contrary to some other corporations that buy up studios, Microsoft is known to have a fairly hands-off approach toward IPs it buys. They believe that the developers that made it into a brand worth buying know how to handle their business, and if that attitude changed with Minecraft, it would be a first. If anything, Minecraft is the prime example of an IP that has improved tremendously while owned by Microsoft; we got stuff like the Nether Update, which I personally think is one of the best updates Minecraft has had in nearly a decade.

Secondly, Mojang developers, most notably among them Felix "Xilefian", have publicly displayed sentiments like "I wish people didn't bring up 2b2t" (one of the largest multiplayer servers in the world) and, paraphrased, "if you're against this system, you are a clown"; does that sound like someone begrudgingly carrying out the orders of a higher-up corporate entity? Or someone with a specific vision for what the game should be (i.e. an experience for young children), with frustration at the backlash from more mature demographics?

The point I'm trying to make by writing this post is that the majority of people opposed to this change are not, in fact, edgelords who are mad that they can no longer say racial slurs online. There are more serious concerns regarding the precedent it sets for the future of Minecraft multiplayer, that Mojang developers haven’t responded to in any of their lackluster “responses”.

Server ownership and server hosting

I am a server owner. If you're reading this, you probably know that, because who the fuck else reads my blog? But just to put it all out in the open: at this point I’ve invested more than $1000 in a physical machine in my house that, aside from my website, and a discord bot, I use to host several Minecraft servers. With the soaring energy prices in Europe right now, you can bet your ass I’ll end up spending like a third of my yearly income from my shitty part time job on keeping this machine running.

I turned 24 recently, and I have been playing Minecraft for over 12 years, since the very early days when we would get our updates on the Tumblr blog "The Word of Notch" and you could play the free game "Minecraft Classic" in your browser. I bought the game in Alpha for $5. I have been involved in hosting private Minecraft servers since at least 2013, and in doing so have been around the block in terms of the different ways people enjoy playing SMP.

Mojang devs have compared the Minecraft Community Standards to Discord's Terms of Service. In fact, they have compared receiving a global ban from Minecraft multiplayer to getting your Discord account terminated for breaking the ToS.

Anyone with a baseline understanding of how this stuff works on a technical level should immediately recognize a big problem with that line of argument.

Discord guilds are "owned" by their creators in name only. They are hosted using proprietary software on privately owned machines operated by Discord Inc. The Company; in this regard they have far more in common with, say, a Facebook account than a Minecraft dedicated server.

The only type of Minecraft server comparable to a Discord server is Realms; they come with the same heavy restrictions on customization for the sake of a guarantee of stability and no back-end administrative headaches, with the hosting handled by the developers themselves.

If you, on the other hand, want to actually operate your own private Minecraft server, you either have to rent server space (for money) from a third party hosting provider unaffiliated with Mojang, or invest significant personal resources (like money) into setting up your own physical server.

In these cases, the only thing provided by Mojang is the Minecraft server software. Everything else; the setup, operation, and maintenance of the actual server, the time and financial investment, the moderation of the community and curation of its contents, are all your responsibility. It’s quite a task, but the people undertaking it are well-equipped to do so.

It’s easy to write off your detractors as a vocal minority. It’s easy to claim that, for example, the Minecraft subreddit is not an accurate representation of the Minecraft playerbase (probably true), or that 2b2t is an unhealthy and toxic environment (definitely true). And yes, there have been serious cases of grooming and danger to children on different Minecraft servers in the world.

But the question isn’t whether or not harmful stuff is going on; the question is whether it’s Mojang’s responsibility to do something about it if it’s happening on someone’s private server, and the answer is a resounding “nope”.

So what does this all mean?

What this means is that Mojang is now enforcing control and undue influence over the goings-on on machines they have no legal authority over.

Yes, pedantic people will say: Well, it’s their server software you’re relying on, and they’re free to change that in any way they want! And yes, that is correct. They are free to dictate what their software does when we choose to use it, but they are also not responsible for how we choose to use it.

It’s also not even true; that we are reliant on their software for our server needs, that is. Running a pure vanilla server is almost unheard of especially public-facing ones; it completely lacks security features, and even back in the day the bare minimum was to run Bukkit + Essentials, with a permissions framework of choice. Nowadays people will bundle the Minecraft server jar with something like PaperMC, Spigot, or other software that increases performance (Mojang’s server software is notoriously ill-equipped for large public multiplayer) as well as fixing numerous bugs that negatively impact the multiplayer experience.

The main problem here, however, is more general than “Mojang is encroaching on my machine! Not in my backyard!!111″.

Mojang is, slowly but surely, changing its attitude towards its playerbase to be increasingly paternalistic and patronizing. Their idea of what their target demographic is has changed drastically from what it used to be.

A good example is how, in the EULA and in other places on the Minecraft website, it is expressed that "griefing" is a negative thing. Now for the average casual survival server, this is obviously true enough that it doesn't need to be emphasized; however, on the other hand, there are various widely popularized PvP gamemodes, like Factions, where griefing is an integral and accepted part of the competitive experience. Given the fact that Mojang interacts with Minecraft content creators regularly, they are undoubtedly aware of this. And yet, they choose to include it in the EULA. Why?

It all makes a lot more sense if you see Minecraft not as the game you remember from 10 years ago, but as the game it is right now. The overt majority of the Minecraft playerbase now consists of children and young teenagers who started playing after the Microsoft acquisition and have no particular love for “edgy” or “old-school” communities.

The comparatively miniscule holdover of adults who’ve been playing Minecraft since the early days simply does not make Mojang enough Sweet Ca$$$h Money to warrant giving a shit about. And yet, I’m pretty sure that the old-school Minecraft fanbase from back in the day is overrepresented among server operators, and are indispensable to keeping the landscape of privately hosted multiplayer servers interesting and vibrant.

Think of the children...!

Unfortunate, the truth is that those large-scale multiplayer experiences, while they’re run by adults, are mostly populated by children, and sweeping legislation to “protect minors online” is always on the horizon both in the EU and the United States; massive internet platforms full of children, such as Minecraft, have to pre-empt the possibility of getting sanctioned if it turns out that any child can freely connect to 2b2t and instantly get their chat filled with racial slurs and sexual innuendo.

At the end of the day, Mojang has simply correctly identified that their primary source of revenue is forever going to be young kids, or more accurately, their parents; whereas the adults who bought the game for cheap in 2011 aren’t going to make them any more money.

In a changing online media landscape it is in their best interest to reform their platform to be maximally appealing to parents, authorities, educators and children; and if you’re the kind of person who wants total personal control and ownership of your online experience, you are just shit out of luck.

And ultimately, if you do end up getting banned for something unfair, and the ban appeal process doesn’t overturn it, then what’s left? Well, if you really want to continue having the full experience, you would probably just purchase a new account. To them, there is no downside in this scenario; sweeping moderation guarantees to take care of 100% of toxicity and threats to their increasingly pre-teenaged playerbase, and the few cases that aren’t valid are either fixed through recourse... or by giving Mojang another $20.

Now, I strongly doubt this was some sort of nefarious scheme to make everyone buy additional copies of the game, as some particularly cynical redditors have insinuated, but if that thought ever did cross their minds, it certainly wouldn’t be an argument against the current incarnation of the report system. Ultimately, Mojang’s attitude is: if you are flagged in any way as a source of harmful conduct on our children’s game, you don’t get the benefit of the doubt: we excise you.

The thing they’re painfully oblivious to, for some reason, though, is that there is no overarching multiplayer experience. There is no single “children’s game”; there is still, to this day, no Roblox-esque central Mojang-hosted multiplayer platform to which all Minecraft Java Edition players connect in order to play. There are only the millions of privately hosted machines, such as mine, and there should be no arbiter of what is “toxic” in my server, except myself, my userbase, and the applicable laws in my polity.

Mojang’s community outreach and policing should remain strictly limited to those who want to be reached out to and policed.

The alternatives

If we accept the premise of my last paragraph, then what could Mojang do instead?

Extending them the benefit of the doubt, the devs and their bootlickers have argued on several occasions that “many server owners are not equipped to handle the moderation of their communities". Weird take, but ok; based on no real data as far as I can tell, but let’s roll with it for a moment.

If that’s true, then what should Mojang do? Pick your answer:

A) Mojang should provide server owners with more effective moderation tools, such as a way for players to report other players to the server owner.

B) Mojang should implement a mandatory global moderation system that bypasses server owners altogether and thus reduces the control and social authority they have over their communities.

It’s glaringly obvious that, if you really think about it, their decision in this case does not make logical sense. Perhaps that’s the reason why they haven’t replied in any real depth to the question of why, exactly, this system is being implemented?

Either way, the most obvious solution and compromise would be to make the report system opt-in. If a server owner does in fact believe they are ill-equipped to handle the moderation of their own server (then why are you starting a public server in the first place? but ok.) then they can simply decide they are okay with Mojang’s trained moderators (or “Minecraft Investigators”) to do the job for them.

The real alternative, though, that would actually satisfy everyone, is to have the report menu as it currently exists implemented into the game, but send its report output to the server owner instead of to Mojang, unless the server owner has explicitly chosen to send it to Mojang.

This would not be hard. This would be welcomed with open arms by the server admin community. In fact, if this were to be combined with real public server security features like build protection and such, it would be one of the greatest updates for multiplayer hosting in the history of the game.

Alas, it’s not what we got.

I will certainly continue to play Minecraft. I will continue to host multiplayer servers, thanks to the existence of mods like "No Chat Reports". But the sad reality, I think, is that this trend is going to continue. Mojang is very likely to continue prescribing particular ways to play their game and interact with their services, despite the decentralized nature of the platform.

At least we can be sure the smart people in our community will continue to find ways around it. That, too, is the beauty of having third-party server management.

#minecraft #minecraft servers #minecraft 1.19 #chat reporting #minecraft report system #mojang #microsoft #microjang

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merakiui · 1 year

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Y-yandere tsum tsums..? /j

I am so relieved to know someone else is on the same brain cell as me because this was my first thought when I saw the tsums with the characters LOL;;;;;; just the idea that the tsums have more rizz than the students because they're cute and can get away with anything because they're just having harmless fun. Floyd's tsum could shove itself into your chest or crotch and, though it's very embarrassing, you'll laugh it off because the tsum is just being silly and exploring, albeit exploring in very awkward places. Floyd is going to tear his tsum apart for being so bold and skipping bases he hasn't even arrived at yet.

Or Riddle's tsum making itself oh-so-comfortable in your laundry, specifically amidst your undergarments. Riddle is beyond infuriated and flustered when he learns of what his tsum has done. He apologizes so stiffly to you, all while strictly admonishing his tsum in the same breath. Of course this indecent behavior will not be tolerated and must be swiftly reprimanded! But it would be nice if his tsum happened to snatch a pair of your underwear for reasons that will remain undisclosed.

Or Leona's tsum watching you bathe, sitting so comfortably on the edge of the bath, admiring your figure. You let it do this because it's just so cute and there's no way such a cute thing would have any ulterior motives. Leona's tsum is bold, so Leona can't exactly fault it because he'd do the same thing if he was in the tsum's place. Or the tsum sleeping alongside you, curling up on your pillow or in your arms and resting so soundly. It glares so viciously when Ruggie tries to collect it the next morning on account of Leona's orders to retrieve it. To think it would gravitate to someone besides Leona...

Or perhaps Jack's tsum actually plays the role of a helpful wingman and tries to set you and Jack up together. Maybe it knows Jack likes you so much, so it attempts to get closer to you to prompt Jack to muster the courage to tell you of his feelings. Of course when the tsum goes about it in very roundabout ways (i.e. following you everywhere to the point where it's invasive and embarrassing), Jack's going to mistake its intentions... ^^;;

Or Cater's tsum getting you to pose in very,,,, compromising ways so it can take good pictures. You might think it's weird, but the tsum is bouncing up and down and it appears so happy. Naturally, you just want to ensure it remains pleased so it isn't compelled to misbehave. Cater never thought he could be jealous of a plushie, yet here he is, gripping his phone in an iron-tight fist and smiling so forcibly while his tsum is so obviously flirting with you.

Or Epel's tsum essentially making Epel become immensely clumsy for the day. He's always chasing after his tsum, only to run into you every time and end up in very awkward positions. His tsum trips him and he falls right into you, or the tsum trips you and you fall on top of him. The tsum probably knocks into Epel's head so the two of you kiss by complete accident. It's a very troublesome tsum, but Epel isn't going to complain. As annoying as it is chasing the tsum around campus, it's allowed him to fall into your chest, to kiss you, to feel you up under the guise of making sure you're okay... :)

Or Sebek's tsum taking the opportunity to be held by you. It looks so happy in your arms. Sebek is distraught. How dare his tsum act so unbecoming and bothersome towards someone he admires! More importantly, how come he isn't the one being held? :( Sebek's tsum loves to follow you around just as much as it enjoys trailing after Malleus. The tsum will even want to follow you all the way to your bedroom, at which Sebek sharply draws the line. If he can't reach that place with you yet, then his tsum certainly won't! >:(

All of the tsums definitely get lots of kisses from you because they're too adorable. You'll fawn over them. Meanwhile, the students are suffering because they want to be kissed and hugged, too. T_T

#twisted chit chat #the image of a tsum holding you captive is so silly to imagine #omg imagine floyd's tsum sitting there and watching while jade rails the life out of you...... 😵‍💫#it's like when you are doing anything private and you want to turn the plushies away so they won't see #you try to turn tsum floyd and he just turns right back around to watch LOL #he definitely tries to report it to floyd so he'll know his brother is laying more pipe than him orz #jade's in for a very painful kick in his dick #how dare he sleep with you while floyd's busy babysitting his pesky tsum!!! >:( not fair at all

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