Save Minecraft, for Yourself

My first Minecraft experience was around 2014. About the same time, Mojang Studios was acquired by Microsoft. Since then, Minecraft stayed in my life as no.1 video game. The first version I played was Java version 1.7.10. Soon after that, version 1.8 came out.

Then I’d move to Pocket Edition. I remember when they ported over redstone, and that’s alpha 0.13 in November 2015. Minecraft was simple back then: Download and play (no DRM). Even on PE, you don’t need any sorts of account to play, even for multiplayer.

This was before PE merged with a bunch of other branches and became the Minecraft: Bedrock Edition. I didn’t play much BE after that, and the Xbox account requirement for multiplayer was added sometime later, as you’ll see in this clip.

If you download Bedrock right now, even you own the full game, you still need to sign in with an Xbox account before you can play multiplayer.

And that restriction is not only for Microsoft controlled servers. Multiplayer is completely disabled until you sign in. There’s no offline mode.

This feels pretty scammy to me, since they didn’t mention anything about a mandatory 3rd party account before your purchase. At least on Steam, you get a warning like this:

The mobile world is a mess

Influence on JE

Microsoft’s influence didn’t really cause much issue for Java Edition players, not until 2020. The account migration has been a pain in the ass for a lot of players, that includes me. The authorization server is very unhappy about my IP addresses, and constantly block me from refreshing my OAuth token.

Then came the XUID system, which is a unique identifier for tracking you across platform and devices.

And if you’ve been following Minecraft’s updates, you should already know the new Chat Report system. It’s a total mess, with dozens of exploits and problems that are unfixable with the current implementation.

I won’t go into the technical details here. All you should know is with this update, anyone could trick you into saying something, and/or take your message out of context. Combined with some other arbitrary chat messages, they could make it seem that you’ve said some nasty stuff. Reported to Microsoft, and your account could be banned.

On BE there is now a word filter implemented, because of it, you can’t say “night” since “nig” is blacklisted. You also can’t say crap, which is obviously too much swearing for 10-year-olds.

And not to mention all the people who got falsely banned.

People has protested against all this, but Microsoft deliberated ignored those reports and questioning. All they’ve given out till now is some corporate speech, which are mostly bull.

You might be interested in reading people’s reaction to this official Reddit thread about 1.19.1 pre-release 2 (Archive / PDF). Reddit has produced a lot of beautiful comments that are far better than my own writing.

Kid-friendly content

It seems that Microsoft really is pushing the “Safer for Kids” slogan, and some people are actually buying it. Considering a majority of Minecraft’s player base are underage, it’s somewhat understandable for them to do something about the bad behavior on their platform.

The problem is that, pretty much no one on Java is playing on Microsoft’s platforms, that being Minecraft Realms. The whole community is built on federated and distributed server instances.

Some are vanilla or vanilla-like, others are modded.

Some are moderated 24/7, some are full anarchy.

Some are Christian and kid friendly, others are simply not.

The variety of servers truly made Minecraft a game for everyone. Remember, the OG Minecraft players, let’s say they started playing at the age of 12, are now 25 years old. Lots of players that started playing as students, are now competent adults. We don’t need Microsoft to stick their nose in our perfectly fine game, and ruin it by making everyone feel unsecure.

Maybe Microsoft need to redo their estimations. Instead of counting the number of whales, which are mostly children being exploited by the BE Marketplace, count the people who actually care about the game.

But why would they do that :)

I mean, I haven’t paid Mojang anything after buying Both BE and JE back in 2018. They obviously want to squeeze every possible cent out of the game, before it inevitably dies out. Or they just want that extra telemetry data, so they can further data mine you, that include kids.

This is Microsoft we’re talking about. Like any other megacorporation, your personal data is gold to them. For them, data protection means to protect your data from you, and keep it among all highest bidders.

What comes next

Some individuals are worried that Microsoft will do something stupid to older versions of the game, all 600+ of them. Maybe they will remove them from the launcher for incompliance of certain child protection policy, or they will simply proceed to add moderation to all of them.

My stance on this is that, they should never touch old versions. If I wanted to play my first Minecraft version someday with a few friends, I’m not going to jump through what ever hoops Microsoft would have by then.

I’m not going to be bounded to Microsoft services, because they could go down anytime in the future. Either due to an outage, or JE became abandoned.

Every once a while, I see news about games, who’s servers got shuts down. I don’t want that to affect my perfectly fine single-player game.

Actions

Some people’s reaction to this sudden change in development direction is to harass devs on Twitter. The problem being that most Minecraft devs don’t even work on this feature, and they cannot do anything about it. It’s been a few days since the first preview of this feature being published, and the Twitter shitstorm had exactly 0 effect on the development process.

Instead of joining them, I think it’s best to my interest to just download every version of Minecraft and keep them forever. That way, those changes can’t possibly affect my own Minecraft experience.

Not that I plan to play newer versions anyway.

With that in mind, I spent some time writing a absurdly “secure”¹ program to download every Minecraft file to my computer.

For demonstration purposes, I have a public status page set up.

I still hope Microsoft will somehow change their mind and revert this change, but with a backup plan ready, I can finally stop worrying about this.

If you’re someone like me, who sees Minecraft as an important part of your life, and are also worried about your own future Minecraft experiences,

Download ALL MINECRAFT FILE NOW, before it’s too late to do so. Better safe than sorry.

Special part for Technoblade

Hearing the final messages of Technoblade has made me heartbroken, and I’m forced to postpone the writing of this by 1 day.

His death is an incredible loss for the Minecraft community. Looking back at his last videos, even on his deathbed, he’s still trying to entertain and enlighten his viewers. That positivity is something we all need in the current world.

Alex, aka. Techno the Pig, you will be missed, by all of us.