MAMEWorld Forums - The Loony Bin - I'm ill enough to just straight-up diss you for no reason

Rant mode: ON

Over the past two years, quite a number of fairly large Minecraft servers have popped up that have an "interesting" business model, which is to re-sell portions of the Minecraft gameplay. For example, if you "donate" $20, you get a diamond pickaxe. If you "donate" $100, you get diamond armor. That kind of thing. The funny thing is, it's never been allowed by the Minecraft EULA, Mojang just haven't been terribly aware of the state of things until they started looking into it.

Everything came to a head about two weeks ago when someone tweeted at a team member asking him if what these servers are doing is okay. That team member correctly responded that no, it's not okay. Then one thing happened that I'm not sure anyone expected: People lost their fucking minds.

Suddenly people are freaking out, telling us that we're "worse than EA", demanding the "old EULA", never mind the fact that the EULA didn't change in the first fucking place. All kinds of conspiracy theories erupted, like the company wants to kill these servers, that the company's doing it just to drum up sales for Minecraft Realms, all of which are patently false. Now, the company would have been well within its rights to tell these people to go get bent, but no - those of us on the team spent four hours across two different meetings these past two weeks, first hashing out a set of basic exemptions to the EULA with which people can make money off of their servers without actually running afoul of the stated policy. It's a rather simple policy, too: You can't sell anything that affects gameplay in a way that puts one player at an advantage over one who hasn't paid for the same thing. Cosmetic things like pets or nameplates or colored nicknames or particle effects are fine, charging for access to a server is fine, charging for access to a special second VIP server instance with beta versions of minigames, all of these are perfectly fine. Then, since this wasn't good enough for people, we had the second meeting, where we came up with yet another list of exemptions, including the notion that people can donate towards a server-wide goal, at which point everyone on the server receives a benefit. This is something that games like Second Life have done to great success. Still not good enough.

Over the past two weeks I've gotten to experience legions of easily-led tweens tweeting at me to tell me to die, that I'm a faggot, that Mojang should burn, that we hate Minecraft, that we're killing Minecraft, that we're worse than EA, and more. Oh boy, Johnny McFuckstick in Podunk, AL thinks that I should eat a dick, I sure haven't heard that one before! It's seriously enough to make me just want to take a week off from work and drink until my liver fails and I die an ignominious death.

The thing that galls me the most, though, the most unbelievable thing, is the sort of inverted view of reality that these people have somehow managed to have instilled on them. These money-grubbing, fly-by-night, shit-house server owners have managed to create such a toxic community surrounding their pay-to-win servers that they've convinced their users that we are the ones who are like EA for stating that our EULA would start to be enforced. You know, as opposed to the server owners who are parting out the fucking game like a Ford Fiesta at a fucking chop shop. Not one shred of remorse for the e-mails that we regularly receive from parents whose children have spent $200 on server perks, then gotten themselves banned, and who apparently now can't connect to "our servers" - because they're so technically ignorant that they somehow think that all of these microtransactioned-out-the-ass servers are run by us and not unconscionable fucks looking at their children like rosy-cheeked piggy banks.

I seriously can't believe that given how the company has absolutely bent over backwards for its community that people somehow think Mojang has it in for all Minecraft servers or something like that. No, the company has it in for those server owners who have created an utterly toxic community by selling existing gameplay features piecemeal.

Rant mode: OFF

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEQi87xSIgU