Minecraft Forums

Pretend Mojang is saying something like "We don't like it when people kill puppies".

Everyone is now freaking out as if Mojang is about to feed all the puppies in the world through a blender to ensure that no one else can ever kill a puppy ever again.

LOGIC \o/

Quote from Blackstripe

Ok... I'm gonna just break this down.

1: Companies exist to make money. That's just a fact. If there were no profits, none of these things would exist in the first place.
2: Mojang EARNED every penny of sales that they've gotten. Notch created an amazing game that appealed to an almost un-tapped market and did it WELL. Jens is now leading the project and continues to do a bunch of good work on it.
3: No where in any of this did Mojang say they want a cut of those sales. They don't care about someone getting paid. What they've spoken out against is servers selling parts of their game at outragous prices to people. Mostly, to kids who are using their parents' cards without permission.
4: You appear very ignorant of basic marketing dynamics, and about the situation as a whole. Stop listening to trolls, Stop getting your information from the Rumor mill, and try doing a little bit of digging into the facts of the situation before spouting nonsense about greed.

Please shed some light on me and what did i get wrong, even if the numbers are 10 times less it's still way too much. (care to show me the exact numbers?)

Minecraft was mostly marketed for free by the community as much as i know, so their marketing costs should be low.
Community is mostly what made minecraft a success, they only provided us with the game.

If you think it's fair that a company makes so much then good for you, but at least they shouldn't crap on their customers whenever they want to.

If you want to call me ignorant and misinformed at least point me to where that truth is you speak off, otherwise you are wasting your time, i won't change my opinion because you think i'm ignorant.


" You are in no position to spout nonsense about "greed" when you have no basic knowledge of marketing dynamics."

Supply and demand, what's there to not know? The current economic system is a fail but we currently can't make anything better. People getting overpayed for doing nothing and people not getting payed at all for working their butts off is no news to me. I'm just outraged when i think about it and how unfair it is.

Robert, please explain how Mojang trying to enforce a moral and legal thing yet at least trying to find middle ground against the seemingly opposing side is bad? Unless you don't think it's bad.

I wouldn't pay to play on any server, or play on a server that sells kits, or one that uses rewards to turn the donation process into an equivalent microtransaction system. All that it is is a continuation of the same opportunistic profit-driven system of perpetual income-inequality of the real world injected into a virtual environment. Forget $10K kits, some people can't even spare $100, or even $20. So those who start with such extravagant kits are automatically guaranteed to keep the advantage no matter what, with very little opportunity for those who don't. A legitimate player starting with wooden tools and no armor will never catch up to a player that starts with several full sets of diamond ones maxed out with the best enchantments. Unless the kitted player has a lot of downtime, their mines will stay between 8x and 16x as large - essentially claiming the land above it as well - and also finding more dungeons, gathering mob drops faster, enchanting sooner, exploring more of the overworld, claiming more villages and raiding more temples, visiting the Nether sooner, brewing sooner, going to the End sooner, and potentially killing the dragon before other players have even gotten their first set of enchanted diamond armor - and if it is an infraction of the server rules, they can just buy their way out of any trouble that they get into - perhaps enabling them to grief, steal, and murder other players, when poorer players could not do so because they could not afford to buy their way back onto the whitelist over and over. All because their real-world wealth advantages (or the lack thereof) are allowed to influence their ability to find, claim, and utilize resources, or to protect themselves and secure their property in-game. It's everything that's wrong with the real world, complete with corrupt politicians and crooked cops (owners and admins) beholden to their major donors. Don't get me wrong, I would, and have, donated to servers in the past, but only because I believed in the server - receiving only the benefits of a special title, a colored name, or an honorable mention on their website's donor page, which did not change the dynamics of the game, or give me any significant advantage, except perhaps to show newer players that I was an older and therefore more trustworthy member of the server - which I would ultimately have demonstrated anyway.

I run a small server and I planned to stand out by having no pay to win perks. I don't ask for donations because I feel that is wrong on so many levels. This is minecraft, not some pay to win that a lot of companies are doing now a days.

I really hope mojang cracks down on the EULA and ToS in a way that stops servers from selling stuff. The mods/addons/plugins are owned by the game developers for most games out there. Why do people that make third party content make money off something that mojang should technically own?

Quote from hardcorerobot

So I can't make money selling my photographs if I use Photoshop?

Your argument is at best facetious.

So you think the eula is a fraud?

Quote from EpicGamingAlive

https://www.change.o...ange-the-eula-4 Just SIGN this! We are sending this to MOJANG showing how stupid they are for doing this!

Explain in bullet points why what they are going to do (do you even know what they are going to do?) is stupid?

Quote from ORabbit

I've been looking into this issue more deeply, as when I first got into MC, I don't remember donors and perks being a big thing like they are now. And I have to be very, very honest as an experienced gamer and a person with a lot of life experience with not nice people:

Many of All of these perk system on servers that I've looked into make me wildly uncomfortable, even ones that are being promoted by microcelebrity You Tubers that I otherwise like. I personally would not want to be on a server with one of these systems. In the very least, it's potentially game-breaking, this is, ruins the game for anyone else who isn't buying into the perk system, and encourages otherwise honest server owners to do some dumb things that are damaging to the community. In the worst, it's just a feast for scam artists and grifters to take advantage of dedicated fans, especially younger fans who by no fault of their own don't know better.

If I was in any way associated with Mojang, I would certainly feel the need to step in and draw some clear lines and work out something with server owners, to protect the product both legally and as a business venture. And that is ultimately in the best interest of the community as well. I don't think anyone either on the business end of MC or on the fandom end wants this community to become associated with rip offs and shady server perk systems. Anyone who's been a gamer for a while know how that can happen, and how it has happened with other games.

The truth is it's very hard to verify the trustworthiness of any server owner as it is now. Unless this person is a longtime buddy of yours and you can personally vouch for them, you really don't know that person or their motivations. If Mojang sets down some rules that server owners have to agree to, then at least we'll have a bar against which to measure them. And maybe this won't make everyone happy but personally, I don't want to start hearing stories of people donating and then logging on the next day to find the server down and the owner unreachable, and then a few months later a suspiciously similar new server and server owner opens up and starts asking for donation. Because if that's not already happening, it will. Human nature is very predictable like that.

I pity the ignorance of you people.

minecraftsurvivalgames.com
http://hypixel.net/
forum.hivemc.com
www.mineplex.com
roxbot.com
TheCoreMC

Are trust-worthy...

First off, is that the best font you could find for your post? ick.

Quote from Kabis

The servers that rely on "donator perks" are the kinds of servers that need to be shut down.
First off, we need a fine line to what "Donor perks" are.

They're pretty much saying "Our server is so bad we've had to rely on selling you Mojang's content to be able to stay alive".
Uhh, if a server was so bad, then why would people pay money for perks on it?

Whereas if they actually innovated on the game and added content of their own, they wouldn't be having such a bad time. Again, what instigates someones own content? First off, you have to work off limitations within vanilla minecraft. Sure bukkit helps as an abstraction layer but when it comes down to it anything is mojang's property. Is giving someone extra money on a kit server count as working off someone elses code, or using it yourself? Is giving someone modified items working off mojangs content, or is it your own?

un-innovative servers are the ones that will be hurt. This is how the world works. If a company is unable to be better than the other companies it goes out of business. Therefore, companies strive to offer better content and the MineCraft world has a whole gets better.
Uhh, this is already how it works. Better servers get money from people because they enjoy it more often? You act like because they offer content that affects their servers gameplay it is automatically a bad server? One, that is a pretty unfair thing to say. Two, the competition is already there.

More servers isn't always better.
What the heck does this mean. How much of the time is it good?

Few people who are actually good at development and programming can make high profit servers. Minecraft lets you make servers. If you want to host it on your home PC for you and some friends, SO BE IT. GO DO THAT. IT'S FREE! But don't go purchasing a $50 a month dedicated host that can support 500 people at one time and hope to rely on donations alone. That isn't how the real world works.
Ohh, my, just... wow. There is one thing that does NOT happen in the real world, and that is giving money to people FOR NO REASON. If you expect a magical fairy world to pop up where everyone pays their fair share you are lost in your own head. I read some stories on here of people that claim they made money for their server by just asking people. But they both have no proof to back it up or could just be a fortunate lucky person. One said his server was for a niche like popular server so the money probably came from fan-boys. If skydoesminecraft just asked for money I'm sure tons of people would just throw it on him and be like "PLS MENTION ME IM UR BIGGEST FAN PLIZZZ BUDDER"
Also, you just contradicted youself, You could make a pay to win server with your own plugins, you might want to restate yourself. If I made a server that lets you make giant whirlwinds of instant death to others and charge 1000$ for the privilege to make them, that is pay to win without what you said should not be allowed.

To those of you saying "If I make a mod I'm not allowed to sell it". You are allowed to sell content that you have made. If YOU wrote a bukkit plugin you are allowed to sell it. It doesn't matter if it relies on Mojang's code or not. Minecraft relies on Microsoft's or Apple's code. With out their OS Minecraft wouldn't be able to run! But Mojang can still sell their game with out being sued by Microsoft or Apple you can sell your code with out being sued by Mojang... That's how it works. Say you write a plugin that displays very nice particle effects over bow shots. You can sell that to players in game.
But again here comes the vauge problem of what is and isn't yours to sell. Those particles have to be spawned in using mojangs code and possibly content. Would modifying content already in the game count as your own content? If I made a plugin that gave diamond chestsplates double power without enchants, and then sold those is that okay? You can still make pay to win in a similar fashion. Things like mcmmo demonstrate this easily.

If some one else writes a plugin to do something, YOU ARE NOT allowed to sell that with out THEIR permission. yeah, but likewise what you said with your previous example. If I have essentials, which is almost a must have bukkit plugin for any server. Can I give money from the plugin using my own code, and consider it my own work? If there is a permissions plugins with ranks that isn't yours that contains only things you made, are you allowed to use the ranks plugin for that? I mean, you are making money using it directly. I will also add that most plugins don't give a rats butt about being used for money making, as they already get massive amounts of money from ad clicks and stuff.

If you want to charge people to play on your server, that is perfectly fine. It is pretty much saying "If you want to use my computers resources, and connect to my machine over the internet, you're going to have to pay. Mojang does not own your internet when you host a server.
Getting people to join a server is hard enough on its own, no one will get to know what playing on a server is like if they can't get to know it. Maybe you could allow a demo then ban them but only with a lot of time would they get to like a server enough to be willing to pay money to play it.

Notch himself stated that He wanted server owners to be able to make money like it was said in the video. Now how this is going to come across is not known but I have experience with the baddies. They are usually Youtuber affiliated servers too. I used to play on this server called SGCPVP and it was absurd. People were paying 50-400 dollars every day for pay to win privileges. This is the kind of thing that mojang clearly does NOT want. What I think is going to happen, is that greedy pay-to-win servers are going to have to give up a lot of things or else be shut down. I see nothing wrong with selling in game content as long as it seems fair, not out of greed and put towards a server and its hard working staff. Of course this is against the MTOS but at this point it is down to the ethics of the entire thing.

I think what we really need is some sort of community police to give the big offenders a giant smack.
Sort of like the Tribunal in League. Or whatever it is. But a playerbase, with authority, to enforce a fair compensation standard.

Quote from cup of water

Notch himself stated that He wanted server owners to be able to make money like it was said in the video. Now how this is going to come across is not known but I have experience with the baddies. They are usually Youtuber affiliated servers too. I used to play on this server called SGCPVP and it was absurd. People were paying 50-400 dollars every day for pay to win privileges. This is the kind of thing that mojang clearly does NOT want. What I think is going to happen, is that greedy pay-to-win servers are going to have to give up a lot of things or else be shut down. I see nothing wrong with selling in game content as long as it seems fair, not out of greed and put towards a server and its hard working staff. Of course this is against the MTOS but at this point it is down to the ethics of the entire thing.

Exactly. I am going to agree with your post. If only I could up vote... Ran out of up votes...

But seriously, pay to win games are just absurd. Basically, Notch is ok with server owners making profits, but not large profits for pay to win situations.

Quote from hardcorerobot

So I can't make money selling my photographs if I use Photoshop?

Your argument is at best facetious.

Nowhere in the Photoshop EULA doesn't it state that you cannot make money from selling pictures edited or painted in their program.

This is also a classic example of a false analogy logical fallacy. There is no way that Minecraft and Photoshop could be compared in this scenario.

Quote from ledrewxlamour

Nowhere in the Photoshop EULA doesn't it state that you cannot make money from selling pictures edited or painted in their program.

This is also a classic example of a false analogy logical fallacy. There is no way that Minecraft and Photoshop could be compared in this scenario.

Exactly this.

Your example would make more sense if it went like this:

"That would be like purchasing photoshop, then charging other users to edit their photos on your pc, using photoshops program"

See the difference.

Exactly 2:01 is when I FREAKED TO DEATH!!!!!

What happens when the big donators (some of which are rich people) try to sue for a refund over the donation perks that no longer work? Mojang would lose a lot of money on lawyers at the very least.

Quote from jDude6456

I believe that Mojang should just put a cap on how much money an item is sold for. For example, a kit for a server can't be sold for more than $400.

I exactly agree. Of course, they may still get angry calls from parents, but if a kid charged like $40 instead of like $1000, it would be a bit less dramatic.

*Just an opinion don't kill me*

If Daegonner PvP shuts down someone will be very very angry... I've got ehh, Lets say 2k on that server. LOL. I swear the owner is drunk and has large partys on his yacht. (On which the server is hosted because the uptime is horrible.) The Pay to win needs to lessen but at the same time how are people who have paid thousands going to feel if the server is required to take away those privileges?

Life is a double edged sword. It cuts you going either way.

Quote from coolAlias

snip

Thank you, someone who I can agree with. A lot of the problems seem to be coming up from some bad parenting issues :\ - but unfortunately, it doesn't matter in this day an age. Parents who spoil their kids will get mad at the people who appear to take the money, which to them is just the name of Minecraft, or Mojang.

Quote from hardcorerobot

snip

Ok to start of with, Mojang hasn't said or attempted anything and aren't preventing people from making a dime. They intend to find a middle ground, which personally doesn't sound very feasible, but hey at least they are not going out right and shutting everyone down yet. You make it sound like they've already done so.

Also, your argument about how Mojang has no right, is horrible invalid. You bought the game and agreed to their ToS and EULA. Meaning anything you make you are already aware that you are not supposed to many any money off of it at all. And even if "you don't care" what it says, it really doesn't matter because you agreed to it, and honestly if you plan to go to court of not caring about something you agreed to, good luck.

Lastly, the EULA is something you've agreed to, and there is no getting around it. Mod makers, map makers, server owners, or others who build on the game are all aware (or at least should be since they agreed to it) of the EULA. There is nothing absurd about any of it, and comparing Mojang's EULA to other companies is just stupid because the EULA can be written differently for any software. Sure it gives the company the power to make their own laws, but you do have the choice to not agree to it and go elsewhere.

Quote from Crusher48

snip

Nothing happens, I garuntee that every single server that has donation perks also has their own agreement or statement about it being non-refundable and that the compensation may be changed or removed at any time with or without warning. You can't sue against things you agree to, and if you don't agree then don't buy it. Plus, no one is going to buy a lawyer over anything that is under 5 grand, it would cost way more for the lawyer in the end and you end up poorer.

Quote from SpikeViper

I exactly agree. Of course, they may still get angry calls from parents, but if a kid charged like $40 instead of like $1000, it would be a bit less dramatic.

*Just an opinion don't kill me*

This idea of a cap is compeltely dumb. What if I had several very reasonable 20 dollar packages that were fair, and then I wanted to make a bundle price of 50 of the packages for 800 dollars. In the end the package is much cheaper for each in the bundle and the cap rule is no longer useful. It really isn't about the money being spent, but what the server gives in return.

If a game has a bunch of kits they should in theory be balanced kits. This allows for variety when donating, but no benefit. Unbalanced kits create a pay to win server, and sometimes it isn't even intentional. So really the change that needs to happen it making the power of kits fairly equal and at least attempt balancing issues (which in any game are never perfect). Big servers like Mineplex actually do this fairly well. You can still win with the default kits, but you can pay for more variety and still be equally matched.

--------------

On another note. This whole thing was started by comment made in chats by a developer voicing his opinion. While I think voicing opinions is a good thing, you really should not listen to anything that isn't an official PR statement, especially from developers like Grum, who really loves his voice in chats. In my opinion he seems to really like having the authority and makes it very clear by giving statements like the ones he did.

Also, when it comes to complaints from parents to Mojang, it is unfortunate but they really need to take actions to prevent them. Eventually it could add up, even though it really is the parents fault for letting their kid buy such outrageous things with their money.

Anyways, hopefully we can get an official statement and a more black and white way of seeing things and how to go about them. In any case, it will be extremely hard to enforce on just the bad servers, and Mojang has its work cut out for them.