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Hello!
Let’s get one thing clear: we love it when Minecrafters host servers. Tiny or massive, running vanilla Minecraft or a heavily modded version, we think they’re all great. Playing with friends in persistent worlds is awesome. Everyone knows that.
Over the past week there’s been lots of discussion about Minecraft servers and your right to monetise them. Legally, you are not allowed to make money from our products. There has been one exception to this rule so far – Minecraft videos. We’re about to make a second exception – Minecraft servers.
Hosting servers can be expensive. We want to give community members a way to cover their costs. That said, we don’t want our players to be exploited, or to have a frustrating time unless they pay. The following rules, which may be tweaked at a later date, have been created with those points in mind.
You are allowed to charge players to access your server
So long as the fee is the same for all players, you are allowed to charge for access to your server. You are not allowed to split your playerbase into paying, and non-paying users, nor can you restrict gameplay elements to different tiers of player.
Basically, if you’re charging for access to your server, you are selling a “ticket” and there can only be one type of ticket, no matter how much people are willing to spend.
You are allowed to accept donations
You are allowed to accept donation from your players. You can thank them publicly, or in-game, but can’t give them preferential treatment for donating. You are not allowed to restrict gameplay features in an attempt to make money.
You are allowed to provide in-game advertising or sponsorship opportunities
Running servers can be expensive, with that in mind, you are allowed to put adverts in your Minecraft worlds to help with costs. Used within reason, adverts and sponsorship can be good ways to fund a server.
You are allowed to sell in-game items so long as they don’t affect gameplay
We don’t mind you selling items in game, but they must be purely cosmetic. Pets, hats, and particle effects are OK, but swords, invincibility potions, and man-eating pigs are not. We want all players to be presented with the same gameplay features, whether they decide to pay or not.
There is one exception to this rule – capes! We have a lot of fun making cool capes for extra-special members of our community and Minecon attendees. We’d like to keep them as exclusive as possible. So, yeah, no capes please, for free or otherwise.
You cannot charge real-world cash for in-game currency
We don’t mind you making up currencies which players earn through playing but you are not allowed to sell it for real-world cash. Remember – if the stuff you sell affects gameplay, we’re not cool with it.
Don’t pretend to be us, and provide your customers with loads of info!
If you do decide to monetise your server, you must clearly state that the purchase is not associated with Mojang, declare who the money is going to, and provide a purchase history and contact details. You should also check up on the legality of selling digital items in your specific region.
Thanks for reading!
As I hope you’ve noticed, these rules are making attempts to prevent Minecraft servers becoming “pay-to-win.” We hate the idea of server hosts restricting Minecraft’s features to players who have already bought our game! It seems really mean.
We’re hoping that these rules will give hosts opportunity to continue creating awesome Minecraft worlds, and for our players to enjoy them without worrying about cash.
Have a good day!
1. I refuse to charge players to access my server. You want to stop pay-to-win? Well, pay-to-win becomes an absolute when you completely cut out the ability to compete without money. Just because a server feels like they're pushed into a corner with your new EULA terms, thousands of players will now be unable to access the servers they love, due to the fact that they've changed to this new system.
2. A purely donation based server won't last long. Even when ran well, it's hard to meet monthly payments and population demands when there's no incentive for donation. On top of this, there's absolutely no way to track and determine whether we provide perks after the "donation" has taken place. An anonymous chest of goodies appearing outside of somebody's house can't really be traced.
This 'rule' is just silly. It's like the standard "No Running In the Hall" rule. It's only there to attempt to push people into walking based on the fear of the very, very, very minor amount of people who actually get caught doing so.
3. I'll just skip this bit about in-game advertisement. I don't think I have to go over why I don't plan to include this in my roleplay environment.
4. Can't sell in-game currencies? Well, I sell creditpoints which can be used for cosmetics. Now, I'm well aware that it doesn't go against their "As long as it doesn't affect gameplay" tidbit, but just the fact that I can be 'reported' to Mojang for something like this is absolutely childish.
I think that last bit pretty much wraps up how I feel about all this. Childish.
I feel like Mojang is attempting to play schoolteacher with all its subjugates right now, and I don't appreciate it in the slightest. Whether I'm in violation or not, this sort of Big Brother behavior is completely and utterly unnecessary, and makes me want to avoid running a server.
I agree but good luck finding any legality in it hahaa, mojang is picking a very wrong battle
Offline mode does not verify or prove its piracy. I'm talking literally about downloading and using minecraft without paying. The whole, torrenting business. Which offline does not prove, it can be used, but does not prove.
My point is, and with that, I leave the minecraft community because If this succeeds, minecraft will be dead in heartbeat. ( it won't, people will still charge you for what they believe in), that the server you host, where ever you host, is fully under your control. If you chose a public host, yes they will follow mojang like lapdogs, if you host it with your own money, your own dedi box, and service, mojang has no chance except to file a cease and desist order directly against you (this would hurt them more than it hurts you).
Fact is, servers will continue to use ranks, kits, mods, plugins, to charge players to keep themselves alive, is it unfair? Maybe, is it wrong? maybe, is it unethical maybe? You are forgetting one thing, YOU DO NOT HAVE TO PLAY ON THAT SERVER. You are still in control of FREE WILL, "Choice". To choose or not to choose to play...
100k servers, you cannot tell me that atleast one server in the world is to your liking...
Alas, I await for my C&D letter from Mojang, Good luck fellow hosters!
Their rules are fair to everyone, except for the fact that people can charge money to gain entry to the server. That's just kind of an excuse to get people to shell out money to greedy server owners. Still, the rules are pretty fair. If you advertise special things for people who give money to the server (which would be called purchases when people give money for items), then that's not fair to the people who are sensible & won't pay for items.
If people just give money to the server for the sheer fact that they like it, then that is alright. There are no advantages in that system, just people who like the server and give money to it just because they are happy it exists. If your server isn't making enough money to keep it running, then use some of your own money. You had to use your own money to get the server started in the first place, so why can't you use that same money to keep it going?
Before people complain about, "I don't have enough money to keep my server going," remember that you made the decision to buy the game and made the decision to agree to the EULA. You must abide by the rules that Mojang has set in place for most everything that relates to Minecraft. If they say that you can't use Pay-2-Win tactics to get people to purchase items on your server, then you can't use Pay-2-Win tactics. If they say that people can't make money off of their game, then people can't make money off of their game. You didn't help make the game, you didn't work on the code that makes the game run, so why are you entitled to the money that you make off of people purchasing items off of the server that you are renting?
No, you can't. Did you read the post you're replying to? The whole point of the updated EULA is that you can no longer do this. You may have OPINIONS on what you should and should not be able to do, but your statement is flat out wrong.
I'm pretty calm sir, read my last post: I await my C&D. If I don't get any, its all just hoax. Thus, I continue to run the server as I please and see fit. FYI, minecraft server client is still the exact same size, last date of modification. Not violating any rules.
The server would probably be Vanilla lol.
Except the issue is that most people that play on these servers abide with the pay-to-win systems to the point where they start paying with their moms' credit cards. Tell me now, do you seriously think that Mojang allowing people to PAY TO ENTER a server isn't enough?
If the server hosts REALLY needed the money, then they could have a pay-to-enter system, or a donation system that gives them aesthetics, which would be sufficient to pay the rent if the server is popular. Blocking off players from using specific items and entities is merely a method of whoring money.
Besides, it's not like realms actually competes with full servers. It's way too limited and restrictive. Never mind that plenty of people (myself included) will continue happily hosting small servers four small communities of players. A server hosted on someone's spare computer in their house is still going to be better than a realms hosted world. (Provided the owner actually knows what they are doing anyway.)
It doesn't matter whether their rules satisfy your or not. You bought the game made by them. They sold it to you. It's their work. If you had at least so much as a minor part in the creation of the game, then maybe you could charge for items, but you can't walk right up to them and tell them how to run their game.
This isn't so much a matter of legality as it is morality. The terms of service laid out by the previous EULA definition was incredibly vague. If you'll remember, even Mojang admitted that, and that was the cause of all this fuss. Now, they're refining those terms.
The issue with that is that they allowed that vaguery to control and dictate the means by which the community supported itself. True, in some ways this created the pay-to-win system, and that may be an issue, but to attempt to completely choke out the community based on their own personal beliefs is wrong. Let's talk dirty metaphors:
"You live in a city, which has just passed a new law, stating that sodas are illegal. Of course, nobody takes this serious. It's soda, afterall. We'll just do what we do naturally, and drink it on our own personal whims. As the years go by, the city takes no measures whatsoever in enforcing this law. It allows soda to be sold, and soda ends up becoming incredibly popular. It's sold on every street corner, every restaurant, and even in the back alleyways of the crime-ridden poor districts.
Soda ends up becoming an icon for the city. It attracts tourists to come see the city, who end up flooding the local economy, turning it into a booming soda sight-scene. (That's a doozy, eh?)
All the while, the city does nothing about enforcing the soda law. It actually profits from the lack of enforcement, to the point that soda-related activities become a staple in the everyday lives of the citizens. Things are going swell in soda-ville.
All of a sudden, the city decides that a particular brand of this soda is violating the law. It sends out a massive order of removal for all citrus-using products in the city. The families, those that have chosen to sell their lemony beverages instead of the more popular cocoa bean-using drinks, are now suddenly out of work. Their businesses are foreclosed upon, their mortgages withdrawn, and their children forced to rummage through the dumpsters for food."
While vastly overexaggerated, this has a lot of similarity to our situation with Mojang. The issue doesn't lie in the fact that we've always been breaking the law, but in the fact that the law wasn't enforced, which PROMOTED ITS BEING BROKEN. On top of that, Mojang has profited from this. The ability to sell donation packages as we please has allowed us to run our servers in a business model that's right for us. It's promoted self-growth, and the community has flourished from it. Self-growth is the very core of this community, and without that hands-free attitude we've always seen from Mojang on certain areas, we'll see that growth stifled and put in the ground.