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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!
You all know it is true but you don't want to admit it.
Next thing you know mojang is going to require every server is PG friendly so the youth is not corrupted by the interwebs,
Ha ha, good one.
I thought this exactly. It's not right.
From what I can tell from the EULA.
Sounds more like someone got tired of Minecraft and is seeking ways to crash it economically. This will do that.
Curing is the wrong attitude. Instead they need to embrace the community and modify their EULA to match it. Not try to enforce it.
and the other real problem are all the blind people who are thinking this will make minecraft servers even more fun.
No it will not. It will lead to watered down servers with less ram/player lots/ memory/etc.. due to not being able to run off of purchases of packages. Less plugins, only vanilla servers will prosper.
The Bukkit API is by the Bukkit team. Craftbukkit which is used to actually run a server is still vanilla Minecraft, just with the Bukkit code grafted on.
Just don't play on those servers. That's all there is to it.
If Mojang owned the servers in question, and they do not, they'd have a legal claim to what was charged. At most they have a legal claim to a percentage of the monies collected.
I'd love it if people played on my servers, but they don't, cause I don't charge for awesome ingame things, you have access to all of it. Nothing to entice you to rank up. Guess what I use a cheap hosting provider, two of them. One of them is mondo crappy, the other is good but only for bukkit and tekkit. I can't host what I want cause no money comes in, there is no reason for folks to donate. Why would you.
It's like going to McDonald's and they give you a free burger every day and then one day they say, hey you gotta start paying for that. Do you start paying for it? or do you stop going to McDonald's?
Exactly. The Minecraft server hosting market is essentially dead now unless the EULA is updated to accommodate the existing working dynamic.
HAHA Their is no way im going to lisin this or im going to lose alot of money by making every1 pay the same thing
Which begs the question, if it was so unbearable, why did you keep playing it? After all you found that server online somehow, you could have easily found another one.
I think this is far too broad, because now all creative servers will no longer be able to
- Give donators access to World Edit, because then random trolling non-donators would have to have access to World Edit, and could grief the server by abusing the plugin to crash the server.
- Give donators additional Plotme plots.
- Give donators access to a free build area, that random people would constantly grief if any old player who had just joined could access it.
- Give ranks and benefits to players who earn them with good builds.
These rules will kill creative servers like TCS, Vaduct's server, and WoK.
These creative servers aren't doing anything evil, they can't survive without breaking these rules, because making a creative server pay-to-join would turn away 99.9% of players, and having no incentive to get people to dontate means that theres no way they'll get enough donations to help them run the server.
Over all, I think this is really just a shotgun solution, and I think Mojang should sort these problems out on a case by case basis. Sure, charging 1000$ for a set of super enchanted gear on one server is stupid, but you can't just ban all transactions. I think someone should be allowed to pay 10$ to get access to flashing disco armour or World Edit.
(Yes, I know I'll get flamed ) (No, I don't care)
You sir have hit the nail on the head!
I want to take a minute to restate some things that have been said before but are still being ignored or misunderstood. Please remember that I understand that my posts are just my opinion. IANAL and that I am commenting on how I think things work in the USA. Your local laws my be different or I could simply be wrong.
1. They are NOT making the server license more restrictive. They are actually granting more rights than the current license. From what I have seen, the original/current license forbids all commercial use. That means under the original license you are in violation of your license if you run a server and receive any money from your players. (Sharing the cost of a server is not the same thing.)
2. Running a modded server does not change anything. Even a full reimplementation of the server written from scratch is a derivative work if the programmers had any exposure to the decompiled software owned by Mojang. (Search on "COMPAQ, IBM PC BIOS" for more info.)
3. No one has ever purchased Minecraft server. It has always been downloadable for free under a specific license. As such, none of the consumer protections for purchases come into play. If you want to use Mojang's server software legally you have to agree to their rules. (I bother to say this because of all the ignorant "I bought Minecraft, I will do whatever I want!" posts.)
Here are the reasons I personally would follow their rules.
1. Karma. If I ignore the wishes and rights of the owner of a creative work like Minecraft, why should I expect anyone to respect my wishes and rights for anything I create?
2. Reputation. Why would anyone who enjoys Minecraft associate or do business with someone who does not respect the rights of the creator/owner of Minecraft? Doing so just gives Mojang incentive to release less information to the community and become more hostile to server admins in general.
3. DRM. If too many choose to ignore Mojang's license terms, they may choose to find technical means to enforce them. Do you really want Mojang to start down the DRM path? Here are some of the things I see coming if that happens:
a. Server Login. They could easily recode the server software to not run without logging into a Mojang account. (Yes it could be hacked out, but thanks to code obfuscation, a new hack would have to be created for every release.)
b. Enforced code signatures. To the best of my knowledge, Java supports verifying a signature on classes before allowing them to run. This would make life much harder for anyone how wants to modify the server software. It would also make all current mods unusable.
c. Removal of the Offline option. This would require all of your users to login with their Mojang account giving them a very simple way to force you to follow their terms.
4. Legal trouble. Why would I knowingly put time and energy into running a server if I knew that the way I was running the server might cause Mojang to send my ISP or server host a cease and desist letter that could take me offline for weeks or possibly forever? This may be specific to the US, but Mojang can easily get any server taken offline by sending a single DMCA Takedown letter to the ISP or hosting company.
I don't run a server for anyone but friends, but I still think this is the reality of how things are.
NO, no it isn't. A player on a minecraft server is essentially anonymous unless they gave out too much personal information. Unlike a family member that can report to an 'authority' anything they want for any reason they want without any real consequence.
Even if there was a version of Bukkit that ran without any of Mojang's code OR assets being present on the server it would still be a "derivative work" from a copyright standpoint unless it was written without looking at the decompiled Minecraft code. Since there is no published Minecraft Client API, I am going to assume that Bukkit is a derivative work. As such, it is my understanding that unless the Bukkit team has a separate license with Mojang, everyone running a Bukkit server is required to follow the Minecraft server license.
The problem with your idea is that the majority of players aren't mature enough to support the servers they like and who is gonna want to pay up front to join a server. The only servers that will benefit from the upfront charge are the large popular servers that are getting spanked with the new EULA now. They are no doubt paying a small fine or something and this new EULA is a legality that is being done to facilitate them. The large servers will continue under a slight modified internal management of players now and Mojang wins because no upstarts will stand a chance.
Partitioning out land or setting up additional worlds in itself should be no problem. Whether in the freebuild area or outside if players have access to all the same blocks, items, mobs etc. then gameplay remains the same. Now if you go and say, block off all the jungle biomes in the world so only donators can access them, then you'd have an issue.
If ranks and benefits are based on activity in the game, that's fine and always has been. You just can't throw money at the server admins and get VIP status for that alone.
So in your infinite wisdom what do you see as the model for making money now?
Lol, everyone has free access to TNT on both of my servers.
The best plugin I found for anti-griefing is called "Grief Prevention", all the others can be violated in one or another.