I only stopped by here to change the email address for this account because it's been getting spam. (it was a unique address I set up for, and used only for, this forum) And, sadly, it appears that this will be the last time, too. This isn't my only identity (Citric knows who else I am, and why) Nobody cares, of course; I'm not sure why I'm even posting this. Twitch will get more users, the stock speculators will be pleased because Twitch has more "users" who never actually use, but hey, the metrics are there, and I guess everyone will be happy. Everyone else. So it goes. Bye, y'all.
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- Kythan
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Member for 10 years, 2 months, and 16 days
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Oct 14, 2017
Kythan posted a message on Merge Your Minecraft Forum Account With TwitchPosted in: News -
Apr 1, 2014
Kythan posted a message on Minecraft Convention Scams - What You Need to KnowLook out, this is going to be a long one:Posted in: News
First, for the posters above who say "well, the victims deserved to get scammed because they didn't successfully protect themselves": That's a griefer's excuse. And I see exactly the same thing in Minecraft: "If you don't protect your server/stuff/whatever from griefing, you deserve to be greifed." Or, in short, if someone can successfully perpetrate a crime against you, then you deserve to be a victim of a crime. Robbed? You deserved it. Carjacked? You deserved it. Murdered? Yeah, you deserved to die. If you didn't, you wouldn't have been in that theater in Aurora, you wouldn't have been in the Twin Towers, you wouldn't have been at Fort Hood. But you were, so it's your fault, not anybody else's, that you were murdered. Malik Hassan, James Eagan Holmes, and an assortment of Al Quaida terrorists, didn't do anything wrong. It's all the fault of the people they murdered.
Ridiculous, isn't it? It's a comforting thought to have -- "I'll never be a victim because I'm too smart to let it happen." But it's not that easy. Someone who's just as smart, if not smarter, than you are might want you to be their victim, and when it's them versus you, two or three or ten versus one, you may very well lose, even if you think only people who aren't you are ever the targets of successful crimes.
In any crime, you have two people with opposing goals. Let's say, for instance, that Al wants to break into Zoe's house and steal Zoe's TV. Zoe, on the other hand, does not want her house broken into nor her TV stolen. They both take steps to accomplish their goals. Zoe locks her door, and Al breaks a window instead. Al succeeds in his goal: he breaks into the house and steals the TV. Would you seriously say that this is Zoe's fault? Al succeeded in what he set out to do; Zoe failed in what she set out to do. The outcome was what one of the two people wanted, not the other, and it's the person who wanted it that way, and worked to make it happen that way, who gets the blame (or credit), not the person who wanted it to be some other way.
Now, specific to MOTM and the situation.
First, some background here: I have been a member of the convention committee of two separate science fiction conventions. I have worked as a volunteer -- including security -- at numerous others. I was a volunteer staffer at the professionally-run Game Developers' Conference for two years. I have been an exhibitor/vendor at multiple conventions, from college student-run conventions in spare rooms of the student union building to GenCon and Dragon*Con. And I have attended dozens of volunteer-run SF, anime, and comic book conventions over a period of decades, from student cons to Worldcons. In short, I have a lot of experience with conventions, both behind and in front of the scenes, and this speaks directly to that experience.
It's obvious that the guy is lying from his own words.
Quote from Kevin Roman »My wife and I, just like many other parents, were bummed that our children were unable to attend the official Minecraft Convention - Minecon, back in November of last year, being as though tickets sold out in a matter of seconds. In response, we thought it would be a nice idea to create our own Minecraft gathering....
Okay, so his kids couldn't go to MineCon, so he wanted to create his own. I can see that. But if that's so, why did he decide to also do the same thing somewhere else -- NYC -- too? If you're doing something for your friends and family, you do it near home; you don't do another one in a major market because that's not where your family is.
Now, as for the claims in his statement:
He says that there were no decorations, no displays, no nothing, because the attendees stole all of them. They apparently even stole the signs from the walls and the decorations from the ceiling, and of course the table drapes, curtains, etc. But if that's the case, how come all of the videos show people standing around in a barren room, and none of them show people hauling all this stuff out the doors? I haven't seen a single picture of someone stealing so much as a "Welcome to MOTM" sign. Is it a 1024-person conspiracy against Kevin Roman or something? He says that this was a success because only 10% of the people who were there have complained on Facebook. So all those other people who didn't complain (and by his logic, therefore supported him), they must have videos, or at least stills, of attendees stealing everything that wasn't nailed down and prying loose that was. Where are those pictures? Where is the evidence that would support him? For that matter, where are his pictures of a beautifully-decorated convention venue before they let the paying customers in? You don't do all that work, set everything up, and not at least pull out your cell phone camera and get a couple shots of how nice it looks. Yet he expects us to believe that all this stuff existed, and was set up, and nobody took a picture of that, and then after the doors opened, it was stolen, and nobody, not one of the 1024 attendees, not one of the volunteers, and not him, took a picture of that either.
Now, the matter of how people could steal all of that stuff in the first place: Where was his security? I'm not talking rent-a-cops (though given the location and the expected attendees, it wouldn't have been a bad idea to hire a couple) but convention volunteers. I've been one, multiple times. They're the people with the little red "Security Staff" ribbons hanging from their badges who say "Hey, don't mess with that!" when someone tries to walk off with something -- and takes a picture of them for future identification if that doesn't dissuade him. Where were those people when this massive wave of theft was happening? Convention security is something that anyone who is trying to put on a convention -- even if they're just a student SF club at a small branch state university -- has, because if for no other reason you need someone to check to make sure everyone coming in actually paid. I'm pretty sure he made certain that the attendees had shelled out the required $50, and he certainly had some way of ejecting everyone when he shut the whole thing down after 2 hours (probably when his venue rental was up), so how come those people were unable to stop -- or even report on -- this massive theft of, well, everything?
He says all the rest of the stuff -- the LEGO sets, the PS4s, etc. -- that he promised to give away was in a back room so people wouldn't steal it. Fair enough; I've done my time sleeping on the floor of the video equipment room at an SF con so that people wouldn't make off with the equipment overnight. But how come when he did giveaways -- remember those pens? -- he didn't give away THE LEGO SETS instead? He was doing a giveaway. Whatever the setup, whatever the circumstances, he was doing a giveaway. He had a choice of what items to give away: "Let's see, should it be these Minecraft LEGO sets that I bought and advertised? Or should it be some spare boxes of pens that I got at the dollar store for the staff to use?" Then he chose the pens. He's expecting us to believe that he left the advertised items on the shelf and gave away junk instead. He already had those LEGO sets (or so he claims) but he didn't give them out; instead, he gave out boxes of cheap pens. Why not use the LEGO sets, if they existed, and make people happy instead of angry? The only reason I can see for this is if the LEGO sets never existed at all.
I've seen screwed-up conventions. Even a screwed-up Worldcon. I have a pretty good feel for what screwed-up conventions look like. And this doesn't look like one. If he'd told the truth, I'd be able to accept it as a huge screw-up. But he didn't. As I demonstrated above, just from his statements in his own defense of what happened, he lied, liked, and lied some more. That's not what people who make mistakes do.
This wasn't a screw-up. This was a scam. - To post a comment, please login.
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In my opinion, people do not send me enough money (in small, unmarked bills, please). It's highly unlikely, however, that other people are going to agree with this opinion.
There are some opinions which most people agree on, such as "kicking puppies is bad." There are some opinions which some people agree on and others do not, like "brussels sprouts are edible." And there are other opinions which most people look upon with complete disbelief, and make comments like "what, is he daft?" When you are expressing any opinion, it's always wise to first determine which of these categories it falls into. When that opinion is that a perfectly innocuous word is cruel, you can be fairly sure that not many people agree with that opinion, and therefore they're about as likely to change their behavior in response to that opinion as they are to change their behavior in response to my opinion that they don't send me enough money.
Furthermore, let's look at your proposal, substituting the phrase "there's not enough info" for the word "vague". It means the same thing, does it not? (after all, that's kind of the point of substituting it) And we learned in math class that if A=B and B=C, then A=C. If "there's not enough info" means that same thing as "vague" and "vague" is cruel, then "there's not enough info" is also cruel. They both mean the same thing: "hey, dude, your suggestion is thinner than the pepperoni on a discount pizza." One is just using more words to say it.
There are plenty of words that are truly negative, and can be used in ways that are truly cruel. If someone were to tell a poster "You're a stupid, ignorant loser, and your suggestion lowers the IQ of anyone who reads it," that would be cruel. (it would also be harshly dealt with by the moderators) But "Your suggestion is vague" is not. It might conceivably be incorrect (though, having read hundreds of suggestions on MCF in the time I've been here, I would bet against that) or correct, but not cruel.
To make a long post short, there is enough real cruelty in the world; we don't need to seek out more.
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There's nothing bad or disgusting about the word "vague"; it simply means "it needs more details" or "there's not enough information" but in a single word, not a phrase. It's not cruel. It's not hurtful. It's not negative, at least not any more so than "there's not enough information" is. It's just a word meaning "not clearly expressed." Which is what so many of the suggestions in question are: not clearly expressed. They're sort of an idea ... "we should have more kinds of food" ... but beyond that they're just hazy. You know, vague.
Why don't people use other words? Because when "vague" is the appropriate word to use, it would be downright silly to try to circumambulate around the word because one person, for reasons that escape me completely, finds a perfectly innocent word to be hurtful. (and if "vague" is so bad, what happens if if someone says "that is a terrible idea" or, worse yet, "that's just plain stupid"?)
I'm not trying to be unkind here, but if you find the word "vague" to be cruel and hurtful, the solution really isn't trying to make everyone else use a different word; the solution is to toughen your skin a bit so you can cope with it. The world has a lot worse words than "vague" in it.
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You don't want to run a Minecraft server if you can't make money from it? Well ... don't. The world will keep turning on its axis if only the people who want to run servers because they think it's fun, not because they want it to be a cash cow, do so.
If you're so good at games and all, write your own game, sell it, and make more money than Notch. That's easy, right? Because actually creating Minecraft was the easy part, wasn't it? Well?
People who think what they're doing (running a server) is the hard part, and what Mojang did (designing, coding, and marketing Minecraft) was easy, are like the people who go up to authors and say "I've got this great idea. How about I tell you the idea, and you write the book, and we split the money?" The best response I've heard of was "How about this: you keep the idea, and you write the book, and that way you get all the money?" Somehow, they never seem to want to do that. Except with servers, they don't even want to split the money. They want to keep the money for themselves. Yeah, right.
If you want to run a server, run a server. If you can't afford to run a server, don't run a server. But pay-to-win servers should have been stopped when they started, and need to be ended now.
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The question has to be what subs they're trying to maximize? If all they wanted to do was maximize subs, period, there are things more popular than Minecraft. Some are even allowed on YouTube. They're trying to maximize a particular sort of subs. What it is, I'm not entirely sure, but apparently it does not include young children.
Define objectionable? What offends you? me? Quavelen? Geneo? A 7-year-old? The 7-year-olds that hung out at the playground by my former apartment? (their language could peel paint) Do you want a bunch of people, many of whom are kids themselves, to try to work out appropriate ratings for their videos? And for what country? YouTube, like the Internet, is international. Even if we just limit ourselves to English-speaking countries, the limits on what is and isn't allowed can vary widely. (see: Gordon Ramsay, cooking shows thereof) And since you're already allowing your child to play a game rated specifically for older children, is it going to make a difference?
You're 50? Yes, I am.
[quote]
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And I do not believe that the entire world should be made suitable for a 7-year-old child. In fact, although I couldn't immediately find a rating for Minecraft for the PC, the XBox and PS versions have an ESRB rating of 10+. So you are allowing your child to play a game intended for (at a minimum) people almost half again his age, and then complaining that people even older that that do not conform their behavior to what you consider to be suitable for your child's age.
Minecraft is not intended for 7-year-olds. Minecraft videos are likewise not intended for 7-year-olds. If you want to allow your little boy to play Minecraft despite this, you are going to have to watch those videos yourself, and determine which ones you want to let him see and which ones you don't. That is your job, as a parent, and it is neither right nor possible to expect other people to do that job for you.
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"George, we've got two possible YouTubers we can put some money behind. What do you think of them?"
"Well, Dave, this guy SomeRandomDude is doing some pretty amazing videos. He doesn't have much of a computer, but he's funny, he's entertaining, he's creative, and he's really making the best of what he's got?"
"What about the other one?"
"SilverArchex? I've got no idea, really. He doesn't actually seem to have any videos up. He talks a lot about how good he's going to be if we give him a better computer, but what he already has is better than what SomeRandomDude is using to make really good videos, but all he's making is noise."
"I vote for sponsoring SomeRandomDude. He's shown us what he can do, and it's pretty good."
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"What would you do with a thousand tubas?"
"Oh, I don't want a thousand tubas; I just want the money."
When someone wants easily five times the cost of a computer that could do all the he claims to want it for, I start wondering which it is that he really wants, the computer or the money?
Hardware doesn't replace talent. If you're good, it'll show through no matter what kind of computer you're running, and there's at least a possibility that you'll get enough subscribers, and enough interest, to justify buying a better computer. And if you're no good, you're not going to be any better with the best computer in the world; you're just going to be a lamer with a fancy computer.
I'm also reminded of the kids who dream of an NFL career as a shortcut to fame and riches, and ignore things like academics in the process. There are 32 NFL teams, 53 men to a team, and the average career length of a player who makes it to opening day (one of those 53, in other words) is 6 years. So 1/6 of the players per year are replaced, or roughly 283 players. According to usafootball.com, there were 1,134,377 boys playing high school football in 2010-11. If we assume that they're evenly divided between 9th-12th grade, that's 283,594 graduating each year ... almost exactly 1,000 times as many as there are jobs opening up in the NFL. So these kids have 1 chance in 1,000 of becoming a professional football player ... and 999 chances in 1,000 of ending up in the kind of job that involves a funny hat and french fries. Yet they all think they're going to be the ones.
Standout YouTubers are the same way: for every Sky or Pew there are a thousand, ten thousand, wanna-bes that never made it and never will make it. Nobody is going to risk the cost of sponsorship for some random person who shows no signs whatsoever of being one of the winners (for example, not using what he has, even if it's little better than a Commodore 64 with a wonky cassette drive, to make amazingly good videos) and every sign of being one fhe wanna-bes and thinking that it's all about the hardware.
Also, the staff here gets pretty exercised about things that look like members begging for money, so I'd really advise not doing it. Besides, you'd probably get a better profit in a subway station with a sign; we're all poor, we spend our money on games
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I don't think that's the case. Aside from his later post, there was the thread title: "Who is running this place?". One would expect "this place" to mean "here" and, therefore, that he wants to sue "here" -- aka the Minecraft Forums. Then there's this quote:
That is a direct request: "refund my money." It's clearly not addressed to Mojang or Microsoft, both clearly identifiable (and presumably sueable) companies. Therefore, it must be addressed to the website owners -- who are neither one. Yes, the OP really is trying, via a post on a website, to threaten a totally unconnected company with a lawsuit, demanding that they "refund my money please".
And you want some of that money?
If you'll look about, you'll note that there is a big Curse logo at the top of the home page. There are various exhortations to sign up for Curse network membership, buy Curse Premium service, etc. Never a mention of Mojang or Microsoft.
I'll put it in big, bold letters:
Nobody here can give your money back.
They are Curse, Inc. (as they say all over the forum) They are not Mojang. They are not Microsoft. They do not have your money. They never had your money. They can't give you what they don't have and never had.
I am neither Mojang nor Microsoft nor Curse, but I'll give you what reassurance I can:
I have bought operating systems, development tools, applications, and games from Microsoft over a period of many years. I own an XBox 360 and an XBox Live account, not to mention running several versions of Windows on several different computers. And never have they sent me a C&D for using my own screen name, nor attempted to seize anything I created using software purchased from them -- things which would be, to Microsoft, worth considerably more money. They're far from my favorite company (though at least they're not EA, or the rump of SCOX if that still exists) but they have presented no direct threat to me.
I'm assuming from the posts that you're a Macintosh user, and have scrupulously avoided any games from studios owned by Microsoft or for which the IP is owned by Microsoft, such as Halo, Fable, Age of Empires, etc. Take it from a Windows user who does buy and play those games: Microsoft doesn't know you exist. They don't care that you exist, except that you shelled out a few bucks for a game, which helped to buy some senior executive a bigger yacht. They're not coming after you. If you want to sue Microsoft, they're easy to find. But getting all paranoid on this forum is not going to help you in any way.
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"This place" doesn't have your money. They never did. MCF is no more a part of Mojang or Microsoft than, say, Planet Minecraft is. If you want to sue someone, I'm fairly certain that you can find Microsoft easily enough. That's who you need to sue, not some random forum owned by a totally unrelated company who has nothing to do with any of this except for reporting it.
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Actually, that isn't the case.
I own a canoe, which I paddle on lakes and rivers on a regular basis. I've owned and/or used canoes, kayaks, and rowboats of various sizes, and even briefly piloted a DUKW (which, admittedly, couldn't go at high speed if it tried). I've run low-end whitewater (class II) in a canoe. I've observed many other boats, including human-powered, sailing, and motor-propelled, made of materials ranging from birchbark to high-strength modern composites, under conditions from calm ponds to whitewater, oceans, etc. And one thing I have noticed about all of them: none of these real-life boats are as fragile as Minecraft boats. In fact, children's pool toys are not as fragile as our "boats".
If you make a sudden sharp turn at high speed in a real boat ... you stay in it. There is a reason why out lakes are not littered with people who were dumped out of their boats, and that reason is that people rarely fall out of boats -- you have to put some work into it. (mind you, people do manage this, and sometimes even drown themselves in the process, but as a percentage of boaters, they're a very small minority) There are two further reasons why the idea that the Minecraft "exploding boat" is equivalent to falling out of a boat is faulty.
One, these are not motorboats; they're essentially canoes. They can't go any faster than you can paddle them. So they're not making sharp turns (or any other kind of turn) at high speed, because they can't reach high speeds. There are ways to damage a canoe, and I've even done a few of them, but turning too hard isn't one of them.
Two, you can leap out of a boat in Minecraft. People do it all the time. When you do so, you're swimming in the water, and the boat is floating around somewhere near you. Therefore, going from the boat to the water does not make the boat disintegrate. Since jumping out does not make a boat disintegrate, why does falling out?
Consider the classic birchbark canoe. Some people still make them, by the way, just to keep the tradition alive. Far from exploding when it touches a lilypad (or turns sharply), a birchbark canoe is routinely dragged up on shore when not in use. And that is perhaps the frailest of our historical models. Minecraft boats are more like wood-and-canvas canoes, which you can (and I have) run over submerged beaver dams and whatnot, or perhaps wooden rowboats, which people crash into rocks on a regular basis. For that matter, the raft I built out of firewood when camping at about age 7, while it had some serious flotation issues, still didn't disintegrate when it touched the shore. (given the flotation issues, or more accurately lack-of-flotation issues, it did that a lot) Again, even a child's pool toy is more durable than a Minecraft boat.
There are two basic factors that can be used to justify a given mechanic in a game: 1, it is realistic, or 2, it makes the game more fun. Minecraft's exploding boats are in no way realistic; even an inflatable toy is more durable than they are, not to mention a firewood raft built by a 7-year-old. And their habit of coming apart is merely annoying, not challenging. This leaves us with no good reason for this behavior except "that's the way it's always been."
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If you don't want people to argue with you, I would strongly advise against posting on forums (any forums). The whole point of a forum post is discussion, and if people agree, there's really nothing to discuss. So of course people are going to disagree.
And this is more cruel than creepers how? Minecraft has, by my count, 11 different kinds of hostile mobs (and I'm probably missing some; it's morning). A 12th does not somehow make the game any worse than the previous 11 did.
It's a thing: http://www.amazon.com/Rabbit-Rabbits-Keychain-Bright-Assorted/dp/B00CKDGX3I/
Zombie pigmen have been around for a long time. They're nothing new. For that matter, zombies have been around since the beginning. They're dead guys who want to eat your braaaaaaains! If their existence is a sign of cruelty, it's not that Minecraft is becoming cruel; it always was.
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There is an old Yiddish saying: "If one man calls you a donkey, ignore him. If two do it, look in a mirror. If it is three, buy a saddle." All of your server bans have been unfair. You expect the staff of this forum to behave unfairly. It's always the other guy's fault. Honestly, if I were you, I'd at least start looking in the mirror, and maybe checking out some saddle prices online.
Very few server owners will IP ban someone for trivial reasons. There are always exceptions, sure, but the chances of one person running into two of them, let alone more, are vanishingly small. If you've been IP banned, they had some reason to think it was necessary to do so -- some reason to believe that an ordinary ban would be insufficient to keep you off their server (and remember it's their server; it's up to them if they don't want to play with you, or with me, or with Notch himself). I suspect there is a great deal more to this story than we're getting here.
As for expressing your opinion: as always on the Internet, it is not what but how. People will respect someone who disagrees with them politely more than they will someone who agrees with them rudely. (there have been times I've questioned my own beliefs simply because people who shared them spoke and acted so disagreeably) This has not changed on the Internet, nor off the Internet, probably in the history of the human species.
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A newbie is someone new to a game (or anything else). We all started as newbies. And, as we learned our way around whatever it was, we grew out of newbieness.
A noob is someone who acts like an immature, entitled, deliberately ignorant git. A noob might have been playing a game for years, but if he acts that way ... "I want, give it to me!" ... "I want, do it for me!" ... "I hate you because you won!" ... he's still a noob. Some people, I think, are destined to be noobs for life.
Basically, it's the difference between not knowing something and not wanting to know something.
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Snapshots tend to be slow, probably because they're stuffed to the gills with debugging code. Updates are, if anything, faster than the previous version because the programmers are optimizing code as they get the chance.
In what way?
And we have that miracle called the Launcher: if you think that the current version is "too hard", then pick a previous version you like better, and play that.
What does the price of the computer have to do with it? I'm playing, by the way, on a computer I built for considerably less than that, five or six years ago. It's working fine.
This sentence no sense. Seriously, I'd like to debunk this if I could, but it makes utterly no sense to me as a programmer. I'm not sure what you're trying to get at. If you could explain it more clearly, I'll cheerfully point out the errors there, too.
So ... for Minecraft to stay popular, it needs to become stagnant.
That's an interesting take on the subject, given the number of people here who say the opposite -- that Minecraft needs to change more rather than less, and that Mojang is "out of ideas" because Minecraft isn't changing fast enough to suit them.
I reserve my hatred for people who are genuinely evil, not just wrong.
But you're not "saying the truth" -- you're stating an opinion. Your opinion. I beg to differ, and I suspect that there will shortly be a deluge of posts which also disagree, some of them very impolitely.
As for the inevitable C++ vs. Java comments: There's a thread about that. I already ranted there. Let's not get this thread locked by turning it into a copy of that one.