Minecraft players outraged as Microsoft deletes accounts that weren't transitioned
Cutoff date had been extended to September 2023.
we shouldn't have had to transition but if you didn't know they were doing this then you probably haven't tried to play the game within the last 5 years
I'm one of those people. I haven't played in years. I may never have played again. I only found out because my daughter is now at an age where she asked if we could play together. I received no notice from Microsoft and I don't do social media so it was a complete surprise to me when I couldn't log in, then find out through their support that I had lost access to something I had legally paid for.
yeah I just wanted to say the "we shouldn't have had to transition" but I didn't want the hivemind to get mad at me if I didn't add a negative to the end
I believe that you didn't receive any notices, but I think that's an exception rather than the rule, there was probably something wrong going off on their side. I personally received several emails, they were getting kinda annoying, to be honest.
I'm very surprised by the discourse in this thread. I understand that people were given lots of warning, but that doesn't excuse that they just had their purchase recinded. Why not just allow download of an old version of Minecraft Java still?
I'd consider myself a Microsoft fanboy as I've had Xbox live for nearly 2 decades and Game Pass since it came into existence. Removing people's purchases for any reason is a scummy move.
Devil's advocate: the login requires a server, so even old versions won't work unless they keep them online. And without support, they will be easy target for hackers.
I hate this, and honestly the best would have been to not change the logging at all. I bought a game that didn't need a MS account to play and this change doesn't bring any benefit.
Also lots of other places (YouTube as an example) allow you to migrate your account indefinitely, over a decade after they were purchased.
If you self host an older version, you can allow non-authenticated users. I did that for years so my kids could play on our LAN with just the one license. I eventually bought a second license, but we still haven't played outside our LAN.
I lost my Minecraft account to this, but that's because the email address I bought the game with was with Lavabit, and thus never was able to receive any of the emails. Couldn't verify I owned it either because again, no access to the email address.
I was just a kid when I signed up for that Lavabit address sometime in the 2000s, a kid who was vaguely interested in the idea of privacy and software freedom (I used PPC Ubuntu on a G3 iBook btw). Bought Minecraft Alpha in 2010 for €10. Now because of time passing and some bullshit happening I don't have access to any of it.
But tbh I never opened a support ticket or anything, because fuck Microsoft. Its the principle of the whole thing
I was in a similar situation but I ended up creating a support ticket. They responded by asking me to verify my ownership by responding to their email from the account I didn't have anymore... So you saved yourself some wasted time by not attempting to resolve the issue with them.
Yeah, I figured as much.
What a big brain move from their support team, lol
It’s bad enough when these companies are monopolistic and malicious. But monopolistic, malicious AND incompetent - argh, it’s just too much.
Haven't they been warning about this for like a year?
At least three, as far as I can tell. Probably more.
Yeah I had been getting those emails for a long ass time
I looked through my email, they first asked me in February 2022.
I only saw the warning the first time it was announced, which I transfered over back then. But then I never heard of it again, so if someone happened to have been busy and missed it the first time it made headlines I could see how they could be caught off guard with how I completely forgot about it until it made headlines for it being discontinued.
For people that didn't transfer right away, like me, I got so many emails telling me to transfer the account. So people that didn't transfer right away, stil got plenty of notice
Friendly, and unsolicited reminder that the Minetest engine + its game Mineclonia (or alternatively Voxelibre) are a pretty good open source alternative as of late.
Minetest is also getting some pretty nice upgrades to its graphics lately. The upcoming release should be looking quite pretty.
+1 for Minetest
I run a server on our local network that kiddos love
It was fairly simple to setup including which game type and mods
its game Mineclonia (or alternatively Voxelibre)
I see that Voxelibre has considerably more players, but you list Mineclonia first. Do you have a preference between the two?
Well for the sake of context Mineclonia is a fork of Mineclone2, which has now rebranded itself as VoxeLibre. The project was forked due to personal and design disputes. In fact the most productive developer of Mineclonia, used to be the lead dev of mcl2.
Currently VoxeLibre maintains the continuity of the original project and the community which explains its higher popularity. Mineclonia by comparison has very little presence, the discord server was set up like a couple of months ago I think.
But in terms of code, mineclonia has been the faster evolving of the two. More features, more bug fixes, and advances from voxelibre that are deemed valuable are cherry picked. In terms of specific features, I really prefer the double digging depth, and the better villages. And voxelibre has significantly shortened the attack range which I find really annoying.
Other than that, mineclonia is more commited to being a true clone of minecraft, with voxelibre going out of its way to diverge, especially after the rebrand, which might turn out to be wise if microsoft's trademark lawyers come knocking.
I see Minetest is available for android. Can you run Mineclonia on a phone?
Indeed you can. Personally I find the phone interface a bit too clunky, but if your phone's hardware is up for it, it does run, and all platforms that support Minetest are compatible with each other.
Can you use minecraft mods with any of these clones?
If not it's kind of a deal breaker.
Highly unlikely. Minecraft has a lot of quirky code, and the mods would have been built around that code.
For all intents and purposes, the clones are a different game entirely, and unless the mod author specifically goes out of their way to make their mod compatible with the clones, or a different version for it, they won't work.
Nope, you can just use these mods for the time being.
On the flip side, it's orders of magnitude easier to write a Minetest mod, and keep it updated with later versions and compatible with other mods.
That happened to my sister unfortunately. She tried to transition her account and kept getting strange errors and minecraft support was very unhelpful. I ended up buying her a new account for her birthday, which I'm glad we can play together again, but it sucks that some strange bug took her account in the first place.
It wasn't the big, it was Microsoft. They forced the transition and refused to solve the issue you faced.
What's fucked up is they still have a custom skin my ex made for me on my account, but I don't own the game.
One Reddit thread warrants a whole article? Is this what journalism is today?
Always has been.
I'm not sure I understand. As recently as a few years ago, it was common to find high quality long-form articles on just about any subject linked from your favorite subreddits/tweeters/etc. Now, it seems like the majority of "news" articles I come across are vapid, two paragraph, summaries of a Reddit post or Twitter thread, that don't anything substantive of their own. I mean, yeah you could find a lot of that 5 years ago too, but now it's hard to find anything else. It wasn't that long ago that we had newspapers and magazines, both online and offline, that were actually known for hard-hitting, in-depth journalism. Then they all got sold to companies like Meredith and Conde Nast and have become nothing but thinly veiled advertising. I guess my point is that it hasn't always been that way, and it doesn't have to be that way now.
still sucks but I mean they did warn about this for propably over 2 years
i feel like it was longer. its been more than that since I last played minecraft and I definitely remember getting the warning multiple times via email I feel like it even got delayed based on how long ago it feels.
yeah now that I think about it it might be over 3 years :D proåably even more
Yeah seriously…. I received so fucking many emails over the last n years about it. I hadn’t touched mc in many years, pre MS acquisition and I was made well aware of what was happening.
There are comments in this thread talking about MS had taken purchases away, like come on now.
More like 5 years, my account was migrated in 2019 (found the email looking for something else) and I remember not doing it right away, but because I had already received multiple emails from them warning me about it.
damn time flies :D
Okay, but breach of contract isn't okay just because you announced you were going to do it well in advance. It just makes their culpability easier to prove because they announced their unlawful intentions extremely clearly.
I am against DRM just like everyone else but trust me they tried. They emailed me constantly telling me to move the account. There has to be some personal responsibility right?
I guess it's too much to ask the richest company on the planet to keep a list of a few accounts indefinitely. I'm sure that database is a whole gigabyte sized and maintaining it requires a whole person to check in on it once in a while. Obviously they can only afford that level of effort for a year or two. And we're only taking about removing access from millions of people to something they paid good money for, and also doing it because. Yeah, I'm with you on this one, totally not their fault.
Couldn't they have closed the migration but sent out redemption codes to people's emails for those who hadn't migrated?
Responsible for what? Getting something I paid for stolen?
I mean, there are open-source clones, right, like Minetest, yes?
The angry Redditor wrote, “The fact they can just take away your license to the game like that is [expletive] insane. This is why I’ll never support DRMs, if a game has a DRM you do NOT own it. Only a license to temporarily play it.”
I mean, I get that complaint on a broader basis -- and I think that that might be a problem moving down the line. If a company can buy a company that has sold you access to a game, and that company can cut off your access to that game, then they get leverage that they can use to extract other things out of you. Like, that is a real, legitimate issue. And it applies to anything that you buy digitally, not just games -- books, music, software packages. If a vendor can change the terms on which you have access to the thing, they have ongoing leverage over the customer, and at some point, if a game isn't generating an ongoing revenue stream, I can definitely imagine someone thinking "I can monetize this leverage".
However, specifically for Minecraft, it seems kind of like complaining that someone is cutting off your access to Microsoft Solitaire. It might be annoying, but...you can go out and download a free and open-source package that can do essentially the same thing, yes?
Minetest isn't really a substitute for Minecraft. Yes, its similar, but its far less polished, lacking in content, vanilla and otherwise, and is missing a lot of the technical functionality that makes much of Minecraft's content (esspecially on the modding side) possible. Don't get me wrong, I want to like it, and I've debated trying to contibute to it myself (although my skills are very lackluster) but as it stands its only really a substitute in the context of things like casually playing Pocket Edition.
No one wants to play Minecraft, they want to play dragons reloaded two, or harvestcraft, or whatever. Minecraft is really kinda bad as a stand alone thing, that's why people will still get excited when they hear the name hytale. The modding community is what people buy the game for, and that isn't replicated anywhere else.
Hard disagree, of i play Minecraft, it's for vanilla Minecraft. Clones just don't capture that arm feel and vibe of Minecraft either
kagis
Fair enough. It looks like Minetest has about 1,620 mods:
https://content.minetest.net/packages/?type=mod
And Minecraft 169,849 (assuming that Curseforge is comprehensive):
https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft
Though I also see a lot of stuff online saying that Minetest also has considerably better performance and is a lot less buggy, so...shrugs
Buying a game for the modding community
Buying
(which doesn't get you ownership)
for the modding
(which doesn't get them to own)
Buying
Paying
...What kind of idiots...?
Not quite the same as what was purchased.. just let them download and play the old version they bought
Time to sue for breach of contract. My original agreement with Mojang which Microsoft bought is forever.
And if you bought in alpha, it is for "every future version" of Minecraft. I made it into that group by like a week.
If Microsoft wants to keep profiting off of Minecraft's name, then they are making "future versions" and they need to honour that. They don't want to do that? Okay, call it "shitty block building game rip-off #15,084,831". But they won't, because that name is valuable for good reason.
It would cost them literally nothing and gain massive goodwill to give that out to like the tiny minority of early players, many of whom won't even use it, but something about being a corporation makes it impossible for them to do literally anything good. It's frankly baffling.
Not to Pirate, (i own the Java version since 2015~)but is there a way to have a minecraft executable that runs localy and never connects to microsoft/internet? I know minetest exists, have made a world there a while ago, but its ever so slightly diffrent
The official Minecraft server .jars (and all the modded ones) can be configured to not check in with Microsoft. The game itself can be launched in offline mode too. Might be easier to get it set up with a 3rd party launcher instead of the official one.
I paid for Minecraft more times than any other game. If there's a free way to play it, I do feel entitled to that.
I have gotten more free accounts on Minecraft than any other game. I bought it twice on Java (not counting copies I bought for family) and once on bedrock, so when they moved accounts to Microsoft and gave every Java account a bedrock account and every bedrock account a Java account, so I now have three on each version. A second (or third) account is useful for rescuing your main account in some circumstances
UltimMC lets you play without an account
These people had years to migrate their accounts, were told to migrate their accounts, and warned to migrate their accounts because the old mojang auth system is insecure and needs to be sunsetted, and when it does, they will lose access.
They sat there and played the "no, I won't move" game, and now they're upset because the thing they were told for years would happen happened.
And they would have had to have no social interaction with any minecraft player on any online platform and in real life in all those years, as well as ignore every email from mojang, never look at the minecraft website, and so on, to not be notified.
I basically agree with all of that, but it was totally possible to upgrade the auth system and keep it separate from Microsoft. Obviously Microsoft wouldn't do that, but that's kind of the point, isn't it?
I don't think any company would want to keep a separate auth system if they can help it, though. No one wants to spend resources maintaining redundant account systems and interfaces between them when they have the option to consolidate.
But I suppose I just don't see why there had to be a deadline at all. They know the email addresses associated to the original accounts, so there should just be a database they can reference to check if that email address has an unmigrated account and prompt to convert when next they log in. This is beyond "I don't want to maintain two account systems," it's "Let's just throw away this old table of email addresses so we can make more room on our servers for telemetry data."
I bought Minecraft when it was first purchaseable. Only converted my account last month as my new-school-entrant kid has asked what it is.
And honestly, I wish I didn’t. The MS launcher is an absolute shit show in usability for adults, let alone kids. Next time it forces me to log back in I’m just pirating it.
I bought two copies, I’ll fucking run them how I please.
I use the Modrinth App because it's the place where cool people get minecraft mods now, and as a Minecraft launcher it's a lot better - it uses an auth token system so you only sign in once with Microsoft's website to connect the app to the login.
I'm amazed at how much better the official launcher is on Linux than on windows.
Windows:
Linux
I bought the game at the of alpha with an email I lost access to at some point. I remember my Password and Username but forgot the email address I used. I think it also wasn't even possible to change the email address in the Mojang Account back then. So I definitely didn't sit around and ignored the migration, I even tried contacting the support.
Anyways what sucks is that I remembered my email address this winter, but already after the cut off point. Would have been nice to get to keep that very old account. But as others have mentioned, the experience is probably better with a pirated version anyway.
I also get the feeling that Linux Fans would jump on the opportunity as well.
As much as I think it's a shitty move, they warned about it for long enough, and they can't be expected to maintain a deprecated login system indefinitely.
I don't know if I migrated my account though, but since I only play on self hosted servers I don't care, worst case scenario I'll crack it to not need a login and be done with it.
What do you mean, they warned about it long enough? I bought it, I played it as a kid. Now I want to share it with my kids and it turns out Microsoft said on some website somewhere, and maybe in a few emails to a nonexistent aol address, that they want me to update my account, and since I didn’t do that I have to buy it a second time? I learned today that they’ve “attempted to contact me”. I never agreed to a EULA that said I had a limited amount of time for anything. Nor did anyone else who purchased before 2011.
I bought it before 2011, technically if you lost access to the email you might have lost access to that account years ago without knowing. Even if Microsoft was doing what I think they should, i.e. keep a database of emails and allow people to migrate their account forever, you would still not be able to recover it. Wanting to get an account back from an email you lost access to is like expecting steam to give you all of the keys on your account to add to another if you forgot your password and can't prove it is you.
While I agree it's awful, there were numerous news articles since Microsoft bought Mojang about it. I haven't played Minecraft since I was a kid (my kids use my account) and I was aware of it long before it was required. Basically, they supported both for a few years, then only supported Microsoft logins but kept the Mojang login to convert accounts for a few years, and now they're disabling the Mojang login entirely.
They've handled this about as well as I could hope for. They bought Mojang ~10 years ago, and I remember converting my account like 3-4 years ago after putting it off for a year or so.
So 10 years from aquisition to disabling the old login servers is quite generous imo. I've been using the same Minecraft license since I bought it ~15 years ago (2009/2010, whenever it was in open beta). That's a pretty good run. That's pretty good for a constantly upgdating game.
It sucks that some people lost their accounts, but aside from a handful like you, I'm guessing most of those aren't interested in ever playing again, so the impact is low. Hopefully their support can do something for you.
Just nix the login servers and the problem is solved. Go back to that whole era of "When you buy it, it's yours forever" that we seem to have lost. Anti piracy needs to get more creative than just robbing paying customers of their product.
don't need any future updates, the game was fine when I bought it. I didn't buy the game from Microsoft, so I don't see why they are trying to glean information off a purchase I made 13 years ago.
I "transitioned" to Vintage Story anyway.
Thanks for the heads up on that game. Looks fun!
It's basically TerraFirmaCraft, but as a standalone game, if you ever played that mod.
Welp, guess my account is gone. That's kind of shitty but I bought it just out of alpha and realistically wasn't going to play it again. And now if I ever want to I'll just pirate it.
I'm glad I literally JUST bought a copy of Minecraft so I didn't have to deal with this mess.
But unfortunately I have to deal with Microsoft shenanigans now. And I can't even play the worse version on Linux.
Why would you want to play Bedrock on Linux? The Java version is great, supports mods, etc. The only reason I can think of is to play with console players in MP, so I recommend pressuring them to play the Java version so you can use mods (or play Minetest if they don't want to pay). It runs fine on most potatoes, so if they have a PC of any variety, they can probably run it.
one would argue that's a Linux feature
At least I can still play Minecraft in general.
Minetest engine and its games are great fun. It's super easy to mod with Lua scripts and there is awesome documentation. ContentDB has an abundant selection of games and mods for anyone to customize their play.
Nice, I'll be sure to check it out.
How is it a mess? They gave people YEARS with constant reminders and it takes like half a minute to do. Anyone having issues with this is a fucking idiot and deserves to loose their account.
It was not a simple process. I've been trying for years to migrate, and gave up because it wasn't worth the hassle. I have been playing Minecraft since the alpha, and I have bought the game several times over.
To know that my account is now simply gone means that I'm just that much less likely to return. If I have to rebuild, I'll invest my time in a game that won't be taken away from me.
🏴☠️💃🦜
Happy pride month?
What does 196 have to say about this?
It was one post on Reddit. It had a ton of comments but it isn’t a huge number of players mad about it. It was in a piracy sub and still most of the comments were along the lines of “Why didn’t you migrate your account during the 3ish years they were emailing people who hadn’t done it?” And the rest were either “DRM bad” or “Just pirate it, it’s not hard.”
Not really a news worthy thing. People had more than enough time and warning to move their account and the people who didn’t have nothing to stand on other than misplaced anger. I’m not a fan of Microsoft but they really did handle the migration well and gave people way more time and notice than they needed to.