![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Minecraft EULA
Jun. 18th, 2014 05:18 amOk I guess I'll do my take on the whole Minecraft EULA fiasco and on the video ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kane_magus found in the comments of the article in particular:
Having played on public servers for the last few years, my opinion on "pay for perk" donation systems is pretty dark. I haven't seen servers that try to extort 1000-10000 dollars for perks personally, but I have seen servers with ranks that cost over 300 dollars. At least one server would charge between 5-50 dollars or so for a rank - and it would be temporary, for like a month or so.
In some cases I don't particularly mind some rank type crap, but many servers do dickish things to make these ranks seem all the more attractive. In particular, gimping standard minecraft features unless you pay up. I don't mean withholding perks from plugins. But actually witholding stuff from vanilla minecraft. A common target is limited access (or none at all!) to enderchests. Some will prevent the player from even crafting one unless you pay up.
If you're on the pvp servers, it gets even worse since those servers regularly RESET the map and players. Sometimes once per major update, but I've seen some that will reset it almost monthly. The people who have paid for ranks... often times get the bonuses with their kits restored! Everyone else gets to eat shit and start right from the beginning. And whatever reason they want to give for it, a big reason would be to make the payments more attractive.
But I'm getting off topic. My beef with the video in particular is that he's trying to show both sides of the coin, but he's glossing over the reality of the situation.
Mojang had never approved, and in fact flat out refused in the EULA, to let people make money off of their game in this form. That people gleefully ignored the EULA that they refused to read in the first place and began exploiting mojang's customers does NOT make it legal for them to do so. If they're taken to court, it would be an open and shut case. And they would lose.
His defence for the people who are doing this stuff is that "it's too late for mojang to be doing this now. There's people running servers that quit their jobs, school, etc, so they could start a business running servers like this."
But... if you're going to make a business doing something you aren't allowed to do, shouldn't you expect the natural outcome when you finally get told not to do it? So really.. I have very little sympathy for these individuals. Particularly if they were doing a crappy job anyway. The whole donating thing started as a way to support a server anyway, not to provide full time employment. :P
So in the end, I can only say Mojang is right. People abusing the system are wrong. They should have expected the consequences as the people doing this got greedier and greedier.
The only thing I will conceed in the matter, is that I agree Mojang should have nipped it in the butt a long time ago when it first began appearing publically. It would have stopped the entire thing from spiralling out of control like it has. But just because they didn't, it doesn't justify people doing it.
They should all be glad it's Mojang they're screwing with. If they tried this kind of thing with EA or Activision or just about any other game dev/publisher, they'd have simply been dragged into court if they didn't immediately shut down their infringing server after a harsh lawyerly letter.
Lawyerly is now a word. Get use to it.
But then this is a given, given that damned near every other game dev won't even allow individuals to host their own server to begin with. This is actually one of the big reasons why.
kane_magus found in the comments of the article in particular:Having played on public servers for the last few years, my opinion on "pay for perk" donation systems is pretty dark. I haven't seen servers that try to extort 1000-10000 dollars for perks personally, but I have seen servers with ranks that cost over 300 dollars. At least one server would charge between 5-50 dollars or so for a rank - and it would be temporary, for like a month or so.
In some cases I don't particularly mind some rank type crap, but many servers do dickish things to make these ranks seem all the more attractive. In particular, gimping standard minecraft features unless you pay up. I don't mean withholding perks from plugins. But actually witholding stuff from vanilla minecraft. A common target is limited access (or none at all!) to enderchests. Some will prevent the player from even crafting one unless you pay up.
If you're on the pvp servers, it gets even worse since those servers regularly RESET the map and players. Sometimes once per major update, but I've seen some that will reset it almost monthly. The people who have paid for ranks... often times get the bonuses with their kits restored! Everyone else gets to eat shit and start right from the beginning. And whatever reason they want to give for it, a big reason would be to make the payments more attractive.
But I'm getting off topic. My beef with the video in particular is that he's trying to show both sides of the coin, but he's glossing over the reality of the situation.
Mojang had never approved, and in fact flat out refused in the EULA, to let people make money off of their game in this form. That people gleefully ignored the EULA that they refused to read in the first place and began exploiting mojang's customers does NOT make it legal for them to do so. If they're taken to court, it would be an open and shut case. And they would lose.
His defence for the people who are doing this stuff is that "it's too late for mojang to be doing this now. There's people running servers that quit their jobs, school, etc, so they could start a business running servers like this."
But... if you're going to make a business doing something you aren't allowed to do, shouldn't you expect the natural outcome when you finally get told not to do it? So really.. I have very little sympathy for these individuals. Particularly if they were doing a crappy job anyway. The whole donating thing started as a way to support a server anyway, not to provide full time employment. :P
So in the end, I can only say Mojang is right. People abusing the system are wrong. They should have expected the consequences as the people doing this got greedier and greedier.
The only thing I will conceed in the matter, is that I agree Mojang should have nipped it in the butt a long time ago when it first began appearing publically. It would have stopped the entire thing from spiralling out of control like it has. But just because they didn't, it doesn't justify people doing it.
They should all be glad it's Mojang they're screwing with. If they tried this kind of thing with EA or Activision or just about any other game dev/publisher, they'd have simply been dragged into court if they didn't immediately shut down their infringing server after a harsh lawyerly letter.
Lawyerly is now a word. Get use to it.
But then this is a given, given that damned near every other game dev won't even allow individuals to host their own server to begin with. This is actually one of the big reasons why.
