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.
Keeping up a server that allows migration has negligable costs for a product the size of minecraft. There is no excuse…
Keep that in mind next time you consider giving money to Microsoft. I definitely do.
I’m just playing devil’s advocate, and never es l was this name more appropriate.
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
That doesn’t matter. You don’t get to just unlitaterally revoke something people paid for because they didn’t want to sign up for an account at a company that was unrelated to Minecraft when they bought the game. This should be illegal.
What was the original license that people paid for? Is there anything in there that would protect them?
Clearly not , which only makes the point. Consumer protection for digital products is weak and needs reform.
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That doesn’t matter. If you buy a house and miss a sentence buried in page 2,784 of the agreement that says that the previous owner can arbitrarily decide to take the house back whenever they feel like it, that still won’t hold up in court. Digital products need to work the same way.
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
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.
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.
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.
Forgot about replying but I’m begging y’all to stop coming up with reasons this isn’t an issue, I have proof of purchase on an old hard drive and my username and password worked til the day I stopped playing. Very quickly googled and support used to help people migrate accounts with no email access, so yes authenticating a login on the server was plenty for them, just not anymore. Comparison doesn’t work
If you lost access to the email and forgot the password you can’t demonstrate to the support person that you are who you say you are. If support people changed your password under those conditions then the system could be abused to reset random people’s passwords. Also you don’t know if your username/password still worked, if those credentials were leaked anyone could have changed your password, and Minecraft old auth system leaked a few username/passwords, I remember having a list of them that I used to introduce people to the game (obviously I never changed anyone’s password, but there are plenty of douchebags out there)
BTW I never said this isn’t an issue, IMO they should keep a DB and allow the migration indefinitely, so it is shitty of them to put a time limit on it. But if you lost access to the email for that account I can understand them not allowing the migration, part of activating an account is usually validating the email address, so whoever owns your email address now gets to own that account.
???
and forgot the password
Made-up scenario.
So take MS to small claims court. Get an order for them to restore your account and user name per the licence you presumably still have a copy of
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.
Nice to hear someone’s thoughts, but this is actually covered by US case law regarding EULA/TOS consent, and in places like Australia with even better protections regarding video games it is even more obviously not something Microsoft is allowed to do. Something else you may be unaware of is that their support page specifically says they won’t assist with account migrations. It doesn’t matter, I paid for a product and now I have full use of it again—with the caveat that I can’t use official servers, because I guess what I should actually do is devote daily attention to whether or not a company is trying to take back something I paid for.
Actually, something I paid someone else for.
Their support will do nothing. My oldest daughter tried to play on her account after not playing on it for probably five years. She found out that she missed the conversion and we had to buy it again for her. Really sucks that they can just decide to do things like this. Should have unlimited time to convert- not log in and play on the old system but they could have kept a list of accounts at trivial cost.
Yeah, it really does suck. But I’m guessing the majority are unaffected, so it’s way better than other transitions. I’ve had the same account since buying way back in 2009/2010, that’s a pretty good run imo.
Sorry about your daughter’s account.
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.
There were always low-effort articles where some journalist would rip off another paper without really looking into sources, and sometimes that original article would just be citing a forum post or something. A couple games of telephone later, and you get outlandish claims not backed up by anything at all, and it all happens when journalists rewrite things in their own words.
What seems to have happened is that those low-effort articles have exploded in number and have gotten better at SEO, to the point where the higher quality content gets buried by SEO spam. It certainly doesn’t help when sites like Reddit give it more credibility by users linking to them, and it’s easier than ever to pay someone (or configure AI) to generate these articles en-masse.
Those high quality sources still remain, they just don’t show up in searches. Go ahead and read Reuters, New York Times, The Economist, etc. They mostly still exist, and they’re still high quality. But their headlines aren’t as evocative, so they don’t get passed around social media (where people rarely read past the headline anyway) as much.
In the past, we called low-effort, sketchy sources “tabloids,” now we just call them “news” and reserve the term “tabloid” for the crazier stuff that makes it to store checkout lines.
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.
If your mad it’s your own fault you had 3 years
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If your mad it’s you’re own fault
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i wonder if this and other obscure errors people get that prevent them from transitioning is done on purpose for randomly chosen users, its more money for them after all when people have to buy the game again.
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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.
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
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
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.
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So many Microsoft bootlickers in this thread.
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Linux is not a corporation, there is no boot to lick.
What a wild take. I’m genuinely baffled that someone thought that “Linux bootlickers” was a remotely salient thing to say.
Bro its not bootlicking to say its a legitimate interest to delete stuff that could lead to lawsuits and is a security risk. Its also not bootlicking to say that they where warned repeatedly for at least 3 years now. You are just stupid.
So, how does it taste?
🥾👅
Is it that expensive to just keep a database of codes that can be redeemed for people who haven’t migrated yet? Like humble bundle keeping track of what you buy? Or even lemmy with comments linked to users?
It is. A good database is waaay less expensive and not a security risk. Microsoft is a company operating in areas with privacy laws, a leak could cost millions of completely unnecessary compensation.
They could handle it through support. Remove the automated process and do an email verification check and support could manually migrate the license.
I totally understand Microsoft’s desire to remove obsolete services like account transitions, but they should still have a mechanism for resurrecting old accounts if you can prove you are the original account holder.
They need more than email verification. Some privacy minded people signed up with throwaway email, but probably have other proof of ownership
A proper corporate database with the security it needs and the amount of people accessing it (remember how many people bought Minecraft) yes it would be expensive to have multiple databases doing the same thing.
No it wouldn’t, millions of people bought it but the vast majority migrated, even if there were still millions of people to migrate this wouldn’t get hit very hard because people would not migrate all in one go, so any simple master+slave database system would work, even an SQLite is capable of handling this volume. The total cost of this would be less than $100 per year if they wanted to outsource everything (which is essentially nothing for Microsoft), if they used any of their existing servers for it the coat would be a lot less possibly very close to 0.
Its Microsoft - they offer multiple DBaaS themselves.
But it costs a lot more than $100 in man hours to properly propose, approve, and implement any production system.
Yes, but it also costs as much to sunset a system, so they spend that money regardless.
If people haven’t transferred would they be accessing it? Not much incentive for people who already transfered to go back to just claim a code, and people who haven’t yet probably aren’t going to be logging in all the time.
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.
Man I made my Mojang account so long ago that when I tried to transition I couldn’t recover the account password to do it.
still sucks but I mean they did warn about this for propably over 2 years
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 haven’t read into this but do you have actual proof that it was unlawful in any way? this is no different from game servers and websites shutting down and it happens all the time
Well then read into it if you want to make pronouncements about it. It is the revocation of a license that was sold in perpetuity. That is quite different to no longer providing a service in general. It is selectively denying service to a certain group without legal cause. There were no terms in the contract with Mojang that they could unilaterally remove the license if you didn’t do a specific digital dance on their terms. If it is unlawful, the lawsuit will determine that.
And my point is that if it is indeed unlawful, then telling people years in advance makes no difference, especially if, in some cases mentioned in this very thread, people tried to transfer and couldn’t and were given no way to fix it.
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
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.
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