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?
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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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
So, how does it taste?
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.
Just out of curiosity, what content is it that you play with on Minecraft that you’d like on Minetest?
Personally, Im more of a creative-mode player at the moment so the majority of the problems don’t affect me. Its also been a couple months since I last tried Minetest (mostly on Mineclone). From what I remember, my personal dealbreakers were:
-
IMO much uglier graphics, and more significantly, its harder to graphically customize with mods and resource packs. Maybe its more versitile than I’m giving it credit for, but at the very least, its not used as there aren’t enough modders and artists making content for the game to even remotely compete.
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Performance - Minecraft may not be optimized, but I was getting much worse performance on Minetest. In particular, I was getting massive frame drops any time I placed or broke a block, making it extremely nauseating to play.
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UX - There were a ton of small roadblocks to actually playing the game as I wanted to. First, customizing the graphics settings - the menu was disorganized and defaults were really weird for my hardware. Then, I had to find and edit the permissions file to be able to fly and sprint on my creative world. Even after that, if I remember right, the controls or flight movement were limitted or weird but in a way that couldn’t easily be fixed.
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Lack of world editting commands - Im sure theres mods for this one, but its more work to find, figure out, and set up and by the time I got to this point, having to put in even more work just to make the game comparable was a dealbreaker.
-
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
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.
The richest company on the planet is Walmart.
I think that depends on your metric.
Market cap, revenue, profit, assets? They will all have a different leaderboard.
False. It’s Microsoft.
- Microsoft has the highest Market Cap
- Walmart has the highest Revenue
- Saudi Aramco has the highest Profit
“Richest” isn’t really a term you can compare without further clarification.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_revenue
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by_market_capitalization
Couldn’t they have closed the migration but sent out redemption codes to people’s emails for those who hadn’t migrated?
I think that’s not a good idea for the same reason that password reset emails expire within minutes.
On another platform, they might have transferred the accounts anyway and force password resets, but that’s likely not an option since they’re MS accounts.But the alternative is just closing it and now there being no option at all.
They could create a MS account for you based on your email, and have it locked such that you need to reset through their system. Seems reasonable to me.
The migration has been going on for multiple years (I believe more than 5). Anyone who wanted to keep their account would’ve done so.
So why not send a code to them before closing it for good so they have an option to redeem versus none at all.
They got sent a link before closing for good. That was their option to redeem. If they didn’t in all that time, it’s probably because they don’t want to keep their account.
Keeping legacy systems costs money, they have no reason to keep those codes valid for 30 years just in case someone decided they wanted to keep their account after 30 years.
They gave users more than enough time to migrate. 3 years is a lot of time. In most Democratic countries elections come up every 4 years, it’s almost a full election cycle.
They got sent a link before closing for good. That was their option to redeem. If they didn’t in all that time, it’s probably because they don’t want to keep their account.
Or… and maybe we think about this for a second. I wanted to buy a game. Not an account to Microsoft. Migrating to another service wasn’t in the terms I agreed to… especially to Microsoft.
If they didn’t in all that time, it’s probably because they don’t want to keep their account.
That’s an assumption that leads to corporate bullshit like this.
Who said 30 years. It’s just a code sent to email with expiration. And when digital codes are sold what is this supposed legacy system. Did Microsoft suddenly stop selling digital codes?
I thought you meant they send a code that never expires so you can recover your old account. What you are proposing is give everyone who didn’t migrate a code to redeem Minecraft?
That is even less viable. That’s basically giving everyone that didn’t migrate a full refund (+ extra because now Minecraft is cheaper so you can sell it for more). Which would also lead to a potential customer lost because they bought the “second hand” key.
Why would Microsoft do that. They’d be better off just paypaling every non-migrated account 20€.
Responsible for what? Getting something I paid for stolen?
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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.
I tried transitioning my account and every time it said it was done, I’d get another email saying I need to do it
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:
- complains if your logged in account doesn’t match your game account
- Requires you to log out of one account to log into another in a not very clear or user friendly way
Linux
- No logged in account to complain about
- Lists all your accounts and lets you swap by clicking on the one you want in the accounts list
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.
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.
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.
