Minecraft does not ban users for profanity. The list of ban offenses is currently:
Hate speech, sexual content and soliciting improper contact, real life threats, exposing the personal information of others, posting links to malicious software, impersonating staff, cheating/exploits (this includes anything that would negatively affect another person’s gameplay experience), general commercial spamming
Profanity is considered the responsibility of specific server moderators since it's a low-level offense that's virtually impossible to police in a game like Minecraft. They're trying to avoid the notoriety recently obtained by Roblox for being a place for adults to exploit children.
If my own experience years ago is any indication, this would create so many ban options it’s not funny. 10 year olds love pretending to be more than they are.
Honestly, starting a new block engine from scratch with the lessons learned from Minetest and Minecraft would be a better idea. Minetest is just too far behind to catch up, on a dilapidated tech stack with a far worse modding layer than Minecraft.
Why the assumption that they care only about liability? Minecraft is now a multi-decade game and they want to keep it as the #1 king of it's domain to sell copies for many more decades.
That will be hard if parents see headlines about "Minecraft" (no, the specific server host won't matter) being used to exploit or otherwise prey upon children and stop buying it.
> if parents see headlines about "Minecraft" (no, the specific server host won't matter) being used to exploit or otherwise prey upon children and stop buying it
You make it sound like it's an alien concept that only us techies understand, but it is actually quite a mainstream understanding that once you legally buy a thing then whatever illegal stuff you do with it is a responsibility of law enforcement and not whoever made and sold you that thing. What is alien here is this belief that intentional remote crippling of a product with no court order or anything is somehow even legal
Anyway. If you follow the money real threat to MS bottom line is not losing a 30 bucks one time per household but having people prefer the more moddable, unlockable OG version that the cool kids are playing (JE) over recurring revenue cash cow (bedrock).
Because Microsoft sees what's happening to Roblox and what has happened to countless children-oriented online game platforms and wants to make absolutely certain they don't have headlines about adults abusing children, exploiting children, taking children off-site, or so on from "Minecraft". Because you can be damn sure the parents won't read the nuances of what server it was.
And yet far less naive than believing a group of 10 year-olds are being repeatedly banned for no reason with their chat off, instead of the obvious that when parents aren't looking they're being abusive to others in chat.
Reminds me of the classic:
> No, I wasn't looking at dirty websites, it was a virus!
Can you name a single moderation system that operates on this scale that will not automatically ban someone for getting mass reported? This is a fairly well known phenomenon.
That's obviously not what's happening here though. I have plenty of adult friends who go on public and private servers and actively trash talk during games and have never been banned. And none of their friends have been banned. A small group of 10 year-old children aren't having a coordinated attack of hundreds to thousands of reports against them repeatedly over many months.
Not to mention tacking on the requirement that instead of a bunch of 10 year-old children being - as they tend to be - offensive/testing limits when adults aren't looking, Microsoft is publicly lying to their customers (creating liability) and implementing an automated system so poor it doesn't so much as check if the reported user even uses chat.
EDIT: To further substantiate what I'm saying, I just checked and you cannot submit a report without selecting the specific messages that relate to it. The UX requires that the individual messages are selected and cannot be submitted empty. The parent is at least being misled in thinking their child or their friends don't use the chat feature.
> A small group of 10 year-old children aren't having a coordinated attack of hundreds to thousands of reports against them repeatedly over many months.
You know they are likely playing with a large group of other 10 year old children right? There’s going to be at least a few amongst them that just think it’s fun to mass report everyone that says anything marginally inappropriate.
Imagine you buy a Monopoly, D&D or MtG set. You don't have room to play it at home so your child goes to a game cafe to play it with friends. A sex offender is trying to cozy up to them. Who would you blame for that, Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast? Is allowing them to confiscate a game set (or cripple it so it can't be played with other people) the right solution?
As a side effect, if you or your child are a bit inconsiderate during a tense moment of the game and someone gets mad back, with a press of the button they can block you from ever playing by reporting select words to game publisher. You will not be entitled to refund. Would you say that if this was not abused in a couple of months then it's definitely OK and we shouldn't worry about it?
Minecraft was sold as a game set. There are paid official places you can go play it now, but buying the game set does not require you to use them. Do not mistake it with Roblox, that one is both a game cafe and a game set.
People are recounting actual real instances of abuse. Both here and youtube creators. And it seems pretty plausible. This is basically enabling online bullying and lynch mobs. You only have to join one negative server to get banned from everything everywhere. I think this would be more forgiveable if it was an autoban from the place you were misbehaving, or if the bans were default limited in length without a detailed appeal process involving the person whose account was being stolen servers could opt out of the ban process so at least you could still play with friends at home.
If a company is repeatedly banning 10 years old without explanation, in a game where they know that 10 years old are common, then obviously the company is at fault. Kids are not adults, they are not responsible for their fails, and they can't learn without explanation. It doesn't matter whether they did something ban-worthy, they are kids..
As someone who used to be a part of the Minetest scene, it's not even remotely close. While it's low-end requirements are better, it runs remarkably poorly for what it is. It's (default subgame is) a decade behind Minecraft in terms of usability/features. It's barely maintained, especially after one of the big modders and graphics developers died to a heart disease.
And with the mods, it's only "easier" at the very surface level. Unlike the Java-edition of Minecraft, where anything can be changed, you are limited to their modding API in Minetest. And this API is thin.
No dynamic skyboxes, no full entity rotation, no way to handle subgrids. Entities have huge pop in/out issues and forget about anything crazy like having animal heads rotate to face you. No custom keybindings, no overriding mouse controls. Forms have terribly poor ergonomics and it's taken a few years now to have elements displaying at the correct coordinates (for a while, different elements had slightly different interpretations of the grid). Tons of stuff is hard-coded, like how tools work, damage calculations, HUD. And none of this can be added or changed without a fork of the underlying C++ engine codebase.
For the longest time they had no client-side modding and when they added it, they ended up barely having anything in it. So if you want a mod with some kind of vehicle, it is a complete hitchy mess since the client-side's would interpolate wrong and need to be forcefully corrected by the server dozens to hundreds of milliseconds later.
I spent a lot of time making mods for the couple folk I played with. I eventually quit because it was so frustrating trying to work with that engine and constantly jury rig and compromise solutions. Went back to Minecraft for those times I want to play a block game.
I know I'm being a bit brutal, but Minetest doesn't stand a chance when the expectation is set that it is/will be in the same ball park as Minecraft's level of quality or moddability.
> It's (default subgame is) a decade behind Minecraft in terms of usability/features. It's barely maintained,
This is intentional and the default game will be removed by default. Users will instead be directed to the built-in content downloader to install a game. The default game is designed to be modded, and you're also encouraged to install other games. Minetest is a game platform and a game engine, rather than just a game
> especially after one of the big modders and graphics developers died to a heart disease.
We have a new graphics developer, they've added dynamic shadows and a post processing stage. This improves the performance of tone mapping, and allows for effects like godrays, bloom, and depth of field. They've also worked a fair bit on performance improvements and bug fixes, like better depth sorting
> No dynamic skyboxes, no fulrotation
Both of these have been supported for years
> no way to handle subgrids
This is mostly out of scope, Minetest is a block voxel game engine. But you can do this anyway, see the go mod - it allows you to place pieces on a board
> no overriding mouse controls.
You can rebind mouse controls using the config file. There's a settings redesign coming soon as well, the plan is improve the keybindings menu there too
> Forms have terribly poor ergonomic
This is one of our roadmap goals. One of our developers is working on a new UI API, there's also work on a new mainmenu and maintenance on the existing API
The current UI API has improved a lot in the last couple of years
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You are right about a lot of the limitations though, such as custom keybindings. We are working to improve this - we have adopted a roadmap to provide focus. You can keep up with development on our blog: https://blog.minetest.net/
> No custom keybindings, no overriding mouse controls.
You can, but you have to change it in the config file. Instead of resolving this limitation, they documented it on the wiki: https://wiki.minetest.net/Controls#PC
I don't understand how things can be this mediocre for so long; other open source implementations of popular proprietary games aren't like this. OpenTTD, OpenRCT2 and OpenMW are all more feature rich and polished than the originals, so I don't think it's a fundamental limitation of volunteer projects. I think maybe, Minetest deliberately keeps the edges rough to stay off Microsoft's turf.
I suspect Minetest's status owes a lot to its name that sort of implies being a test implementation rather than a game proper.
Any MC alternative will becomr popular when MS removes or closes down MC JE, which is imminent because presumably without it people can publish patches that bypass protections as described in the linked thread
I don't know about the others you listed but as OpenTTD is a logistics management simulation, it surely draws a more mature target audience than Minecraft does. An audience that is more likely to possess the necessary expertize to further its development.
That's an interesting hypothesis, I'm not sure about it.
OpenRCT2 is a re-implementation of Roller Coaster Tycoon 2; a business simulation game in which you build theme parks. It's similar to TTD (which was a predecessor from the same developer), but with much less focus on logistics and more focus on artistic creativity. OpenMW is a re-implementation of Morrowind, a fantasy roll-playing game that, by modern standards, is a bit unforgiving to beginners and doesn't have much hand holding. All three are from the 90s and arguably nerdy.
On the other hand, it's my perception that minecraft has a mature and nerdy following too. Lots of kids play it as well, but there seems to be no shortage of tech workers who are into it. I think minecraft's redstone has more to offer a nerd than any of the three above games. And there is a mature modding scene for minecraft, making the game even more technical. I think/hope throwaway290 is right, that minetest will get much more attention from capable developers once Mojang strangles the life out of Java Edition.
Could it be that network effects are much stronger for Minecraft? Morrowind is a single-player game. OpenTTD has network play but I have always played it solo and I suspect many others are the same. I don't play Minecraft but from what I have seen, cooperative play is a big part of it. Players may be less motivated to work on a FOSS alternative when they know that they would then also have to convince the community to move to it, which is much harder. Same way it's difficult to build a real FOSS alternative to WhatsApp, for example.
