[aceazzameen]

Yeah, I'm a parent that was new to Minecraft during lockdown. It didn't take me long to figure out Bedrock and Java are incompatible, but I did have to explain it to other parents with kids that wanted to play with my kids (my kids play on Bedrock to be most compatible).

My biggest issue is the amount of friction when creating a new Microsoft account for a child. I have to walk through other parents in creating a MS account for themselves (if they don't have one), then how to make a child account with a username, then finding and ticking a bunch of checkboxes to allow online play, then launching Minecraft and signing in with the new child account. It's way too many steps with email verifications. It's >30 minutes. In just my circle there's several parents who gave up and sadly their kid can't play with their group of friends. People outside of tech don't have patience for that crap. This is all outside the fact that each console has their own form of friction in allowing kids to play online.

C'mon Microsoft, you can improve the new user process. Just make an optional in-game wizard asking parents a bunch of questions so kids can play ASAP. And if the issue is that it wouldn't fit in with the one-size-fits-all MS accounts used for everything else, then flag the "wizard-built" accounts as incomplete so parents can go through making a 360 account another day. Damn metrics.

[elzbardico]

Frankly, this is the kind of friction that I would like to see more in all things involving minors in the internet. If people can’t be bothered to jump through the hopes required to create a somewhat safe online identity for their kids, one that they should be supervising, maybe it is best their kids stay offline for their own safety, because their parents can’t be bothered to make sure they are safe.