[sneak]

They require a Microsoft account. There was a period of time where you could port over your Mojang account, but I and many other people did not, because I didn't want a Microsoft account or to have to agree to the Microsoft Terms of Service, a new legal contract which didn't exist at the time I paid for Minecraft. It's a classic bait and switch.

Then, the account migration window closed, and Mojang accounts stopped working. Now I and thousands of others can't play the game we paid good money for.

Fuck Notch and Microsoft both.

[hungmung]

Yep, and when you get your Microsoft account, you have to deal with their fucked up login system. Many a child's tear (also adult's tears) has flown over their jank. Mojang never locked anyone out for 30 days when they reset a password.

Oh and they routinely give you other people's custom skins.

[bstsb]

> Oh and they routinely give you other people's custom skins.

are you playing multiplayer on the Bedrock version? you just have to toggle a setting locally, or other player's skins will show up as a randomly preselected skin. it's called something like "Enable untrusted skins" or similar.

[hungmung]

No, Java. I'll go through the settings again and doublecheck but sometimes the skin will change and it won't accept you changing it back for weeks.

[mcv]

I think companies should be required to repay the original purchase price when they pull shit like that.

I did migrate, though with extreme reluctance, and my son's Minecraft account somehow ended up in my wife's Microsoft account (she'd had a Hotmail account since forever, he had no MS account).

[0cf8612b2e1e]

There were also many stories (myself included) where Microsoft indifference could not port your account, even if you did it within the window. Sheer malfeasance that they could not just email a new code to everyone who had purchased the “lifetime” license.

[kjkjadksj]

This happened to me as well. I just opted to pirate the game. I figure I am allowed to since I have a lifetime license since alpha, just m$ dropped the ball porting my account.

[Novosell]

Oh shit. It's been more than a decade since I played Minecraft but sounds like I, too, have lost my account then.

[hammyhavoc]

Players had from October 2020 to December 2023, and emails were sent alerting customers of this. That's years more notice than the likes of others give, e.g., Twilio giving 2 months to announce the removal of their free SendGrid plan.

It's a game. If a professional SaaS provider gives two months then more than three years to migrate a game account is actually quite amazing.

If customers didn't want to migrate or just couldn't be bothered then that's on them. The game is cheap enough if you want to play it that badly.

Entitled.

Now do Meta killing Facebook Live video storage with a month's notice to download a decade's video per Facebook Page, for which only the page owner could do.

[tialaramex]

> There was a period of time where you could port over your Mojang account,

To be fair that was a fairly long period IIRC. And they really put some work into that last migration once they announced everything else is going away. Minecraft has all these legacy systems because nobody knew it would be huge, so during the Alpha and early Beta periods it's just whatever payment system they've cobbled together this week.

I'm still not sure if the scattered piles of emails, account names, IDs, passwords, receipt codes or other detritus eventually persuaded them I'm tialaramex or whether the fact I'm just very obviously tialaramex (it's gestured at in my email address, it's my HN account handle, if I ever tweeted, which I do not, I would be @tialaramex, it's everywhere) prevailed and so that's why I got my tialaramex Minecraft persona connected to whatever nonsense Microsoft have. But either way, once we reached the "Now a human is needed" step they were as helpful as you could ask given how cheap Minecraft was back when I bought it.

I think if you lost all contact for so long you weren't aware there was a migration it's not unreasonable to think if you suddenly regain interest you should pay for Minecraft. The current Minecraft is very different from what you last saw, albeit not in its essentials.

[sneak]

You are missing the point.

I was well aware of it. I don’t want a Microsoft account. I don’t do business with Microsoft.

Microsoft demanded that I agree to a new contract, the Microsoft Terms of Service, to which I do not and will not agree, to continue to use the game I already paid for.

This is called a bait-and-switch. I paid money, got the product, used the product, then they altered the deal, Vader style. Sign this new contract or you lose your game.

It’s bullshit any which way you slice it.

Arguably it’s Mojang’s fault for selling to such a shitty acquirer and betraying their customers, not that we need any more reasons to understand what a total piece of trash Notch is.

[immibis]

You actually don't have to. You can just install the game and play it. Java Minecraft has no effective anti-piracy checks, which also means it has no effective legal-copy-but-not-using-a-microsoft-account checks. And the auto update URLs have no authorization checks at all. You can go to the root index URL (I don't remember it) and follow a few HATEOAS links to get any version-specific .jar that's available in the official launcher. This is an open secret and they leave it that way on purpose. Most third-party launchers (e.g. PrismLauncher) won't force you to log in before installing the game.

Of course, you should only install the game if you own a license to it. Otherwise that's piracy and it's illegal.

[sneak]

PrismLauncher does do an account check now, I learned after this comment. But there’s an easy bypass by putting some json into accounts.json and then it works fine.

[mcv]

It's Java. Wouldn't it be possible to decompile it and just remove the account checking? Maybe mod it out? There are mods that change the game dramatically, so why not this?

[sneak]

Yes, it’s more than possible to crack the game. All of the normal servers however will refuse to talk to you without you presenting valid login tokens from Microsoft, so you’re limited to local singleplayer.

[immibis]

And LAN play in "offline mode". There are some Internet servers in offline mode with aftermarket authentication systems bolted on, but mostly only 13yo pirates play them.

Did you think Microsoft was obligated to maintain your access to servers though? Even "stop killing games" doesn't ask that much.

[mcv]

But at least you can play the game. And maybe play with people with a similarly cracked version. That sounds entirely reasonable to me, if you don't want to have anything to do with Microsoft.

[dougSF70]

It's a relief Google didn't acquire minecraft...no humans in the loop to help you out.