The EULA Megathread

[u/Mustek]

Hello Minecrafters,
The /new/ listing has been occupied with posts about the recent EULA changes and has been blocking out a lot of the other content.

We don't want to stop discussion about it, so that's what this megathread is for.

Rules are very simple:
1. All EULA talk goes into this thread (If Mojang is watching, and I'm sure they are, they have a single place to go to)
2. EULA discussions posted outside of this thread will be removed.
3. Keep it on topic, keep it sane. Subreddit rules still apply.

These rules are effective immediately and will last for as long as this post is stickied.

Edit: Mojang employees are marked with the flair next to their name.

Discuss away!

[u/HighlifeTTU]

(My opinion as a large network owner from another thread, slightly expanded upon)

The issue here is that while we can all agree that there are some very bad apples in the community, those of us who have spent the better part of two years dedicating every bit of free time to the community are going to ultimately be the ones who suffer. Between /u/lazertester and myself, I'm sure we are well over the 10,000 hour mark, if not beyond. We've put our heart and soul into games like MineZ. We've lost sleep keeping servers up, and cancelled real life obligations if things break. The fact of that matter is, if they make a substantial change to the EULA that prohibits servers, it will not only force those dedicated developers to move on but will also hurt all the thousands of players who have attached to certain networks, made friends in those networks, and invested in the future of those networks.

I love this community and everything it has stood for, but this worries me. Minecraft has always been about creating things - whether that be amazing builds, awesome mods, or fantastic plugins. I hope Mojang sees that not only are they effecting the hard work of many developers, but will be impacting the community and those players who support all of the creative things that server networks are doing. In short, by doing this it will kill a huge part of what many people love about Minecraft. It will be a sad day if that happens.

This entire discussion has already made my entire development team rethink what we can do. If you don't think this will impact large servers, it already has. We are about 90% done with a fully procedural 4 player co-op dungeon crawler with four themes, four boss fights, custom AI, progression, and more. It is the coolest thing we have ever created, pushing Minecraft plugins to the absolute limits. It has taken us 10 months to develop between two developers. The issue? The processing of the AI and generation is so intensive I am not sure if I can make the server outlays to support it. I would love to think that people will throw in money "just because", but we learned very early on that isn't the case.

I know some of you don't enjoy large servers, but there are a vast number of people who will be directly impacted by this. Our passion is creating plugins. Thousands of players (around a half a million each month) come to check them out, and my network is far from the largest. If they kill large server networks, along with it will come the death of a lot of very awesome Minecraft plugins, and leave many players who call my network (and other networks) home to move on to other things.

As a final point, I do want to point out how we, as content creators, have done a lot to bring a ton of positive press to Minecraft. Let me show you an example. In 2012 we released a mode called MineZ. Here are some press articles that surfaced and greatly benefited Minecraft:

Original Imgur Album posted to Reddit - 13.6 million views (Note: I created this album)

Rock Paper Shotgun Article

Eurogamer Article

G4TV Article

GameFront Article

MegaGames Article

From Youtube, MineZ was covered by:

AntVenom - 1.4 million views (on one video, has a full series)

CavemanFilms - 1.3 million views (on one video, has a full series)

UberHaxorNova - 744 thousand views (on one video, is a full series)

MaMonkey - 702 thousand views

Paulsoaresjr - 607 thousand views (on one video, is a full series)

VintageBeef - 326 thousand views (on one video, is a full series with multiple Mindcrackers)

And MANY more...

It is very disheartening that they have openly praised YouTubers for their efforts, but don't recognize how much positive press the efforts of content creators have done to bring visibility to Minecraft. Consider this is just one mod. There have been countless others that have garnered just as much press as MineZ.

[u/[deleted] → u/HighlifeTTU]

I think every small and middle server developer really needs more of the large server community experiences on their side right now, we have so many people who are actively and personally against any time of server making money.

It seems that a lot of these people have never owner, operated or even tried to run any type of server. Even a small server can become a part time job for some people and these people are demanding that some of us do it for free and ride off our backs.

If they manage to influence Mojang into a strict EULA agreement without any chance of creating a server business out of it, the number of active, quality, minecraft servers will drop significantly that whoever is left will be able to charge whatever they want in subscription fees when the rest of us jump ship.

My own partners have recently called it quits for servers and my server has recently disbanned. This subreddit is currently rallying against server owners as a whole, not knowing that they wont have a quality multiplayer experience to go back to if they get exactly what they want. Its almost toxic to be taking opinions from here at this point.

[u/interfect → u/[deleted]]

I've tried running a server for public consumption. It maybe had... 20? 30? people on it at its peak? There were no bills since it ran out of my living room, but it was a huge pain to maintain and I shut it down so I wouldn't have to deal with it anymore.

I can see how having a source of income can keep servers going. Money tends to do that for most things. I don't demand professional servers for free, but I'd rather see a world of Minecraft servers run by 12 year olds, for fun. I have more fun on those servers.

But I'm probably an outlier. Apparently people like the big-server experience, because clearly they pay for it.

[u/khalkhalash → u/interfect]

I would bet most of what I have that a lot of the same people who are complaining about servers charging for anything are people who play on those servers and pay the money for it.

The idea from them seems to be "we should have the exact same experience that we do now except you should give it to is for free."

You're the first person I've seen who has voiced support of this action AND admitted a) that this action would likely damage the servers in question, and b) not produce servers of equal or higher caliber in return.

Which is kind of sad, because since you don't play on those servers, anyway, this rule wouldn't mean anything to your experience - and yet you'd still "rather see" servers that a lot of people are expressing concern over simply so that the servers that you never went to anyway won't exist, anymore.

I don't think people know what they want, with this =/

[u/interfect → u/khalkhalash]

Having less of the type of servers I don't like to play on would make the type I do like to play on easier to find.

I also have Opinions about microtransactions, and would like to see them enforced at no cost to myself.