Cutoff date had been extended to September 2023.
  • moosetwin@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    553·
    17 days ago

    we shouldn’t have had to transition but if you didn’t know they were doing this then you probably haven’t tried to play the game within the last 5 years

  • Guntrigger@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    492·
    17 days ago

    I’m very surprised by the discourse in this thread. I understand that people were given lots of warning, but that doesn’t excuse that they just had their purchase recinded. Why not just allow download of an old version of Minecraft Java still?

    I’d consider myself a Microsoft fanboy as I’ve had Xbox live for nearly 2 decades and Game Pass since it came into existence. Removing people’s purchases for any reason is a scummy move.

    • Railcar8095@lemm.eeEnglish
      193·
      17 days ago

      Devil’s advocate: the login requires a server, so even old versions won’t work unless they keep them online. And without support, they will be easy target for hackers.

      I hate this, and honestly the best would have been to not change the logging at all. I bought a game that didn’t need a MS account to play and this change doesn’t bring any benefit.

      • Highstronaught@feddit.ukEnglish
        13·
        17 days ago

        Also lots of other places (YouTube as an example) allow you to migrate your account indefinitely, over a decade after they were purchased.

      • racemaniac@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        6·
        17 days ago

        Keeping up a server that allows migration has negligable costs for a product the size of minecraft. There is no excuse…

        • Railcar8095@lemm.eeEnglish
          1·
          16 days ago

          Keep that in mind next time you consider giving money to Microsoft. I definitely do.

          I’m just playing devil’s advocate, and never es l was this name more appropriate.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        17 days ago

        If you self host an older version, you can allow non-authenticated users. I did that for years so my kids could play on our LAN with just the one license. I eventually bought a second license, but we still haven’t played outside our LAN.

  • FrostyCaveman@lemm.eeEnglish
    366·
    17 days ago

    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

    • charles@lemmy.ca
      English
      62·
      17 days ago

      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.

      • FrostyCaveman@lemm.eeEnglish
        52·
        17 days ago

        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.

  • walderan@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    261·
    17 days ago

    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.

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      3·
      17 days ago

      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?

      • walderan@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        8·
        17 days ago

        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.

  • Lumelore (She/her)@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    24·
    17 days ago

    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.

    • PsychedSy@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2·
      16 days ago

      What’s fucked up is they still have a custom skin my ex made for me on my account, but I don’t own the game.

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    2910·
    18 days ago

    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?

    • PlzGivHugs@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      151·
      17 days ago

      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.

      • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
        2·
        17 days ago

        Just out of curiosity, what content is it that you play with on Minecraft that you’d like on Minetest?

        • PlzGivHugs@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          2·
          17 days ago

          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.

          • 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.

          • 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.

          • 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.

    • shani66@ani.socialEnglish
      197·
      17 days ago

      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.

    • ryannathans@aussie.zoneEnglish
      3·
      17 days ago

      Not quite the same as what was purchased… just let them download and play the old version they bought

    • reksas@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      1·
      16 days ago

      i wonder if this and other obscure errors people get that prevent them from transitioning is done on purpose for randomly chosen users, its more money for them after all when people have to buy the game again.

      • EmperorHenry@discuss.tchncs.de
        English
        1·
        16 days ago

        My account wasn’t even valid anymore, I bought one of those cards with a code on it to get minecraft when I first started playing and then there was about a 8 to 9 year gap where I didn’t even think about it

  • JCreazy@midwest.socialEnglish
    2214·
    17 days ago

    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?

    • UnityDevice@startrek.websiteEnglish
      141·
      17 days ago

      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.

    • Iapar@feddit.deEnglish
      112·
      17 days ago

      Responsible for what? Getting something I paid for stolen?

    • stardust@lemmy.caEnglish
      91·
      17 days ago

      Couldn’t they have closed the migration but sent out redemption codes to people’s emails for those who hadn’t migrated?

      • filcuk@lemmy.zipEnglish
        32·
        17 days ago

        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.

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          41·
          17 days ago

          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.

        • stardust@lemmy.caEnglish
          31·
          17 days ago

          But the alternative is just closing it and now there being no option at all.

  • can@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    61·
    17 days ago

    Welp, guess my account is gone. That’s kind of shitty but I bought it just out of alpha and realistically wasn’t going to play it again. And now if I ever want to I’ll just pirate it.

    • stardust@lemmy.caEnglish
      62·
      17 days ago

      What’s so hard about login to get code if they didn’t want to do the migration process when that’s something even sites like humble bundle and other online stores offer without offering direct downloads of games or anything like that. Or even send a code to their email with an expiration date after closing the migration process for good. When poorer sites can do it what’s Microsoft’s excuse.