The Outrage of Minecraft 1.19.1 and Permanent Bans

Minecraft 1.19.1 has universal bans across multiplayer servers and realms as Mojang and Microsoft adds Player Chat Reporting to the game through the Social Interactions Screen.

Edited by Th3pooka

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[xisumavoid]

To address the kickback on this video, I have written a response here:

[PolluxaC]

There used to be a 6 yo kid playing on a small public family-friendly SMP that I was on. It was obvious from his speech patterns and thought process that's he was a small child. He screamed a lot, threw tantrums a lot, griefed other people's bases a lot, but he was also just a really young kid trying to enjoy his first multiplayer game. We decided not to ban him, and his even younger sister, because we didn't want their first multiplayer gaming experience to end badly, you know. Whenever he logged on, the adults of the server simply sighed, took turns to babysit him (mostly just to make sure he wouldn't get lost or grief anything important), and taught him how to play the game.

So, if the chat reporting system had been in place back then, we could've mass-reported a 6 yo and got him banned from online multiplayer permanently? From playing block game with his sister on family-friendly servers? Come on, now. People will have to buy new MC accounts to play online again and Microsoft knows this. I can see them grinning and saying "STONKS!".

[joshuarosen]

Most people make a fuss about very little and you often correctly point that out.

This is not one of those cases. This is overreach by Microsoft and this is something the whole community should be up in arms about this. This will be widely abused and could easily turn into an absolute disaster.

[TheMisterEpic]

While I do appreciate your opinion, what you haven't talked about is the thousands of cases of bedrock players being "shadow-muted", whereby they are muted from multiplayer servers and are unable to speak. These individuals are given no warning about their mute, no information about why they were muted and when applying for unmutes are told that "microsoft can't do anything". You mention we haven't heard much from the bedrock community about issues relating to false-bans or mutes, but even large bedrock servers (such as lifeboat) have had to include sections in their FAQ's about these shadow-mutes because so many individuals were asking about them.

Furthermore, maybe the reason we haven't heard much from the bedrock community about false-bans or mutes is because they are younger, and less likely to be present on social media platforms, as well as less likely to understand how to appeal their ban. When I made my video mentioning the issue of shadow-mutes on bedrock, I had numerous comments from individuals who mentioned that they had the same issue, and just thought it was a bug in their game. They didn't even know they were punished, many of which mentioning they barely used chat at all!

For the first few months microsoft introduced their global banning system on bedrock, there was no way to appeal a ban at all. Their help website which you were linked to after being banned, did not have any information surrounding how one could appeal their ban. Coupled with the fact that you basically are given no specific reason as to why you are banned on bedrock, led to many players being banned with no reason, and no method of appealing. Many of these bans were also found to be false (youtuber Jet Starfish has some examples of this), but only after banned players waited months for microsoft to finally add an appeal section to their official article. And even then, many players did not know they could appeal. There are youtube videos which demonstrate how you can appeal for unbans, and in the comments you can see dozens of people mentioning they had been banned for months or even years, and did not know they appeal at aall. Not to mention the fact that even after banned and successfully appealing, microsoft still didn't give banned players any explanation why they were banned!

How could you possibly look at such a flawed ban system and think that this is ok for java? Sure, it probably won't affect 99% of the players, but the 1% that is mistreated whether that be for false-bans, or for real bans, should set an example of what could happen to anybody.

[topster]

The idea that "highly trained" moderators will handle complaints successfully is an absolute farce. Find me one moderation team for any large gaming community that doesn't make frequent, miserable errors.

[RubenYT]

Minecraft itself isn’t a community, every server in it has its own small community and I think it should be the job of the moderators of those servers to actually decide how they want people to act in their server, and not the job of some underpaid microsoft worker who does nothing but read chat messages all day while throwing random *global* bans around.

[skeletorthebest]

The argument “think of the children” is so over-done, it hurts. Not just in Minecraft, but in politics in general- the argument has been used to justify numerous invasions of privacy. There’s nothing wrong with letting each server owner make their own rules, as they will most likely be properly enforced.

The lack of an appeal system also scares me; what if there’s a false positive and you can’t appeal to staff? Seems a bit messed up to me.

[valthan]

My only gripe with the moderation is this: I play on a custom, private server much like Hermitcraft. Privately paid for, hosted and moderated with whitelisted-only access for members whom we've met in real life. I do not like the insinuation that our hard work is inadequate. If we wanted help, we'd ask for it.

[VJArt_]

"Think of the children sneaking into adult servers" their parents should be at fault for that, not the server with clear rules that individuals could break. We shouldn't expect communities to parent children, their actual parents and guardians should.

[frostiifae]

"And let's face it, the grey area is likely to be the smallest; we don't consider the black and the white" - X, when you wrote this line, you should have recognized that something was very, very wrong. Digital privacy isn't an issue that can be divided into black and white, and if that's your general approach to controversy you are probably not equipped to tackle controversial subjects. Especially not if your conclusion is "they didn't do a good job communicating with us". Why do you think that is, X? Do you think they just *forgot* to mention some stuff? Or is maybe some motivation for them not to tell us everything up front? What does that say about the features they're developing? What does that say about their character as developers of the game?

It's not a question of whether "protecting the children" is worth "but i might get false reported :(". The core of this issue is that Mojang and Microsoft are overreaching their bounds, solving problems that aren't their responsibility and, for the most part, didn't need to be solved in the first place. Even in the best case it's an enormous waste of Microsoft's resources for a miniscule gain, but it's almost certainly a move intended to establish more control over the playerbase. No matter how good their intentions are in doing that, it doesn't benefit the players - or the game - for them to do so. Their inability to communicate properly isn't a separate problem - it's a symptom of a larger and much more concerning issue of bureaucracy causing distrust between the developers and players (in both directions!). And that lack of trust is why people are so anxious about what else Microsoft might have planned.

They could improve things with much more lenient rules, allowing private servers to opt out, or setting a client-side parental filter instead - but I think most people would agree that the best thing to do would just roll back this entire feature and not bother with it at all. It might not lead to peoples' frantic worst-case scenarios, but no matter what it leads Minecraft in a worse direction.

[JaceSwalworth]

As a server owner for a small group of adults, this is complete overreach by them. If someone’s causing problems, *I ban them* instead of removing their multiplayer access completely. I don’t agree with you here, and my entire community wants this chat moderation thing altered or removed altogether

[Nephelangelo]

With all due respect, Microsoft needs to keep the hell out of what people do on their own private servers.

[gputi]

This will change the game forever... for the worse, and here's why:

• A vulnerability was found that allows non-existent messages to be attached to a complaint. This allows you to change the context of the player's messages, make him an intruder and block him from online play for no reason. There is no guarantee that this vulnerability is the first and the last, so you can expect mass destruction of YouTuber accounts.
• Many categories of complaints limit freedom of speech and protect players. For example:
— Alcohol can be mentioned in a role-play or in adult conversations, but the category "Drugs and alcohol" does not make exceptions for such cases.
— On servers with PVP and anarchy, players often use the words "explode" or "kill", which falls under the category "Threat of causing harm".
Mojang claims that they know about it, but recent cases of player bans prove otherwise. They are collected in (this article).
• The complaint system blocks the player not only on version 1.19.1, but also on all versions up to 1.6.
• The fear of the new system will lead to a huge drop in online servers, which can subsequently lead to the death of Minecraft.

Only you, Minecraft players, can stop this.

[BowAssassin]

7:27 Yes, we are. Bedrock players often complain about the Microsoft moderation. A good example of our complaints about Microsoft Moderation are shadow mutes. Its often random, automated, and gives the muted player no notification that they have been shadow muted. It can't be appealed and the only way to be unmuted it via "Positive Chat Interaction", which is kinda difficult to do if no one can see what you say.

[slayazes]

A moderation team being "Well trained, well informed and making good decisions" would be a very very rare thing to happen.

[dynosophical]

So, the biggest problem I'm seeing here is that this feature was never missing. Server owners have had the ability to ban players as long as I've been playing the game and I've never heard any complaints about that. That sort of moderation makes sense, allows each server to have its own rules, and can't lead to a misstep on one server causing a permanent ban from all servers.

At the same time, like you said, not all servers will want to deal with someone else's idea of moderation. Forcing all private server owners to participate is a pretty bad move when they could've easily made it a choice and only applied their blanket bans to the servers that opt in.

[anonymous_moose]

Person with moderation experience here, people are very right to be concerned.

Beyond many other, very legitimate issues, there's something that hardly anyone ever talks about but, when I had come to realize it, had been a major reasoning behind my retirement.

Underneath it all, systems like this, systems where you directly report to some global, higher authority... despite our purest of intentions, it has itself become a vector for abuse.

Abusers are not idiots. The dangerous ones aren't, anyway. They are masters of social manipulation & deception. They regularly engineer situations in which their targets look bad while they look like a saint. That is why this is fundamentally a flawed idea. Global moderators do not patrol servers to see what's really going on. They're just given limited chat logs and told to make a decision from there, chat logs that can very easily be socially engineered by an intelligent abuser to appear in their favor. These global moderators don't have time to study the behavioral patterns and social interactions of people like 'field moderators' are supposed to. And yet these people are the ones with ultimate power.

Similar principles are why school anti-bullying policies are nearly-universally considered a failure by everyone who actually remembers what it was like to live under such a policy, and even then, teachers at least have the potential to pick up on their students' behavioral patterns. Global moderation is too disconnected for any such thing to take place.

What I think should be done, instead of giving this ability to everyone including the abusers who would no doubt use this for evil and get away with it because it's their word vs others, and theirs is far more convincing, is to give the ability to report to server staff of major, trusted servers. People who would actually be able to study situations and give complete context rather than some vague and easily abuse-able system that any abuser with a brain could rig in their favor. It's not perfect by any means, but it would do the job much better than trusting this to people who don't know nearly enough about what's going on to be making decisions like this.

[kennyholmes]

"I'm sure the moderation teams will be well-trained, well-informed, and making good decisions to a high standard;"
You don't get it, X, do you? They're gonna use bots. Big companies always do things like that: saying they'll use nothing but the best and then use algorithms that often are the worst possible choice. Have you not seen how "Night" has been put on the blacklist of words simply because of the first three letters?

[crisa]

This is going to get buried, but I think it’s important to say. X taking a “moderate” opinion (pun unintended) in EVERY analysis video is, albeit unintentionally, unhelpful at best and harmful at worst. Difficult issues require careful critical thinking. Taking the sitting on the fence stance does not automatically make one’s opinion more correct or more reasonable than someone who has thought through the issues and has a stronger reaction.

Injustice or unfairness often rightly invoke strong reactions. Condemning those who have strong reactions while sitting on the “moderate” fence has historically led to abandoning those who most need to be defended and helped. This is not a helpful example for anyone watching X’s content.

[davespriter]

“if youre in a server of adults, how can you verify their age?” I KNOW THEM. IVE BEEN TO THEIR WEDDINGS. IVE GONE DRINKING WITH THEM. IVE DISCUSSED INSURANCE AND TAXES WITH THEM

…and some of them are petty as hell and i could see some of them using reporting abuse against one another. its better to be able to know what powers over each other my friends can and cant handle and plan social situations around that, even online

i respect u a lot xisuma, i just find the idea that every minecraft user is name and a skin to be ridiculous.