It's a big deal because Minecraft's server system is traditionally very decentralized. However, this change suggests that Microsoft now wants to increasingly centralize the game. Microsoft seems to be going against the game's original ethos.

There’s no going back though, is there? Once Minecraft is playable over LAN without internet connection, there’s very little to nothing that MS can do to police speech, right?

I don’t mean to be dismissive but the censorship is virtually opt-in at this point, no?

The MS controversy is that they implemented a centralized chat signing feature that is not opt-out. Most of the fun Minecraft servers are using a kind of server-side modding, but their users are playing with "vanilla" clients. So if you get banned by MS, you can't join those servers. MS is now the gatekeeper of offensive chat, not the individual servers.

You’re saying the servers are fun and that’s fine. However, I’m of the opinion that it’s the players who make the game fun and if the players choose to play on virtual LAN servers, then they, in essence, opt-out of the censorship.

Even the LAN servers are still part of this censorship model. The only way to avoid this censorship is to crack the game and run the server in cracked mode.

> Literally just don't be an idiot. Its not that hard.

Kids are often antisocial and exhibit poor behavior. Kids also love Minecraft.

Permanent, Microsoft-account level bans for questionable chat text is ridiculous.

I don't disagree there.

But I very highly doubt the ones doing all this complaining are actually kids.

Imagine if suddenly the web changed so that it was possible to be banned from every single website (you can't even look at them) for your behavior on a single site by a moderator with incomplete context even if it was done in private.

This is a big change to how things work and it was forced onto the community.

If you are playing in a private server it should be up to that server to ban or not ban people, the same way if you are in a private bar it should be up to that bar to ban you from it because you use profanity.

No, the ridiculousness is the deep centralization. Whether it's Minetest OR cracked Minecraft, it's clear that Microsoft is an irresponsible, or more importantly, unnecessary steward/middleman here.

Those who want Microsofts vision, I suppose that's fine -- but I see no good reason to require or respect it. On with the mods.