Things that only affect how you look. Something like a different colored name, a hat, a pet, or some other sort of vanity item like that. Nothing that affects gameplay at all though, those things can't legally be sold.
I am not oblivious to that which is why I am saying minecraft will have less massive public servers and more smaller and private ones. It is still minecraft minus the business. Nothing wrong with that unless you are a server owner wanting to make money or a player spoiled by being special in the server with the perks.
Or how about if you're someone like me? I've spent no money on the Shotbow Network, but I'm still a server regular. You seem to have this idea that these huge servers had awful free content, and were only out to rip people off. If that was the case, these servers would not get nearly as much support as they do.
Mojang claims the new EULA is intended to save us from greedy server owners charging an arm and a leg for simple gameplay features. They've said you can't charge for gameplay features like kits and in-game currency, yet they've turned around and explicitly recommended you instead charge everyone in order to access their server. They say they don't want people to end up paying for the game twice, yet they quite hypocritically recommend exactly that. Instead of getting angry emails from parents about $500 credit card charges from a server selling a diamond sword, they'll get angry emails from parents about $500 credit card charges from a server selling the ability to simply log in and be whitelisted. The only way this makes sense to me is if there is a hidden agenda - one intended to handicap Minecraft servers so Mojang can save the failing realms service. Disgusting. #LitterallyWorseThanEA #SaveMinecraft
I agree with and have stated myself all but this part:
The only way this makes sense to me is if there is a hidden agenda - one intended to handicap Minecraft servers so Mojang can save the failing realms service. Disgusting. #LitterallyWorseThanEA #SaveMinecraft
Who said you need to charge upon entry? Why not use priority access model where paying members have the ability to join full servers by filling reserved slots or kicking out a non paying member? It's hilarious how people are conspiring about Mojang being greedy when they can't see the greed of server owners luring and selling digital power to make tons of money out of a game they just bought for $27 or even for nothing if we are talking about cracked servers.
I agree with you about the Mojang hate bit, but:
I feel like (Note, I'm speaking while having zero experience hosting or running servers) priority access is not going to be enough of an incentive to get people to put money into a server. While it does sound nicer than a subscription fee, the number of "donors" on current servers is not all that high (Just speaking from experience playing on servers).
EDIT: Oh, and I also don't feel like huge server developers, who spent months developing great new content, wanting to have enough money to keep running their server and developing new content are greedy
It's harder to ripoff somebody when you are simply offering server access than by luring them through power. Having power means you can assert your dominance to free players while having server access don't have that kind of appeal. You have to charge fair if you want customers to actually like your server enough to pay and play.
Most people have been talking about small children when discussing this particular topic. I could see server owners lying outright, saying their server provides several excellent experiences that it actually doesn't, claiming to have lots of players, and just generally lying about how much fun these children would have if they'd only pay some ridiculous server entry fee. We're talking about children who were gullible enough to pay hundreds of dollars for diamonds here. Even something as simple as something along the lines of
"All/only the cool/mature/rich people play here!"
Could persuade the same kind of small child who bought a diamond sword with their parents' money to buy entry to a server with their parents' money. Marketing is quite a versatile and effective force.
We reserve the right to change this agreement at any time with or without notice, with immediate and/or retroactive effect.
But then:
Any suggestions made are assumed to be offered for free unless otherwise agreed before the suggestion was made. We're not going to put up a huge EULA. We're trying to be open and honest, and we hope people treat us the same way back.
We're not going to put up a huge EULA. We're trying to be open and honest, and we hope people treat us the same way back.
Or how about if you're someone like me? I've spent no money on the Shotbow Network, but I'm still a server regular. You seem to have this idea that these huge servers had awful free content, and were only out to rip people off. If that was the case, these servers would not get nearly as much support as they do.
My point since the begining: If your patrons wants to support your server with pure donations, then good for you. If they don't want to, then you have no choice but to scale down the server or shut it down. No one is forcing you to maintain your server size with reduced income.
I feel like (Note, I'm speaking while having zero experience hosting or running servers) priority access is not going to be enough of an incentive to get people to put money into a server. While it does sound nicer than a subscription fee, the number of "donors" on current servers is not all that high (Just speaking from experience playing on servers).
EDIT: Oh, and I also don't feel like huge server developers, who spent months developing great new content, wanting to have enough money to keep running their server and developing new content are greedy
Most people have been talking about small children when discussing this particular topic. I could see server owners lying outright, saying their server provides several excellent experiences that it actually doesn't, claiming to have lots of players, and just generally lying about how much fun these children would have if they'd only pay some ridiculous server entry fee. We're talking about children who were gullible enough to pay hundreds of dollars for diamonds here. Even something as simple as something along the lines of
"All/only the cool/mature/rich people play here!"
Could persuade the same kind of small child who bought a diamond sword with their parents' money to buy entry to a server with their parents' money. Marketing is quite a versatile and effective force.
Agree? Disagree?
So what if they don't want to spend money on priority access? Keep your server small then and scale it with your income. I am starting to think there is a requirement on how big your server is. Is there a hidden prize somewhere that awards the biggest server? Tell me about it
Children are more prone to be tempted to buy power than a simple server access. Of course they could always complain about a server ripping them off when they realized it doesn't look what they thought it would be and the server will be in deep trouble to the masses. Children won't call paying $100 for a stack of diamond a ripoff because they don't know what is the real value of diamond on legit servers. Overall, it's harder to ripoff someone with server access over power because the power satisfaction over another player is gone.
That's why Mojang was totally OK with having some of the server owners come to Minecon and get their own presentation on how to run a server for profit.
I agree 100%. They ask server owners to come and share with the community on how to make money by owning a minecraft server. Also its not just server owners who are 'crying' its the players who play on their server, also if these rules are implemented the multiplayer will most likely die. Imagine how many people would still play.
This EULA business is gonna completely change minecraft's multiplayer aspect. For three years now, I've always wanted to have a fair and square gameplay experience. I noticed quickly on these raid servers or minigame servers or prison servers that these donation packages will be the tipping point of the gameplay experience. i find that if I like the server and not want to have to pay to win, it'd be very enjoyable. However, it's not the case on these servers. These packages are not only unfair, they're overpriced and quite bluntly, useless. If someone wanted and advantage, they should get it themselves like 90% of the MC community does already. I played on a "vanilla" server one time and saw donation packages for 200$.. You get full diamond, a sword, 300 levels of xp, flying, admin commands...etc. This isn't fair! For those of you who are against this, you're saying that Paying to win is the same thing as working to win. This is what tears servers apart but makes them at the same time. Sure, I can agree that making an income off of minecraft servers is going to be a challenge but honestly it's about time that it became enforced. I've seen too many 7 year olds in full diamond, creative mode flying around murdering the people that actually make this game enjoyable. Thank you mojang, you're doing us a favor and we can't thank you enough for it!
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This question is very difficult... I can see points on both sides. I personally haven't really seen this over powered pay to instantly win much. Maybe I'm just not playing on the right/wrong servers. Mojang has said that they want to avoid having people pay for Minecraft and then have to pay for servers, but this seems to be supporting just that. I'd guess that servers will switch to entry fees to stay afloat. I also wonder about servers like MCnext, which spend their profits to charity. It encourages you to donate to children by giving some in game rewards. I suppose that would become illegal. I'd hate the idea of advertisements coming into Minecraft. I get very annoyed at advertisements quickly. I'd much rather deal with the occasional "op kit" than to have ads constantly thrown in my face or having to pay a subscription. I don't think that the goodwill of people donating to keep up the server alone will be enough to support many servers.
In the world we live in today I doubt that would ever happen. This is how it worked before:
Kid: Mom can I donate to this server I will get lots of stuff in return!
Mom: Sure, sounds like it's worth it.
How it will work soon:
Kid: Mom can I donate $30 to this server?
Mom: I guess what will you get.
Kid: Nothing just it will keep up the server for a while.
Mom: Okay!
Doesn't work like that...
Let me make you an example:
Kid: Mom can I play with the colored skin guy?
Mom: No they are inferion
People fought to get over the racists culture and are still about it. The same will go here, it will take some times, it will not be immediate, but good people will fight to make donation for nothing ( for keeping a server you like running ) the "new trend" and annihilate the greedy minecraft culture.
And if you really want to make a living providing elettronic/virtual fun to people, do like notch did ( and many others ), code your own game.
I don't know if you've read many EULAs, but Mojang's is not large by any stretch of the imagination. Go look at Microsoft's general EULA. The damn thing feels longer than Lord of the Rings.
I don't know if you've read many EULAs, but Mojang's is not large by any stretch of the imagination. Go look at Microsoft's general EULA. The damn thing feels longer than Lord of the Rings.
The EULA for Word alone is 21 pages.
I was meaning that they said they weren't going to put up a "huge EULA". I thought that they meant that they weren't going to make an EULA like this, although I guess they could have also meant they weren't going to make a large-sized EULA. They also said this.....
If you've bought the game, you may play around with it and modify it. We'd appreciate it if you didn't use this for griefing, though, and remember not to distribute the changes. Any tools you write for the game from scratch belongs to you. You're free to do whatever you want with screenshots and videos of the game, but don't just rip art resources and pass them around, that's no fun. Plugins for the game also belong to you and you can do whatever you want with them, including selling them for money. We reserve the final say regarding what constitutes a tool/plugin and what doesn't.
.....which the current EULA seems to go against. That was before the "we reserve the right to change this agreement" line, though.
So you think a server with 100% paywall is much better than a server that accepts free players provided the server is not full? If you get kicked, you simply wait until the server has one less player so that you can join again or, better yet, pay the priority fee to have 100% access to the server anytime. I would prefer this than having p2w players showing off their superiority in the game and some of them have the tendency to abuse their power over free members.
My point since the begining: If your patrons wants to support your server with pure donations, then good for you. If they don't want to, then you have no choice but to scale down the server or shut it down. No one is forcing you to maintain your server size with reduced income.
And my point: It'd be really really nice (also really really different from the way most EULAs work, I know) if the big servers didn't have to scale down because Mojang suddenly decides they want to enforce their EULA now. There's a nice balance where things are with the big servers where they float on "donations" and their stores, allowing people who don't actually want to spend anything to play on the server with those who felt like paying for stuff.
Now, do what Mojang did and forget the EULA for a while. Disregard whether this community is legal or not, and think about it. This server is acting just like a "F2P" MMO game with microtransactions. If the big server in question is a minigame server, now think about this: were it not for Mojang's disregard for their own EULA, would this kind of experience be available anywhere? Think of trying to develop, [i]and then market[/i] a F2P MMO where all the players do is play one of a few unrelated minigames with other people.
The community, through Minecraft, created a sort of semi-game that can be played (and enjoyed, as shown by anyone like me) without paying anything, because there are players out there who did pay. Their reasons for paying are about to get trimmed down to the goodness of their hearts, and servers, as you've said, are probably going to have to scale down because of this.
There goes the MMO aspect; there goes quite a bit of publicity, which takes away some of the new players coming in who didn't hear about the server; there goes further development, in order to keep things small, and then servers just aren't the same anymore.
[I had a bit more here, but then accidentally hit the mouse button for going back a page and lost it. Ugh.]
So what if they don't want to spend money on priority access? Keep your server small then and scale it with your income. I am starting to think there is a requirement on how big your server is. Is there a hidden prize somewhere that awards the biggest server? Tell me about it
Yes! There is. Bigger servers usually have the funds to pay for further development. This means that bigger servers will have more minigames, or more overall general content, than smaller servers. For quite a lot of people, that makes the bigger servers more fun. Scaling down a server does not come without consequences.
Children are more prone to be tempted to buy power than a simple server access. Of course they could always complain about a server ripping them off when they realized it doesn't look what they thought it would be and the server will be in deep trouble to the masses. Children won't call paying $100 for a stack of diamond a ripoff because they don't know what is the real value of diamond on legit servers. Overall, it's harder to ripoff someone with server access over power because the power satisfaction over another player is gone.
I'd hope that older and/or smarter players could complain "to the masses" about a server charging hundreds of dollars for diamonds, putting the server in deep trouble. Likewise, I'd hope the older or smarter players would know what the real value of diamonds or other gear is on other servers.
Whether it's ripping people off with server power, or it's ripping people off with server entry, I feel like we're dealing with extremely similar situations. Both have a high possibility of brief success, followed by utter failure as soon as the scammers get to the wrong people.
The children that I mentioned that fall so much more easily for scams like this will, of course, not be the only people who come across the scam. Sure, the children will will be able to see through the "new" scam, but it'll probably catch enough people that Mojang will still get letters from parents wanting their money back. That's my take on things, anyway.
I hope I'm making sense right now, I'm rather tired.
I agree 100%. They ask server owners to come and share with the community on how to make money by owning a minecraft server. Also its not just server owners who are 'crying' its the players who play on their server, also if these rules are implemented the multiplayer will most likely die. Imagine how many people would still play.
You think multiplayer will die. I think this will herald in a new era for it. Personally, Minecraft's online community is far too large for it to ever die. I can understand your worry. All most minecraft players have ever known is P2W servers. We've grown to accept it in some ways. Even I've grown to accept it personally. That is too say I know that the only servers that have survived for a long period of time are the ones that usually have 30% of it's fanbase paying to troll the other 70%. You just deal with it or you don't play minecraft online these days.
So why do I have faith in Mojang's move here? So I first bought minecraft way back in Beta 1.2 roughly. That was near alpha back then. I'm not saying because I have been with the community longer that it somehow makes my opinion more valid than someone else's opinion. I am saying there was almost a time back then when servers were not P2W at all. The modding community was fresh back then, green around the ears. McMMO had just released and duping was so easy with it. Bukkit wasn't nearly as popular as it is now. Servers just didn't have the capabilities to limit players to their wallets back then like they do now. I mean you could donate for a few perks if you found the right server, but nothing compared to modern day servers, servers where you can even pay to get unbanned if you were caught cheating. Still, servers went on, even though they were not designed to be P2W and force the players to pay for the server costs. Some went on without having any incentive what-so-ever to "donate".
How? How could a server even run back then if the players didn't pay for the server? Well, someone once said. "Who doesn't want a server that isn't P2W? We all do, but let's be realistic. If the players don't pay for it, who will?" Well, back then, do you know who paid for server costs? The owner. I know, a stupid concept these days when it comes to minecraft servers, but back then, you didn't have the right to call yourself the owner of the server if you couldn't afford to pay for the server's costs. And this is the new era I think Mojang will herald in. One where the owner of the server will be financially responsible for the server's upkeep again. After all, Minecraft is probably one of the worst PC games to suffer from people trying to monetize private servers. I can't name a single PC game that is worse with it's private servers. I've played plenty of other PC games where the private servers had owners actually willing to pay for the server's costs out of their own pocket.
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A lot of servers won't pay out of pocket though. A lot of owners don't care if they won't be paid to upkeep the server. They won't waste money on it. No loss for them. It's not going to be fun for the players though. Would love to go into more detail but as the majority of my posts including this one are on my nexus 7, it's kinda hard.
This EULA business is gonna completely change minecraft's multiplayer aspect. For three years now, I've always wanted to have a fair and square gameplay experience. I noticed quickly on these raid servers or minigame servers or prison servers that these donation packages will be the tipping point of the gameplay experience. i find that if I like the server and not want to have to pay to win, it'd be very enjoyable. However, it's not the case on these servers. These packages are not only unfair, they're overpriced and quite bluntly, useless. If someone wanted and advantage, they should get it themselves like 90% of the MC community does already. I played on a "vanilla" server one time and saw donation packages for 200$.. You get full diamond, a sword, 300 levels of xp, flying, admin commands...etc. This isn't fair! For those of you who are against this, you're saying that Paying to win is the same thing as working to win. This is what tears servers apart but makes them at the same time. Sure, I can agree that making an income off of minecraft servers is going to be a challenge but honestly it's about time that it became enforced. I've seen too many 7 year olds in full diamond, creative mode flying around murdering the people that actually make this game enjoyable. Thank you mojang, you're doing us a favor and we can't thank you enough for it!
How is this "doing a favor"? Those servers you are talking about? You are now going to be FORCED to pay to play them, or they will be non-existent because they are shut down. Those servers that are overpowered out there don't need to be played, so don't play them. This is slowly going to end multiplayer servers, can't you see that? It's a "favor" for those that aren't going to pay, and with no advantage, nobody will pay. How is the server going to stay up? You mentioned it's difficult. It's difficult already. This makes it close to impossible. What's the fun in watching servers fail? It's not something you enjoy so it should fail for everyone who does?
And my point: It'd be really really nice (also really really different from the way most EULAs work, I know) if the big servers didn't have to scale down because Mojang suddenly decides they want to enforce their EULA now. There's a nice balance where things are with the big servers where they float on "donations" and their stores, allowing people who don't actually want to spend anything to play on the server with those who felt like paying for stuff.
Now, do what Mojang did and forget the EULA for a while. Disregard whether this community is legal or not, and think about it. This server is acting just like a "F2P" MMO game with microtransactions. If the big server in question is a minigame server, now think about this: were it not for Mojang's disregard for their own EULA, would this kind of experience be available anywhere? Think of trying to develop, [i]and then market[/i] a F2P MMO where all the players do is play one of a few unrelated minigames with other people.
The community, through Minecraft, created a sort of semi-game that can be played (and enjoyed, as shown by anyone like me) without paying anything, because there are players out there who did pay. Their reasons for paying are about to get trimmed down to the goodness of their hearts, and servers, as you've said, are probably going to have to scale down because of this.
There goes the MMO aspect; there goes quite a bit of publicity, which takes away some of the new players coming in who didn't hear about the server; there goes further development, in order to keep things small, and then servers just aren't the same anymore.
[I had a bit more here, but then accidentally hit the mouse button for going back a page and lost it. Ugh.]
Yes! There is. Bigger servers usually have the funds to pay for further development. This means that bigger servers will have more minigames, or more overall general content, than smaller servers. For quite a lot of people, that makes the bigger servers more fun. Scaling down a server does not come without consequences.
I'd hope that older and/or smarter players could complain "to the masses" about a server charging hundreds of dollars for diamonds, putting the server in deep trouble. Likewise, I'd hope the older or smarter players would know what the real value of diamonds or other gear is on other servers.
Whether it's ripping people off with server power, or it's ripping people off with server entry, I feel like we're dealing with extremely similar situations. Both have a high possibility of brief success, followed by utter failure as soon as the scammers get to the wrong people.
The children that I mentioned that fall so much more easily for scams like this will, of course, not be the only people who come across the scam. Sure, the children will will be able to see through the "new" scam, but it'll probably catch enough people that Mojang will still get letters from parents wanting their money back. That's my take on things, anyway.
I hope I'm making sense right now, I'm rather tired.
Everything lies in the hands of the minecraft community. Let them decide if a server is worthy enough to spend money on without any perks on it. I may sound like a broken record here but I repeat: If the community wants the server not to scale down because they genuinely like it, they will support it regardless of perks. Server owners are just threatened because they know that some players don't really like their server contents and they only come for the power when you buy something from the server. It is not up to the server owners to dictate how big their server is. It's up for the community to decide if they wanted your minigames to exist or not.
How is this "doing a favor"? Those servers you are talking about? You are now going to be FORCED to pay to play them, or they will be non-existent because they are shut down. Those servers that are overpowered out there don't need to be played, so don't play them. This is slowly going to end multiplayer servers, can't you see that? It's a "favor" for those that aren't going to pay, and with no advantage, nobody will pay. How is the server going to stay up? You mentioned it's difficult. It's difficult already. This makes it close to impossible. What's the fun in watching servers fail? It's not something you enjoy so it should fail for everyone who does?
You are another misguided soul who mindlessly believe those greedy server owners about multiplayer servers dying with EULA. I ask you, what is minecraft somewhere in 2010 before public servers were popularized?
I can't believe mine craft has done this. You have just made my 50$ worthless on my favorite server. I think you have lost another player, next they know minecraft will be dead faster.
Everything lies in the hands of the minecraft community. Let them decide if a server is worthy enough to spend money on without any perks on it. I may sound like a broken record here but I repeat: If the community wants the server not to scale down because they genuinely like it, they will support it regardless of perks. Server owners are just threatened because they know that some players don't really like their server contents and they only come for the power when you buy something from the server. It is not up to the server owners to dictate how big their server is. It's up for the community to decide if they wanted your minigames to exist or not.
You are another misguided soul who mindlessly believe those greedy server owners about multiplayer servers dying with EULA. I ask you, what is minecraft somewhere in 2010 before public servers were popularized?
Yeah, I'm "misguided". Have you tried to run a server yourself? Just a question. It's expensive. Another question. Do you play multiplayer? All servers are trying to be as large as possible, why? Because it's fun to play with more people. You have a better experience. Where Minecraft was in 2010 is completely irrelevant. That was when Minecraft was still fresh, people still playing singleplayer and figuring out the game. The uprising of Minecraft was 2010, now it relies on multiplayer to keep it fresh, which is going to be hit hard by this.
Things that only affect how you look. Something like a different colored name, a hat, a pet, or some other sort of vanity item like that. Nothing that affects gameplay at all though, those things can't legally be sold.
Or how about if you're someone like me? I've spent no money on the Shotbow Network, but I'm still a server regular. You seem to have this idea that these huge servers had awful free content, and were only out to rip people off. If that was the case, these servers would not get nearly as much support as they do.
I agree with and have stated myself all but this part:
I agree with you about the Mojang hate bit, but:
I feel like (Note, I'm speaking while having zero experience hosting or running servers) priority access is not going to be enough of an incentive to get people to put money into a server. While it does sound nicer than a subscription fee, the number of "donors" on current servers is not all that high (Just speaking from experience playing on servers).
EDIT: Oh, and I also don't feel like huge server developers, who spent months developing great new content, wanting to have enough money to keep running their server and developing new content are greedy
Most people have been talking about small children when discussing this particular topic. I could see server owners lying outright, saying their server provides several excellent experiences that it actually doesn't, claiming to have lots of players, and just generally lying about how much fun these children would have if they'd only pay some ridiculous server entry fee. We're talking about children who were gullible enough to pay hundreds of dollars for diamonds here. Even something as simple as something along the lines of
"All/only the cool/mature/rich people play here!"
Could persuade the same kind of small child who bought a diamond sword with their parents' money to buy entry to a server with their parents' money. Marketing is quite a versatile and effective force.
Agree? Disagree?
NO, that is worse than P2W.
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But then:
Ok, Mojang.
My point since the begining: If your patrons wants to support your server with pure donations, then good for you. If they don't want to, then you have no choice but to scale down the server or shut it down. No one is forcing you to maintain your server size with reduced income.
So what if they don't want to spend money on priority access? Keep your server small then and scale it with your income. I am starting to think there is a requirement on how big your server is. Is there a hidden prize somewhere that awards the biggest server? Tell me about it
Children are more prone to be tempted to buy power than a simple server access. Of course they could always complain about a server ripping them off when they realized it doesn't look what they thought it would be and the server will be in deep trouble to the masses. Children won't call paying $100 for a stack of diamond a ripoff because they don't know what is the real value of diamond on legit servers. Overall, it's harder to ripoff someone with server access over power because the power satisfaction over another player is gone.
There's a difference between a hero and a champion. A champion overcomes threats, but a hero overcomes fears.
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Then there's also a Youtube channel I'm somewhat involved in.
Let me make you an example:
Kid: Mom can I play with the colored skin guy?
Mom: No they are inferion
People fought to get over the racists culture and are still about it. The same will go here, it will take some times, it will not be immediate, but good people will fight to make donation for nothing ( for keeping a server you like running ) the "new trend" and annihilate the greedy minecraft culture.
And if you really want to make a living providing elettronic/virtual fun to people, do like notch did ( and many others ), code your own game.
I don't know if you've read many EULAs, but Mojang's is not large by any stretch of the imagination. Go look at Microsoft's general EULA. The damn thing feels longer than Lord of the Rings.
The EULA for Word alone is 21 pages.
I was meaning that they said they weren't going to put up a "huge EULA". I thought that they meant that they weren't going to make an EULA like this, although I guess they could have also meant they weren't going to make a large-sized EULA. They also said this.....
.....which the current EULA seems to go against. That was before the "we reserve the right to change this agreement" line, though.
So you think a server with 100% paywall is much better than a server that accepts free players provided the server is not full? If you get kicked, you simply wait until the server has one less player so that you can join again or, better yet, pay the priority fee to have 100% access to the server anytime. I would prefer this than having p2w players showing off their superiority in the game and some of them have the tendency to abuse their power over free members.
And my point: It'd be really really nice (also really really different from the way most EULAs work, I know) if the big servers didn't have to scale down because Mojang suddenly decides they want to enforce their EULA now. There's a nice balance where things are with the big servers where they float on "donations" and their stores, allowing people who don't actually want to spend anything to play on the server with those who felt like paying for stuff.
Now, do what Mojang did and forget the EULA for a while. Disregard whether this community is legal or not, and think about it. This server is acting just like a "F2P" MMO game with microtransactions. If the big server in question is a minigame server, now think about this: were it not for Mojang's disregard for their own EULA, would this kind of experience be available anywhere? Think of trying to develop, [i]and then market[/i] a F2P MMO where all the players do is play one of a few unrelated minigames with other people.
The community, through Minecraft, created a sort of semi-game that can be played (and enjoyed, as shown by anyone like me) without paying anything, because there are players out there who did pay. Their reasons for paying are about to get trimmed down to the goodness of their hearts, and servers, as you've said, are probably going to have to scale down because of this.
There goes the MMO aspect; there goes quite a bit of publicity, which takes away some of the new players coming in who didn't hear about the server; there goes further development, in order to keep things small, and then servers just aren't the same anymore.
[I had a bit more here, but then accidentally hit the mouse button for going back a page and lost it. Ugh.]
Yes! There is. Bigger servers usually have the funds to pay for further development. This means that bigger servers will have more minigames, or more overall general content, than smaller servers. For quite a lot of people, that makes the bigger servers more fun. Scaling down a server does not come without consequences.
I'd hope that older and/or smarter players could complain "to the masses" about a server charging hundreds of dollars for diamonds, putting the server in deep trouble. Likewise, I'd hope the older or smarter players would know what the real value of diamonds or other gear is on other servers.
Whether it's ripping people off with server power, or it's ripping people off with server entry, I feel like we're dealing with extremely similar situations. Both have a high possibility of brief success, followed by utter failure as soon as the scammers get to the wrong people.
The children that I mentioned that fall so much more easily for scams like this will, of course, not be the only people who come across the scam. Sure, the children will will be able to see through the "new" scam, but it'll probably catch enough people that Mojang will still get letters from parents wanting their money back. That's my take on things, anyway.
I hope I'm making sense right now, I'm rather tired.
You think multiplayer will die. I think this will herald in a new era for it. Personally, Minecraft's online community is far too large for it to ever die. I can understand your worry. All most minecraft players have ever known is P2W servers. We've grown to accept it in some ways. Even I've grown to accept it personally. That is too say I know that the only servers that have survived for a long period of time are the ones that usually have 30% of it's fanbase paying to troll the other 70%. You just deal with it or you don't play minecraft online these days.
So why do I have faith in Mojang's move here? So I first bought minecraft way back in Beta 1.2 roughly. That was near alpha back then. I'm not saying because I have been with the community longer that it somehow makes my opinion more valid than someone else's opinion. I am saying there was almost a time back then when servers were not P2W at all. The modding community was fresh back then, green around the ears. McMMO had just released and duping was so easy with it. Bukkit wasn't nearly as popular as it is now. Servers just didn't have the capabilities to limit players to their wallets back then like they do now. I mean you could donate for a few perks if you found the right server, but nothing compared to modern day servers, servers where you can even pay to get unbanned if you were caught cheating. Still, servers went on, even though they were not designed to be P2W and force the players to pay for the server costs. Some went on without having any incentive what-so-ever to "donate".
How? How could a server even run back then if the players didn't pay for the server? Well, someone once said. "Who doesn't want a server that isn't P2W? We all do, but let's be realistic. If the players don't pay for it, who will?" Well, back then, do you know who paid for server costs? The owner. I know, a stupid concept these days when it comes to minecraft servers, but back then, you didn't have the right to call yourself the owner of the server if you couldn't afford to pay for the server's costs. And this is the new era I think Mojang will herald in. One where the owner of the server will be financially responsible for the server's upkeep again. After all, Minecraft is probably one of the worst PC games to suffer from people trying to monetize private servers. I can't name a single PC game that is worse with it's private servers. I've played plenty of other PC games where the private servers had owners actually willing to pay for the server's costs out of their own pocket.
Everything lies in the hands of the minecraft community. Let them decide if a server is worthy enough to spend money on without any perks on it. I may sound like a broken record here but I repeat: If the community wants the server not to scale down because they genuinely like it, they will support it regardless of perks. Server owners are just threatened because they know that some players don't really like their server contents and they only come for the power when you buy something from the server. It is not up to the server owners to dictate how big their server is. It's up for the community to decide if they wanted your minigames to exist or not.
You are another misguided soul who mindlessly believe those greedy server owners about multiplayer servers dying with EULA. I ask you, what is minecraft somewhere in 2010 before public servers were popularized?
Some great games just die
Yeah, I'm "misguided". Have you tried to run a server yourself? Just a question. It's expensive. Another question. Do you play multiplayer? All servers are trying to be as large as possible, why? Because it's fun to play with more people. You have a better experience. Where Minecraft was in 2010 is completely irrelevant. That was when Minecraft was still fresh, people still playing singleplayer and figuring out the game. The uprising of Minecraft was 2010, now it relies on multiplayer to keep it fresh, which is going to be hit hard by this.