Mojang Threatened to BAN my Minecraft Server…

Not too long ago now my server received an email from Mojang’s official enforcement team they outlined the variety of rules which we had supposedly broken mentioning that if we did not respond within seven days our server would be banned for good the Minecraft Euler has been a major source of drama

Dating back as early as 2014 and was a key reason Notch would end up selling the game to Microsoft and ultimately moving on from Minecraft for good these days there is still much confusion and drama regarding what can and can’t get you blocked with many pay to win and

Even non-paid to win servers being blocked then unblocked and blocked again with seemingly no consistency even more recently there’s been Revelations that Mojang is going as far as to ban servers which contain guns enforcing a rule which is not listed anywhere potentially putting Hypixel themselves at risk of being blocked and supposedly breaking

Laws in various countries but wait let’s not get ahead of ourselves here why do Minecraft servers even get blocked in the first place well contrary to Common belief the rules and regulations surrounding what you can and can’t do with Minecraft servers aren’t actually located on the public Minecraft Euler

Page but rather in another article known as the commercial usage guidelines there’s quite a long list of them but I’ll summarize the important guidelines now according to these guidelines you are allowed to charge for access to your server which means for example charging plays a certain fee or requiring them to

Have a rank to play specific game mode as some Bedrock servers do you are also allowed to ask for donations provided they do not offer any benefits in return but you can offer server-wide rewards if donation goals are achieved you are allowed to use and sell in-game

Currencies as long as they don’t look like mine coins and aren’t associated with Mojang and finally but most importantly you are allowed to sell entitlements that affect gameplay basically being paid to win provided they don’t negatively affect another player’s experience and do not give a competitive gameplay Advantage now you

Are probably aware that 95 of Minecraft servers are in fact a paid to win so why are they not banned well the key word here is competitive according to Mojang a competitive gameplay Advantage is something that can cause a player or group to perform better than another however certain game modes can be

Considered non-competitive and thus are allowed to be paid when and this is where the confusion and problems begin if we head over to the blocked Minecraft server’s Twitter account an account which tracks servers which are blocked and unblocked you may notice that a variety of big pay to win servers have

Been blocked and then unblocked only hours later only to still be very pay to win and no different what’s even more concerning is that many servers who Pride themselves in being Euler compliant are also blocked for seemingly no reason but then unblocked not long after so what’s going on well servers

Are being blocked because their players are not subscribed to the Mr Epic you see one guideline we missed was the one which said all players and server owners have to subscribe to the Mr Epic no pressure of course anyways from looking into a variety of cases where servers

Have been blocked and from my own experience talking to server owners what Mojang deems as competitive and ultimately what leads to servers being blocked are two things in particular first of all payouts a lot of servers often actions or even Skyblock have real money Rewards or service store credit

For the top players on the server every season prior to the map resetting well to be more accurate they used to offer these payouts if we log on to the icon factions right at spawn they have some information mentioning that cash payouts are no longer allowed whether or not

This contributed to the icon’s untimely Decline and soon to be closure is unclear but the ultimate decay of factions across Minecraft as a whole can be somewhat attributed to lack of payouts which is what a lot of players used to play for this is common amongst many Skyblock and faction servers by the

Way all of which were forced to remove payouts or be blocked forever for whatever reason Mojang clearly doesn’t like them the other reason servers get blocked is for selling on bands servers such as Viper MC have been blocked in the past for selling unbans and had to

Remove them to be unblocked now selling unbans kind of sounds bad at first but actually it’s really not if you cheated on a server and got banned realize your mistake and wanted to play again you can pay to get a second cons now if you

Decide to cheat again all you do is run the risk of losing more money it’s pretty fair in my opinion and there are some non-paid win service out there such as PVP gym where unbans actually make up majority of the servers already low Revenue so clearly they do greatly help

Non-paido and servers stay afloat so why would Mojang ban such a rather uncontroversial thing and then continue to allow things like gambling well it’s simple if a player is willing to spend 20 to 30 dollars sometimes even more to buy an unbanned for a server then they

Would also be clearly willing to spend the same amount to buy another Minecraft account and debate the ban instead so Mojang or Microsoft realize that these servers were getting money instead of them and promptly stepped in to ensure the money is instead given to them but this still doesn’t explain why Mojang

Threatened to block my server since we have neither of these well the reason they emailed us is simple and it’s mainly a fault on our end basically on our store we use the word donation instead of purchase and since our ranked perks do give players things like cosmetics and extra commands they don’t

Qualify as a donation according to Minecraft’s commercial usage guidelines so we made some quick changes ironed out a few formatting and layout problems as well and our case was resolved smoothly but ultimately we were lucky and the same can’t be said for many other server owners whilst some servers may be asked

To remove leaderboards or payouts to comply with the guidelines other servers like Hypixel with Skyblock which is pay to win still have leaderboards but seemingly get away scot-free UC servers have been given contradictory information in the past and credit to Seth who runs a server called dire skies

For providing me with some of the following information here Dias guys who were originally contacted by enforcement for a similar reason my server was I told after questioning for further info surrounding the guidelines that servers are allowed to sell pay-to-win items regardless as long as there are

Non-paying paths to earn the same items but then here an entirely different server is told that server owners can’t sell anything that directly affects a player standing on any server leaderboards before unblocking that same server when they still sold things that well affected the player’s standing on leaderboards they then tell server

Owners that you can still pay twin items as long as they aren’t too paid to win but clearly they don’t have a precise method of determining if a server is too paid win or not it’s very inconsistent and even ignoring the fact that most servers are not considered competitive

Almost all of them are still breaking the rules you see what I haven’t mentioned yet is also what Mojang doesn’t allow on servers specifically everything on the server must be suitable for children and miners with them explicitly stating as an example that gambling is not allowed now I’m not

Too sure if the Mojang enforcement team hasn’t logged onto a server in a while but almost every single Minecraft server that exists now has some form of loot boxes or crates most of which are selling Keys individually for real money and offering pay-to-win rewards so why aren’t these servers blocked well while

The Euler does not go into any more detail on these monetization methods Seth was able to get more information from the enforcement team according to the Mojang enforcement team crates loot boxes and create keys are generally compliant with the Euler if they meet one of these following criteria they are

Cosmetic in nature only do not give a competitive Advantage are disabled in PvP areas and the keys for them can be obtained through normal gameplay means furthermore to be compliant of the potential items that can be earned in crates must be listed and the odds must be listed as well so clearly according

To merging enforcement crates are allowed in Minecraft which doesn’t make much sense as even including most of these detailed guidelines they are still gambling which is against their publicly listed guidelines but the arguably even bigger issue here is why none of this information about crates and loot boxes

Is public this info is nowhere to be found and the only way you would know if you broke Mojang’s guidelines surrounding gambling is if you will broke them and servers have been threatened with a block for doing so in the past yet almost 95 of servers get away scot-free where is the consistency

This now leads us to the big issue that’s happened recently so I hope I’ve made it clear to you how problem automatic Minecraft guidelines surrounding server operation are with their inconsistent blocks vague guidelines and utter contradictions amongst different servers well a couple days ago now a Minecraft gun server

Received an email from Mojang enforcement for those of you unaware gun servers like Grand Theft Minecart are servers which use resource packs and plugins to add pixelated guns to Minecraft some of these servers date back over 10 years now and thus Staples in the multiplayer scene Mojang’s commercial guidelines surrounding

Servers were last updated in April of 2020 but Grand Theft Minecart and a German server called German minor de received this email a recent directive from Mojang leadership has determined that guns and weapons are considered non-compliant features under the adult content requirements for commercial usage servers basically guns are no

Longer allowed and these servers are required to remove all references to guns and Firearms otherwise they will be blocked keep in mind the supposed adult content is nowhere to be found in these guidelines and the only similar point which I believe they are referencing is the same vague statement many servers

Are already breaking mentioning all content must be suitable for children and minors Grand Theft Minecart would respond to this email from Mojang enforcement mentioning how gun servers have operated for years under the Euler and that they themselves had been deemed to be compliant by merging enforcement only months ago now they also mentioned

That guns were critical to the service identity in game modes a very vague response was received mentioning that the new directive only includes guns and firearms and not weapons and other items like swords bows TNT and gun powder which already exist in Minecraft Grand Theft Minecart tried to compromise

Mentioning if they could add orange tips to their weapons so they would look like airsoft guns instead but were unable to get a clear answer from them the email conversation ultimately concluded that servers are not allowed to use guns or Firearms but have to use Replacements like laser blaster or magic wand and

Whatnot instead the full post with this discussion is below but then one of the server owners contacted one of the members of the enforcement team on Discord who mentioned that the guidelines surrounding guns had not changed and that they would look into it but the onus of Grand Theft Minecart

Aren’t too optimistic I guess if you want to play with pixelated guns you have to play Roblox now or fortnite or literally any other game with the same age target audience as Minecraft that still has guns now there are some big issues with what’s happened here number

One is that this change came out of the blue with no real notice and is still not clearly stated in the commercial usage guidelines so once again how are Servo owners meant to know what they can and can’t do when things change randomly with no prior warning and the second

Issue is that these servers have invested years of hard work thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of their time and now could lose it all because some uninformed Mojang employee decided one day that they don’t want something as harmless as pixelated guns in the game What’s even more interesting though

Is the potential illegality behind this situation currently a large group of over 30 gun server owners have gotten together in a panic after hearing about the situation fearing that they are next some of which have tried to reach out to emerging enforcement to receive clarification here is one such response

A server owner got real slash authentic guns in Minecraft have never been approved so now there’s once again even more conflicting information the most popular servers in Minecraft like Hypixel and Mineplex both had or still have guns in the game so is this actually a new directive or was this a

Rule that for some reason was never enforced up until now why are only some servers getting emails nobody knows because there’s no clear and consistent information listed anywhere the group of gun server owners have been doing some serious research and discovered that Mojang could be breaking laws in Europe surrounding consumer information and

Contracts as Kian owner of an upcoming Call of Duty inspired Minecraft server known as MC War told me in the European Union’s official article on consumer rights specifically in Article 5 it is mentioned that before consumers are bound by contracts a Trader must provide information in a clear and comprehensible manner basically what

Kian has told me is that the commercial usage guidelines are not clear enough and now that such unclear rules are being enforced that were not explicitly outlined anywhere Mojang could potentially be violating this law but I’m no lawyer and neither is Kian just remember while these anti-gun changes

Only currently affect a small percentage of servers the potential ramifications are what’s most worrying there clearly is a disconnect in communication between whoever is writing the guidelines and rules and the enforcement team who are enforcing them that’s most likely why server owners get such conflicting and different information that previously

Was nowhere to be found in the public guidelines if things continue the way they are who’s to say that in a week’s time servers won’t be allowed to sell anything at all anymore maybe one day PVP won’t be allowed at all it sounds extreme but if we keep seeing new

Directives being enforced out of the blue is there really any guarantee anymore and with Mojang seemingly trying to become more child friendly who knows what else servers might be forced to remove but sure Mojang ban pixelated guns for the sake of children but continue to allow crates and gambling

Nice priorities I hope you all enjoyed the video be sure to subscribe thank you all so much for watching