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
I’m one of those people. I haven’t played in years. I may never have played again. I only found out because my daughter is now at an age where she asked if we could play together. I received no notice from Microsoft and I don’t do social media so it was a complete surprise to me when I couldn’t log in, then find out through their support that I had lost access to something I had legally paid for.
I sincerely doubt you received no notice from Microsoft. I received multiple emails from them, even though I didn’t play back then. If I hadn’t transitioned I’m pretty sure they would’ve kept sending me emails.
Doubt all you like. I checked multiple times after opening a ticket to make sure I hadn’t missed something. I would actually be a lot less annoyed with them if I had.
Were you using a weird email provider? Maybe the emails were sent to spam. Or you were looking in the wrong email.
Nope, it was Gmail and I know it’s the correct account because I have other emails regarding that account going back a few years including confirmations and a password reset.
I did check spam at the time. I really tried to give them the benefit of the doubt but all I can figure is my account slipped through some weird crack. It’s likely I never would have even known if it weren’t for my kid asking me one day if we could play together.
You come off sounding like an ass.
I’m just pointing out misinformation. Me (and many others) received plenty emails from Microsoft. I doubt that they only sent them to some people and not others.
yeah I just wanted to say the “we shouldn’t have had to transition” but I didn’t want the hivemind to get mad at me if I didn’t add a negative to the end
I got so many emails from them telling me to transition the account or I would lose it. So they did give lots of notice.
Even tho it sucks losing access, it’s still a great game worth every penny
So did most of my friends, but I checked multiple times and confirmed that I had nothing. I would have been a lot less annoyed with them if I had received an email and missed or ignored it. For whatever reason, the notifications never made it to me.
Probably spam filter? I remember consciously ignoring them for over a year until I finally gave in and converted.
I did check that at the time as well. Nothing was there.
A search in Gmail (which that used) finds stuff on spam. Also Gmail won’t put a Microsoft company’s mail in spam
Also Gmail won’t put a Microsoft company’s mail in spam
I highly doubt that’s true. I have gmail, and it puts official stuff in spam all the time.
Official stuff, sure, but not system generated email from giant companies like Microsoft
You could put in a support ticket explaining your situation. It would probably get resolved as this was an honest mistake.
I did. Unfortunately the chain ended with repeated canned responses to me that the grace period had ended and the only way I could get access again was to repurchase the game.
No, MS doesn’t care. Had to rebuy for my daughter.
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I believe that you didn’t receive any notices, but I think that’s an exception rather than the rule, there was probably something wrong going off on their side. I personally received several emails, they were getting kinda annoying, to be honest.
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.
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.
Also lots of other places (YouTube as an example) allow you to migrate your account indefinitely, over a decade after they were purchased.
Keeping up a server that allows migration has negligable costs for a product the size of minecraft. There is no excuse…
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Haven’t they been warning about this for like a year?
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What was the original license that people paid for? Is there anything in there that would protect them?
Clearly not , which only makes the point. Consumer protection for digital products is weak and needs reform.
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At least three, as far as I can tell. Probably more.
Yeah I had been getting those emails for a long ass time
I looked through my email, they first asked me in February 2022.
I only saw the warning the first time it was announced, which I transfered over back then. But then I never heard of it again, so if someone happened to have been busy and missed it the first time it made headlines I could see how they could be caught off guard with how I completely forgot about it until it made headlines for it being discontinued.
For people that didn’t transfer right away, like me, I got so many emails telling me to transfer the account. So people that didn’t transfer right away, stil got plenty of notice
So many Microsoft bootlickers in this thread.
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Is it that expensive to just keep a database of codes that can be redeemed for people who haven’t migrated yet? Like humble bundle keeping track of what you buy? Or even lemmy with comments linked to users?
A proper corporate database with the security it needs and the amount of people accessing it (remember how many people bought Minecraft) yes it would be expensive to have multiple databases doing the same thing.
No it wouldn’t, millions of people bought it but the vast majority migrated, even if there were still millions of people to migrate this wouldn’t get hit very hard because people would not migrate all in one go, so any simple master+slave database system would work, even an SQLite is capable of handling this volume. The total cost of this would be less than $100 per year if they wanted to outsource everything (which is essentially nothing for Microsoft), if they used any of their existing servers for it the coat would be a lot less possibly very close to 0.
Its Microsoft - they offer multiple DBaaS themselves.
But it costs a lot more than $100 in man hours to properly propose, approve, and implement any production system.
Yes, but it also costs as much to sunset a system, so they spend that money regardless.
If people haven’t transferred would they be accessing it? Not much incentive for people who already transfered to go back to just claim a code, and people who haven’t yet probably aren’t going to be logging in all the time.
They could handle it through support. Remove the automated process and do an email verification check and support could manually migrate the license.
I totally understand Microsoft’s desire to remove obsolete services like account transitions, but they should still have a mechanism for resurrecting old accounts if you can prove you are the original account holder.
They need more than email verification. Some privacy minded people signed up with throwaway email, but probably have other proof of ownership
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So, how does it taste?
🥾👅
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Linux is not a corporation, there is no boot to lick.
What a wild take. I’m genuinely baffled that someone thought that “Linux bootlickers” was a remotely salient thing to say.
These people had years to migrate their accounts, were told to migrate their accounts, and warned to migrate their accounts because the old mojang auth system is insecure and needs to be sunsetted, and when it does, they will lose access.
They sat there and played the “no, I won’t move” game, and now they’re upset because the thing they were told for years would happen happened.
And they would have had to have no social interaction with any minecraft player on any online platform and in real life in all those years, as well as ignore every email from mojang, never look at the minecraft website, and so on, to not be notified.
I basically agree with all of that, but it was totally possible to upgrade the auth system and keep it separate from Microsoft. Obviously Microsoft wouldn’t do that, but that’s kind of the point, isn’t it?
I don’t think any company would want to keep a separate auth system if they can help it, though. No one wants to spend resources maintaining redundant account systems and interfaces between them when they have the option to consolidate.
But I suppose I just don’t see why there had to be a deadline at all. They know the email addresses associated to the original accounts, so there should just be a database they can reference to check if that email address has an unmigrated account and prompt to convert when next they log in. This is beyond “I don’t want to maintain two account systems,” it’s “Let’s just throw away this old table of email addresses so we can make more room on our servers for telemetry data.”
I bought Minecraft when it was first purchaseable. Only converted my account last month as my new-school-entrant kid has asked what it is.
And honestly, I wish I didn’t. The MS launcher is an absolute shit show in usability for adults, let alone kids. Next time it forces me to log back in I’m just pirating it.
I bought two copies, I’ll fucking run them how I please.
I use the Modrinth App because it’s the place where cool people get minecraft mods now, and as a Minecraft launcher it’s a lot better - it uses an auth token system so you only sign in once with Microsoft’s website to connect the app to the login.
I’m amazed at how much better the official launcher is on Linux than on windows.
Windows:
- complains if your logged in account doesn’t match your game account
- Requires you to log out of one account to log into another in a not very clear or user friendly way
Linux
- No logged in account to complain about
- Lists all your accounts and lets you swap by clicking on the one you want in the accounts list
I bought the game at the of alpha with an email I lost access to at some point. I remember my Password and Username but forgot the email address I used. I think it also wasn’t even possible to change the email address in the Mojang Account back then. So I definitely didn’t sit around and ignored the migration, I even tried contacting the support.
Anyways what sucks is that I remembered my email address this winter, but already after the cut off point. Would have been nice to get to keep that very old account. But as others have mentioned, the experience is probably better with a pirated version anyway.
I also get the feeling that Linux Fans would jump on the opportunity as well.
still sucks but I mean they did warn about this for propably over 2 years
i feel like it was longer. its been more than that since I last played minecraft and I definitely remember getting the warning multiple times via email I feel like it even got delayed based on how long ago it feels.
yeah now that I think about it it might be over 3 years :D proåably even more
Yeah seriously…. I received so fucking many emails over the last n years about it. I hadn’t touched mc in many years, pre MS acquisition and I was made well aware of what was happening.
There are comments in this thread talking about MS had taken purchases away, like come on now.
More like 5 years, my account was migrated in 2019 (found the email looking for something else) and I remember not doing it right away, but because I had already received multiple emails from them warning me about it.
damn time flies :D
Okay, but breach of contract isn’t okay just because you announced you were going to do it well in advance. It just makes their culpability easier to prove because they announced their unlawful intentions extremely clearly.
I haven’t read into this but do you have actual proof that it was unlawful in any way? this is no different from game servers and websites shutting down and it happens all the time
Well then read into it if you want to make pronouncements about it. It is the revocation of a license that was sold in perpetuity. That is quite different to no longer providing a service in general. It is selectively denying service to a certain group without legal cause. There were no terms in the contract with Mojang that they could unilaterally remove the license if you didn’t do a specific digital dance on their terms. If it is unlawful, the lawsuit will determine that.
And my point is that if it is indeed unlawful, then telling people years in advance makes no difference, especially if, in some cases mentioned in this very thread, people tried to transfer and couldn’t and were given no way to fix it.
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?
Couldn’t they have closed the migration but sent out redemption codes to people’s emails for those who hadn’t migrated?
The migration has been going on for multiple years (I believe more than 5). Anyone who wanted to keep their account would’ve done so.
So why not send a code to them before closing it for good so they have an option to redeem versus none at all.
They got sent a link before closing for good. That was their option to redeem. If they didn’t in all that time, it’s probably because they don’t want to keep their account.
Keeping legacy systems costs money, they have no reason to keep those codes valid for 30 years just in case someone decided they wanted to keep their account after 30 years.
They gave users more than enough time to migrate. 3 years is a lot of time. In most Democratic countries elections come up every 4 years, it’s almost a full election cycle.
If they didn’t in all that time, it’s probably because they don’t want to keep their account.
That’s an assumption that leads to corporate bullshit like this.
They got sent a link before closing for good. That was their option to redeem. If they didn’t in all that time, it’s probably because they don’t want to keep their account.
Or… and maybe we think about this for a second. I wanted to buy a game. Not an account to Microsoft. Migrating to another service wasn’t in the terms I agreed to… especially to Microsoft.
Who said 30 years. It’s just a code sent to email with expiration. And when digital codes are sold what is this supposed legacy system. Did Microsoft suddenly stop selling digital codes?
I thought you meant they send a code that never expires so you can recover your old account. What you are proposing is give everyone who didn’t migrate a code to redeem Minecraft?
That is even less viable. That’s basically giving everyone that didn’t migrate a full refund (+ extra because now Minecraft is cheaper so you can sell it for more). Which would also lead to a potential customer lost because they bought the “second hand” key.
Why would Microsoft do that. They’d be better off just paypaling every non-migrated account 20€.
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.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.
But the alternative is just closing it and now there being no option at all.
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.
The richest company on the planet is Walmart.
I think that depends on your metric.
Market cap, revenue, profit, assets? They will all have a different leaderboard.
False. It’s Microsoft.
- Microsoft has the highest Market Cap
- Walmart has the highest Revenue
- Saudi Aramco has the highest Profit
“Richest” isn’t really a term you can compare without further clarification.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_revenue
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by_market_capitalization
Responsible for what? Getting something I paid for stolen?
One Reddit thread warrants a whole article? Is this what journalism is today?
Always has been.
I’m not sure I understand. As recently as a few years ago, it was common to find high quality long-form articles on just about any subject linked from your favorite subreddits/tweeters/etc. Now, it seems like the majority of “news” articles I come across are vapid, two paragraph, summaries of a Reddit post or Twitter thread, that don’t anything substantive of their own. I mean, yeah you could find a lot of that 5 years ago too, but now it’s hard to find anything else. It wasn’t that long ago that we had newspapers and magazines, both online and offline, that were actually known for hard-hitting, in-depth journalism. Then they all got sold to companies like Meredith and Conde Nast and have become nothing but thinly veiled advertising. I guess my point is that it hasn’t always been that way, and it doesn’t have to be that way now.
There were always low-effort articles where some journalist would rip off another paper without really looking into sources, and sometimes that original article would just be citing a forum post or something. A couple games of telephone later, and you get outlandish claims not backed up by anything at all, and it all happens when journalists rewrite things in their own words.
What seems to have happened is that those low-effort articles have exploded in number and have gotten better at SEO, to the point where the higher quality content gets buried by SEO spam. It certainly doesn’t help when sites like Reddit give it more credibility by users linking to them, and it’s easier than ever to pay someone (or configure AI) to generate these articles en-masse.
Those high quality sources still remain, they just don’t show up in searches. Go ahead and read Reuters, New York Times, The Economist, etc. They mostly still exist, and they’re still high quality. But their headlines aren’t as evocative, so they don’t get passed around social media (where people rarely read past the headline anyway) as much.
In the past, we called low-effort, sketchy sources “tabloids,” now we just call them “news” and reserve the term “tabloid” for the crazier stuff that makes it to store checkout lines.
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.+1 for Minetest
I run a server on our local network that kiddos love
It was fairly simple to setup including which game type and mods
Can you use minecraft mods with any of these clones?
If not it’s kind of a deal breaker.
Highly unlikely. Minecraft has a lot of quirky code, and the mods would have been built around that code.
For all intents and purposes, the clones are a different game entirely, and unless the mod author specifically goes out of their way to make their mod compatible with the clones, or a different version for it, they won’t work.
Nope, you can just use these mods for the time being.
On the flip side, it’s orders of magnitude easier to write a Minetest mod, and keep it updated with later versions and compatible with other mods.
I see Minetest is available for android. Can you run Mineclonia on a phone?
Indeed you can. Personally I find the phone interface a bit too clunky, but if your phone’s hardware is up for it, it does run, and all platforms that support Minetest are compatible with each other.
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.
It wasn’t the big, it was Microsoft. They forced the transition and refused to solve the issue you faced.
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.
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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.
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Minecraft migration service has reached end of life. Redeem Minecraft code 1234-ABCD by June 30, 2024 through Microsoft.
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Illegal activity detected
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I pointing to your previous claims of illegal activity and making fun of how you’d probably see the sending of a code as illegal.
As much as I think it’s a shitty move, they warned about it for long enough, and they can’t be expected to maintain a deprecated login system indefinitely.
I don’t know if I migrated my account though, but since I only play on self hosted servers I don’t care, worst case scenario I’ll crack it to not need a login and be done with it.
What do you mean, they warned about it long enough? I bought it, I played it as a kid. Now I want to share it with my kids and it turns out Microsoft said on some website somewhere, and maybe in a few emails to a nonexistent aol address, that they want me to update my account, and since I didn’t do that I have to buy it a second time? I learned today that they’ve “attempted to contact me”. I never agreed to a EULA that said I had a limited amount of time for anything. Nor did anyone else who purchased before 2011.
I bought it before 2011, technically if you lost access to the email you might have lost access to that account years ago without knowing. Even if Microsoft was doing what I think they should, i.e. keep a database of emails and allow people to migrate their account forever, you would still not be able to recover it. Wanting to get an account back from an email you lost access to is like expecting steam to give you all of the keys on your account to add to another if you forgot your password and can’t prove it is you.
Forgot about replying but I’m begging y’all to stop coming up with reasons this isn’t an issue, I have proof of purchase on an old hard drive and my username and password worked til the day I stopped playing. Very quickly googled and support used to help people migrate accounts with no email access, so yes authenticating a login on the server was plenty for them, just not anymore. Comparison doesn’t work
If you lost access to the email and forgot the password you can’t demonstrate to the support person that you are who you say you are. If support people changed your password under those conditions then the system could be abused to reset random people’s passwords. Also you don’t know if your username/password still worked, if those credentials were leaked anyone could have changed your password, and Minecraft old auth system leaked a few username/passwords, I remember having a list of them that I used to introduce people to the game (obviously I never changed anyone’s password, but there are plenty of douchebags out there)
BTW I never said this isn’t an issue, IMO they should keep a DB and allow the migration indefinitely, so it is shitty of them to put a time limit on it. But if you lost access to the email for that account I can understand them not allowing the migration, part of activating an account is usually validating the email address, so whoever owns your email address now gets to own that account.
???
and forgot the password
Made-up scenario.
So take MS to small claims court. Get an order for them to restore your account and user name per the licence you presumably still have a copy of
While I agree it’s awful, there were numerous news articles since Microsoft bought Mojang about it. I haven’t played Minecraft since I was a kid (my kids use my account) and I was aware of it long before it was required. Basically, they supported both for a few years, then only supported Microsoft logins but kept the Mojang login to convert accounts for a few years, and now they’re disabling the Mojang login entirely.
They’ve handled this about as well as I could hope for. They bought Mojang ~10 years ago, and I remember converting my account like 3-4 years ago after putting it off for a year or so.
So 10 years from aquisition to disabling the old login servers is quite generous imo. I’ve been using the same Minecraft license since I bought it ~15 years ago (2009/2010, whenever it was in open beta). That’s a pretty good run. That’s pretty good for a constantly upgdating game.
It sucks that some people lost their accounts, but aside from a handful like you, I’m guessing most of those aren’t interested in ever playing again, so the impact is low. Hopefully their support can do something for you.
Nice to hear someone’s thoughts, but this is actually covered by US case law regarding EULA/TOS consent, and in places like Australia with even better protections regarding video games it is even more obviously not something Microsoft is allowed to do. Something else you may be unaware of is that their support page specifically says they won’t assist with account migrations. It doesn’t matter, I paid for a product and now I have full use of it again—with the caveat that I can’t use official servers, because I guess what I should actually do is devote daily attention to whether or not a company is trying to take back something I paid for.
Actually, something I paid someone else for.
Their support will do nothing. My oldest daughter tried to play on her account after not playing on it for probably five years. She found out that she missed the conversion and we had to buy it again for her. Really sucks that they can just decide to do things like this. Should have unlimited time to convert- not log in and play on the old system but they could have kept a list of accounts at trivial cost.
Yeah, it really does suck. But I’m guessing the majority are unaffected, so it’s way better than other transitions. I’ve had the same account since buying way back in 2009/2010, that’s a pretty good run imo.
Sorry about your daughter’s account.
Just nix the login servers and the problem is solved. Go back to that whole era of “When you buy it, it’s yours forever” that we seem to have lost. Anti piracy needs to get more creative than just robbing paying customers of their product.
don’t need any future updates, the game was fine when I bought it. I didn’t buy the game from Microsoft, so I don’t see why they are trying to glean information off a purchase I made 13 years ago.
Not to Pirate, (i own the Java version since 2015~)but is there a way to have a minecraft executable that runs localy and never connects to microsoft/internet? I know minetest exists, have made a world there a while ago, but its ever so slightly diffrent
The official Minecraft server .jars (and all the modded ones) can be configured to not check in with Microsoft. The game itself can be launched in offline mode too. Might be easier to get it set up with a 3rd party launcher instead of the official one.
I paid for Minecraft more times than any other game. If there’s a free way to play it, I do feel entitled to that.
I have gotten more free accounts on Minecraft than any other game. I bought it twice on Java (not counting copies I bought for family) and once on bedrock, so when they moved accounts to Microsoft and gave every Java account a bedrock account and every bedrock account a Java account, so I now have three on each version. A second (or third) account is useful for rescuing your main account in some circumstances
UltimMC lets you play without an account
