ESA bafflingly declares private Minecraft servers 'illegal'
www.pcgamer.com
Catch me on the corner selling server.jar out of a long trenchcoat.

People don’t even want you to play a video game in private now.

"Gibbons cut in: “They’re illegal. They are not in any way affiliated with Microsoft. Microsoft, for Minecraft, has gotten a lot of criticism because of those community servers not employing the same safety standards that Microsoft does on their Minecraft servers.”

  • PlzGibHugs@piefed.caEnglish
    6·
    2 days ago

    Additionally, there are “offline servers” that use mods to patch out all communication with Microsoft/Mojang/Minecraft systems, and various other pieces of code that attempt to enforce only paid players joining a server, ultimately allowing people to connect without having actually purchased the game.

    Not sure if this is still the case, but at least a few years ago, it didn’t even require any mods. It was just a boolean toggle in the standard config file.

    • ∃∀λ@programming.dev
      3·
      1 day ago

      https://minecraft.wiki/w/Server.properties

      The online-mode key controls whether players without a Minecraft account (i.e. paid for the game) can join. It looks like enforce-secure-profile has something to do with chat messages getting sent to Microsoft. The history section doesn’t mention either of these ever getting removed.

      online-mode will become important when the devs decide Minecraft has reached end of life and shut down the authentication servers. Players who have a copy of the game client will still be able to play together by connecting to a server with online-mode=false. online-mode=true serves the purpose of limiting players to those who coughed up money for an account, helping to protect the server from ne’er-do-wells.