The Failures of the Minecraft Chat Reporting System…

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my main issue with this is that with most other games, the servers are hosted by the parent company, and therefore they have the right to regulate all the chat messages and whatever else on it. All Minecraft servers are hosted (or at least paid for) by members of the community and are not run by mojang. So it doesn't make any sense for mojang to have control over a server that isn't theirs to control. it should be up to the server owners what do with chat messages (and also their responsibility to deal with bad actors in those servers)

"It's for the kids!"
Online interactions are not rated by the ESRB. Parents should be monitoring their kids, not mojang.

Mojang: is incapable of investigating servers that break the eula
Also mojang: is incapable of moderating their in game store
Also mojang: "we'll personally investigate every single report and won't make false calls, believe us"

The part that angers me the most is the fact that for weeks they had the utter gall to say "we value your feedback" while subsequently ignoring the overwhelming flood of negative feedback going as far in some cases as to openly mock people about their negativity and down-voting the chat reporting posts 'into oblivion'. If they were at least honest about their intentions it would be a slightly different story. Instead we were lied to about any sort of 'value' they see in the community and near the end told to suck it up.

Then when the exploits came out they ran damage control on twitter saying they fixed all the issues. Given the state of the G named mod set by Gild and Ada, there is clearly a lot left to be desired. But we're supposed to just ignore that I guess. The cherry on top. leaks then came out showing that community personalities were basically on payroll to downplay the whole ordeal. Absolutely ludicrous.

You forgot to mention why Minecraft doesn't need this kind of system. It's because Minecraft multiplayer is a decentralized network of servers. Each server has its own rules and administrators. Minecraft doesn't need a centralized moderation. Minecraft needs better moderation tools for server owners and administrators.

Reporting schlatt's bacon question for "psychological warfare" got me good.

When I was 18(over 30 now) I was let onto a server that was intended for 18+, it wasn't a hard rule, they were just weeding out anyone who might be to young for foul language and drug or political discussion, the server was very wholesome people got along great, even when they didn't like each other. The forum we ran out of, one day interjected it's unwarranted 3rd party moderation, which started a domino effect that killed our community. I never found anywhere I fit in like I did there. RIP Duncan Trussel Family Hour Minecraft server

My personal concern with it from the start is third party reports. Say you prank your friend and they jokingly insult you, however, someone else on the server sees their insult and decides to report it, despite it having no affect on them.

An example outside the game of this would be two friends bantering and a third child thinking they are bullying one another and reporting it to the teacher.

The difference between this happening outside vs in-game is that if a teacher was to act upon the report, they would speak with the friends, gathering context of the situation, recognise that this report has been a mistake (or potentially an intentional attack on someone by reporting them) and neither of the friends would be punished.

However, Mojang take the report at it's face value, the context that "person A was insulting person B", without talking to person A and person B to understand this isn't the case. Mojang are then punishing people for "harassment or bullying" because they don't have the context that this is bantering between friends (potentially following a prank), or that the third party not involved in the conversation reported them with the malicious intent to punish "person A was insulting me." despite having no actual involvement in the conversation outside witnessing it.

Make no mistake, this update was not controversial. It was UNIVERSALLY HATED

I feel like if a server is in Whitelist mode, the chat reporting should be automatically disabled. Whitelisting should already take people's behavior into account, or at the very least, the server admins have accepted the responsibility themselves.

This is a slap in the face to all servers with moderators and the community in general. Especially since it’s so horribly insecure. Literally all they had to do was implement this system only on official Mojang sanctioned servers/realms, etc

The worst part is that any kind of outcry they get from adding this feature will be ignored until it stops being talked about. This same problem has happened before. Resistance stops because it's not doing anything, not because we're suddenly ok with it or have "gotten used to change".

"I'm going to burn down your house!"
What they meant: The house the player built in Minecraft.
How Mojang can interpret this: A real life terrorism threat.
I think we all see the problem.

It's about time. This system has so many flaws that have been ignored time and time again. You are a hero to the community.

The reason why they don't add a reason you are banned is so you can't dispute it in court. It's still scummy and they should definitely be held accountable for it.

as a linux user i miss the days of notch talking about open sourcing minecraft. a vid on the quasi-openess of the minecraft code which allowed modding to flourish would be interesting

I really think what mojang is attempting to do is a "one size fits all" and didn't think into the grey areas. They're really only seeing in black and white, and it's very invasive.

They simply NEED to tell people when they ban them WHY they banned them. You paid for the product you need to be told how you broke the TOS. This is a recurring problem in ALL live services. There needs to be more legislation demanding companies give this information to the affected parties.

Even if this system was entirely safe from any exploit ever, it’d still be unforgivable to be subjected to it. What happens when mojang and a significant portion of the community disagree about whether something should be ban worthy, or when the community itself is divided in opinions over what should and shouldn’t be allowed? Inevitably, conflict happens.

There’s a reason the java multiplayer scene has been so decentralized all this time. Forcing moderation to become so is the antithesis of how the community operates. As long as this system remains as is, minecraft simply will not be in good shape.

If mojang insists on keeping this abomination and wants the community to not be up in arms, then at a bare minimum:
Servers must have an option to disable the whole thing without the use of mods,
Players must have the game inform them of whether or not a server has reports enabled before joining, and
If a player owns thier own server, they must be allowed to bypass global bans to join it.

But after how badly mojang has run things since 1.9, I’m not getting my hopes up. Hytale can’t come soon enough…