New Minecraft Moderation System Makes Players Angry

The recent update of Minecraft, along with its new moderation policy, turned out to be more than controversial. According to it, moderating features by Mojang now also cover private servers, regardless of their own rules. This effectively means the end of self-moderation, as reports by users will be effectively sent to Mojang instead of local admins.

Though, in theory, it seems reasonable to give everyone the ability to report hate speech, abuse, or threats, in practice, it’s not always like this. For example, somebody’s words not meant as hate speech may be interpreted by some as such. And what’s then? Then the user can be banned globally. That is, on all the servers.

The publisher says it will try to minimize the collateral damage of such an innovation. Mojang will employ a team of human moderators rather than AI, who will handle reports from servers. There will also be no constant moderation of chats, they say; only reports will cause them to interfere. Still, it wasn’t enough to smoothen down the effect of both this decision and the comment of one of the developers who said that Mojang would not let users’ opinions influence the studio’s decisions.

The player community is outraged. Private servers have always been considered the last harbor of freedom; now, they attract more attention from Mojang and (thus) Microsoft, no matter how they try to soften the impact. Besides that, many players just don’t believe there won’t be constant monitoring. This causes raged reactions on social media.

The update in question is 1.19.1. And the community has already replied with its own software solutions – like a patch named No Chat Reports, which does exactly what it says on the tin. It may also lead to the growing popularity of older versions of Minecraft or pirated modifications. What do you think of automatic reports? And should publishers like Mojang respect the community’s voice? Let us know your opinion in the comments!