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Minecraft players outraged as Microsoft deletes accounts that weren't transitioned
(www.tomshardware.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2024
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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
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
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.
???
Made-up scenario.
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.