Vidya Gaem News: Notch stomps on P2W. Server owners everywhere inexplicably angered.

Mojang has stated recently that there will be a new addition to the EULA of the game Minecraft, stating that no one may make money off of the game.

This means that if you run a server, you are no longer allowed to sell items, statuses, mods or other related things in exchange for donations to keep the server up. You can still accept donations for running a server, but in-game items cannot be sold.

Most would consider this a good thing, because now servers will be less P2W. But, some server owners disagree.

A forum post on the Minecraft Curse forums where people state things like, "this will kill the community!" and "no one will ever play Minecraft after this". Despite this backlash from server owners, Mojang has remained adamant and will not be changing the EULA again.

Though there is no more incentive to donate to keep servers running, many remain optimistic that players will simply donate to continue enjoying playing on the server.

Thank you for joining us with this week's addition of "Vidya Gaem News", join us next week for our special E3 Recap episode, where we'll be covering all the announcements and news behind the event.

(Yes, I'm actually making this a thing. Unless I'm lazy)

I think it's a fine line.

Disabling things and making it so you can only buy them? Definitely dirty. Like some servers disable the crafting of diamond swords and you have to buy them with real money. Very dirty.

But what if I want to pay a server a few bucks to get a few thousand cobblestone? Why not? It speeds up the game and if it's worth it to me, then great. If not, I don't buy it or go to another server.

People have a choice. They don't have to play on those servers.

So I half agree with Notch's ruling, half disagree with it. Removing items and requiring people to pay? Big no no. Allowing people to speed up the game? Doable.

Personally? If it were a primarily PVP server, I wouldn't join a pay to win. But if it was mostly a community/fun/creative server? Pay to speed up is doable.

Running servers is expensive. We're probably gonna see minecraft server rental costs go up because of this.

This is a good point, although something like the exchange bukkit plugin works well for speeding up the construction process.
Especially if it's a well balanced plugin, one that'll exchange a diamond for 400 or so cobble or something.

Speaking as someone who mostly plays SSP/CSP, I don't have much experience with multiplayer stuff, and as such when I want a thousand cobble I usually strip mine the entire underground of a continent while listening to podcasts/music, so I can't really say for sure if that would be a good exchange.

But beyond that, the EULA now states that you can't make money "without permission", so this was probably an "intellectual property" thing first and a "stop P2W" thing second, maybe permission will be given to servers who want to sell things for speedup purposes, we'll see.

And now it's starting to sound like a d*** measuring contest. Mojang is upset that other people are making money and want to be the only ones making money. At leas that's what it sounds like.

If Mojang wants to make money off of servers, then rent out servers themselves. Have public servers and renting server options.

Like I said, it's an intellectual property thing.
It's illegal to make money off of someone else's IP without their consent, and the fact that they were selling things that were already in the game kind of makes it worse. That's EA level micro transaction.

Again if you want to sell someone the stuff to make building go faster that's fine but selling someone a diamond pickaxe with unbreaking X and silk touch X is just silly.
Especially for the kind of insane prices some of these servers ask for things like that, I've seen SMP servers selling diamond armour sets with impossible achievements for something like $150 per set.

Been somewhat following this whole bit and this is what Mojang/etc is pissed about, server admins locking down included content unless you pay up.
Last I'd heard, anything custom(third party skins/models/items/etc) is fair game

right, because a modded file isn't their IP. Its like charging for dlc, in a game that is theirs, but the DLC is designed by you. I think that holds water.

Well this whole pay to win thing is hardly anything new. I remember playing Counter Strike 10 years ago on servers that give mod powers to donors and so on.