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Minecraft Now: June
As June came to a sweltering close yesterday some of us took refuge indoors where we found another of Minecraft’s sneak peeks into the minds of its development team. During Minecraft Now: June- the official dev showcase and interview livestream presented by Mojang and Microsoft, we got a recap of the Mangroves DLC, an interview all about the Warden and its mysteries and possibly what’s to come, and the hype train was chugging along for the new SpongeBob DLC. YES! That’s right you read that correct; we’re getting a SpongeBob DLC for all of you late 90s early 2000s kids like myself. I found the most interesting thing in the livestream to be the Warden discussions. Apparently the Warden has had 175 revisions to date; the devs discuss all of their revision processes and the Warden’s behavior and how/why it does the things it does in quite a bit of detail. If you’d like to check out the VOD of the whole livestream and any previous Minecraft Now events you can find them all archived in this playlist from the Minecraft YouTube channel!
Last Time On Secrets Of Minecraft
On the latest episode of Secrets of Minecraft we were shown some interesting concept art of urns and what looked to be a burial site used by the ancient builders. A very passionate and creative Twitter user @BuildsZenith aka Turfnerf added these things into Minecraft. I’m going to go with one of the commenters though and hypothesize that Squidward from the SpongeBob DLC is coming to Minecraft 2.0.
Let’s Talk About Chat Reports… Again…
With the recent backlash from 1.19.1’s Pre-Release 1 debut, chat moderation has been on the minds of almost every server administrator, and it appears Mojang as well. Mojang has pulled the planned launch of 1.19.1 to address certain “features” primarily chat reporting. Bug fixes and updates to the chat systems have also been made and pushed as 1.19.1-Pre-Release 2: These updates include displaying “secure” and “not secure” chat markers for all messages that show when a server may be tampering with or disabling chat authentication for players to bypass the reports system. The chat variables used for posting system messages and instanced client-side messaging have also been changed- this unfortunately will break almost every plugin that uses any sort of chat-supported feature. It’s not overly complex to fix, but the communities and server administrators will need to wait on the developers of their preferred plugins to make these variable changes. The truly annoying part about this update to the chat system is that it is not possible to remove the always visible warnings that will now be displayed to all users. Mojang is not backing down from their global reporting and moderation plans but they did clarify that users will not be banned for swearing or inappropriate language unless it involves hate speech, bigotry, insights real-world violence or threats, or breaks EULA. Supposedly every reported message will be treated with context and consideration by a Human, but seeing how Microsoft has had many issues with Xbox Live moderation in the past- I’m still not optimistic about this. Server owners and administrators will still not be told if players were temporarily or permanently banned from Minecraft by the global moderation team, so expect some very angry users if this does happen. My personal recommendation would be to explicitly put in your server’s rules that any violations of the EULA will result in a temporary or permanent ban by either your staff of Mojang’s moderation teams and that if such a ban does occur from Mojang, it cannot be appealed by your staff and must be done through the appeals form from the Minecraft website. I fear this will lead to a significant increase in chargebacks and bad behavior from those banned by the global moderation team- as they have nothing to lose now and are frustrated with their circumstances.
Finally, A Farewell To Technoblade…
Technoblade, Alex is his real name, was an inspirational person. He struggled for a very long time with his illness and he always, always, thought of his fans, his friends- the reason he got up in the morning was for you. For Alex, being Technoblade wasn’t just a cool monicor that made him famous, it was an honor and a privilege to make content that everyone enjoyed every single day. He loved Minecraft, and he loved making people smile; he loved his family, and he loved his fans. He cared about the people that looked to him for comfort and entertainment so much that the last thing he did in life was to script a video, his goodbye video. Technoblade didn’t want to leave everyone wondering what happened to him; this was something that weighed on him for the last several months. Eight hours after finishing the script for the video he passed on. I would like to encourage everyone that hasn’t seen it already to take a moment and reflect on his last words. Technoblade wasn’t just some guy who made Minecraft videos, he was a paragon of love, and compassion; as we move and the days go by, as his death slowly begins to fade away in our minds we should hold on and learn from the values that he embodied and treat others with the love and respect that he put into this world.
“So long nerds”- Technoblade Jun 30, 2022
Written By: TheBlindGamer#6786
Friday, July 1, 2022