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Minecraft 1.19 was a controversial update due to Mojang’s broken promises surrounding fireflies and birch forests. However, the added content, which includes mangrove swamps, mud, ancient cities, the warden, and the allay, is generally held in decent regard by the community.
However, as slightly controversial as 1.19 was, its sequel update, 1.19.1 really pushed the community to its limits in terms of good controversy and backlash. This is due to one change: bringing harsh chat reporting to the Java edition of Minecraft.
Minecraft 1.19.1’s most controversial change - the chat moderation
The main crux of the change is bringing over the chat reporting features that Minecraft Bedrock Edition has had since its inception to Minecraft Java Edition and overhauling the system to make it more robust and streamlined.
If a player is in any world, from large-scale servers down to local LAN worlds with more than one person, they can open up the social interaction menu. This menu will display all online players, with those who have sent messages closer to the top of the menu.
There will be two icons next to each individual’s name. A chat bubble icon will mute the player, causing the muting player to no longer see the muted player’s messages in the chat. The second option is a caution sign, which is the report button.
Players will be taken to the reporting window when clicking this button. From here, players can select up to four chat messages to report, the category the report falls under, and then describe what happened that is causing the report to be made under a thousand characters.
Chat messages before and after the currently selected messages will also be sent for additional context. The categories for reporting that players can use include: hate speech, terrorism, child se*ual exploitation, imminent harm, non-consensual adult imagery, harassment, defamation/impersonation/false information, and drugs and alcohol.
However, if a player has not sent any in-game messages, they cannot be reported as there are no Minecraft messages to select.
What the change does
Once a player report has been generated, it is sent off to a supposed human moderation team over at Mojang. The community has some serious doubts that it is not being automated, but this will be covered later.
If the moderation team deems that the offense was severe and did breach Minecraft’s Terms of Service, the reported player will be banned. There are numerous different bans of different lengths for different severities of breaking ToS.
The shortest ban length is a three-day ban, though there are also seven days, 14 days, 30 days, and finally, a permanent ban. These bans will only apply to multiplayer, at least for now, meaning that players that have been banned will be unable to play any multiplayer, including LAN worlds, for the duration of the ban.
Mojang has claimed that the number of reports against a Minecraft player is not a contributing factor to whether or not a player is banned, but some community testing and anecdotal evidence suggest otherwise.
The controversy behind it and community backlash
As keen-eyed readers might have already picked up, the first major issue with the chat reporting system that the community has pointed out is that the ban applies to multiplayer as a whole rather than any specific servers or IP addresses.
That means a player could be banned for something said on a server and unable to play any multiplayer, even privately hosted servers.
That segues nicely into the biggest issue the Java community has with this reporting system. It is a total multiplayer ban, keeping players from playing on servers not hosted by, paid for by, or run by Mojang.
These are private servers with private moderation teams that are either spending money to have the server hosted or are using their hardware to host the server, and Mojang has decided that they will be the final say and arbiter of what can and can’t be said in-game, with no regard to any potential rules for specific servers.
The community has been quick and loud to point out that it is completely unacceptable for Mojang to police things outside of any servers they are hosting, as it is not their hardware or their money being used to keep the server operational.
It would seem that, unfortunately, Mojang has made it very clear that they will not be backing down from this new moderation.
