by belval on 9/30/21, 5:14 PM
Eh Minecraft is a video game, I just don't see the privacy risk with "typical" Windows-level telemetry happening there.
At some point we have to accept that this data actually helps them fix real issues too, they're not monetizing their players directly with it.
by kortex on 9/30/21, 5:06 PM
> In this release, we are
re-introducing diagnostic tracking, which was part of Minecraft: Java Edition until 2018.
So it was there, they took it out, now it's back.
by vkoskiv on 9/30/21, 5:36 PM
The phrase "...to better understand our [users] and to improve their experience..."
always rings alarm bells in my head. It's corporate lingo for "We want to increase profits by selling your private data for as long as we can get away with it."
by moogly on 9/30/21, 7:17 PM
Not related to telemetry, but I checked out Minecraft about less than a year ago for the first time in about 10 years (I had to dig out my old account details from an ancient email and migrate my account through some strange form) and spent a week playing it until I had enough, and I was shocked, absolutely shocked at how little has been added to the game during those 10 years.
Sure, the fact that they have two divergent, separate games and are completely unable to move over to the C++ codebase and sunset the Java version due to the lack of modding (I remember the modding community screaming about needing a proper modding API back in the olden days, and Mojang hiring some of the Bukkit team back in 2012 to develop it, and it never came to fruition, still to this day), makes them having to do twice the work implementing stuff, but that's at least parallelizable work. I doubt the same people work on both codebases?
I feel I need to sit down with someone who's working at Mojang and ask wtf is going on over there because it could be fascinating.
by zeta0134 on 9/30/21, 5:41 PM
Maybe they'll notice that when I launch the game on Linux, I get about 10-20 FPS boost over Windows on identical hardware. I've always wondered about that; in theory shouldn't it be the reverse?
by altcognito on 9/30/21, 6:35 PM
Specifically they need to telemetry on the biggest change they made: how poorly does the new world generation and chunk loading work.
This was a huge change and it is honestly pretty slow even on beefy boxes.
by supperburg on 9/30/21, 5:37 PM
I really want to see a Minecraft that’s written in a fast language and also takes advantage of the huge amounts of storage and memory that we have now. The main problem with Minecraft is that you can see the end of the blocks even on high settings. Would also be cool to see slightly smaller blocks
by sneak on 9/30/21, 5:20 PM
Are there any products whatsoever that come out of Microsoft that don't contain spyware?
by josephcsible on 9/30/21, 5:00 PM
I'm not sure if there's an option to turn this off, but even if there isn't, since it's Java Edition, a mod could easily be created to turn it off anyway.
by crorella on 9/30/21, 5:59 PM
Telemetry per se is not a bad thing when you make it with privacy at the center of it. If you offer users the chance to opt-in/opt-out of logging and then
REALLY respect that decision by first) not generating data when the user does not want to and second) not using the data for purposes the user does not sign up for (in downstream, analytics mostly)
then telemetry can actually be beneficial to keep improving your product and features.
by oauea on 9/30/21, 6:09 PM
Interesting design choice to have the website not be scrollable while showing content outside the fold.
edit: Apparently this happens when running the "I don't care about cookies" browser extension, which is necessary to make the web somewhat usable after the EU's ridiculous ruling.
by yuuta on 9/30/21, 6:48 PM
The key problem is that Mojang does not allow users to disable it.
by joshghent on 9/30/21, 5:07 PM
Weird that a Microsoft product would get hard to disable telemetry…
All jokes aside though, this doesn’t seem too bad and I can put myself in their shoes to understand why they want this data. It would be difficult to monotone this information (asides maybe a nice shiny new Surface machine).
by zapzupnz on 9/30/21, 8:19 PM
I'm surprised it hadn't already, to be honest.
by swalls on 9/30/21, 7:15 PM
Even if they're not doing anything nefarious with that data, I'm against telemetry other than crash reports because data driven design makes for boring art.
by Shadonototra on 9/30/21, 5:40 PM
microsoft really turns everything it touches into a giant poop
by h54545nb on 9/30/21, 5:33 PM
Well I was going to re-install and check out new updates but I guess not anymore. I don't care how helpful it is, if there is no details on the exact specification of what data is shared and no way to disable it, I won't support the product.
by rozab on 9/30/21, 5:11 PM
If the reasons they give for this were honest, you'd think their time would be better spent building the kind of extremely basic integration tests that would detect if, say, their world generation broke making the game unwinnable.
https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MC-236618
Inflammatory zingers aside, I don't mind telemetry in a product like this and I'm sure I'd want it if I were working on it. But I'd want automated tests first. Factorio's approach seems enlightened, but very rare in the industry.