Banning the Sale of Minecraft Accounts

[Lotus]

Hey all,

Recently, MCM made a good step in the right direction by enforcing strict policies against resource leakers and those affiliated. However, in the eyes of many, it was a half-baked effort knowing that this site thrives on the Minecraft TOS violating sales of accounts (and the other range of TOS violating services this website facilitates). I wish to see the removal of accounts as a step towards making this marketplace a platform that actually cares about ethics.

Why would we want to ban the sale of accounts?

1. Legitimize the marketplace. The site hypocritically enforces Rule 5.4 by striking down those who violate product ownership rights heavily, yet turns a blind eye to the sale of Minecraft Accounts which violates Mojang’s TOS. Choose one or the other. Remove 5.4 and commit to being a black market, or equally enforce your own rules across all sections of the forum. Being inconsistent and half-assed only annoys the community even more.
   
   
2. Get rid of our most toxic and notorious members. The accounts market is saturated, comprising of crackers stealing accounts, returning ban evaders and is also the section holding the most linked scam reports often closing due to inconclusive evidence.
   
   
3. The site no longer needs to allocate resources to develop features and moderate the section. "Opportunity cost"
   
   
4. MC-Market will not die. By considering points 1 and 3, MCM can become an even better place for everyone and expand into even more markets. There are far more and far better opportunities out there.

Fun reads :

• https://www.mc-market.org/threads/81435/ (60% agreed)
• https://www.mc-market.org/threads/85005/ Announcement in the past for the removal of accounts.

The site doesn’t need to be plagued by accounts anymore. This site has a bigger future for itself by legitimizing itself into a community that leads others. Honestly, I shouldn't even need to be trying to convince everyone by explaining all the benefits of removing the section. This should not have been even allowed on this site in the first place.

 

[Joey]

Just let this happen so MC-M can finally die lol

 

[fruitymc]

You're quoting a different part of the EULA, that directly contradicts their commercial guidelines.

I was cordial enough to find the commercial guidelines and correct section you talk about. Here they are:

Extended Functionality and “Mods”
If you comply with and follow the Essential Requirements (in the Brand and Asset Usage Guidelines) and Naming Guidelines above YOU MAY distribute or make available plug-ins and other bits and pieces of extended functionality etc. that you create (together, "Mods") for free and without any charge

Yet I fail to see the part where they mention the sale of "mods"/plugins is allowed. They only mention that you are allowed to distribute these explicitly for free and without any charge. Could you please elaborate as to where in this text it is stated that the sale of "Mods"/plug-ins is permitted?

 

[500miles]

"let's fuck over the people who bought Premium" -MC-Market staff team

It's sad that the majority of the people agreeing to this post are staff members who have never even joined in on the market.


It is indeed a really clean way to kill the forum like Joey said.

 

[Violet]

So you guys are really saying that you want us to leave MC-Market and move over to the "black-hat competitors" you dislike so much?

 

[Cal]

Thanks for bringing this to my attention utaninja.

Speaking as someone with a very limited dataset. The overwhelming majority of people I know from MC-Market either came in to trade for an account, or to trade on server related goods.

By removing the ability to sell accounts, one of MC-Market's major engines for growth is completely obliterated.
But how good is the accounts at growing the site?

A discussion should revolve around a question; I believe the question we should be asking here is as follows

Is the growth delivered by the account section worth the immortal practices it brings to the site?

If this is the question we are trying to answer; then we need a measure.

An Objective Measure of the Benefits of the Account Section:
Where do users first post when they join the site? Take the first 5-10 posts, decide what sections are account related sections and which are server related, and find out how many make posts in each. Broadly comparing the people who join for mostly server related offerings vs the people who join mostly for account related offerings should offer some insight as to why they joined. Then by removing those who joined for accounts purposes from previous user growth trends and project where the site would be had those forums not been there.
Once you know how many people come because of accounts, determining the true dollar cost of removing the accounts section is but a step away.

One of MCM's unspoken truths is that the accounts section is the worst. Unfortunately, many if not most of the accounts in the accounts section were obtained via less than moral means. The section is frequented by many who go on to even shadier practices and the section takes up a disproportionate number of site resources. Surely there are innocent folks who will get caught out by the removal of the section, but that number is much smaller than many would like to believe.

I will not draw a final conclusion without the data. That said, to take a guess now, the dollar cost of removing the account section is significantly lower than many on this thread believe it to be.

 

[puzeh]

It seems many users, including yourself, have the perception that "Minecraft" solely means account sales, and nothing else.

I'm unsure why this is, considering there are so many more sections oriented to Minecraft; we can still operate as a Minecraft forum if account sales are removed.

Let's quote Verringer here from back in 2014:


The primary focus wasn't account selling, nor was it even worth mentioning it seems. To me, it was more tacked on, as admittedly, it does have a large community and following.

Every person who isn't a user of mc-market when I mention the site it always clicks in their head that they've heard of this place where mc accs are sold. It's what the site is notorious for. MC doesn't only mean accs sure, but we're not resource market or social media market lol. If you were to remove acc sells there would be little appeal for most users / new users considering to join for this reason. There's already other places to buy server builds/plugins/resources, yet this is the best place for mc accs. Removing mc sales will only help your competition

 

[user01]

This is a really fucking stupid idea. The staff member who accepts this suggestion will be the one responsible for the death of this site.

 

[Doge]

I know I originally said I wouldn’t bother writing a reply, but oh well, here I am. Had a bit of time so I thought “Why not? Just for fun.”

Recently, MCM made a good step in the right direction by enforcing strict policies against resource leakers and those affiliated.

Yes, I agree that it is good that members from our community who spend time and effort coding resources are more protected from piracy.

However, in the eyes of many, it was a half-baked effort knowing that this site thrives on the Minecraft TOS violating sales of accounts (and the other range of TOS violating services this website facilitates). I wish to see the removal of accounts as a step towards making this marketplace a platform that actually cares about ethics.

If it’s “consistency” and “ethics” you care about - why is this thread aimed at Minecraft accounts specifically and not things that violate ToS’s in general? This makes me believe that you and most of the people supporting this just want to remove Minecraft accounts. The title should be “Remove selling things that violate ToS’s” and you should’ve listed common things on this site that violate various ToS’s, Minecraft accounts included.


Here is what you are trying to compare:


Community members of ours who put effort into coding resources, only for it to be leaked and made available for download to anyone for free. Piracy is occurring here.


vs


Breaking Mojang’s ToS by Re-selling Minecraft accounts, all of which have been purchased from Mojang at some point. Mojang already made money from the first person who bought the account from them. ToS violation is occurring here.


Big difference. Piracy = illegal and enforced by governments. ToS violation = not illegal and enforced by corporations.


On top of that, Mojang is a multi-billion dollar corporation who makes over $1 million per day on average in Minecraft accounts alone. Boo-hoo, some people will buy re-sold accounts instead, virtually having no effect on their massive daily revenue. As I’ve said before: it’s about as immoral as ripping the tag off your mattress.


All acts of piracy are able to be combatted by the DMCA act, via a “DMCA Takedown Request”. The only exceptions are certain forums who have hosts that ignore these requests and are in a country where it cannot be enforced. Unfortunately, a certain popular resource-leaking forum hides behind one of these hosts, which is why it is a problem. With that being said, if Minecraft account sales fell under this, Mojang would’ve filed one of these requests years ago. And they clearly have seen this site, because they have registered accounts and I have found evidence of what they do when I was a mod and had admin panel access. If a support ticket is made to recover an OG on Mojang, they currently use MCM to search for a thread to determine if the account was sold or not, which is why people often delete threads after selling. If Mojang wanted to stop Minecraft account sales, they could. They could have people who just come on here, look at usernames to search in their panel to see sketchy IP changes and account detail changes and permanently lock them. But they don’t, so clearly it’s not their priority, which makes sense, because again, the potential money lost from account sales is way less than paying support employees.


Enforcing ToS’s is solely the job of the company which they were respectively made for and if they want to, they can choose to enforce them.

Why would we want to ban the sale of accounts?


1.Legitimize the marketplace. The site hypocritically enforces Rule 5.4 by striking down those who violate product ownership rights heavily, yet turns a blind eye to the sale of Minecraft Accounts which violates Mojang’s TOS. Choose one or the other. Remove 5.4 and commit to being a black market, or equally enforce your own rules across all sections of the forum. Being inconsistent and half-assed only annoys the community even more.

See above statement. Piracy versus ToS violation. Completely different things, no inconsistency/hypocrisy here. You said it yourself - “Product ownership rights” vs “Mojang’s ToS”.


Yes or No - do you believe that this should be applied to everything that breaks a ToS and not selectively limited to Minecraft accounts?


If so, we would have to remove a TON of sections from the forums and lose a LOT of traffic/users. This would result in a competitor using this gift to them to overtake MCM.


The below items are some I saw listed by Terminated which would also have to be disallowed.


“- Removal of the sale of all social media accounts/ all accounts in general for any website/program.


- Removal of the gift codes and licenses section as this is also against relevant terms of services


- Removal of established servers, setups, plugins and many resources which violate TOS


- Removal of the video game items section as this is also against any sane companies TOS


- Removal of all loans due to PayPal being a primary method and it being heavily against their TOS as stated above


- Sale of other products such as but not limited to: Hacked clients, ghost clients, any Minecraft mods as well as any other products which violate a third party's TOS.


- Currency conversion on the basis that it could be considered money laundering


- Removal of most of the appraisals conversations including strict rules about what is allowed to be posted there because most of the things there currently have now been disallowed due to the removals above.


- Removal of most recruitment and staff threads due to the servers they are about being non EULA compliant.


- Removal of ANY thread where PayPal friends and family is the only payment that is taken and g&s with fees paid isn't”


Assuming that this information is entirely correct, do you support removing all these things to be “consistent” and “ethical” ?


On top of that, think of how many resources would have to be allocated to taking care of this. Every section would have to constantly be monitored to ensure that ToS violating activity or discussion isn’t occurring, because with nearly everything digital, there is some ToS about it that is easily violated because unlike physical items, digital items can easily be taken away from you.

Get rid of our most toxic and notorious members. The accounts market is saturated, comprising of crackers stealing accounts, returning ban evaders and is also the section holding the most linked scam reports often closing due to inconclusive evidence.

That’s implying that our toxic members only sell Minecraft accounts and that if removed that they will fully leave. Our toxic members aren’t limited to one specific section. I’ve seen a lot of toxicity spread throughout the forums. In fact, most of our toxic members are what I like to call “forum drifters” - they don’t stick to a specific section. They often are active in chat and the discussion forums, many of them don’t buy/sell much, and those that do buy/sell, usually don’t limit themselves to one section, but rather a little from multiple sections.


You’re blaming Minecraft accounts for toxic PEOPLE. People are people. In this case, we’re a forum who mostly consists of teenagers on the younger end. We are a Minecraft forum afterall. The age group is why we have so many toxic members, not sections which some of them use.


“saturated”

Yes, it is indeed a popular section with high demand.


“comprising of crackers stealing accounts”

Cracked accounts etc are already disallowed. Sellers are presumed innocent until proven guilty. I myself as a mod have removed plenty of stuff after seeing proof and I’m sure you have too. Without proof, there’s just assumptions.


“returning ban evaders”

That is why purchasing premium is a requirement. And yes, I know it still happens, but certainly much less than if the requirement wasn’t there.


“is also the section holding the most linked scam reports often closing due to inconclusive evidence.”


It also happens to be one of the biggest sections with some of the highest user count. There should be many many more posts, but 1. The old Minecraft account section was deleted in 2016. And 2. Many sellers delete threads after selling their accounts.


There tends to be more crime in bigger cities.


Also note that when M6Gaming was a scam resolver, he didn’t complain about the section. He was scam resolver for around 3-4 years I believe. He consistently kept scam reports at under 2 pages and also made sure to consistently respond within 24-48 hours.


Hmmmmmm, sounds like the forum’s growth with not enough staff is the problem and not any particular section.

3The site no longer needs to allocate resources to develop features and moderate the section. "Opportunity cost"

>Develop features

This made me laugh, almost no changes have been made to the account sections since BeBosny added them. The only notable change is the “Private Accounts” section suggested by me, which Mick added, but that was very simple to do. And none of these changes required development.


>Moderate the section

Ok, so instead it can go to moderating the whole forum to make sure nothing that violates any ToS or discusses violating a ToS happens.


Same moderation (could even be more actually), much less site features and active users. Terrible trade off.

4MC-Market will not die. By considering points 1 and 3, MCM can become an even better place for everyone and expand into even more markets. There are far more and far better opportunities out there.

No. Since you want “consistency” and “ethics”, the whole “ToS enforcement” would result in a TON of sections being removed and MANY items being disallowed.


What are these markets it can expand into? Keep in mind, ToS’s would have to be followed. This would prevent a LOT of digital items from being sold.


What are these “better opportunities”? Please do tell me and remember to pick ones that don’t violate ToS’s.

Fun reads: https://www.mc-market.org/threads/81435/ (60% agreed)


https://www.mc-market.org/threads/85005/

Look at when and why those threads were made - After the 2016 lock wave happened. There was a TON of confusion and chaos because of Mojang locking accounts. They were believed to be unsafe to be sold and thus removed. Obviously this heavily influenced the vote, since what Mojang did made it seem like a high-risk item. Also, despite what BeBosny said in that thread regarding his opinion on Minecraft accounts, he still ended up collaborating with me to re-work the section to make it safe and add it back and he realized it was better than he thought it was, otherwise he would’ve just kept it removed.

The site doesn’t need to be plagued by accounts anymore. This site has a bigger future for itself by legitimizing itself into a community that leads others. Honestly, I shouldn't even need to be trying to convince everyone by explaining all the benefits of removing the section. This should not have been even allowed on this site in the first place.

What this site doesn’t need to be plagued by is self-righteous users who believe they are morally superior to those who sell Minecraft accounts, have little experience with Minecraft account sales themselves, know little about the market and as a result want to take away business opportunities from others.


How about instead of looking for things to remove, start improving the site from the top. This forum is being neglected from the highest level of ownership. Here are some main points I touched on in the past:


“ • Image Proxy

When you embedded an image, it was viewed from the source server, the server could see all incoming traffic, which meant IPs could be seen. Literally every single forum has this by default. Suddenly a thread was made saying that an image proxy would be added to prevent IPs from being seen like that. ETA: 24 hours. Okay, fair enough. But then a month passes, 2 months pass. Before you know it HALF A YEAR passes and then only is it added. Keep in mind, during that time, none of the embedded images, old or new worked, unless they were posted through imgur.


• System Emails

This happened during summer 2018, for around a whole MONTH. There were issues with MCM system emails being sent out (Confirmation, password reset, 2step verification codes) It was so bad that people were told to temporarily disable 2step verification (thus removing a security measure) because if they didn't, they couldn't get the email and were locked out of their accounts until the issue got fixed.


• Massive Backlogs

I don't even remember how long this lasted (I believe for somewhere between to months to close to year), but it was with support requests, regular reports and scam reports. At one point, reports piled up in the high hundreds for a while, and I witnessed this myself, because I got responses to reports weeks later that I'd even forgotten about. Scam reports were behind by like half a year and scammers were getting away with scamming more people. Support requests would remain unanswered for weeks to over a month. At least the report backlog has been fixed, scam reports are much better and idk about support requests.


Then we have the staff turnover rate, mass reputation deletion, etc etc.”


And it seems like the backlogs are back, because I made a few reports weeks ago, no response, reported again asking to just let me know if you saw this, no response. So yep, looks like it’s back.


It’s painfully obvious that this site isn’t what it used to be. It’s being treated like passive income rather than a living community.


One of the WORST things you can do to a community is to consistently promise but rarely deliver. Sadly, this has been the norm here for a while now.


Wow, that was a lot. I’ll probably be busy again, so there’s a good chance I won’t be able to reply again.

 

[Deathadder]

It's a minecraft tos, ain't illegal, for the law this is legal, clear you haven't studied anything @ school, also this site is shit anyways, cannot change unless mick sells and ban everyone and completely reset it, kids here are broke and stubborn

 

[Dies]

Many people payed for premium to start selling minecraft accounts you know...

 

[Louwtjie]

Thanks for the tag 0n. and Bonsai.

Here my opinion, I'm not going to waste my time and read everyones reply I just read Justis and Doge

I have an extreme bias against the sale of MC accounts, however I use to buy accounts back in the day, that was the original way I found this place.

MCM talks the talk, but can't do the walk. as justis reported.

It's no secret why the accounts forum was back it was to well, make money. And validly so.

Unethical, against TOS and infringe on ownership rights. I'm not going to bore you with a legal opinion but in a few words;

The dealer is just as good as the stealer.

MCM should disallow the sale of accounts, that violates the original owners rights (PRODUCT CREATORS)

Then comes the arguments about the sale of Resources; MOJANG allows free and fair use of it's product, which concludes that PLUGINS etc, is valid and allowed to be sold, builds are allowed to be sold (HELLO MINECRAFT MARKET PLACE!!!!!)

Now, with all this taken into account yes, MCM should remove the sale of accounts, social media etc.

The argument against the sale of the accounts; 'it will be the death of MCM'

MCM is no longer just a market place for MINECRAFT, it developed into something more, freelancers, designers etc. Believe it or not a majority of my own clients are not even related to MINECRAFT at all. It's a valued argument and lacks clarity and validity. Nor can we accept the argument that growth forward will continue without the minecraft section as there is a lack of clarity and statistics.

I only see growth coming from the removal, less scam reports and a more ethical and structured market place.

But what ever decision the MCM management does take, will impact the forum as we know it, we will have parties that accept it and parties that will leave.

Every actions has a consequence.

And I have faith MCM will make the correct one.

Side note; I'm not going to subject myself to your disagreements, nor your quotes on my post. This is my opinion if you don't like it, It's all good

 

[Ted]

Ban it.. To many people selling shitty semis

 

[jxhdvn]

The argument against the sale of the accounts; 'it will be the death of MCM'

MCM is no longer just a market place for MINECRAFT, it developed into something more, freelancers, designers etc. Believe it or not a majority of my own clients are not even related to MINECRAFT at all. It's a valued argument and lacks clarity and validity. Nor can we accept the argument that growth forward will continue without the minecraft section as there is a lack of clarity and statistics.

I only see growth coming from the removal, less scam reports and a more ethical and structured market place.

this is an online marketplace and the removal of selling not only minecraft, but social media accounts, currency conversion, selling giftcodes/cards, other accounts, some discord services, and many, many other products in order to stay consistent is legit just mcm shooting itself in the foot. nothing but decline is gonna be seen from this - people are gonna move on to another site that is probably more insecure just because mcm wants to be consistent for once out of the long lifespan of this site. should have really done this a long, long time ago, pre 2016 because the implications of everything suggested by these guys leads me to believe if implemented this forum will drastically change. not everyone on here is a freelancer, designer, or does something of that sort. a lot of us specialize in buying and selling accounts

 

[Grapefruit]

This is bullshit and a completely flawed argument. If this gets removed I want my $30 back, I'll message Justis or whoever the fuck when the time comes for that

 

[nfdegreu3i23r22r]

 

[iojafwiojiuawhd]

Whereas, for other sections such as social media accounts, someone websites allow those sales

no social media website allows u to sell accs / usernames