Mojang and Microsoft recently came out with 1.19, the Wild(ly disappointing) Update. In it, they included stuff such as the Mangrove Swamps, Ancient Cities, and server moderation. That's right; they are going to moderate our servers. Basically, if you get banned from a Minecraft server with their standards, you get banned from all multiplayer. I speak for a lot of people when I say that I am against this decision. In this article, I will be discussing these decisions and what they mean.

To start, I would like to mention Minecraft Realms. Realms are like servers, but they are easier to customize and Mojang hosts them for us. I feel like this would be a good place to put their moderation tools. After all, they are hosting these servers; they get to make the rules. Moderation and banning would be good for realms ONLY, and I would be okay if it means I risk the possibility of getting banned from all realms. However, they feel the need to push them onto the servers.

So why is this a bad idea for servers? Well, first of all, and most importantly, most Minecraft servers are not actually affiliated with Mojang and Microsoft. Instead, they're run by Minecraft players. Why should Mojang be allowed to put their moderation rules on our servers, and even ban us from all of them for something we did on one?

My previous point brings up another point: They're our servers, and we typically have our own rules on our servers. We have our own moderation tools, our own rules, our own ways of keeping the peace. Why should it make sense that Microsoft gets to dictate the rules that are on our servers? We're playing their game, sure, but these aren't their servers.

Another point I have is that Microsoft doesn't have a good track record when it comes to moderation. Think back to Minecraft Bedrock Edition. People were getting banned for things they don't even know about; they don't even know what they were banned for. People reach out to Microsoft about their bans and get no context as to why they were banned. I fear that they won't do so well with this, either.

I would also like to bring up the fact that nobody asked for this. In fact, people constantly ask to get this change repealed and there have been news articles on the fact that people constantly ask Mojang to not go through with this. Microsoft shouldn't go through with this if they want to keep their playerbase.

The last point I wish to present today is that the report system in 1.19.1 is easily exploitable. There are ways to make players send messages that they didn't send, use their signatures, and get them banned. There is also the possibility of leaving off messages in a chat report so it seems like people are responding to one thing when, in reality, they either are responding to something else or not even saying it at all.

The moderation system Microsoft wants to implement into Minecraft Java Edition is a terrible idea. This decision will make servers stay on earlier versions of Minecraft and even make them lose players. I am not the only one to say this, but because of these new moderation features, I will not be updating to 1.19.1 when it comes out.