PSA: If you still have a Mojang account for Minecraft: Java Edition, you have less than a week left to migrate to a Microsoft account to avoid profile deletion

LCP@lemmy.world to Games@lemmy.world – 498 points –

Thought I'd share this in case there are people who are unaware or have been pending off the migration process.

Starting September 19, 2023, at 11:00 am EST/17:00 pm CEST, unmigrated Mojang accounts will not be able to sign in to Minecraft.net or the Minecraft Launcher to migrate. We’re doing this to ensure that everyone is playing using accounts with improved security and player safety.
Source: Minecraft.net article

What will happen to unmigrated accounts?

Once the deadline for migration is reached, players will no longer be able to access unmigrated accounts. All unmigrated accounts will be deleted at a future date.
Source: help.minecraft.net

What if you don't have access to the email address associated with your Mojang account, or have any other queries?

The details are unclear. The Minecraft help center link says "Minecraft player support will no longer be able to help with migration-related issues after September 5, 2023." whereas the minecraft.net article states "[...] starting September 19, 2023, Minecraft Support will no longer be able to assist in any MSA migration-related tickets."

What do you get for migrating to a Microsoft account?

Microsoft claims improved account security, and 2FA. You will get a Migrator cape and access to Minecraft for Windows (Bedrock Edition) on the Microsoft account chosen at the time of migration.

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I tried to recover my Mojang account and migrate it three times. Each attempt gets a stock response asking for certain info (receipt, email, username). When I provide this, I get a response from a different support user asking for the same thing I just provided. After three to five back and forths (with the same questions and the same answers) I get busy, frustrated, and leave it for a few weeks.

Once I have time, I start over and the exact same thing repeats again.

I wrote it off as a loss last year with an asterisk of "another reason to fucking hate Microsoft"

Yeah, I bought it during beta testing and my account was attached to an old email. Gave up trying to migrate years ago. I'm actually surprised they still haven't deleted it already.

This is bullshit. What could it possibly matter to them, other than to force people onto their miserable platform. Bastards.

Authentication servers do not run themselves, they need babysitting and patching and upgrading because this is users' passwords and secrets. Microsoft obviously does not want to keep managing this old login system because it's miserable unrewarding janitorial work for a sysadmin or a developer.

The fun part is most of the people bitching have no clue how to do any of this. Probably the same people who bitch about new games not supporting Windows 7.

Oh gosh, they bought a computer game company and they don't want to pay to support existing customers? They don't want to maintain accounts that represent HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of hours of creativity, a long-time faithful user fanbase, because they now feel it's miserable unrewarding janitorial work?

It's MINECRAFT! Do you even know what people do on Minecraft? It's not saving progress we're talking about here. It's destroying an ARCHIVE. It's a life some kid has lived in there.

You make it sound like it's perfectly reasonable to ditch this community because it's an expense and an inconvenience. Get lost with your Microsoft defense. They don't need you. They don't give a shit.

Gee whiz, you sure are mad about a person explaining reality to you

This is becoming the norm here unfortunately...

I think they're a very vocal, but disagreed with, minority. I think some people here think all of Lemmy is unwaveringly anti-corporation and anti-capitalist.

I'd consider myself mostly anti-corporation and mostly anti-capitalist, but I also understand that not everything every corporation does is out of some desire to commit the worst thing possible on mankind (e.g. retiring old authentication servers that they've kept running for years while warning people that it'd eventually be cut off).

Anyway, Lemmy hates these 5 Cs (in no particular order): -Corporations

-CEOs (in particular Elon Musk and Spez)

-Conservative politics of any kind

-Capitalism

-Chromium browsers, even the privacy-oriented spinoffs.

Reality is trash, send the nukes flying please.

Soon we'll all be drinking toilet water, and doing a live dress rehearsal for Mad Max.

The players still have their stuff and their user ID, just under a new login process. They've been pestering users to make this migration for years and years.

Edit: also, this is Java edition, meaning the worlds they built are just Minecraft save files that a new user could access. The cloud-based one was Bedrock Edition, that's the one where you'd have cloud-based worlds that you could lose if you lost your account.

What's getting destroyed? You wouldn't be able to login to the server but the data would still be there. Transfer the account (or make a new one) and the data's still there as well.

I'm more annoyed that Microsoft split off Java Edition and Bedrock into two pieces of incompatible software, but I'm honestly surprised they've supported the old auth services for this long.

I don’t see how you could possibly make Bedrock and Java compatible with each other seeing as the whole point of Java edition is compatibility with mods written in…Java…

The shitty thing to do would have been to tell mod users to fuck off and force everyone over to Bedrock. Instead they’ve done well by the community, maintaining Java edition and even giving it preferential treatment when it comes to updates. Bedrock is built for consoles, where mods are not a thing and performance is more important.

Yeah, I get that Bedrock is for consoles, but as far as far as "performance" that's mostly a front-end consideration.

I just wish that there was a level of compatibility where one could still self-host and allow the console etc players to join

You're welcome to take on the rewrite of our auth-service too, since it seems so trivial in your world. Always fun to drag legacy services around for those 12 really loud and angry users.

They don’t want to hire people to build and maintain a secure login platform when their parent company already has one. This is way more work and liability than most people realize.

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For anyone left behind, Minetest is a community-developed alternative.

It's more of a game engine/launcher + highly moddable, so the base game is rather minimalistic, but you can simply install more extensive games. For example, for a very Minecraft-like experience, MineClone2 is your best bet.

So when do I get my refund?

Never. Microsoft says fuck you.

I will say it sounds like a lovely lawsuit waiting to happen though, especially in countries with good consumer protections. I wonder how Canadian law would feel about this? 🤔

I paid like, 10 dollars what's gotta be 15 years ago now.

Like if there's a class action lawsuit over this I wouldn't turn down the settlement but I'm not losing any sleep over it

Some of us paid $39. :(

Edit: I think that's what it cost. It was awhile ago, but it wasn't cheap.

Of note is that if you purchased the game before ~2012, the user agreement had no clause regarding them being able to change it willy-nilly.

Microsoft is a trillion dollar company. Unfortunately I doubt any country is going to meaningfully harm them over accounts like this. (I am one of the people that cant migrate because the email I had associated with it is gone and the game was gifted to me so long ago that I wouldn't be able to easily prove it was mine)

You'd be surprised, EU fines and consequences to shitty anti-consumer actions like this are built to hurt. There's a reason why the new iPhone has USB-C, and it's not out of the kindness of their heart.

Apple is building proprietary USB-C cables that the iPhone will extremely prefer. So absolutely not for kindnes

Yes, but in this case? The users are being migrated to a new authentication account and have been notified for many years that they needed to move over - it's been like 5 years, right? The servers are staying up. And if you've got a Mojang account, any possibility of this still being under even the most generous warranty is long gone.

If you want to participate in a community where you control the software, you should be getting into open-source games. Minetest is great! It has a better modding system than Java edition! But ultimately, if you're playing commercial games, you have to deal with a reality that the company owns it and there's no guarantee what will happen to their servers after the warranty is expired.

I mean, I paid like 8 bucks for the game (or however much it was in the indev version) but it's still shitty and arbitrary.

Does this mean we'll need to pay for the game again if we don't do it in time?

That does appear to be the case at this moment.

Sidenote, I have a feeling that's straight up illegal under contract law. IANAL though.

Edit: Just so ppl have something specific: you bought access to the service. It's probably gonna be limited in the User Agreement as "if this service has to be shut down, you agree to lose your access and you don't sue to get your money back". But this is a backend migration and I'm fairly sure this is not something they had in their original contracts. That's why sniff a broken contract and when they don't refund your money, I sniff broken laws.

If it's not, it should be.

We can write laws and vote then into power, we can fuck up whatever company we want to.

I hate that Minecraft is one of the two things I even need a Microsoft Account for.

Can't migrate. Will not accept ULA. I now have to rely on pirated version for a game I paid twice. This does not make sense.

They're gonna delete my game without giving me a refund? Fuck them.

I know this comes across as one of those classic phishing emails that claim to require your immediate attention or else your account will be deleted, but unfortunately in this case it's legitimate.

I’ve tried to migrate my account several times in the past. It never works for some reason. Also, I can never seem to untangle the web of deceit known as Microsoft/xbox/Minecraft profiles and family/group settings. About once a year I spend a couple hours trying to sort it out and then give up because it never works. Google can be awful sometimes but at least they figured out “sign in with Google”

I did it last week and always got an error trying to create a new microsoft account during the migration process, even in different browsers and after disabling adblockers. Then I just manually created a microsoft account on the microsoft website and in the minecraft migration process chose to use an existing account instead of creating one. That worked for some reason.

In this case I'd get around to it too. I went through it a few months ago and it was not easy. They put a fucking idiotic time limit of 15 minutes on the email, which invariably arrived much later than that. I sat spamming the "send email" button out of frustration.

Morons. It's email.

Eventually one happened to actually arrive in time, but I'd leave some spare time to retry if you care at all.

They probably want it to fail so that they have fewer users on their servers that already paid. I'm sure their attitude is "pay us again if you want to keep playing".

I keep getting those emails even though I've migrated my account and can play Java Minecraft through the Microsoft launcher.

Leads me to think my account isn't migrated but I guess I'll know for sure in a week or so.

If you are currently able to login and play, then you should be good. I believe they blocked Mojang and Legacy accounts from logging into the launcher a while back.

Doesn't hurt to check though. Make sure that the upper left corner of the launcher shows your Xbox Gamertag (may be different from your Java Edition username) and says "Microsoft account".

I thought they'd done this already. They've been pestering for a while right?

Thanks for the FYI, haven't played in years but got it merged to my Xbox account with no issues.

So you're saying there's still time, cool I'll get around to that Later. ..

Does Lemmy.world have a remind me bot?? 😂

Thanks for reminding me. I've just migrated.

Not sure when the next time will be that I can play Minecraft, but I guess it's nice that I can when I want to at any point into the future.

If I had used Windows 10 edition at any point, would I have already migrated? I haven't played Minecraft in ages, but I certainly don't want to lose access to it.

Edit: Wtf... I get an "Access forbidden" error just going to minecraft.net/login

If you purchased or redeemed a code for Minecraft for Windows 10 Edition in the past, your Microsoft account is eligible to get Minecraft: Java Edition for free. If you log into the Minecraft Launcher with your Microsoft, it should prompt you to set up a Java Edition username (separate from your Xbox Gamertag).

More information can be found on their help page here.

Other way around, actually. I bought Minecraft way before Microsoft owned Mojang, but at some point they gave access to the Windows 10 edition for owners of the Java edition. I've installed that before, around that time, and I'm just wondering if that was enough to have migrated my account. It's worrying tho that I tried to login in at minecraft.net and got a access error trying to reach the login page.

Redeeming that Windows 10 Edition code is separate from migrating to a Microsoft account. The code was just a free perk.

If you have not migrated your Mojang account yet, you have two options:

  1. Migrate your profile to the same Microsoft account as the one on which you redeemed that Windows 10 Edition code. The benefit of this is that all your PC Minecraft is on one login.
  2. Migrate your profile to a different Microsoft account, allowing you to double dip. You'll end up with two Microsoft accounts, but also two Minecraft: Java Edition and Minecraft for Windows 10 licenses. It's free real estate.

Man, I’d prefer to have this account on my Xbox account but it won’t let me migrate since I have a different Minecraft account there already. Wish it would just let me throw that one away and link this one in.

You will have to request Minecraft Support to delete that existing Java Edition profile from your Microsoft account. Once they do so, you can migrate your Java Edition profile to it. I'm assuming their support's pretty hammered right now, so I'm not sure if they will get back to you in time.

The easiest thing to do would be to choose a different Microsoft account to complete the migration, despite the inconvenience it might cause later on.

Migrate it to your child's/spouse's Microsoft account if you have one. If you're feeling extremely generous, migrate to a friend's Microsoft account. You can then swap usernames between the accounts at a later date.

You have an entire lifetime to drop that shit and play Minetest instead but i wouldn't wait too much

It's been ten years. This is not at all unreasonable.

I know you bought your car 10 years ago, but you refused to make an account with the company that bought your car dealer out after you bought a car from them, so now we're repossessing it.

Of course it is. I bought a product I can no longer use without signing away privacy after the fact. Not that I've played Minecraft in the last 10 years but still.

It's a shame Minecraft got bought and put on the windows store and mobile. For a while there kids actually learned what java was and had to move files around to install mods and skins. Now they're all computer illiterate again.

Yes it was so much better when it was owned by a Qanon-brain-addled bigot.

Marcus Persson left Mojang in 2014. Qanon wasn't a thing (even as a 4chan meme) back then. He began to spiral back in 2016, which I can't say I blame him for. A history of mental illness combined with unlimited money and moving countries while being heralded as a god of video games in the media would fuck anyone of us up I think.

It's been 10 years since what? Since Microsoft bought Mojang? So you're saying you're okay if in 10 years Microsoft takes away your copy of Skyrim or Call of Duty unless you give them your phone number?

No one is taking anything away. Just update your credentials.

Why? I didn’t pay to have a Microsoft account. I can’t make just a Minecraft account, they require my full name and date of birth to make a microsoft account. That’s an entirely different dynamic than the Mojang account that requires literally no personal information. I didn’t agree to give Microsoft my information when I bought the game, and I have no obligation to do so. They, however, have an obligation to allow me to access the game that I’ve paid for in perpetuity.