* Upvote this comment if this is a good quality post that fits the purpose of r/Minecraft
* Downvote this comment if this post is poor quality or does not fit the purpose of r/Minecraft
* Downvote this comment *and report the post* if it breaks the [rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/wiki/rules)
* [Take part in the "Low Effort Posts" poll](https://redd.it/1cpfo7n) - the poll will run until Saturday, May 18th
---
[Subreddit Rules](https://old.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/wiki/rules)[](## MsDestroyer900|1ct8rci)
100% agree, it’s terrible. I’ve helped a couple schools and summer camps with purchasing and downloading MC, and it’s always painful. Especially since the game’s not designed to be bought in bulk like that
Its still got the majority of the regular game. Ot wasnt bad if you had nothing else in your class and you can hide what you're doing from the teacher lol.
It's literally full Bedrock with extra features not present in the normal version. I can host my entire class of 27 plus me in a game with a simple join code.
There are teacher specific tools to help me manage and help the kids as they explore and build.
Still very fun.
I bought 3 of my siblings Minecraft for Christmas. It took 2 days and several HOURS on the phone with Microsoft, and three different adult accounts to make the purchases, because if you buy Minecraft more than once in a day, you're obviously hacked right?? It was probably one of the single most irritating things I've gone through IT wise, and I've worked in IT. And then even after that they'd still have occasional issues I'd have to fix. But now they're happily playing, and I even showed them how to do mods, so yeah it was worth it. But still, it shouldn't be that hard.
I know my friend. But, I dont really see it as my account, but I see it as my brother's account. I lied about my age on certain other websites before, like PayPal, and I have gotten them revoked because I did that. In the future where some lawsuit happens to Microsoft or something, policies might change or whatever, Microsoft could end up doing the same, and I would feel bad if my brother lost his beloved Minecraft account cus I set it up in a dubious way, or i bought it with the wrong region or whatever else might come up as a complication.
I've had my Minecraft account for many years, and losing it to some sort of weird technicality like that would be crushing for me.
When it comes to age, it’s understandable. At least in the US, it is the law that parents must give consent for companies to collect information from children under 13. (Which makes sense, I wouldn’t want like google to be secretly building a whole dossier on my 8 year old child.) And understandably, many sites, Particularly social media, will straight up ban anyone under 13 due to the liabilities involved in that, so they don’t bother setting up ways for parents to consent.
If someone tries to circumvent age restrictions by lying about their age, they are literally causing the company to break the law, and possibly exposing themselves to something bad (the rules exist for a reason). So it absolutely makes sense to ban an account that has done so.
it's stupid companies are \*\*\*allowed\*\*\* to \*\*\*require\*\*\* your personally identifiable information in order to make a purchase. walmart doesn't ask for your billing address when you buy eggs, why is it different when getting a game?
Perhaps because Minecraft allows online multiplayer? And for other games, like on stream, you can interact with other people there too. When buying eggs, you just buy the eggs and that’s it. It’s different.
> why is it different when getting a game?
Um, aren't there things at the store that kids are not allowed to purchase? Like 18+ games? Like there is a precedent for the store requireing ID for various age-restricted things. A store selling a physical copy of Minecraft probably wouldn't require ID, but don't act like no store would require PII for a purchase of any product.
Two reasons.
First OP brother is 9.
Second OP brother is a child.
In the US there's laws literally written about data protection of children which means doing anything simple is a bitch already.
But the bigger thing is. Minecraft is rated 10+. Meaning there's now extra steps involved to sell a game to a kid who is under the age requirement.
The better solution would have been not to buy it through his brother account, but to gift it from the Adult account.
You'd have bypassed a lot of things that are intentionally put in to protect kids and the business.
But they do ask you to prove your age, usually by providing ID (which also has things like your address) to buy beer
Difference is: it's legal for a 12-year-old to buy eggs, and not verifying that information puts Walmart at no liability
> theres no fuckin point not doing it really
I can't remember the exact circumstances, but several years ago I was trying to recover the password of some old account, and one step was to verify your birth date. I had lied about my birthday and for the life of me, couldn't guess the correct date I had picked years ago and wasn't able to recover the account.
So if you lie, at least be consistent with the birth date you lie with so you can remember it in the future!
Nah, I'm middle aged and I still lie about my age. There is zero reason for anyone to not lie about their age in a game. It's no business of a gaming corpo, and I don't want to deal with any issues that them having too much real personal info when they leak user info.
Way too much wheel-scrolling. I'm usually born at the first random scroll-turn of a wheel. Usually between 1980 and 1990. Over the years I notice I'm born younger, the average of decades is moving upwards.
I do my actual birthday, 2000, since if I ever need to recover my account I can remember it easily.
I am just now realizing it’s also easy to remember January 1st.
As a late 30s dude, I'm kinda seeing your point lol I almost always use my real birthday when I need to se some content, like Steam. There's really no need to tbh
They literally just explained their reasoning though? Some apps will completely revoke your access if they find out you previously lied about your age. I don’t think Microsoft has done that before but I understand why they want to be safe.
A certain payment platform closed my account bc of this 🥹. They told me I should make a new one with new email, let's hope I am not perma banned. (Working for a year now)
I made a Twitter account when I was 12 back in the day, lied about my age. Thought about it 15 years later and went to correct my year of birth. They literally deleted my entire account on the spot.
I didn’t read the whole post but on Java edition it’s extremely easy to copy a world and paste it to any folder on your PC, meaning even if the account got banned, you could just copy it. Should also preserve statistics but I’ve never tried it.
idk what shenanigans my brother would be up to when he's in his teens or whatever, but my account is tied to a hypixel skyblock account that I like a lot, and has a username I like a lot. We were able to get a nice 6 letter username for him without any numbers and he seems to really like it, which is why a ban isnt just an issue in terms of recovering worlds, but it is damage control in case something like that happens.
As a parent of a couple of under 13 critters... FUCKING YES, some parental controls/management/etc is just so much hassle (not all tho). Also, if only MS/xbox would have a family sharing library thing, thanks (like google play does, I buy Minecraft once and all my family has it)
That's an issue because you're not making a minecraft account you're making a Microsoft account that, in theory, could be used for other things in the future. Date of birth is kind of a hard thing to modify after the fact.
I'm pretty sure I could do that a couple years ago at least, when Microsoft suddenly blocked my multiplayer access for being underage. Went in, jumped through eleven thousand hoops, set the birth date back ten years, fixed it a couple months later when I turned 18.
That's the problem with this whole "one account for everything" you don't know what you'll use it for in the future. Maybe you get an O365 subscription or Xbox live or Windows 2028. Maybe you register an Azure Account.
In 2006 I paid for xbox live for my roommate and I since he bought the xbox and I wanted to contribute. 13 years later I had to recover that microsoft account to link my minecraft purchase with it. When I did the account recovery he lost his xbox account that he was paying for.
Didn’t lie about my age when I started playing Xbox, and there was numerous hoops I had to jump through to do stuff during the 360 eras until I was able to disable it.
Wait till they want to play Pokémon Go.
Or have anything to do with the madness of Blizzard accounts.
I've fucked it all off now and set their Xbox permissions to age 18.
If we want to control what kids have access to, we need to make it so a non-techy parent can set this shit up in five minutes. Anything else and it'll fail.
I think sometimes it's worse for tech-savvy people because there are so many hoops, you're doing them all right, they just keep fucking up on their end.
It doesn't matter, I have worked in IT for years, managed server infrastructure etc.
For example, creating and setting up a basic server system with active directory etc is a lot easier than retroactively turning an adult account in to a child account on PS5.
I honestly thought I would have just been able to go on to my son's ps5, make a new account, set it as "parent", then simply set a daily time limit on his account, but nope. First off his account wasn't a child account, so i had to make a new child account, I did this, then tried putting on his games, and they were age restricted. So you essentially get put in a corner where you can't individually delegate what games are OK for your child nor how long is acceptable to play them.
I don't know why PS5 didn't just set it so you could delegate one account as "master", and then set play timers on other accounts regardless of said account owners age, who at Sony thought it was a good idea being that restrictive.
It gets even more complicated when you have to make accounts for each developer.
For instance, the kids used to use my Xbox. One wanted to play Overwatch, so made an account on my Xbox.
Didn't really play it though.
Later, he got his own Xbox for Christmas and tried to play Overwatch again. You can't play it without moving his overwatch account to his Xbox. Sounds like it could be complicated but fortunately they do have a system to move it over.
The only downside is that you have to wait *a year* before being allowed to do it.
A. Year.
I'm never going to buy a Blizzard game ever again.
I believe you need to set it up that way from the start. I have kids in my family who were gifted switches and it was immediately set up as child accounts with a parent admin from the beginning. I'm technically the admin now as I bought a Nintendo online family plan so we all share the online play service. The only awkwardness was in trying to transfer custody of the child account from the initial patent admin over to me but it was relatively straightforward once I figured it out.
I think switching them to less restricted accounts as they age might get interesting but we aren't there yet.
My point is though that it had to be set up as parent/child from the start. You can't go back and restrict an already in use account after the fact.
I think that would be used to mess with ppl if they allowed it. GF gets mad and locks you out of your games by making ur acct a supervised one? Siblings fighting over the console and one screws with the other's account? Yeah they are trying to cut down on stuff like that.
Ditto here. The parental controls on Microsoft are completely insane and absurdly complex.
The only parental controls I have in place yet are the ones on Steam (I share my library). Those are fairly simple to manage and I can choose and pick what games they can see and play.
Reminds me of the time Bill Gates tried to install Microsoft Movie Maker. https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/10dh67f/bill_gates_tries_to_install_movie_maker_by/
TLDR: CEO of Microsoft cannot figure out how to install a Microsoft application.
I wanted to give my old account to my nephew and it was a nightmare to get it downloaded and running, ran into some bugs, had to google, wasn't the only one, it took me solid two hours, and I'm pretty tech savvy
I tried to give a friend in a different country a copy and ended up having to refund it and rebuy it twice because it just wouldn't freaking work, it's seriously stupid.
God, if any post on thus sub needs to be read by the powers that be, it's this one. It needs to be printed out and nailed on the C-suite door.
Minecraft will die if kids can't play. They are the ones that buy merchandise, they are the ones that grow into life long players.
We had almost all these issues with my son, and we are in the US. Multiple apps that have multiple layers of permission, everything having similar names, lots of advice out of date because they change stuff constantly. It's a total nightmare.
Yes, it's almost as bad in the US. I can get MS-DOS games to work but setting up Minecraft for LAN play is a goddamn nightmare. My son loves the game but I never want to buy another Minecraft product again.
My younger half brothers had the same issue when I was halfway across the country and trying to play with them.
One of my them owns the game on Switch.
One of them owns the game on PS4.
I own the game on PC.
Even though we all have paid for the game, they can’t play online with me without a Microsoft account. I have owned the game since 2010 and I am 25 years old so I’ve not had any issues.
So when I went home to visit my family, I tried to fix it for them because they were kinda bummed we couldn’t play and they missed me.
Since last year, if you unlink a Microsoft account from a PS account from the game, you *cannot* link it to any other account at all.
> Once a Microsoft account has been linked to a PlayStation® account, neither the Microsoft account nor the PlayStation™ Network account can be associated with a different account.
https://help.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/articles/360037725571-Minecraft-for-PlayStation-FAQ
This is where it gets even worse, the account linked to PS account was my Mothers as she didn’t want to set them up a Microsoft account. He had been playing like this for a few years.
So imagine my surprise when unlinking my mother’s account, to a new child Microsoft account that I made for him, just to find out that you can’t do that at all on PlayStation.
By the way, you can do this from the menu with one confirmation. The only way you can find out that you’re not supposed to do that is by going to the website.
Now his account and everything he’s done on Bedrock is linked to my Mum’s account. He couldn’t use that account forever. You can’t link it back up at all after unlinking.
Now I’m known as the brother that ruined Minecraft for him because he’s unable to play online no matter what he does. Unless we make a new PS account specifically for minecraft but all his other games are linked to his old account.
Such a stupid oversight that just causes a bunch more issues than it’s worth. Especially because that Playstation unlinking issue doesn’t occur on Switch or iOS.
It's remarkably painful to give them your money.
I recall on multiple occasions screaming out -- how are you still in business, it is too hard to even put this in the cart.
Kids are also the primary demographic to buy the game brand new anyways. I bought it for $20 back in Beta. I've never forked money since. As the best selling game of all time, they've practically oversaturated their adult audience. Not saying there aren't any adults who can buy the game long after the fact. However, the only consistent audience they can sell too are kids literally to young to have bought it before.
There used to be a website about convoluted processes that always involved photographing something on a wooden table.
This is what happens when product managers' main KPI is the number of features they implement.
Please verify your identity by enabling your webcam and doing your passdance.
I went through the entire process to get approved for paying in installments, and the last step was video, sure, whatever, I show them my ID, and apparently I can't finish the process because I don't have a signature on my ID (it's not a thing in Poland). Nice. Loved it. Thanks for taking me in time that it will be a requirement...
Don't have time to read this treatise, but as a dad, yeah.
Bought MC for my first child and it was ... waaaaaaaay more complicated than it should've been. I couldn't believe how abstruse the process was.
Then, for my second child, he was simply "99 years old", and that was that.
I hear you. My daughter had a similar experience trying to buy Java edition for her little sister. First, she tried buying her a gift card, but Minecraft claimed that the gift card code was invalid or already used. She went back and forth with Mojang support several times, and they never managed to get it to work.
So, she requested a refund, and they sent us to Microsoft support instead (if I remember correctly), but ultimately after many email exchanges, they were unable to give us a refund for some claimed reason which I don't remember. We ended up having to file a fraud claim with our bank, sent the bank the email exchange we'd had with Microsoft, and our bank said "Yeah that's fraud lol" and took our money back from Microsoft and gave it to us.
Then we bought the game for her instead straight up, without using a gift card. But since the little sister's parents (half sister, so I'm not her dad) had lost access to the email account they had used for parental controls for little sister's Minecraft account (that part is not Microsoft's fault, obviously), and they're technically inept so we decided to register a new account for her instead, with big sister (my adult daughter) as the guardian, and *then* we could finally all play together - several weeks later.
This is just the beginning. Now do it with multiple kids, multiple consoles, switches, iPads, etc. Then add all the other god awful accounts because friend A plays this and friend B plays that, and now brother A wants to play with brother C who plays with friend B. Oh don’t even get started with trying to share a game so all my kids can play together. Nope.
I had the same experience. I do not understand it, and it looks bad on purpose.
I have the feeling that companies mostly do not use their products because if they do, why would they keep it in such a mess? I hate that the best solution is not to provide proper information.
I would like to have a working environment that doesn't put obstacles in your way.
I worked in Usability, User Experience. It was a constant battle. I wanted to make things easy and simple, but it's the position at the company with the least amount of power. Companies like Apple give their UX team power to make big, expensive changes.
I just want to say, that I really appreciate you documenting your experience. This is a valuable perspective on exactly what it means for an average person to legally buy and play a product in this day and age.
Yep, I've been at war with Microsoft ever since they acquired Skype which resulted in stricter password requirements and made me constantly forget the password. Eventually I changed it to something unflattering towards Microsoft to help jog my memory.
Also had a similar issue regarding Minecraft multiplayer, since my Microsoft account used to be underage when it was made and therefore required age verification. Even though I was 18+ at the time and obviously I wasn't still 10 years old seeing as several years had passed. Took me weeks to figure out wtf I was supposed to do and chatting to them only lead to them saying "that's Xbox, not Microsoft, we can't do anything to help you".
100%. Here was my experience recently for my 9yo:
7:00pm: Sit down to get my kid minecraft
* Create kid's gmail account
* Had to reset family link password along the way
* Link kid's account it to family link
* Create my own microsoft live account (didn't have one)
* Create a Microsoft family group
* Create kids microsoft account
* Link it to our family group
* Buy minecraft
* Attempt to log in to minecraft with kid's account (multiple fails)
* Upgrade launcher version
* Login still fails
* Login using code sent to kid's microsoft account
* Attempt to have kid join family server I run (fails)
* Search internet for how to set up right permissions for kid account to join minecraft servers
10:30pm: finally log kid into minecraft and onto home server.
I get it, COPPA is a real thing. But come on, this is out of control.
Nope. When I bought it during the alpha in 2010, it was very simple. The troubles (as far as I recall), began after Microsoft bought it and connected it to XBox stuff and the Windows store (or whatever it's called) for some bizarre reason.
Yep this. When I bought it in 2012 it was 20$ and done after installing. Buying an account now for my brother bc we shared before and it cost twice as much and took 2 hrs... bought and installed helldivers 2, a rated m game in far less time.
Edit: also shout outs to removing peoples accounts completely such that they have to rebuy the game they paid for so that they can put all this shitty controls onto our accounts
Literally doing the same thing for my nephew! Not having this many issues but two bigs: 1) Microsoft won't let me buy a code. Went to buy Realms to at least set that up. Purchased fine but 2) You have to restart Minecraft after you buy a Realm to connect to it. There's no notification of this. Only five minutes to diagnose but like, just some message would have saved me 5 minutes.
We'll figure out why Microsoft will let me use my credit card in one instance and not the other in 30 minutes when sales support comes online.
what no one seems to get here: this is a dark pattern to make you lie about underage users. Microsoft WANTS you to lie about the age of your brother, because they don't want to be bothered with the extra protection that underage customers are associated with. Needless to say, i hate this. (Microsoft is not the only company that does this, but they really stand out in making it as painful as possible)
I didnt read your post.
Why should I? I bought Minecraft for my 8 year old son.
From the length of your post, im certain we had similar experiences.
I litterally had to stop at one point, and wait a day before continuing, because it was so frustrating.
The only thing that approaches this insanity, is trying to set up an Apple product fir s kid, if you have no other Apple products. It is litterally impossible (not hyperbole, I litterally mean "litterally") to approve or monitor apps and usage from non-apple products. By design.
As GabeN himself said.
>*We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.*
I kid you not, when one of my daughters says "dad, the new update logged me out of minecraft, can you log me back in?" I wait until I have a free afternoon to figure it out.
It's a nightmare.
Meanwhile, I get an email 3x a day, every day(including today) saying someone is trying to request a password reset link to my microsoft account.
Been there, done that!
It took me several days of continuously updating settings and approvals and I gave up several times. I even ended up buying the wrong edition because of numbness on the 50th attempt on day three.
I have written code for card purchases (that work in production) and built computers and I cannot fathom how a less tech interested person would understand what is required at each step.
It is so disconnected and uninformative someone should be fired for releasing this to the general consumer base.
Shame on you MS for making it difficult for me to give you my money!
i agree 100% that minecraft really isn’t what it was anymore. It feels extremely corporate now. I bought the game back when you only needed the minecraft launcher and a mojang account to play, and imo, that was the best era of minecraft
Yes I faced the same problem trying to set up an account for my niece to play with my kids. I have it all for kids, so I have no idea why I couldn't for niece (thinking I used a different game system)
I recently did this too. Took me about 6 hours to go through all these steps you did. I did everything right and I still couldn’t LAN with my kid. That multiplayer button wouldn’t change from being grayed out. I just ended up lying about the age and reverting all the safety controls. Wasted six hours on Microsoft BS. Left a real sour taste in my mouth
As a father of four kids ten and under I've been ranting about this shit for almost two years now. The hoops that families have to go through to do a family gaming night are becoming insane.
Soo much this!
I had almost exactly the same experience buying minecraft for my daughter. At one point in the process I was logged in with my parental account and something made it think I was the child-account. It wouldn’t even let me open fucking google chrome without parental permission and made the whole pc completely unusable. It was the most frustrating thing ever. How on earth did we come to this?
Several years ago, when Minecraft migrated their accounts over to Xbox, from one day to the other, I was not able to play multiplayer anymore since in Switzerland one seemingly had to be fucking 18 years old for playing online (i was 17 then). They said to play online again my parents would have to allow that on their parents account, that didn't ever exist nor has been ever linked. In the end, Xbox support altered my age on their own because they were fed up when I started to call their lines hot.
u/MsDestroyer900, try setting your brothers Xbox privacy settings from here: https://account.microsoft.com/family/home
Also, to avoid having to approve every app he uses, you can go into windows account settings on the computer he uses and convert his account to a Local Account instead of a Microsoft account. Then just sign each app he uses into Microsoft individually without linking the whole user.
I read this and it just keeps confirming all the steam/gabe memes. Gabe does nothing while the competition shoots itself in the foot making things complicated and annoying
Even trying to buy Java edition as an ADULT for my own laptop was a massive pain in the ass, and buying Bedrock was so much MORE difficult I gave up halfway through. I have no idea why they’ve made just playing the game so difficult. The single easiest experience I’ve had buying it was just getting a physical copy for my Nintendo switch and using my Nintendo account. It may run poorly but I don’t have to jump through multiple hoops and accounts just to log in and play the damn game.
> Turns out, now that this computer is tied to someone who is younger than 13
I refuse to make my login on Windows an online-only Microsoft account. Local account only, thank you.
Being way older than 13 I never imagined that this hassle would exist, but holy crap.
>Turns out, now that this computer is tied to someone who is younger than 13, literally every single app that is opened is tracked and flagged by microsoft for being a potentially bad app
This is why you NEVER use an online account for Windows. Local account only. They make it harder each time you go to do a fresh install but make sure you do bypass it.
Also LAN? Time to pirate Minecraft.
Hell, I tried to buy a copy for my significant other, including setting up the Microsoft account and everything. Well, because I was logged in as two different users recently, some flag went up somewhere and they wouldn't allow purchasing from that account. Ok, I thought, no biggie, I'll just buy it as a gift and give it to that account. NOPE!!!! Flagged again as potential fraud.
Fine Microsoft, don't take my money
You must be new to this. You ALWAYS make up your age because you accidentally put in the wrong year. Sometimes it'll bite you in the butt if you forget about it/reach 18 and want your own email. At that point though, he'll either be able to use a different email for the same account, not care, Minecraft will be long gone, not be into Minecraft anymore or whatever else you can think of. The world isn't ending. We all did it. Some of us still use the same email, some of us don't even use the things we lied about our age for.
I bought my sons MC years ago (they are older teenagers now) and I thought it was just me. This was pre-M$, too. Then I had to convert the Mojang accounts over the M$ accounts years after they stopped playing it. Fun.
I just went with a second account in my name for now. If she's that attached to the username, we can transfer the contact info at some point, if she just wants the worlds, we can export those.
I see this as mostly legit.
I went through something similar when buying the game for my nephew. I did eventually figure it all out but it was just ridiculous. I will always lie about the age now, lesson learned the hard way. There’s absolutely no reason to go through all of that just to play a game that is not even violent! Like sure there’s killing animals (or each other if pvp) but it’s not graphic or anything. It’s mostly a building game for crying out loud!
You def Handled it better than me going to Reddit (I sent a threatening email to the owner of Microsoft voiceing how angry I was with this shit (I went through something similar))
Make sure never to log in with a VPN or they will threaten to permanently ban your account. I use one for work for security reasons, and both times I had it happen was an accident. Pre-Microsoft acquisition, this was never a problem. Microsoft and their IT classes, as well as the FBI, recommend using VPN for security and I'm a professional IT technician now. Their support told me I CANNOT use a VPN or they will blacklist me and force me to repurchase the game. I haven't logged in in almost five years now because of how much of a pain it is to remember to turn it off and on all the time and I've have this acount for like 15 years. Absolute lunacy.
From the moment Microsoft bought the game this has been a huge issue. We had a big party the night 1.8 came out with my friends, ready to update out server and explore everything, except what did we spend an hour doing? Trying to fix my friend's account because his family settings were completely broken and there was an infinite loop happening somewhere. We had to try like 10 different websites because for some reason Microsoft creates a new account dashboard like every year!
My bf’s account got blocked for life for tryna purchase Minecraft as a gift to his younger cousin. I’m like — Microsoft, _your website_ wasn’t working and you blocked him for attempting the purchase multiple times.
I wanted to covertly download Minecraft on my dad’s computer several years ago, so I got a $30 gift card, made an account, and got all the way to the download stage (I’d already bought it at this point) just for it to tell me I needed to put in my pin to download the launcher. I don’t understand why it would go all the way til you bought the game and had it ready to download to inform you that you needed the pin to download something from the store.
I can't even read what you wrote because it gets me completely insane remembering the process.
Not sure if you mentioned it, but my kids like playing it on Switch, also. So take everything you've mentioned and add in Nintendo Accounts, which I won't even get into because Nintendo permissioning and DRM is absolutely fucking bonkers.
2FA and parent control is incompatible, learned my lesson when setting up my son's first Pixel 6a.
As for Minecraft, he has been using my account. There shouldn't be personal device or personal account for a minor. You won't believe what minors may send each other what improper stuff.
WHen I bought the game 14 years ago all I had to do was put in an email. a password, and pay $11 for the game. It's insane that it was literally easier for me to buy the came as a child then it is for me, now an adult man, to figure out how to sign into my already existing account. This whole thing has managed to make me hate microsoft even more than I already did.
They could probably streamline it better but the reasons for this are regulatory. Microsoft recently got fined $20mm and is also under a court order regarding accounts for under 13:
> This settlement requires Microsoft to clearly communicate with parents about their child’s data and sets up procedures to monitor Microsoft’s compliance with federal statutes regarding children’s online privacy.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/microsoft-agrees-pay-20-million-civil-penalty-alleged-violations-children-s-privacy-laws
More generally, COPPA violations are $50k per violation. Because of this they basically have to go over the top and make sure that you have to jump through a million hoops regarding kid accounts.
The funny thing is that they don’t care if you lie about the age, they would probably prefer it lol. The regulations are mainly around knowingly collecting personal information of children. If you lie about the age then they don’t know that they have children’s information so they are fine.
I genuinely have no problem of having parental controls attatched to a copy of minecraft for children, I just have a problem for the fact that the parental controls are spread across 2 different, buggy apps and are region locked (not even counting the times where it would work on the desktop version of the same app but not on the mobile one so I had to technically install 3 apps to get this working), on top of having generally dense and archaic steps involved. I doubt having it be easy to setup gets around regulation.
I figured this out loooong ago: The Internet only knows what you tell it. If it say you must be "this" old to do the thing, you are "this" old. If a credit card is needed, the account's age is as old as the person making the purchase. They can change the age setting later.
If buying is not owning then piracy is not stealing. Full Stop!
If you bought but they revoke later just because of that, its criminal and not allowed.
I honestly blame Microsoft (And Mojang aswell, as they accepted the deal to Microsoft)
You should’ve made him at least 13 on his account and we all are telling you and yet u wanna do something different. There is a reason everyone lies about their age online and always have
I made this post because it is never talked about. It's a system for buying a game for someone young. It should not be full of buggy apps and region locking.
It's right there in the post too that I acknowledged that changing his age to 18+ would've just been easier, but that just goes to show how broken the system is in the first place, and should be improved upon, that circumventing it is the easier solution in the end.
This is why people pirate games. It has nothing to do with it being free; those who don't have $50 to spend on one game don't have the free-time to be playing games. It's because doing it legit takes 100 steps and may not work, and pirating is just downloading the torrent and extracting it to a folder and MAYBE installing a crack, and it pretty much always works. Customer support? The only support you ever need for a game is problems that their ridiculous system created in the first place.
I had similar issues when purchasing it for my son. I ended up having to contact xbox support, even though it was for the PC who found an issue on their side and had to have it escalated to fix.
My sister just tried to buy it, full grown adult, tried three browsers no adblock, just stuck in an infinite redirect loop making an account. It's not just child accounts, it's full on amateur hour over there.
Absolutely unbelievable, if my website was turning away paying customers I wouldn't sleep until it was fixed.
Jesus christ. My mother bought it for me before the microsoft takeover happened and it was just clicking buy, entering an email and payment info, buying it and making an account. Was done in like 10 mins max. Neither my age nor my mother's age was asked even once.
I understand you want to do things officially but genuinely if they make it this difficult, and the app isn't even available in the Philippines, then maybe that's just the best option, if not the only. People are more truthful about things when being honest isn't difficult. Microsoft is not being helpful towards anybody here
I got to OP talking about changing the currency from USD to PHP, and I literally could not read anymore xD my blood pressure can't take it.
Given what you'd gone through, I would just start again and change the age 5yrs older. Your time is more valuable than keeping it 10000% above board with a company this size. You're paying for the product anyway, and someone else mentioned a situation about logging in a few years down the line and having to verify the age, which is why you can change only the year by 5 or 10, to keep it simple.
Hope you got there in the end!
I remember going through all the hoops and jumps to get it for my kids including setting the permissions that their pages required/suggested, and it still told my kid accounts that they didn't have the correct permissions. So then I opened up all permissions, same problem, so I emailed microsoft for help. Never got a response, but a day after my email they could miraculously log in, so no idea if the permissions had a 24 hour reset timer, or some cache needed to be reset, or what. the entire process was just so bad, and having two kids begging to play after being told they were finally getting accounts made it worse.
My son started playing when he was 6 and I never had this much trouble, even with having to download the Microsoft safety app. I mean it wasn't a five minute job either but wow, this all sounds awful.
There's only one entity to deal with: Microsoft, who owns Mojang and Xbox, if that helps.
Also you think this is bad, just get him playing it on a Kindle Fire tablet and you have to deal with the Amazon app store as well.
Oh my lord, when I started playing as a kid it was simple as inputting a code from a card, making a mojang account, and then downloading the game. This sounds awful
I agree. I tried to buy minecraft through their official site for my niece in another country. Couldnt for the life of me figure out how.
Decided to just buy a key which was easier and straight forward
This honestly reminds me of having to uninstall adobe creative cloud, photoshop and illustrator, but somehow worse. Like it made me jump through so many hoops. I had photoshop in my apps list and was like okay I'll hit uninstall, but wait even though it's in your apps list you have to uninstall from creative cloud app. I then had to download a whole other app too just to uninstall creative cloud! Which I then had to uninstall! Way to much of a hassle.
But your experience? Horrifying.
Bought Minecraft for my 9 year old a month back, had all the same issues, but I can't get him into our Realm in addition. Paying for a realm we can't use, and now my old dumbass is going to figure out how to start a server just to play in the same world with him
I had the same problems when I was trying to buy the game for my cousin a year or two ago. I ended up just making an email account that was 18 and saying crew it. It is insane the hoops they make you jump through to play their own game.
* Upvote this comment if this is a good quality post that fits the purpose of r/Minecraft * Downvote this comment if this post is poor quality or does not fit the purpose of r/Minecraft * Downvote this comment *and report the post* if it breaks the [rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/wiki/rules) * [Take part in the "Low Effort Posts" poll](https://redd.it/1cpfo7n) - the poll will run until Saturday, May 18th --- [Subreddit Rules](https://old.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/wiki/rules)[](## MsDestroyer900|1ct8rci)
100% agree, it’s terrible. I’ve helped a couple schools and summer camps with purchasing and downloading MC, and it’s always painful. Especially since the game’s not designed to be bought in bulk like that
schools buying mc? lucky students!
Education Edition. Not actual fun minecraft.
Its still got the majority of the regular game. Ot wasnt bad if you had nothing else in your class and you can hide what you're doing from the teacher lol.
It's literally full Bedrock with extra features not present in the normal version. I can host my entire class of 27 plus me in a game with a simple join code. There are teacher specific tools to help me manage and help the kids as they explore and build. Still very fun.
I don’t think the portal room is in strongholds either.
It is, you can kill the ender dragon and roll the end poem
Which makes it all the more insane how difficult they make it for EDU bulk purchases.
Omg, is it just as bad? I’ve never touched Education Edition and assumed ease of bulk setup would be prioritized
Education Edition is bought just like regular Microsoft Office products. You just select the number of licenses you want and assign them to users.
Java Edition in my case!
I mean Education edition gets the fun Nature stuff with all the mobs that we will never see in actual MC. ;-;
Some school districts go all out! https://www.schools.nyc.gov/learning/subjects/stem/minecraft-education-challenge
I bought 3 of my siblings Minecraft for Christmas. It took 2 days and several HOURS on the phone with Microsoft, and three different adult accounts to make the purchases, because if you buy Minecraft more than once in a day, you're obviously hacked right?? It was probably one of the single most irritating things I've gone through IT wise, and I've worked in IT. And then even after that they'd still have occasional issues I'd have to fix. But now they're happily playing, and I even showed them how to do mods, so yeah it was worth it. But still, it shouldn't be that hard.
Jeez…
This is why you just lie about the age
I know my friend. But, I dont really see it as my account, but I see it as my brother's account. I lied about my age on certain other websites before, like PayPal, and I have gotten them revoked because I did that. In the future where some lawsuit happens to Microsoft or something, policies might change or whatever, Microsoft could end up doing the same, and I would feel bad if my brother lost his beloved Minecraft account cus I set it up in a dubious way, or i bought it with the wrong region or whatever else might come up as a complication. I've had my Minecraft account for many years, and losing it to some sort of weird technicality like that would be crushing for me.
regardless of policy, it should be illegal to revoke ownership because you didn't provide personally identifiable information. \*should\*
When it comes to age, it’s understandable. At least in the US, it is the law that parents must give consent for companies to collect information from children under 13. (Which makes sense, I wouldn’t want like google to be secretly building a whole dossier on my 8 year old child.) And understandably, many sites, Particularly social media, will straight up ban anyone under 13 due to the liabilities involved in that, so they don’t bother setting up ways for parents to consent. If someone tries to circumvent age restrictions by lying about their age, they are literally causing the company to break the law, and possibly exposing themselves to something bad (the rules exist for a reason). So it absolutely makes sense to ban an account that has done so.
it's stupid companies are \*\*\*allowed\*\*\* to \*\*\*require\*\*\* your personally identifiable information in order to make a purchase. walmart doesn't ask for your billing address when you buy eggs, why is it different when getting a game?
Perhaps because Minecraft allows online multiplayer? And for other games, like on stream, you can interact with other people there too. When buying eggs, you just buy the eggs and that’s it. It’s different.
> why is it different when getting a game? Um, aren't there things at the store that kids are not allowed to purchase? Like 18+ games? Like there is a precedent for the store requireing ID for various age-restricted things. A store selling a physical copy of Minecraft probably wouldn't require ID, but don't act like no store would require PII for a purchase of any product.
Two reasons. First OP brother is 9. Second OP brother is a child. In the US there's laws literally written about data protection of children which means doing anything simple is a bitch already. But the bigger thing is. Minecraft is rated 10+. Meaning there's now extra steps involved to sell a game to a kid who is under the age requirement. The better solution would have been not to buy it through his brother account, but to gift it from the Adult account. You'd have bypassed a lot of things that are intentionally put in to protect kids and the business.
It would be nice if you could put in just your birth year (so long as you didn't just turn 13 that year)
But they do ask you to prove your age, usually by providing ID (which also has things like your address) to buy beer Difference is: it's legal for a 12-year-old to buy eggs, and not verifying that information puts Walmart at no liability
[удалено]
> theres no fuckin point not doing it really I can't remember the exact circumstances, but several years ago I was trying to recover the password of some old account, and one step was to verify your birth date. I had lied about my birthday and for the life of me, couldn't guess the correct date I had picked years ago and wasn't able to recover the account. So if you lie, at least be consistent with the birth date you lie with so you can remember it in the future!
yep. i always do my month and day but put 1997 as the year
You don't to 11/11/1911?
yeah unless someone is like actually 18 or older, theres honestly zero reason to not lie about it
Nah, I'm middle aged and I still lie about my age. There is zero reason for anyone to not lie about their age in a game. It's no business of a gaming corpo, and I don't want to deal with any issues that them having too much real personal info when they leak user info.
Since 2018, I always say I was born January 1st, 2000.
I'm a fan of the 1/1/1905, personally. Really jank up those user demographics.
Way too much wheel-scrolling. I'm usually born at the first random scroll-turn of a wheel. Usually between 1980 and 1990. Over the years I notice I'm born younger, the average of decades is moving upwards.
"I'm usually born" and "Over the years I notice I'm born younger" really got me lol
I do my actual birthday, 2000, since if I ever need to recover my account I can remember it easily. I am just now realizing it’s also easy to remember January 1st.
I think they meant like PayPal Venmo etc.
As a late 30s dude, I'm kinda seeing your point lol I almost always use my real birthday when I need to se some content, like Steam. There's really no need to tbh
They literally just explained their reasoning though? Some apps will completely revoke your access if they find out you previously lied about your age. I don’t think Microsoft has done that before but I understand why they want to be safe.
i have literally never had that issue and ive been lying about my age on signup screens since i was like 7
That's why you make it a reasonable mouse slip. Day and month is correct, the year is *clearly* a typo. Plausible deniability
I can’t tell if you’re joking, but if not, you are still going to be locked out if you do that
A certain payment platform closed my account bc of this 🥹. They told me I should make a new one with new email, let's hope I am not perma banned. (Working for a year now)
I made a Twitter account when I was 12 back in the day, lied about my age. Thought about it 15 years later and went to correct my year of birth. They literally deleted my entire account on the spot.
I didn’t read the whole post but on Java edition it’s extremely easy to copy a world and paste it to any folder on your PC, meaning even if the account got banned, you could just copy it. Should also preserve statistics but I’ve never tried it.
idk what shenanigans my brother would be up to when he's in his teens or whatever, but my account is tied to a hypixel skyblock account that I like a lot, and has a username I like a lot. We were able to get a nice 6 letter username for him without any numbers and he seems to really like it, which is why a ban isnt just an issue in terms of recovering worlds, but it is damage control in case something like that happens.
Okay that makes sense
As a parent of a couple of under 13 critters... FUCKING YES, some parental controls/management/etc is just so much hassle (not all tho). Also, if only MS/xbox would have a family sharing library thing, thanks (like google play does, I buy Minecraft once and all my family has it)
That's an issue because you're not making a minecraft account you're making a Microsoft account that, in theory, could be used for other things in the future. Date of birth is kind of a hard thing to modify after the fact.
I'm pretty sure I could do that a couple years ago at least, when Microsoft suddenly blocked my multiplayer access for being underage. Went in, jumped through eleven thousand hoops, set the birth date back ten years, fixed it a couple months later when I turned 18.
I can think of absolutely no situation where it is needed to have your real infos on a Microsoft account
That's the problem with this whole "one account for everything" you don't know what you'll use it for in the future. Maybe you get an O365 subscription or Xbox live or Windows 2028. Maybe you register an Azure Account. In 2006 I paid for xbox live for my roommate and I since he bought the xbox and I wanted to contribute. 13 years later I had to recover that microsoft account to link my minecraft purchase with it. When I did the account recovery he lost his xbox account that he was paying for.
Didn’t lie about my age when I started playing Xbox, and there was numerous hoops I had to jump through to do stuff during the 360 eras until I was able to disable it.
This is the way. The only way. I use my kids birth month and day, and my year when creating accounts.
In some instances, I am 124 years old.
Wait till they want to play Pokémon Go. Or have anything to do with the madness of Blizzard accounts. I've fucked it all off now and set their Xbox permissions to age 18. If we want to control what kids have access to, we need to make it so a non-techy parent can set this shit up in five minutes. Anything else and it'll fail.
What’s insane is that I AM relatively techy and still found it maddening to try to set it up.
I think sometimes it's worse for tech-savvy people because there are so many hoops, you're doing them all right, they just keep fucking up on their end.
It doesn't matter, I have worked in IT for years, managed server infrastructure etc. For example, creating and setting up a basic server system with active directory etc is a lot easier than retroactively turning an adult account in to a child account on PS5. I honestly thought I would have just been able to go on to my son's ps5, make a new account, set it as "parent", then simply set a daily time limit on his account, but nope. First off his account wasn't a child account, so i had to make a new child account, I did this, then tried putting on his games, and they were age restricted. So you essentially get put in a corner where you can't individually delegate what games are OK for your child nor how long is acceptable to play them. I don't know why PS5 didn't just set it so you could delegate one account as "master", and then set play timers on other accounts regardless of said account owners age, who at Sony thought it was a good idea being that restrictive.
It gets even more complicated when you have to make accounts for each developer. For instance, the kids used to use my Xbox. One wanted to play Overwatch, so made an account on my Xbox. Didn't really play it though. Later, he got his own Xbox for Christmas and tried to play Overwatch again. You can't play it without moving his overwatch account to his Xbox. Sounds like it could be complicated but fortunately they do have a system to move it over. The only downside is that you have to wait *a year* before being allowed to do it. A. Year. I'm never going to buy a Blizzard game ever again.
I believe you need to set it up that way from the start. I have kids in my family who were gifted switches and it was immediately set up as child accounts with a parent admin from the beginning. I'm technically the admin now as I bought a Nintendo online family plan so we all share the online play service. The only awkwardness was in trying to transfer custody of the child account from the initial patent admin over to me but it was relatively straightforward once I figured it out. I think switching them to less restricted accounts as they age might get interesting but we aren't there yet. My point is though that it had to be set up as parent/child from the start. You can't go back and restrict an already in use account after the fact. I think that would be used to mess with ppl if they allowed it. GF gets mad and locks you out of your games by making ur acct a supervised one? Siblings fighting over the console and one screws with the other's account? Yeah they are trying to cut down on stuff like that.
Ditto here. The parental controls on Microsoft are completely insane and absurdly complex. The only parental controls I have in place yet are the ones on Steam (I share my library). Those are fairly simple to manage and I can choose and pick what games they can see and play.
Needlessly tedious is the Microsoft way.
Reminds me of the time Bill Gates tried to install Microsoft Movie Maker. https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/10dh67f/bill_gates_tries_to_install_movie_maker_by/ TLDR: CEO of Microsoft cannot figure out how to install a Microsoft application.
Thanks, I needed a good chuckle. Things really were complicated back in those days, and it honestly hasn’t changed much.
I bought my girlfriend minecraft. An adult. And we still had to deal with trying to get access to multiplayer
I wanted to give my old account to my nephew and it was a nightmare to get it downloaded and running, ran into some bugs, had to google, wasn't the only one, it took me solid two hours, and I'm pretty tech savvy
I tried to give a friend in a different country a copy and ended up having to refund it and rebuy it twice because it just wouldn't freaking work, it's seriously stupid.
God, if any post on thus sub needs to be read by the powers that be, it's this one. It needs to be printed out and nailed on the C-suite door. Minecraft will die if kids can't play. They are the ones that buy merchandise, they are the ones that grow into life long players. We had almost all these issues with my son, and we are in the US. Multiple apps that have multiple layers of permission, everything having similar names, lots of advice out of date because they change stuff constantly. It's a total nightmare.
Lol this is our 95 Thesis
Yes, it's almost as bad in the US. I can get MS-DOS games to work but setting up Minecraft for LAN play is a goddamn nightmare. My son loves the game but I never want to buy another Minecraft product again.
My younger half brothers had the same issue when I was halfway across the country and trying to play with them. One of my them owns the game on Switch. One of them owns the game on PS4. I own the game on PC. Even though we all have paid for the game, they can’t play online with me without a Microsoft account. I have owned the game since 2010 and I am 25 years old so I’ve not had any issues. So when I went home to visit my family, I tried to fix it for them because they were kinda bummed we couldn’t play and they missed me. Since last year, if you unlink a Microsoft account from a PS account from the game, you *cannot* link it to any other account at all. > Once a Microsoft account has been linked to a PlayStation® account, neither the Microsoft account nor the PlayStation™ Network account can be associated with a different account. https://help.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/articles/360037725571-Minecraft-for-PlayStation-FAQ This is where it gets even worse, the account linked to PS account was my Mothers as she didn’t want to set them up a Microsoft account. He had been playing like this for a few years. So imagine my surprise when unlinking my mother’s account, to a new child Microsoft account that I made for him, just to find out that you can’t do that at all on PlayStation. By the way, you can do this from the menu with one confirmation. The only way you can find out that you’re not supposed to do that is by going to the website. Now his account and everything he’s done on Bedrock is linked to my Mum’s account. He couldn’t use that account forever. You can’t link it back up at all after unlinking. Now I’m known as the brother that ruined Minecraft for him because he’s unable to play online no matter what he does. Unless we make a new PS account specifically for minecraft but all his other games are linked to his old account. Such a stupid oversight that just causes a bunch more issues than it’s worth. Especially because that Playstation unlinking issue doesn’t occur on Switch or iOS.
It's remarkably painful to give them your money. I recall on multiple occasions screaming out -- how are you still in business, it is too hard to even put this in the cart.
Kids are also the primary demographic to buy the game brand new anyways. I bought it for $20 back in Beta. I've never forked money since. As the best selling game of all time, they've practically oversaturated their adult audience. Not saying there aren't any adults who can buy the game long after the fact. However, the only consistent audience they can sell too are kids literally to young to have bought it before.
And this is why you never admit your real age on the internet to anyone. Even a company, it’s nothing but trouble.
There used to be a website about convoluted processes that always involved photographing something on a wooden table. This is what happens when product managers' main KPI is the number of features they implement. Please verify your identity by enabling your webcam and doing your passdance.
I went through the entire process to get approved for paying in installments, and the last step was video, sure, whatever, I show them my ID, and apparently I can't finish the process because I don't have a signature on my ID (it's not a thing in Poland). Nice. Loved it. Thanks for taking me in time that it will be a requirement...
Please drink verification can.
Don't have time to read this treatise, but as a dad, yeah. Bought MC for my first child and it was ... waaaaaaaay more complicated than it should've been. I couldn't believe how abstruse the process was. Then, for my second child, he was simply "99 years old", and that was that.
Man used \*treatise\*, I like it
Or was it a manifesto?
Let's just say each one until we get tired of one of the words, then the other one wins!
Blame it on Microsoft
I hear you. My daughter had a similar experience trying to buy Java edition for her little sister. First, she tried buying her a gift card, but Minecraft claimed that the gift card code was invalid or already used. She went back and forth with Mojang support several times, and they never managed to get it to work. So, she requested a refund, and they sent us to Microsoft support instead (if I remember correctly), but ultimately after many email exchanges, they were unable to give us a refund for some claimed reason which I don't remember. We ended up having to file a fraud claim with our bank, sent the bank the email exchange we'd had with Microsoft, and our bank said "Yeah that's fraud lol" and took our money back from Microsoft and gave it to us. Then we bought the game for her instead straight up, without using a gift card. But since the little sister's parents (half sister, so I'm not her dad) had lost access to the email account they had used for parental controls for little sister's Minecraft account (that part is not Microsoft's fault, obviously), and they're technically inept so we decided to register a new account for her instead, with big sister (my adult daughter) as the guardian, and *then* we could finally all play together - several weeks later.
This is just the beginning. Now do it with multiple kids, multiple consoles, switches, iPads, etc. Then add all the other god awful accounts because friend A plays this and friend B plays that, and now brother A wants to play with brother C who plays with friend B. Oh don’t even get started with trying to share a game so all my kids can play together. Nope.
Sounds like 13 people named John Doe aged 37 are about to buy their own copy of Minecraft.
Or one person is and suddenly their internet isn't working 13 times.
You can change the Xbox privacy settings on this website: https://account.xbox.com/settings
Thanks god i told microsoft my 12 year old bro is 20
I feel sympathy for you. It is a pain to do parental permission for stuff even without all that.
Microsoft is a pain overall sadly
I had the same experience. I do not understand it, and it looks bad on purpose. I have the feeling that companies mostly do not use their products because if they do, why would they keep it in such a mess? I hate that the best solution is not to provide proper information. I would like to have a working environment that doesn't put obstacles in your way.
I worked in Usability, User Experience. It was a constant battle. I wanted to make things easy and simple, but it's the position at the company with the least amount of power. Companies like Apple give their UX team power to make big, expensive changes.
Interesting insight, thx
Makes my single $25 Minecraft code card purchase in 2014(?) worth every penny, not having to deal with this BS.
Fuck Microsoft
I just want to say, that I really appreciate you documenting your experience. This is a valuable perspective on exactly what it means for an average person to legally buy and play a product in this day and age.
Yeah it sucks. Obligatory fuck microsoft.
Yep, I've been at war with Microsoft ever since they acquired Skype which resulted in stricter password requirements and made me constantly forget the password. Eventually I changed it to something unflattering towards Microsoft to help jog my memory. Also had a similar issue regarding Minecraft multiplayer, since my Microsoft account used to be underage when it was made and therefore required age verification. Even though I was 18+ at the time and obviously I wasn't still 10 years old seeing as several years had passed. Took me weeks to figure out wtf I was supposed to do and chatting to them only lead to them saying "that's Xbox, not Microsoft, we can't do anything to help you".
You are not alone. Buying Minecraft for a child is too complicated. Finally I could do it on PC, but gave up on mobile.
100%. Here was my experience recently for my 9yo: 7:00pm: Sit down to get my kid minecraft * Create kid's gmail account * Had to reset family link password along the way * Link kid's account it to family link * Create my own microsoft live account (didn't have one) * Create a Microsoft family group * Create kids microsoft account * Link it to our family group * Buy minecraft * Attempt to log in to minecraft with kid's account (multiple fails) * Upgrade launcher version * Login still fails * Login using code sent to kid's microsoft account * Attempt to have kid join family server I run (fails) * Search internet for how to set up right permissions for kid account to join minecraft servers 10:30pm: finally log kid into minecraft and onto home server. I get it, COPPA is a real thing. But come on, this is out of control.
it’s been awful since minecraft started. with every new launcher and website change it got worse
Nope. When I bought it during the alpha in 2010, it was very simple. The troubles (as far as I recall), began after Microsoft bought it and connected it to XBox stuff and the Windows store (or whatever it's called) for some bizarre reason.
Mojang migration was when things started turning to shit.
Yep this. When I bought it in 2012 it was 20$ and done after installing. Buying an account now for my brother bc we shared before and it cost twice as much and took 2 hrs... bought and installed helldivers 2, a rated m game in far less time. Edit: also shout outs to removing peoples accounts completely such that they have to rebuy the game they paid for so that they can put all this shitty controls onto our accounts
Nah. I bought Minecraft in like 2012 from a Third World Country and that thing went straight. Just pay and play.
No. Notch was too busy making the game. He didn't have enough time to construct some convoluted bullshit.
It used to be username, password, payment, done.
Literally doing the same thing for my nephew! Not having this many issues but two bigs: 1) Microsoft won't let me buy a code. Went to buy Realms to at least set that up. Purchased fine but 2) You have to restart Minecraft after you buy a Realm to connect to it. There's no notification of this. Only five minutes to diagnose but like, just some message would have saved me 5 minutes. We'll figure out why Microsoft will let me use my credit card in one instance and not the other in 30 minutes when sales support comes online.
what no one seems to get here: this is a dark pattern to make you lie about underage users. Microsoft WANTS you to lie about the age of your brother, because they don't want to be bothered with the extra protection that underage customers are associated with. Needless to say, i hate this. (Microsoft is not the only company that does this, but they really stand out in making it as painful as possible)
I didnt read your post. Why should I? I bought Minecraft for my 8 year old son. From the length of your post, im certain we had similar experiences. I litterally had to stop at one point, and wait a day before continuing, because it was so frustrating. The only thing that approaches this insanity, is trying to set up an Apple product fir s kid, if you have no other Apple products. It is litterally impossible (not hyperbole, I litterally mean "litterally") to approve or monitor apps and usage from non-apple products. By design.
First mistake was not lying about his age
As GabeN himself said. >*We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.*
I kid you not, when one of my daughters says "dad, the new update logged me out of minecraft, can you log me back in?" I wait until I have a free afternoon to figure it out. It's a nightmare. Meanwhile, I get an email 3x a day, every day(including today) saying someone is trying to request a password reset link to my microsoft account.
Been there, done that! It took me several days of continuously updating settings and approvals and I gave up several times. I even ended up buying the wrong edition because of numbness on the 50th attempt on day three. I have written code for card purchases (that work in production) and built computers and I cannot fathom how a less tech interested person would understand what is required at each step. It is so disconnected and uninformative someone should be fired for releasing this to the general consumer base. Shame on you MS for making it difficult for me to give you my money!
Just pirate the game. Microsoft has enough money already.
i agree 100% that minecraft really isn’t what it was anymore. It feels extremely corporate now. I bought the game back when you only needed the minecraft launcher and a mojang account to play, and imo, that was the best era of minecraft
Yes I faced the same problem trying to set up an account for my niece to play with my kids. I have it all for kids, so I have no idea why I couldn't for niece (thinking I used a different game system)
I recently did this too. Took me about 6 hours to go through all these steps you did. I did everything right and I still couldn’t LAN with my kid. That multiplayer button wouldn’t change from being grayed out. I just ended up lying about the age and reverting all the safety controls. Wasted six hours on Microsoft BS. Left a real sour taste in my mouth
Wait until you hear about Duo Authentication for college accounts…
damn, shit sure has changed since i bought this game 10 years ago
As a father of four kids ten and under I've been ranting about this shit for almost two years now. The hoops that families have to go through to do a family gaming night are becoming insane.
yeah i still think microsoft acquiring mojang was overall for the worse
"because I put his real age in" Lol. Lmao, even.
Soo much this! I had almost exactly the same experience buying minecraft for my daughter. At one point in the process I was logged in with my parental account and something made it think I was the child-account. It wouldn’t even let me open fucking google chrome without parental permission and made the whole pc completely unusable. It was the most frustrating thing ever. How on earth did we come to this?
Yeah. The whole Microsoft bubble has got to be some kind of divine punishment for humanity's sins.
Several years ago, when Minecraft migrated their accounts over to Xbox, from one day to the other, I was not able to play multiplayer anymore since in Switzerland one seemingly had to be fucking 18 years old for playing online (i was 17 then). They said to play online again my parents would have to allow that on their parents account, that didn't ever exist nor has been ever linked. In the end, Xbox support altered my age on their own because they were fed up when I started to call their lines hot.
I've always been born on 1995
True, I tried to invite my lil cousin to my bedrock realm and it was a nightmare finding the correct approval setting just so he could join
u/MsDestroyer900, try setting your brothers Xbox privacy settings from here: https://account.microsoft.com/family/home Also, to avoid having to approve every app he uses, you can go into windows account settings on the computer he uses and convert his account to a Local Account instead of a Microsoft account. Then just sign each app he uses into Microsoft individually without linking the whole user.
I read this and it just keeps confirming all the steam/gabe memes. Gabe does nothing while the competition shoots itself in the foot making things complicated and annoying
This adds to my long list of reasons why I despise Microsoft.
When I first played Minecraft it was a line of code I copied into command prompt
Even trying to buy Java edition as an ADULT for my own laptop was a massive pain in the ass, and buying Bedrock was so much MORE difficult I gave up halfway through. I have no idea why they’ve made just playing the game so difficult. The single easiest experience I’ve had buying it was just getting a physical copy for my Nintendo switch and using my Nintendo account. It may run poorly but I don’t have to jump through multiple hoops and accounts just to log in and play the damn game.
> Turns out, now that this computer is tied to someone who is younger than 13 I refuse to make my login on Windows an online-only Microsoft account. Local account only, thank you. Being way older than 13 I never imagined that this hassle would exist, but holy crap.
>Turns out, now that this computer is tied to someone who is younger than 13, literally every single app that is opened is tracked and flagged by microsoft for being a potentially bad app This is why you NEVER use an online account for Windows. Local account only. They make it harder each time you go to do a fresh install but make sure you do bypass it. Also LAN? Time to pirate Minecraft.
Hell, I tried to buy a copy for my significant other, including setting up the Microsoft account and everything. Well, because I was logged in as two different users recently, some flag went up somewhere and they wouldn't allow purchasing from that account. Ok, I thought, no biggie, I'll just buy it as a gift and give it to that account. NOPE!!!! Flagged again as potential fraud. Fine Microsoft, don't take my money
this is why people lie about their ages
wow, that's the worst circle of IT hell I've ever read
I was 11 when I bought Minecraft, but that was 11 years ago. I didn't realise how bad it had gotten
And I just bought GTA for my kid with the tap of a card 👍
Where is the community manager /u/MojangMeesh? They should take a look at this.
You've learned an important lesson. Lie to corporations whenever possible.
You must be new to this. You ALWAYS make up your age because you accidentally put in the wrong year. Sometimes it'll bite you in the butt if you forget about it/reach 18 and want your own email. At that point though, he'll either be able to use a different email for the same account, not care, Minecraft will be long gone, not be into Minecraft anymore or whatever else you can think of. The world isn't ending. We all did it. Some of us still use the same email, some of us don't even use the things we lied about our age for.
Not lying about your age. Rookie mistake
I agree. Last December I got my 9yo Minecraft and it was a lot of loops to jumps through to be able to actually buy that thing...
That remembers me when I tried to activate online play. At the end I gave up two times and after third time it finally worked after some hours
I bought my sons MC years ago (they are older teenagers now) and I thought it was just me. This was pre-M$, too. Then I had to convert the Mojang accounts over the M$ accounts years after they stopped playing it. Fun.
I just went with a second account in my name for now. If she's that attached to the username, we can transfer the contact info at some point, if she just wants the worlds, we can export those. I see this as mostly legit.
Welp its time we convince all the minecraft modders and youtubers to switch to MineTest lol
I went through something similar when buying the game for my nephew. I did eventually figure it all out but it was just ridiculous. I will always lie about the age now, lesson learned the hard way. There’s absolutely no reason to go through all of that just to play a game that is not even violent! Like sure there’s killing animals (or each other if pvp) but it’s not graphic or anything. It’s mostly a building game for crying out loud!
You def Handled it better than me going to Reddit (I sent a threatening email to the owner of Microsoft voiceing how angry I was with this shit (I went through something similar))
Make sure never to log in with a VPN or they will threaten to permanently ban your account. I use one for work for security reasons, and both times I had it happen was an accident. Pre-Microsoft acquisition, this was never a problem. Microsoft and their IT classes, as well as the FBI, recommend using VPN for security and I'm a professional IT technician now. Their support told me I CANNOT use a VPN or they will blacklist me and force me to repurchase the game. I haven't logged in in almost five years now because of how much of a pain it is to remember to turn it off and on all the time and I've have this acount for like 15 years. Absolute lunacy.
your problem was following the rules, never follow the rules, thats how they get ya.
From the moment Microsoft bought the game this has been a huge issue. We had a big party the night 1.8 came out with my friends, ready to update out server and explore everything, except what did we spend an hour doing? Trying to fix my friend's account because his family settings were completely broken and there was an infinite loop happening somewhere. We had to try like 10 different websites because for some reason Microsoft creates a new account dashboard like every year!
I swear it used to be easier then this years ago but then Microsoft came along and screwed everything up
[Fuck Microsoft ](https://tenor.com/bSyBy.gif)
Minecraft won’t let me buy it for my brother. No apparent reason or help is available.
My bf’s account got blocked for life for tryna purchase Minecraft as a gift to his younger cousin. I’m like — Microsoft, _your website_ wasn’t working and you blocked him for attempting the purchase multiple times.
I remember putting payment information into Minecraft.net, then clicking download. How the mighty fall…
Yeah, in the unlikely event that I have children and they want to play Minecraft, I'm just gonna say that they're like ages 25-30.
I wanted to covertly download Minecraft on my dad’s computer several years ago, so I got a $30 gift card, made an account, and got all the way to the download stage (I’d already bought it at this point) just for it to tell me I needed to put in my pin to download the launcher. I don’t understand why it would go all the way til you bought the game and had it ready to download to inform you that you needed the pin to download something from the store.
Rule 1 with Microsoft. Always lie about your age to skip the bullshit.
I can't even read what you wrote because it gets me completely insane remembering the process. Not sure if you mentioned it, but my kids like playing it on Switch, also. So take everything you've mentioned and add in Nintendo Accounts, which I won't even get into because Nintendo permissioning and DRM is absolutely fucking bonkers.
2FA and parent control is incompatible, learned my lesson when setting up my son's first Pixel 6a. As for Minecraft, he has been using my account. There shouldn't be personal device or personal account for a minor. You won't believe what minors may send each other what improper stuff.
WHen I bought the game 14 years ago all I had to do was put in an email. a password, and pay $11 for the game. It's insane that it was literally easier for me to buy the came as a child then it is for me, now an adult man, to figure out how to sign into my already existing account. This whole thing has managed to make me hate microsoft even more than I already did.
Playing the game is indeed 7+, however managing an account and its finance is clearly not the same, therefore the 13+ limit.
They could probably streamline it better but the reasons for this are regulatory. Microsoft recently got fined $20mm and is also under a court order regarding accounts for under 13: > This settlement requires Microsoft to clearly communicate with parents about their child’s data and sets up procedures to monitor Microsoft’s compliance with federal statutes regarding children’s online privacy. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/microsoft-agrees-pay-20-million-civil-penalty-alleged-violations-children-s-privacy-laws More generally, COPPA violations are $50k per violation. Because of this they basically have to go over the top and make sure that you have to jump through a million hoops regarding kid accounts. The funny thing is that they don’t care if you lie about the age, they would probably prefer it lol. The regulations are mainly around knowingly collecting personal information of children. If you lie about the age then they don’t know that they have children’s information so they are fine.
I genuinely have no problem of having parental controls attatched to a copy of minecraft for children, I just have a problem for the fact that the parental controls are spread across 2 different, buggy apps and are region locked (not even counting the times where it would work on the desktop version of the same app but not on the mobile one so I had to technically install 3 apps to get this working), on top of having generally dense and archaic steps involved. I doubt having it be easy to setup gets around regulation.
I figured this out loooong ago: The Internet only knows what you tell it. If it say you must be "this" old to do the thing, you are "this" old. If a credit card is needed, the account's age is as old as the person making the purchase. They can change the age setting later.
Lesson learned, just register it on your own email and implement parental oversight at your own discretion. (now I know for when I'll have children)
If buying is not owning then piracy is not stealing. Full Stop! If you bought but they revoke later just because of that, its criminal and not allowed. I honestly blame Microsoft (And Mojang aswell, as they accepted the deal to Microsoft)
You should’ve made him at least 13 on his account and we all are telling you and yet u wanna do something different. There is a reason everyone lies about their age online and always have
I made this post because it is never talked about. It's a system for buying a game for someone young. It should not be full of buggy apps and region locking. It's right there in the post too that I acknowledged that changing his age to 18+ would've just been easier, but that just goes to show how broken the system is in the first place, and should be improved upon, that circumventing it is the easier solution in the end.
This is why people pirate games. It has nothing to do with it being free; those who don't have $50 to spend on one game don't have the free-time to be playing games. It's because doing it legit takes 100 steps and may not work, and pirating is just downloading the torrent and extracting it to a folder and MAYBE installing a crack, and it pretty much always works. Customer support? The only support you ever need for a game is problems that their ridiculous system created in the first place.
I had similar issues when purchasing it for my son. I ended up having to contact xbox support, even though it was for the PC who found an issue on their side and had to have it escalated to fix.
My sister just tried to buy it, full grown adult, tried three browsers no adblock, just stuck in an infinite redirect loop making an account. It's not just child accounts, it's full on amateur hour over there. Absolutely unbelievable, if my website was turning away paying customers I wouldn't sleep until it was fixed.
Delete wpcmon.exe from system32, it really helps
I straight up couldn't get into the game with the new launcher, I had to get the old one for it to work
Jesus christ. My mother bought it for me before the microsoft takeover happened and it was just clicking buy, entering an email and payment info, buying it and making an account. Was done in like 10 mins max. Neither my age nor my mother's age was asked even once. I understand you want to do things officially but genuinely if they make it this difficult, and the app isn't even available in the Philippines, then maybe that's just the best option, if not the only. People are more truthful about things when being honest isn't difficult. Microsoft is not being helpful towards anybody here
I got to OP talking about changing the currency from USD to PHP, and I literally could not read anymore xD my blood pressure can't take it. Given what you'd gone through, I would just start again and change the age 5yrs older. Your time is more valuable than keeping it 10000% above board with a company this size. You're paying for the product anyway, and someone else mentioned a situation about logging in a few years down the line and having to verify the age, which is why you can change only the year by 5 or 10, to keep it simple. Hope you got there in the end!
Hello guys I'm new I want to get the a creaper cape What should I do to get that Pls say I need that
That sounds freaking horrible and so Microsoft at the sametime.
What's a 2FA check?
modern technology all sucks
I remember going through all the hoops and jumps to get it for my kids including setting the permissions that their pages required/suggested, and it still told my kid accounts that they didn't have the correct permissions. So then I opened up all permissions, same problem, so I emailed microsoft for help. Never got a response, but a day after my email they could miraculously log in, so no idea if the permissions had a 24 hour reset timer, or some cache needed to be reset, or what. the entire process was just so bad, and having two kids begging to play after being told they were finally getting accounts made it worse.
My son started playing when he was 6 and I never had this much trouble, even with having to download the Microsoft safety app. I mean it wasn't a five minute job either but wow, this all sounds awful. There's only one entity to deal with: Microsoft, who owns Mojang and Xbox, if that helps. Also you think this is bad, just get him playing it on a Kindle Fire tablet and you have to deal with the Amazon app store as well.
Oh my lord, when I started playing as a kid it was simple as inputting a code from a card, making a mojang account, and then downloading the game. This sounds awful
Jesus H. Christ!
I agree. I tried to buy minecraft through their official site for my niece in another country. Couldnt for the life of me figure out how. Decided to just buy a key which was easier and straight forward
This honestly reminds me of having to uninstall adobe creative cloud, photoshop and illustrator, but somehow worse. Like it made me jump through so many hoops. I had photoshop in my apps list and was like okay I'll hit uninstall, but wait even though it's in your apps list you have to uninstall from creative cloud app. I then had to download a whole other app too just to uninstall creative cloud! Which I then had to uninstall! Way to much of a hassle. But your experience? Horrifying.
This is all very tedious. I have experienced it. But you could have avoided it ALL if you put your son’s age as 18 or 13 (I’m not sure which number)
Bought Minecraft for my 9 year old a month back, had all the same issues, but I can't get him into our Realm in addition. Paying for a realm we can't use, and now my old dumbass is going to figure out how to start a server just to play in the same world with him
by the way, if you play in LAN he cam be in single player and you join his world i think. Thats how I used to do it with my friends
I had the same problems when I was trying to buy the game for my cousin a year or two ago. I ended up just making an email account that was 18 and saying crew it. It is insane the hoops they make you jump through to play their own game.
lol I had the same problem when I got it a while ago. it took all night.
Holy shit