Mojang Makes A Good Ban Decision. People Still Upset.

Two hours ago as of writing this, the Youtube channel FitMC (better knowns as "the 2b2t news guy") uploaded a video talking about how griefers were banned from Minecraft.

[Youtube] Minecraft is now BANNING Griefers

Unfortunately this video is spreading FUD about this. Mojang did the correct thing in this situation. They've been making many misstep lately, but this is not one of them. I want to make it known when they are doing the right thing so they can continue to do it more.

To summarize, the griefing group known as The Fifth Column had their Minecraft accounts banned for 12 years. They used dedicated tools to automate identifying and indexing open Minecraft servers not using a whitelist to locate and target users for attacks. They then used this information to coordinate griefing attacks using hacked clients to destroy the hard work of others. More recently, they brought an extra amount of attention to themselves by targeting 50 live-streamers in a single week.

The griefers publicly incriminated themselves by posting videos to Youtube of themselves committing the acts. Mojang used this evidence to administer bans to the accounts.

Now to address some of the videos claims.

Banning these members based on footage and screenshots is unreliable because they can be faked.

False.

The videos used as evidence were uploaded by the users themselves to their own Youtube channels. The likelihood that someone spoofed their accounts, staged the griefing events, hacked into their Youtube accounts, and planted the videos as evidence ahead of time, without anyone on the griefing team noticing, is so astronomically small that it's not a possibility worth considering.

Unlike with chat reports, where the Mojang team is given very little context to decide a ban, this is an example of Mojang actually doing that research everyone wants them to do.

It just so happens that the users left a confession of their acts with evidence open for anyone to watch on a public platform. There is no walking back from that. They cornered themselves with this. Mojang has absolute certainty who was involved in the griefing group.

This reminds me of the 2021 January 6 United States Capitol attack where members of the group gloated by posting pictured of themselves in the act to social media, then tried to squirm their way out when reality caught up to them.

The users incriminated themselves. Did they really think Mojang employees couldn't use Youtube?

This does not mean you have to now fear faked videos of your account being used for ban reasons. There was very good evidence that the videos used were legitimate.

Accounts were banned retroactively.

False.

A retroactive ban would mean that a rule was put into place, then have the accounts banned for doing that before the rule was set in place. This is not what happened.

The accounts that were part of the group did so at a time when it was against the terms of service. They are not being banned for a rule that was added later. Everyone was banned together.

As of now, there's no reason to fear your account is suddenly going to be banned for new rules.

Mojang is inconsistent with their reason for the ban.

False.

Mojang clearly stated that the reason for their ban was Harassment and Bullying.

At 5:27 in the video, Mojang is clarifying that hacked clients were *used* in the act of Harassment and Bullying. This elevated the actions of the group above the typical gameplay experience. They didn't just place a bucket of lava on top of a user's house; they obliterated everything in an unfair manner that's not possible through gameplay.

To interpret this as Mojang banning them *for* using hacked clients is misrepresenting what was actually said.

Mojang is not banning modded clients. You will not be banned for using Optifine.

Hacked clients are very different. There's a clear distinction between the intentions of hacking and modding in this context.

You're free to use a hacked client in your own worlds and servers, but using them to cheat and harass on uninvited servers is quite clearly bad behavior.

The startup message being different when the users attempted to join the "modern" version of Minecraft is not a direct message posted by Mojang to the player. There are a set group of strings that can be used to populate that part of the message field. The index for each likely got shifted as new strings were added.

This bug should be fixed, but it is not evidence that Mojang can't keep their ban reasoning straight. They can contact Mojang directly for a clearer explanation if needed, which they did, then chose to ignore. Prioritize the human response as the reason in this case.

Conclusions

The banning of The Fifth Column is a special case in Mojang moderation. There is clear evidence including public confessions of the acts by the users that they were the ones behind the rule breaking behavior.

Their actions extend beyond simple single server moderation decisions. Their actions threaten the users of the game as a whole. At that level of threat, it is appropriate for Mojang to distribute a global ban.

The members of The Fifth Column are stirring up disingenuous reasons to try and blame Mojang, including trying to drag Notch into the discussion, who has had nothing to do with Minecraft for nearly a decade now. They are trying to push the false idea that they were banned for using hacked clients, and that somehow their actions abided by the Minecraft ToS (they do not).

The incident and ban decision is completely unrelated to the implementation of the Chat Reports feature. A big issue with chat reports was the insufficient information reported by it to make accurate judgement calls. For this banning, Mojang did what everyone wanted, going above and beyond to find additional evidence and understand the circumstances before issuing bans.

I'm surprised at the sheer number of people in the comments sections in favor of FitMC's conclusions.

Side Note

This is unrelated to the video topic, but I'd like to call attention to the last line of FitMC's video description.

This video has nothing to do with speedrunners, 100 days, hardcore, "minecraft but", 1.20, Camels, sniffers, hermitcraft, QSMP, trails and tales, or any of those other topics. No MrBeast in this one either.

This is keyword loading. It's scummy behavior that's intended to manipulate search results. Users who include this in their descriptions are attempting to clog up search results for those topics with their own videos, which is disruptive to the functionality of search engines.

FitMC, don't be part of the problem.