Minecraft: The Community, Management, and why it's important. (Video Essay)
Channel: Between the Lines
Date: 09/12/2022

The recent merge of Java and Bedrock edition caused a new feature to be introduced: Chat Reporting. When this feature was introduced, most of the Minecraft community had been starving for new content, and you-tubers saw this as an opportunity to gain viewership. Previously, the community was frustrated over many things, mob votes, design principles, etc; but now they had a target that was indisputably disliked by many. The CR system was still in alpha, and it had many ways to be exploited. You-tubers such as ItzJhief used this as leverage, making multiple videos on how flawed the old CR system was. Then, over the coming weeks, Mojang fixed the CR system (fixed exploits, bugs, etc). However, the videos did not stop. Individuals such as ItzJhief kept repeating the same things over and over, and their audience believed that the chat reporting system was still as deeply flawed as it was in alpha. This led to many articles being published about chat reporting by Mojang themselves, in an attempt to clear the confusion; However, they were conveniently overlooked by the public eye. To content creators, chat reporting was a way to unify the Minecraft community against Minecraft itself, and any threat to that “unity” was quickly overlooked, as it would cause a loss of profit. To make matters even worse, an organization started by the name of “SaveMinecraft”; this organization wanted you to skip 1/3rds of The Cave Update simply because of the Chat Reporting feature. Some even went as far to say that 1.19 contained chat reporting, when it didn’t. This led many impressionable players  to avoid 1.19 altogether, missing out on new content in the process. This made the player-base even more frustrated. Despite 1.19 having one of the most visually, auditorally, and functionally impressive locations and biomes to date, players still chose to focus on Chat Reporting, since that’s mostly what Youtubers were talking about as “news”. Keep in mind, no one had been banned via the Chat Reporting system, and 5 months later, there is still no news about any player being banned via the system. The massive drama & hysteria over the situation was purely because of the community essentially causing its own outrage. This massive hysteria is why most mods during that time chose to stay on 1.18.2, as well. This led many individuals to choose mods as sources of new content, instead of updating to a newer version. Since players could install any mods they chose, they often compared the quantity of features within their chosen mod to the quantity of features within the average minecraft update. This led to individuals believing that Modders are better developers compared to Mojang, when that’s simply not true. The mods used to make these arguments often consist of 100+ team members, such as Quark or Alex Mobs. Since these mods are open-source, ANYONE can contribute, making development a lot easier for modders. They don’t need to worry about developing Minecraft for multiple platforms and versions either, unlike Mojang. Modders also don’t need to worry about the marketability or management constraints that are applied onto Mojang.

My stance on chat reporting? It’s an overhated and over-exploited topic that has led to the confusion of many. I will continue to update past 1.19, as the features within the next update are pretty nice and functionally neat.

I am not affiliated with PhoenixSC, Minecraft, DoctorR4T, Mojang, Geometry Dash, Mumbo Jumbo, sandstorm, Dream, or Technoblade.

Thanks for watching my video-essay.