fair warning: the post is a non constructive rant where I just vent some anger


So the big day arrived - the "Better together" update for minecraft ( no longer "pocket/console/win10" just minecraft ) arrived, the kids were up in arms; at long last there would be rockets, banners, coloured glass and armor stands.

The joy lasted maybe all of 5 minutes.


As of a few patches ( around 1.0.0 or so ) discovering local games that are hosted via WiFi is not possible, we've gotten around that by using static IPs and adding each others IPs under servers.

But now you cant join servers with out an Xbox Live account.


well shit...

After grumbling about it for quite a while and trying to come up with other solutions ( local games hosted over cable can be discovered by WiFi clients - but that's hardly a solution ) I caved and went to xbox live to create accounts.

I had an old account from way back when the xbox 360 launched, and after fumbling about their web site I found where you could add child accounts.

Great!

"enter email" - teh hell? they are way to young to have emails, guess I'll use the "create email" link.

After a million hoops and "next" buttons I managed to created an account for each of my children using made up names.

Only I couldn't manage their accounts - only track their location ( not at all creepy microsoft why the f**k are you tracking people? ), turned that off.

on a hunch I logged into one of the child accounts in a different browser and was asked to create an xbox live account ... wtf had I been doing so far?

About a million hoops later child 1 appeared on the parent account - only named 'Winterlilly345' (something like it at least :P ) which is the name that would appear in-game I could change the name only once with out having to get my wallet and I really did not want their real names ( which they usually use ) anywhere near microsofts creepy tracking .. oh well a problem for later.

repeat the million of hoops for child 2

I can't manage their friend list and family members dont appear on it automatically

so for each child I need to enable them to add friends log in add all family members ( mom needs an account too - another million million hoops ) then turn off the ability to add friends.

at this point I'm tired of the service but at least I wont have to muck with it again.

I log in with child 1's account in minecraft to test out the limitations I've put in place.

Turns out you can't play with the people on your friend list unless you enable "multiplayer servers" - which would also allow them to play on the servers microsoft added to the list.... WHAT THE FUCK? :><:

So I now have the choice of either not letting them play together or letting them play with a bunch of random pedophiles online?

At this point in time I am livid with rage

after a while I cool a little off and decided, you know what they will just have to do with rockets and coloured glass for the time being - I'll roll back to the previous version of minecraft.

The I remembered - they are playing on iPads, so you cant decide to play older versions

Why can't every thing just be Linux based?


For the time being Linux offers a solution to my problem - running mcpelauncher on my computer and hosting the game over ethernet means they can play together locally, but where previously their mates could connect to our external IP and join them this no longer possible ( unless their parents gives them an xbox account with server access ... :><: god damn microsoft )