We love the rare instances where a company makes a proactive effort to fix a problem before customers have to resort to a barrage of complaints. In this case, Mojang apologized for an upgrade glitch for Minecraft users, and as reader Derick puts it, “You just gotta love it when a company assumes responsibility for a billing mistake without the need to be publicly shamed first.”
Apparently the glitch occurred on Tuesday, where people buying Minecraft on PayPal didn’t get upgraded to a premium account, which was what was supposed to happen. For those not in the know, Minecraft is all about a virtual world that resembles Legos, where players move blocks of stuff around to make other stuff like buildings, collect stuff to put in those structures and there are also spiders and zombies to fight. Although that’s the extent of our knowledge, players can create some pretty intricate things.
Derick says he received an email from Mojang letting know users what had happened and promising to fix it, reading in part:
This past Tuesday there was a glitch in our system where people who purchased Minecraft through PayPal were not upgraded to premium. Additionally, we don’t have the user info in order to upgrade the accounts manually. We only have the email linked to each PayPal account.
Yesterday afternoon when we realized this, our entire web team got to work trying to figure out exactly what we could do in this situation. We decided the best solution was to quickly refund everyone’s money through PayPal. You should receive an email from PayPal letting you know that your payment is being refunded.
We cannot apologize enough for the frustration this has caused you. We are working to prevent this problem from occurring and also setting up a better support system to help assist customers. We’d like to give you a gift code as a way of apologizing for our error.
Code: ***redacted***
To redeem your code visit https://www.minecraft.net/user/redeem and follow the instructions.
We hope you’ll have a great time Minecrafting!
Team Mojang
Too bad other companies wait until customers have to get all sassy to get anything done around here.
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Minecraft is full of win. Great game.
We should have a BCIA Tournament every year.
I would suggest a global tournament so we can include Mojang.
Is there a best company in Sweden competition?
I used to play quake with the guy now known as Notch. I would expect nothing less than for his company to be run with openness, honesty, and integrity. The guy’s really a class act.
I have put some serious time in Minecraft.
And this isn’t really a “Game Company” the game was started by Notch, an individual programmer, and became quite successful and after releasing several versions that people payed for he hired some teams and formed a company.
It is what gaming should be, legitimate gamers, making good quality games that people WANT to spend money on.
Ok, hopefully not too OT, but my almost 9 year old is crazy creative and can build anything with Lego’s. We are conservative parents in the respects of sexual content and moral content (no GTA, for example), but not concerned with most video game violence (he plays Halo, he understands real from fake, I’m ok with it). Would this be a fun game for him? Too old? We don’t do any other online games now because they’re either too young (Club Penguin he used to love), or I worry about other people’s questionable language (like hearing f** every other word on XBox Live…).
Any thoughts?
Simply, yes this is a good game for kids and adults with no adult content. But like any good parent I always suggest supervision, or better play it with them trust me its easy to setup a server (can run on a laptop or existing computer while you have a client open) and play with your kid. I will warn you though… this game is addictive, i have lost weeks to it and my wife worries some times that i dug too deep
Yes yes a millions times yes. The game is essentially a Lego set on steroids.
Just be a little wary of online as, well, with great creative tools come great misuse, but you can’t join a server right now without knowing the IP anyway, so it should be fine, plus you can just nto give him the password to the account you buy it on, as it lets you play offline.
Plus he can use texture packs to make the game look however he likes.
There are tons of server lists out there.
Minecraft is perfect for a kid to be creative with!
Like the previous posters said tho, might want to keep him off the multiplayer servers until he’s a bit older. ^^” language and design can sometimes be a bit mature.
Just steer clear of the sex monster in level six and you’ll be fine. : )
My 5 year old has her own world she plays with (with the monsters turned off). She has built some amazing things in the game. As other have said, keep them in the single player game. They wont be missing anything unless you want to play with them as well, in that case you can rent your own server for almost nothing, or host one at your house for free. The community has really come together to help newbies with this.
http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Minecraft_Wiki
My 7 year-old nephew adores Minecraft, go for it.
The game is awesome for kids because of the different modes. Adults and older kids can enjoy building while battling monsters, but monsters can be turned off (Peaceful mode) and worlds can be made in “creative mode” where it’s less about adventuring to find items and all about building cool stuff.
Also, any adult who buys it for a kid will end up playing it themselves. It’s just too much fun not to. The world generation alone usually draws people in to give it a whirl.
I always loved the “sex is terrible but violence is A-OK” line of reasoning from parents when I worked at Gamestop.
Well, sex will someday be a part of his life. It is a thing he will experience, and boy’s bodies start to tell them they are ready to experience it before their minds are ready (in our eyes) for such a thing. Sex is a normal, natural, and (in the right context) amazing thing. However, violence is not. Violence will never be a part of his life, hopefully. He is not a violent kid, is super smart and understands the difference between video game violence and real violence. I am also concerned about hate speech that he’d see. I know Xbox live is full of racial and homosexual hate speech, which I’d hate for him to be exposed to. I don’t like bad words in games, but I’ll take F**k over GD or f*g or racial speech any day.
In additional to the comment below, which correctly say a lego-loving child would enjoy it, is some of more advanced skills in the game.
One of the bigger ones is electricity – sort of. Notch created a unique source of power than lets you create electrical circuits, and has added a lot of functionality with that – such as minecarts, trap doors, music boxes, all sorts of stuff. Once he gets past the lego-building aspect of it as he gets older he can utilize the more advanced feartures.
My only caveat is if you are so conservative that a game with undead zombies and skeletons is offensive to you on religious grounds. The undead and the “violence” of fighting monsters are very abstract in Minecraft and I don’t expect them to be scary or even de-sensitizing to an 8 year old, but you can always turn the monsters off to get started.
You can check out several video channels on YouTube where people record their buildings and adventures in Minecraft, often parents with their kids. For example Minecraft Family adventures by minecraftwb (which is also a very family-friendly server, but the monsters are turned on).
Not the online version. We mock the conservative fundamentalist players on our server because they are so easy to get angry. There’s a world filter, but it’s not like they don’t know what we’re saying when we tell them to go faug themselves.
Let them play in offline mode, online mode is for the people who can handle it.
Oh oh, on a similer element, Terraria is also very good as well! Sometimes compared to Minecraft, but it has a few more adventure elements.
I don’t normally suggest changes to an article, but the headline was a little ambiguous.
You meant: Game Company Apologizes For Failure To Upgrade Purchases [Without Being Publicly Shamed First]
I read: Game Company Apologizes For [Failure To Upgrade Purchases Without Being Publicly Shamed First]
Agreed.
That was how I read it, too. Much happier story than I expected when I clicked the title.
3rd’ed
I’m more of a Dwarf Fortress kind of gal, but Minecraft is cool too.
You can build some crazy stuff in Minecraft. Like a working computer. Very meta…
http://boingboing.net/2010/11/12/working-8-bit-cpu-in.html
I
If you have never played… don’t. The game needs a warning label for how addictive it is!
> Code: ***redacted***
I tried that on the minecraft web site, but they rejected it! Waaaaah!
I love this game so much, I pay for a hosting service for my “world”! Now if Craftbukkit could only keep up…………
I wish I could host it publicly from home, but damn does it use a lot of bandwidth. :X
So instead it’s locked away behind my firewall. I just leave it running because I like my trees to grow and animals having the run of the place.
If only someday they actually finish the game instead of making endless trivial changes…
They already said the game will never be truly finished. I say this is better than letting the game stagnate.
um… it is “finished” >_>… it’s got an ending and rolling credits and everything
Mojang changed their splash screen to “SOPA, PIPA, how about NOPA” the other day.
Minecraft is a great, creative game, with no anti-consumer tricks.
It’s DRM free, and Notch knows any pirate is a potential customer.
All things considered, this sounds like more of a PayPal issue than a Mojang issue, and the headline should reflect that Mojang did the right and generous thing, and PayPal did, well, what we’ve come to expect of PayPal. PayPal couldn’t provide a list of who paid, yet had enough information to reverse the transactions? Really? Hopefully “We are working to prevent this problem from occurring” means they’ll be dropping PayPal.
That’s all well and good, until you get blown up by a creeper!
my brother in law was showing me this game the other evening and talking about it. Apparently it seems very legoish which considering I had a whole pile of legos when I was a kid, I could see the creativity in this.
THey have been looking to build another server to play on, and the server requirements apparently are not that high up there. I have a amd duron 1.8Ghz just sitting in my basement that can handle up to 2GB memory (4 memory slots) and they acted like that would be premium for this game.
I may look into playing when finances settle back down.
It doesn’t play well on low-end graphics, like Intel’s integrated. ‘Just fine on any discrete graphics card I’ve tried, as well as some Nvidia integrated.
The title makes it sound like it took shaming to make them issue refunds