Update on Songoda: Brianna reached out to me discussing the terms of service and agreed that they needed to be changed. They have made drastic changes to these terms, fixing nearly every point I mentioned in this video and clarifying others. I am very impressed with their effort to make this situation better. On top of this, I made a mistake at 13:08 where I misinterpreted this part of their TOS. This is completely my fault and I take 100% blame for it. In this clause, it mentions that these rules on rights are all user-submitted content other than software. Meaning things like comments, photos, and other non-plugin items. So, what I say here is false and I wanted to let everyone know.

Having a “$3000” dollar rank permanently on sale to trick people into thinking it’s a deal is extremely illegal in a lot of places.

Funnily enough, I used to moderate one of those “temporary servers”, (Ultra Prison). ...it was terrible. All of the staff agreed how horribly pay to win it was, and I quit after I saw that someone had gotten in serious trouble with their parents for spending a lot of money on a practically necessary rank to feel like you’re progressing at all on the server. Loved the people, hated the system.

if you guys stumble upon a p2w server then dupe the hell out of it and break the economy

Some of these server owners deserve to be in jail for fraud and scams

how the heck did I not find this earlier, good video!

Why do small children have access to debit/credit cards in the first place?

buying a new minecraft account is cheaper then the unbans lol

Paid unbanning basically tells me that the server owners and mods like banning people for no reason at all. I have also seen some crazy ranks that cost way more and offer items that are unavailable ingame.

I sleep like a baby at night knowing I've never spent money on Mineplex.

"[VIP++++]", I have never ever even thought I might see that many pluses on a single rank.

Remember when Notch was against the pay2win logic of mc servers but then people hated him for it and then he sold the game to Microsoft? Look where we are now.

I’m sorry but some random stranger threatens self harm over bad reviews on Minecraft plug-ins, I’m gonna tell them to go ahead and do it.

There will never objectively be the "good old days" when talking about issues like these. They have always been there, you just didn't happen to stumble upon them.

It's the end of an era.

I'm curious as to how MineSuperior can still be accessed in many countries, as the practice of falsely discounting prices that never existed is illegal in many places, like Australia.

Mojang did add a server blacklist for Minecraft version 1.9.4 and it did blacklist some Pay-To-Win servers, but they ended up removing it in the version after because of what I think is community backlash. Again. Expected.

some servers start new seasons to just literally reset the save, so people have to buy in-game money and items again, they don't even fix game breaking bugs one skyblock server that i've played (no ads) had a sell wand that allows you to sell items from chest immeiately, but there was an exploit: it allowed players to sell items from chests even if they can't open it (stealing items from other players), the server owner didn't even try to fix this bug, or even remove this sell wand (90% of people were for just removing it), but the owner literally started the new season to reset the save and make people buy stuff again (ofc items like elytras, beacons and OP armors/tools could be dropped only from the legendary chest), there were quests that were giving legenendary keys, but if your RNG really sucked, you couldn't do more quests due to the softlock (which is very normal, because that chest literally drops items worth 10 stacks of cobblestone 90% of the times)

7:50 if iremember correctly this is Illegal in Europe and in Australia. you cannot sell something constlantly "on sale" to manipulate everyone. sales are to get rid of excessive and seasonal stock, not to scam children

Why is everyone suddenly so upset about this. This has been happening for years. When Mojang tried to do something about it, by changing the EULA, this whole community (the competitive community - pvp, factions, etc.) backlashed like crazy and wanted them to revert that change. They did not. And now, years later, this issue is still ongoing - but now it is suddenly a problem? Seems like you at least grew up... That also makes me think though: how can these servers exist with the current EULA. Why doesn't Mojang try harder blacklisting these kind of servers?

Check out the video I mentioned in the beginning once you are done watching this one: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/mbpzhNpmr7TVpY0.html

man, this video is a video

I'm a former developer on the songoda marketplace. I can't say I had a bad experience, but their plugins give off an illusion of being well made, and are so full of bugs its usually not worth it. Also, I was previosely in their discord, and the owner (Brianna) got so mad she deleted a bunch of channels and swore at an employee, who was clearly used to it. I never liked them locking all their plugins behind patron recently, making them super expensive and preventing old buyers from downloading new versions. All and all, I always got a very sketchy feeling from them, and I suggest avoiding giving them money at the very least.

When it showed Songonda I legit thought you were gonna say “Songonda this” you know what. I’m glad you did not betray me like that.

It’s so sad how this video only has 9k views robo is super underrated and makes great content

minesuperior is actually doing the same thing that got fallout 76 sued

It doesn’t help that some servers now ask way too personal questions for voting on their servers. Just the other day, I was on a pixelmon server, when I tried to vote for their server, their website asked for my drivers license to vote…wth?!?

5:22 _If the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that law only exists for the lower class_

Nah scummy servers always exist. We just were young and now understanding.

A youtuber known as AllyMCC did videos on Hypixel. She apparently was a mod for them at one point and had exposed some things about them

Hey RoboKast, just wanted to let you know that you forgot to link to the other video you talked about at the beginning of this one in the description.

I played on the minesuperior server, and left a few days ago. I had looked at their website and was actually shocked that even this server was trying to scam ppl with the ‘on sale’ thing like you mentioned (part of the reason why I decided to leave). Anyways thank you Robocast for raising awareness of these manipulative methods these servers are using, I just wish the owners would actually pay the consequence.

I remember running a fairly popular at the time server in 1.8.1, donations were just that, a donation, no perks, just helping cover the costs no world hub, a few bukkit plugins we messed around with for fun, and it was run by a group of friends chipping in a few dollars from their casual jobs.

As a past and ex-frequent player of MineSuperior, I can definitely say that the money almost never went to fixing the server. Problems would continue for long periods of time, even after notifying the staff. I wouldn't be surprised if the money never went to fixing the server at all. Now that I think back to my time on MS, I regret every penny I spent even if I got some joy out of it. Edit: Grammar

The funny thing is that these loot box's being marked as "on sale" are not actually on sale, they are originally that price but put the on sale thing to urge people to get a "steal" price. (sorry if you mentioned this in the video not sure if you did or not.)

I remember going on Mine-superior and using a hacked client with a X-ray bot mine all the Diamond ore in a stupid large amount by AFKing overnight while the bot did it’s work. After that did not get me banned i used the auto build feature to spam build nether rack phalic objects on creative while chat spamming to look at my plot. Only then Did I get banned.

Me, safe on a full vanilla server, watching the drama from afar...

Oh, from the thumbnail, I thought this was a creepypasta video about some ghost in a "modern" modded server lol.

Hi Robokast, I'm one of the investigators against these types of servers and I've found out that mass information spread rather than crashing or duping servers is the way to go. I made a video about the subject on servers like Hero Mines, and it made a large impact and has informed thousands of people. My team and I are planning to make a petition for Mojang to take much more action into this issue because it has begun to get worse this year. A lot of KZfaqrs have been teaming up to help out.

Putting the prices up insanely high then pretending to put it on sale for its originally intended price? That’s illegal in the UK and Australia, and a lot of other countries too.

God. Minecraft's got it pretty bad, but if you think that it or GTA have it the worst, you need to go take a look at what server owners have done on your (and our, to all the old viewers) Unturned. Nelson himself said himself in a recent AMA on the official Unturned Discord that he does not plan to do anything about possibly illegal & untraceable transactions that happen regularely on the major Unturned servers. And whilst I may just be slightly overdramatizing, by making it sound as bad as possible, the question I asked him very much resembled in meaning what's written above. A vast majority of currently popular Unturned servers, and as a former RP server owner myself, I am very ashemed to have to say this, are based on the Roleplay genre, not on PvP, unlike Minecraft. The most popular (and the most pay to win) servers are either KZfaqr-ran or servers whose owners pay KZfaqrs to make videos on them; just like for Minecraft or basically any other game, but there's a catch - the game is free to play, and there will always be new kids ready to steal their mum's credit card to donate to some server. (And while I am aware this is true for games that you actually have to buy, too, it is undeniably more severe on F2P games; but since we're on the theme already - Unturned-levels of P2W can be found pretty easily on cracked Minecraft servers, as an example) I fully understand why you have stopped making, and most likely aren't going to make, any more Unturned videos - the game's just a cesspool now.

Not sure if you take requests/suggestions but if so, could you ever make a video about Monkey Quest?

I can always sleep easily knowing that I've never fell into that microtransaction trap that some servers do. On most servers I just ignore them and try to have fun. Really wish this one gamemode that had some 50v50 would come back, was great fun seeing chaotic battles, nowadays it's always boring 4v4s.

Thank you, now I will start my own pay2win temporary server.

I've worked as an admin on a few servers (yes, worked, getting paid) and this was a sad and true fact. It's one thing to support the server and get benefits, but it's another when feeling like it's needed and exploiting young and impressionable minds are manipulated into it by mistake, as we can fix that to have a wider and cycling playerbase, but it gets real when they're actively trying to grow that system to have a small but addicted playerbase that will keep paying. Some servers do it better than others, and luckily I have never been a part of something as extreme as some of these examples in the video, but making a proper system that even allows a server to survive without making it pay to win is something extremely difficult. This doesn't condone it, but makes it a normalized practice in the business. I don't even need to mention how messed up it is in communities with elitism fueling the very selection of staff, and dark, disturbing normalization of behaviours such as bullying and doxing, how impaired the emotional development of young teens ends up as a result of toxicity, and predators.

lol.. it's amazing how most of these servers still run despite Mojang hammering down on servers disobeying their EULA. Guess their lawyers really need to do a better job.

Regarding Rockstar it can be argued they are equally as scummy with their online mode. This comment will probably catch some hate but I don't think it can be denied that it's become pay 2 win.

The video Robo used in the beginning is from TheMisterEpic.

It's amazing so many servers expect you to pay $800 for the ability to spawn invincible armor and money at will. I've literally compiled a private list of 44 shamelessly pay to win servers, with the depressing part being that most of them are very popular. It started out as an attempt to remind myself that certain servers are awful so I don't investigate the same one twice, but clearly it got out of hand. Someday, I'd love to create my own server list that lets you filter out certain shitty practices along with each server having independently written descriptions of everything that makes them pay to win or otherwise scummy. Plus I don't have the money to host a website. I wonder if there's a way to achieve a similar effect with a wiki or something, but I don't know if anyone would actually be interested in such a thing.

This one server I'm on that I paid $150 for a kit/rank was taken away when the server closed down and reopened. They have the same domain and server IP, everything about this server and the new kits are the same from price to items, only the names are different however when asking if they can give me back my kit they will say "these kits no longer exist, you must rebuy them but we give OG players a little discount!" bullshit they still exist their right there! I don't recall ever buying my rank under the pretense it was subscription based, no where did the TOS state that, I'm entitled receive what I bought and the Minecraft EULA states this as well but Mojang hasn't done anything about it.

i remember playing minesuperior in like 2011 as a 10 year old when it was minecraft superior gaming they’re scummy as hell now lmfao

A lot of people already knew this kinda stuff; which is why most people avoid these kinds of servers, I get how pump and dump faction servers can get under the radar; but it's horrifying that bigger long-term servers are able to get away with this.

I used to run a Minecraft server back in December of 2020. I remember kids begging to buy ranks on the server. I told them that I don't sell ranks and would only sell ranks once the server was up for a certain amount of time. I remember getting these really sketchy guys asking me to give access to my server. Saying that they will make me rich and everything. I didn't let those scammers get in the way, but I later closed the server because of family drama and to focus on college.

I remember a time when a Minecraft server was just a survival world that had a few other kids who had mod just so they could make giant pixel art at spawn. The good ol’ days

The only thing servers should really be doing to bring in money is completely cosmetic, simple donations, or like how your server offers ranks instantly that can be freely earned over a decent amount of time without being near impossible.

I'm glad that as a kid I spended my parents money into Club Penguin memberships and not into overpowered pay to win Minecraft Server items.

Ive actually been getting started with making my own public MC server, and it's awesome that YT just so happened to recommend me this. My goal is to hopefully make a close-nit and genuine community that I felt when I played MC Java back in 2012-2014. I remember how fresh of an experience playing on survival servers with a bunch of fancy plugins were, where the server was kept afloat in terms of gameplay by the community itself, and not just what content the server had.

the only reason im watching this is to see if hypixels ok, its the only server i go on (other then 2b2t) edit:1 so hypixel does have things that cost money, though mvp++ shouldn't be a subscription and their not things that will truly benefit edit:2 so it still seems fine, so thats good

I 100% agree on this video. I was going to make one myself the same as this, but it was going to be about 40 minutes long and go into even more detail about it. I'm probably not going to now since I just don't really focus on KZfaq. I have been running a server for the past 3 years, and it follows the EULA completely, when someone was to say buy a crate key, it will give that crate key to everyone on the server. When someone buys /fly, they only get it for 24 hours, and it gives it to the entire server for that. People can only buy cosmetic items for themselves. I wish you went more in-depth with some of the stuff, maybe talked to a bunch of server owners and their experiences because there are a lot of people out there like myself trying to make a server designed based on the gameplay, and not for the money. One of the things I think you should have talked about is all the bullshit on mcmarket, all the scams out there, the inexperienced people coming and charging a bunch of money undermining the talented people. The amount of times I've been scammed by KZfaqrs/Streamers, even though graphics and advertising is stupid. It's like no one knows what they are doing. Another example are the Minecraft discord servers where they base their whole model on getting people to pay a bunch of money to do a @everyone giving away a nitro, it's against the rules of discord to do this yet people who work at discord are also corrupt. There are summer hosts as well, hosting companies that pop up to make a bunch of money then close down, and I don't think you were kind enough on Songoda, their plugins are horrible each one of them give constant issues, the support is crap as well. I have literally never found a good developer that I've paid for, my best staff are the ones who come to my server with a similar goal, to make a place for players to enjoy, everyone who i have paid has been crap and most of the time don't know what they are doing or even care about the other side of the transaction, making you send money as Friends and Family so they can just leave without doing anything, even if you don't like their work, once they do it they feel entitled to keep all the money without trying to make it better. There is sooo much more stuff that happens as well behind the scenes and I can't wait to see more videos like this coming up calling out all this crap, it will make Minecraft a better place for the players in the long run. Even if Mojang actually enforced the EULA a bit more it would fix a lot of this. (I've even had some crazy dude try to sue me since I demoted him from my server for threatening to sue my other staff, secretly recording conversations and blackmailing, still to this day he harasses people and it's been almost a year).

I used to play on minesuperior long time ago. I remember they used to double charge people somehow who would buy donator ranks or any other items and just refuse to give any refunds. Im pretty sure thats illegal

Hey there Robokast! I was the person who you mentioned in the reddit thread about Songoda. I would like to let you know a lot of things have changed in a few months, and things have come to light. I went back to the Songoda threads to edit them with information that I had gotten and saw. If you want to talk more, feel free to reach out on discord @LoJoSho#0001 or through Syscraft ( discord.gg/Dx6SSkx ).

Thank you for clarifying these bad practices! The same is for Battlefield servers too, or pretty much any game server.

I remember in 2012 when I could find a random survival games server, go into a lobby and punch a sign to enter a game on one of the original Vareide maps or some custom maps of varying quality. The games were short, and weren't overstuffed with kits and drops and OP tools. Now SG servers just feel horrifically inaccessible and overstuffed and P2W.

wtf I remember when you had 200 subs n played unturned bro good work !

"If your business cannot sustain itself without manipulating your audience.." Literally every ultra rich Western business.

That sequence the bully: scholarship game running in the background caught me so off-guard. In a good way tho lmao

giant note: it is against multiple countries laws to fake a sale like what some of these servers are doing.

Wasn't this against the eula you HAVE to agree in order to run a server?

This is wild because I've never played anything besides survival servers with friends. I had no idea mini game servers were so complex and some were so shady.

I tried playing on MineSuperior and it was kinda crap. Their Prison game mode is locked behind a paywall, and End Cities (and the dragon) are disabled in Survival. Eventually, I got bored with it and decided to use a hack client to prod the server for weaknesses. (their security is terrible, by the way.) The only place on the server with anticheat is KitPVP. The fact that I was able to explore the server at all for two whole days with hacks on is kinda embarrassing.

I once bought the God role for the Aspiria server for like I think around $100 (it had very p2w things like flying, god items, invincibility,and even the ability to change the time), then like a month later I discovered that Horizon guy and realized that I paid for something that was super illegal. I never felt to played

“Let’s take off the rose coloured glasses” 2:04 glasses still on

I didn't know Minecraft serves had microtransactions until now

Preston who owns or owned (Not sure now) Cosmic PVP was a really cool dude who seemed to have a genuine passion for content creation and server hosting he played on his server and it kind of seemed like the server was fine now since he switched to young kids content farming his server seems to have switched to a similar farming methodology. No shade to Preston just seems like his whole goal and strategy changed which was bound to happen with age just maybe this wasn’t the best option. Great video Robo always enjoy seeing you on my notification feed ;)

I used to run my own server and I had an option for people to donate and made sure to emphasise it was completely optional. I felt scummy doing it cause at the end of the day I was essentially monetising “fun” but it was a decision that was decided upon by my own community members and whenever people did donate they’d be able to pick out the things they received in return for it and all of the money from donations went back into the server and anything left over was used to run giveaways and competitions and help me in covering other expenses. Doing it like this is not wrong. If you are going to be monetising your server you should do it in a way that your community decides on and be fully transparent on what people receive for their contributions and be transparent as to what you are doing with said money.

At least if big servers die we have the widespread concept of a SMP to fall back on. Kinda ironic that what will replace the massive server will be where servers started.

Played on servers with shops and stuff but personaly played vanilla which had no perks. But people sometimes pay 200$ for some kind of a role letting them fly etc. Left those servers due to other kind of drama, and found a server that doesn't have any shitty shop and has amazing community.

It's actually in the minecraft TOS that the marketing and selling of minecraft in-game items is prohibited and will result in a ban. But even though they give this very specific rule on their TOS, they don't seem to enforce it all that much.

Jeez, i didn't realize how bad minecraft servers can be. Another issue is, server owners can see EACH AND EVERY PLAYER'S IP! Meaning they can easiy anonymously sell ips without anyone knowing

I'm on a server that uses crates in a more decent way, when you vote for them they give you free crate keys to get a heavily enchanted item

Fell in love with one server years ago since you could get the ranks for free from vote keys. After winning a few ranks i felt the prices were fair enough to upgrade the rank. The server would later go down hill, but it was the only public server that I felt part of a community. Played with alot of the ppl there later on on private servers. Now private servers are where its at imo. Host it on some spare hardware and form your own rules. If your playing with friends you can run a server on the trust system rather than spending hours working on sign shops, land claiming systems and such. No plugins just some vanilla data packs for quality of life features and added items. I also personally like many quality of life features in Aristios’ hacked client such as shulker peek, scaffold walk, and auto tool, so having that freedom is nice.

I remember when I used to obsessively play the Jerry&Harry server because it had peaceful factions (my favorite) and I had countless purchases, (max rank, fly, set time, a whole bunch of shit) and then one day they updated the server and poof, peaceful factions was gone. Never bought anything again.

MesterMC is a hungarian minecraft server network. Its paytowin, and you don't need to buy minecraft itself. It has a custom launcher, and you have to register on THEIR website. Ranks, Skins and cosmetic stuff are unlockable by buying their virtual currency. Also their version uses optifine without permission, and you can't turn it off. Also its a trojan. It also has lootboxes. They also have a rank for hosting your own personal server from them. That you can only join with their client

I'm a simple man. I just play minecraft with my friends man. Never really understood the appeal of these massive pvp servers.

Bro, just for the record, almost every triple a game company which has a young playerbase has loot crates, games like fortnite, valorant, madden, fifa, overwatch, etc. All those rely on their playerbase trying to get not only cosmetics but in most sports games, advantages when playing by getting better players. And yes, it's the same as rockstar asking you to pay 400 dollons for their game, but they might as well be because of how grindy it is to get in-game currency, you'll be better off paying the friggin megalodon card in order to not get destroyed in multiplayer. By the end you spend way more than you're realizing in games that aren't worth that much, the problem is when it's kid's doing the spending with their parents' card. And to top it all off, game companies that do that still have the nerve to ask for full AAA price on their rebranded game from last year. Now it's not all of them and some don't do the things others do, but A LOT have at least one of those issues. Sorry for the long rant, if you got this far have a nice day :)

good vid, this is why I only play with my friends on a private server, or alone

There are issues with smaller servers too, people think that they can do better and try to destroy the existing server's reputation with lies while making their own, then they get power hungry and destroy their own community, seeing lack of interest, they try to further destroy people's confidence in the other servers in what can be best explained as "if I cant have it, nobody can" Source: I had an 8 player server that someone wanted to "run it better" where it constantly was crashing, down, and the playerbase did not like what the admin team did, along with the admin team stealing a modpack that was not authorized to be a public pack because they couldn't run a server themselves otherwise, only adding 2 mods and calling it "potatocraft"

meanwhile I’m still mad about them making wool brighter, after like 4 years

i would say the focus on generating revenue is a big problem, you cant find a server like before (only server i played for survival / factions gameplay was one where donations and rewards for it where not pushed that much, world sizes didnt exist and it even had multiple worlds running at the same time, if you played long enough you had a teleport in the other world, witch basically means you have a whole world, to explore with way less players in it, with other player builds in it already, so its also better than just single player cause you can explore places that you / someone else had previously built on). Since its a losing buisness, its not worth it and ovbiously not a lot of servers do it anymore.

I remember I was scammed of a rank on two different servers when I was like 12, I think on a Pixelmon server and a random Factions server lol, one of the servers claimed they didn't get my purchase and the other merged its server with another and I just wasn't allowed to keep my rank, really stupid but you live and learn.

I was playing on one like this. I was banned there for being rude (btw that story has a lot of mystery, I was not even on the server when that happened and admins didn't even listen to me) for 10 years, I guess because they can't do more. Unban option costs 20 dollars. I'm still banned for this day.

A good way for reviews after plugin update is to simply show the plugin version the review was made at no need to remove them

Some of this video just seems like an ad for your serv- Ohhh. I see what you did there. Nice!

You could sue these owners for doing the always discounted price, because here in Europe that's illegal.

5:30 if you can can buy and unban the mods might also try to increase demand for it

I remember when lichcraft was still a thing I was stupid enough to buy emperor for like 300 bucks. Then I got banned for calling a mod corrupt (surprise surprise, he banned me) and never got any refund until I was suddenly unbanned with zero explanation as to how or why so that was. Interesting

This just reminds me of that ‘limited edition’ thing that shows up in rolling sky every 10 attempts or so, and it basically says ‘hey! Pay one dollar for infinite revives, attempts, and no ads!’ Then in tiny text on her bottom it says ‘only for 24 hours’ Honestly it’s cheaper to just pay the, what, 2 dollar? 5 dollar? Thing for infinite attempts and no ads forever although it’s pretty cheap that they make it so you only have about 4 attempts a day in a game much like geometry dash, where practice and memory are the pretty much only way to win

Just subtlety abruptly dropping an Ozark reference???? Hell yeah, okay I’m down for it

man i've never played on a public server other than mini games. I never knew it was so big

The paying to be unbanned thing is really dark because it means the server’s admins have a monetary incentive to ban long-time players, as they can be pretty sure that the player will use their mom’s credit card to get themselves unbanned, and since the players are kids they wont even realize they got banned for something they didnt actually do, and just think “oops i mustve broken a rule” instead of realizing whats actually going on