well, we're addressing it right now.

really appreciate the detail here.
now the first thing that really blew my mind was when you claimed that amongst the many "bored" activities a person does, like running in circles and talking to people, that one of these activities happens to be swindling kids with a dangerous money-making tool.
I mean take a step back... really? that's your reason for gambling existing in a space for kids? you're bored and it's an option?

okay, guy.

as a side note, I wouldn't call renaming the 'lottery' to the 'raffle,' and other actions along those lines, as "half measures" like you suggested. That looks more like a coverup to enable its continuation. nothing near a half measure, not even a measure at all.

as this first argument stands, "we were bored" and "It looks clean enough for 'EULA'" simply isn't good enough to defend the gambling presence in the server. that's just wrong.

as for the second argument, amazing job on the research! I appreciate the effort. however, I do find you drawing a few false conclusions.
lets just get this first one out of the way.
If an unranked player has to build a redstone farm, and farm it all day, to make the same amount of money a ranked player makes with a command they paid for:
that is pay-to-win.
there is no world in which that is fair. What if the ranked player has the same redstone farm? now there's no chance for the unranked player to ever catch up.
like, you literally made that scenario in your argument - that somehow since the regular player could just grind all day to make the same amount of money a ranked player can make with a command... that it's somehow fair... like what. brother - w h a t. you have that backwards. that is exactly the reason it is unfair.

additionally /fly (like you mentioned), /enchant, /repair, and /movebedrock are so incredibly unfair. like, that is such a lame advantage. and the advantage with these is so clear that I don't even feel its worth I defend each one. they speak for themselves.

Free-to-play players who grinded for a rank? someone still has to buy that rank. that feature is undeniably unattainable without someone spending the money.
and if this were truly fair, every player could reach that rank with the same ease. the fact that some can afford it easier than others proves that something is giving certain players an unfair advantage. since that thing so happens to be money from outside the game - this is still considered pay-to-win.

So overall, I love your data. the data you have actually points out a few more pay-to-win inequalities that existed without me knowing. So thank you, I learned something that will help me later. as for you, I think you're processing your data with bias and coming to the wrong conclusions.
Speaking of which, did you notice a little thing in the data you presented? If a player can give grass blocks to another player to have them pay real-life money for a rank, then this assigns real monetary value to the grass block. Not even Mojang's EULA is on your side with that one.

Finally, I'd hate to open "pandoras loot-box" on this one but..... what about the loot boxes!!! this loops back into the gambling in the server and the way the server itself perpetuates it.
is this wrong? exploitative? short-sighted maybe? or was the server staff just... bored?

 

yes because everyone knows when players speak about things the dev teams listen and make changes

 

Personally I think in game casinos are fine.
Yes there's a risk that a player could lose all their balances, however that's the players own desicion.

I feel that if a casino has its odds clearly stated, has a warning about gambling /quitting whilst ahead etc, and states what rewards could be won, then that's alright. Its casinos that hide their odds. Or lie about prizes available that become an issue. Noone likes a casino that says it's a 1/9 odd, but turns out to be a 1/81 etc.

Casinos have become a core part of redstone mechanics and minigames on skyblock and whilst yes there's concern about players being vulnerable to losing everything, but thats why it's important to clearly sign or label the casino odds etc.

 

Compulsive gambling - Symptoms & causes - Mayo Clinic

Anyone who is going to weigh in on this subject needs to educate themselves, I recommend the above link to the Mayo Clinic, but there are a number of credible sources on the matter.

I do not, nor will I ever condone gambling. That being said, I think this Dennis Miller quote is relevant and applies to this discussion:

“Now I’m not pro-drug. They obviously cause a lot of damage. But I am pro-logic, and you’re never going to stop the human need for release through altered consciousness. The government could take away all the drugs in the world and people would spin around on their lawn until they fell down and saw God.”


As for the "Pay to Win" issue, while it does violate minecrafts EULA, it's a catch 22. While donations are always an option (albeit, a far less lucrative one) for maintaining the server, allowing the player base to purchase virtual items is the only viable option to keep the server running. Not to mention that when given the option to spend hours of your life grinding away for virtual progress, or simply buy a head start, many players are going to opt to skip the parts of the game they find to be dull and not fun, via their hard earned money, in order to progress to a point that they find to be enjoyable.

 

I'm going to attempt to quote this in sections but if it doesn't work @staff can you edit it for me lmao

This wasn't an argument to either condone or condemn gambling; I was simply expressing my opinion on why it exists and why it probably won't go away without major content updates. At the end of the day, Skyblock's many casinos are 100% player run and were not implemented by the server, so they will likely not go away unless server leadership is confident they can ban it without driving away a significant portion of the player base.

Actually, you don't need to 'farm it all day'. One of the things I love about Skyblock is the community's dedication to creativity and innovation. After 14 years, Skyblockers have pretty much figured out how to farm every farmable item with maximum efficiency (and people even adjust these designs to work with new changes like tickrates, erasure of mob AI, recipe tweaks, etc). As such, the newest ore gen designs are almost fully afk-able as you simply need to keep the chunk loaded while you sleep (very low effort unless you consider snoring to be grinding) and then come harvest the ores the next day.

I want to make an unconventional argument here and suggest that people who buy ranks don't do so for the monetary benefit. The only rank with a kit that comes CLOSE to matching a single modern ore-gen is Skytitan, which costs $250. At the standard rate of $1:64 grass, this rank costs 16,000 grass, which means if you purchase it at full price (almost nobody does since the server frequently hosts 25% and 50% off sales), you'd have to collect your kit every single day for 542 days to break even. Even at 50% off you'd need to claim your kit every day for 271 days to make it worthwhile. If someone truly wanted to P2W, they would just spent that $250 on giftcards and sell them to people for grass (people DO do this but at the same time giftcards are freely available to F2P players simply by voting every day for a month).

You state that these things are incredibly unfair and provide an 'advantage' so clear that you don't even have to explain it. May I ask what kind of advantage you are referring to? To have an advantage implies the existence of competition. Skyblock is a player vs environment(PvE) gamemode, which means that the only real 'competition' is the individual player/coop versus the difficulties of their own individual island. You state above that you believe 'the win goal is to make a good skyblock island'; the phrase "you believe" is the key to this issue. In actuality, there is no real competition on the server beyond what people choose to engage in. Skyblock is not a PvP server, nor is it a server where the clearly stated end goal is to accumulate the most wealth (there is a separate /economy version of skyblock for that which I do not play on). Thus, there really is no 'competitive' advantage that /fly, /enchant, /repair and /movebedrock offer.

Let me offer an additional piece of information to support my claims above: any ranked player with /enchant or /repair will do these things for you for free if requested. If these two commands truly offer an insane game-breaking advantage that you could only get by paying hundreds of dollars, people would be much less likely to just offer these services for free.

I think you may have skipped over the part where I mentioned that the server gives out hundreds of dollars in voting rewards every month (Top Voters | Skyblock Official Site). If you go back through the history of these posts, this is a long-standing server tradition that has been done every month since 2014. These monthly giveaways offer $25 for the top 10 votes, $15 to anyone who hit the maximum # of votes without being the first 10 to do so, and $10 for anyone who came within 1 or 2 votes of the maximum. Just going by the last 3 months of top-vote data, you can see that around 60 to 70 people manage to accomplish this every month (alts not allowed, so this is 70 real individual people). Even just going by January's topvoters, this would be a minimum of $870 in free UNPAID giftcards entering the server economy every month. These are accessible to all players regardless of rank and can be used for /store purchases. This means that every player can, indeed, 'reach this rank with ease'. Voting at all four links takes less than a minute a day, so this is pretty much the bare minimum of effort required to get something. Also, consider that there's only so much stuff to buy on the /store and people will eventually run out of things to spend their cards on. Thus, the people who win topvote and have reached max rank frequently sell their giftcards to people who still have stuff they want to buy (in fact, the supply of these vote-reward giftcards is so large that people literally offer discounts on them just so they can sell them for grass! Ex: People frequently sell $25 giftcards for 22 or 23 stacks).

I believe that your compliance concerns are based on the old Mojang EULA. It is true that once upon a time, Mojang prohibited many "Pay to Win" features. However, the EULA has been updated twice since then, once in 2020 and another time in 2023. The new EULA states that servers may make money by selling certain things, including but not limited to:

This is a screenshot from Mojang's EULA which states that these virtual currencies are fine as long as they cannot be cashed out, transferred or converted into real-world currency. The key is 'cashed out/converted into real world currency'. People are paying others with grass to buy ranks and expansions for them, not to exchange for real life currency. Exchanging grass for real money is known as IRL trading, which is also prohibited under this server's rules in order to maintain compliance with the EULA. Thus, the EULA is indeed "on my side".

I think this has to do with how you define 'gambling'. Personally, I don't use crates because I don't like how there's an 85% chance for me to lose more than I gain, but I also don't think that people should ban every feature of every videogame which involves RNG or chance. Loot crates are an interesting topic here since it kind of merges both the issue of gambling and the P2W aspect that you brought up. However, you should know that all types of keys(leg,epic,rare,common,vote) are obtainable in-game without paying for them, and this is part of why it is so much cheaper to purchase loot crate keys in game than to pay for them on the store. This helps to refute your P2W allegations, as even legendary and epic keys are so readily available in-game that the price for them is literally cut in half compared to the ones on /store.

I want to conclude by saying that I think your idea of 'unfair pay-to-win features' fails to account for player behavior and ingenuity. It is true that there are things on the store which SEEM like they provide an insurmountable advantage to people who pay for them. However, players have had more than a decade to figure out ways to close these gaps with both efficient effort and their strength in numbers. In my opinion, we players have created an 'economy' from scratch that works to create affordable prices, encourage certain farming and business practices, and MOST IMPORTANTLY provides ample opportunity for social mobility, where even a greenie can get to Skytitan in less than 90 days with a not-unreasonable amount of playtime.

 

my main motivator is this: why do we have to wait for the devs to do something about all the casinos us players own. if we as people can come to our own conclusions about whether or not hosting casinos in a kids game is an ethical activity, we could get some really helpful work done before the devs eventually get around to it.

 

I'll say it simple to you: Because no one wants that. Casinos are easy money without any effort and they couldn't care less about who their clients are. I might be too extremely dramatic here, but I'm saying it a way u can understand it clearly. You could discuss this with players but there will always be someone with different opinions that favor their interests. If you wish to persuade people to take down their casinos regardless, then I commend you, but the simplest and most effective solution can only come from the higher ups in this case.

 

The truth is that if people really wanted casinos gone, they would disappear tomorrow. People with a strong moral objection to them already don't play or operate them, but I think the large majority of players are those who recognize that there's something generally off about casinos on SB but still play and operate them because they are both available and profitable.

I'm sure there are plenty of people who don't feel too strongly for or against casinos, but as long as there is one person who has no moral objection to them, they will always be around. This is because if even one person operates a casino, the people in the "meh" category will think "well if people are going to gamble anyway, why should I let that guy have all the profits?" and open their own.

Casinos on this server weren't really a mainstream thing until 2019 but once they appeared, people's appetite for them kept increasing.

It is EXTREMELY difficult to get an entire society to give up something enjoyable once they've been introduced to it. Tobacco smoking was first proven to increase cancer risk by 2500% in 1964, yet 60 years later the tobacco industry in the USA alone still pulls in upwards of $76 billion dollars a year.

TLDR: I think casinos will stay until they are prohibited. I also think that they will not be prohibited until Skyblock leadership is convinced they can safely remove casinos from the game without causing a mass exodus of players due to lack of game content/perception that their personal liberties are being disregarded

 

I believe that everything comes down to personal choice, and also believe it’s safer to learn lessons where it’s ultimately just some items on a pixel game rather than wait to learn those lessons in the real world where there are worse consequences. These are just my own personal opinions but understand your own viewpoint.
Children are exposed to gambling in all walks of life from their favourite sports teams being sponsored, ads on TV for sites, Pokémon cards aimed at kids with elements of gambling on “rarities” and skins in video games, crates and such. Now I’m not listing these to excuse the same behaviour but as a way to show that trying to guilt the owners themselves over “morals” is wrong, if you have a problem, take it to staff. If you don’t like their response that’s on you not everyone else.

 

In theory no real money is involved, so if anything I'd hope it'd be a life lesson to the impressionable children on the server. I still think it's a bad thing, but personally I have no interest in telling people what to do in their free time.

That said, I'm incredibly sick of casino ads/spam on the server. You can't find a shop anymore with everyone and their father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate advertising a casino every 5 seconds. So purely out of my own self interest I say get 'em outta here

 

“I don’t have one so no one should” argument

 

He stated that he had no interest in telling others what they should do in their free time, but would like to see less casino ads purely in the interest of clearer chat

 

^ this. It was a joke. Presumably I'm not the only one who finds them annoying.

 

Now this was only a discussion, which the original poster suggested we openly discussed this topic, and to which I did so honestly. It's only natural noobcrew is the one responsible because he owns the server and any currency/decisions contained within in it. No one's forcing anything on anyone here, and as far as I'm aware, there's no rule denying constructive criticism. I still stand with his legal battle, and I still feel proud of this server and community regardless of all of its problems.

 

Right off the bat - why do you think me failing to account for player ingenuity is a problem? I thought I've already made it clear to you: the fact that there are player-made ways around the unfair inequalities means nothing in the face of the fact that those inequalities still exist.

and its true, I skipped the giveaways thing - because it is just more of this aforementioned awful argument.

It's like you yourself are bought into the scheme.
a (A) player having to farm all day to make the same amount a (B) paying player makes in a command or two is irrefutably unfair. A does not equal B.

Your counter example to that aforementioned argument alone baffled me aswell.
"the newest ore gen designs are almost fully afk-able as you simply need to keep the chunk loaded while you sleep (very low effort unless you consider snoring to be grinding) and then come harvest the ores the next day." - CosmicTsunami
so they don't have to farm all day, they have to farm all night? seriously? it's the same thing.

also the screenshot you provided of the EULA doesn't really prove its on your side. like, the image literally says "has no real world value and cannot be cashed out." From this I get the impression that 1. a server is obviously not allowed to provide a space to cash out their currency, and 2 the currency should have no real world value. the fact that you can pay 16k grass to get a rank - or 250 dollars to get a rank violates this and is quite absurd.

I'm not saying the server itself set up this real life value into the grass block - there is no place in the store where you can buy straight up grassblocks.
what I am saying is that since players are using their "ingenuity and behavior" to try and get ranks they can't afford has given the grassblock a vague real-world value.

all in all, I can't keep trying to untie your knotted reasoning again. I feel like half of this rebuttal was just re-explaining the same things I tried to tell you last time.
I genuinely advise you to re-read my last response more closely - and also re-read your own response closely as well. because my point lives within them both.

lastly, I can only offer to present this to you in an entirely different lens so see if I can communicate my point:
pretend that we are in real life, and you are a poor person. And I, as a rich person, am telling you that anyone can work hard enough to be like me if they are determined enough... are you going to buy that?
I know you have a proclaimed Free-2-Play afforded skytitan rank or whatever it is... but are you really going to look down at an unranked player, with your 20+ grass rolling in per day, and maybe a casino or two printing cash out of me (for some, not specifically you in this example), and tell me I just have to work harder? I just have to beg and crowd around a "giveaway voting competition"? that is some serious re-framing going on.

 

skyblock started my raging gambling addiction. thanks noobcrew

 

But how do you suggest the server sustains itself? Out of charity? P2W gateways are necessary as much bad as it sounds, it's just that this server doesn't execute it perfectly with the lack of updates. Giveaways and voting are just a way of promoting the server further( that's how I got reeled in hehe), and I find it a perfect system that gives an opportunity to unfavored people to get up with the ranked people.

 

you know, this is another reason I thought it was good to bring this discussion here. some people like casinos, some people don't, and some people haven't thought about it much.
I figured, if this discussion generates enough thought about casinos then this category of people who don't run into the casino aspect of things - and don't think about it much - would think about it, and come to their own decisions.

Lets get people really thinking about this. asking themselves hard questions. using their critical thought and their moral compass and seeing what they decide to do with it and what conclusions they draw upon challenging the status quo.

LeoSteel, I find merit in your statement about there being safer places to learn hard lessons about gambling. and I totally see where you're coming from.
I just think among the two options of:

1. having gambling in our server which could potentially teach kids good lessons about gambling while also potentially sprouting gambling addictions in the much more "prone to addiction" communities (children).
or
2. not having any gambling in the server where there's no chance a kid could potentially develop a gambling addiction from us, and can still potentially learn good lessons around gambling elsewhere in the world.

that option 2 would be the ideal pick.

also, I find most casino owners make the appeal to staff argument where, "since staff is okay with gambling on a game for kids it must be okay for me to profit off of gambling in this children's game"
and that's why I'm not making this about server 'lawfulness'. I'm making this about ethics, because it is entirely possible for staff to pass and unethical rule.

Ocultado, I thank you for your warnings. and I invite you to my action. I do wish to persuade people themselves to take down their own casinos, and I do wish to get staff involved in the discussion. because I believe all of that helps in this matter. and, since we both seem to share a similar sentiment about gambling in this server - you can do the same! the freedom is yours.

I get where you're coming from. and I should say: I thing the lawsuit going on with microsoft right now is total bs. noobcrew has my full support with that.

but secondly, is it really MY responsibility to invent an entirely different monetization plan for the server just because I find the current one unethical? or is it the servers responsibility to come up with a different monetization plan for the sake of young players.
I find that question a bit unfair towards me in the discussion around the p2w aspects.

 

I really don't think children will become gambling addicts due to Skyblock. I don't see a problem with paying a fake currency to gamble. By this logic, mock sports betting apps that hundred of thousands to millions of children use all the time should be banned. Free online blackjack or even Push Your Luck (A mock gambling game I played in 6th grade on COOL MATH GAMES) is immoral too, as long as they are not losing anything of monetary value or are becoming addicts, but that isn't the case.

 

I don't think kids will become gambling addicts due to Skyblock either. I think kids could become gambling addicts due to gambling.
I mean, why do real world casinos forbid a child walk anywhere near gambling machines without an adult?