[Inhibit]

That's appalling. We've gone from running internal on local networks to forcing a potential security issue to allow for multiplayer.

My personal favorite is Microsoft discouraging local Minecraft servers with the rational that anyone could type anything on them! Who knows what you and the people you explicitly allow on your server might type!

But your switch example is worse, I think.

[mrguyorama]

Nintendo has required you to compromise your network security for online play since the DS and Wii. They often required you to set up "DMZ" and port forwarding and still wouldn't work, and the original DS could only do WEP wifi security.

[mschuster91]

> and the original DS could only do WEP wifi security.

That's excusable though. The DS was released in 2004, with WEP being deprecated only in the same year [1] and most consumer routers / APs of the time not getting updates to WPA anyway.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wired_Equivalent_Privacy

[mschuster91]

> My personal favorite is Microsoft discouraging local Minecraft servers with the rational that anyone could type anything on them! Who knows what you and the people you explicitly allow on your server might type!

I do understand where they're coming from, it's brand safety 101 - they don't want to risk the PR disaster from incompetent parents coming into their child's room and seeing n-bombs dropped into the Minecraft chat, leading to the parents shitstorming Microsoft for not moderating the chats when Microsoft for once isn't responsible for not moderating.

I think that legitimate fear is also why so many games removed self-hosting servers. I can remember from the UT2004 days that there were a lot of questionable things said in online chats... obviously sexism, but also lots and lots of racism and antisemitism.

[the_only_law]

> I do understand where they're coming from, it's brand safety 101 - they don't want to risk the PR disaster from incompetent parents coming into their child's room and seeing n-bombs dropped into the Minecraft chat

Maybe, I’m misunderstanding the initial statement, but if this were case, why ban local servers and not public, internet accessible servers? I promise there’s a much higher chance of that hypothetical happening on those.