I stopped playing Minecraft recently again. I first quit a few years ago, but wanted to show it to my young son. Trying to go back and EVEN JUST INSTALL it now is filled with Microsoft-ian circles of login catastrophe and "upgrade your account" nightmares.
The installation process was so difficult, I will never play again.
As somebody who started playing back in alpha, it's amazing how many user-hostile changes have been made. Needing to transfer accounts multiple times, finding the cross-platform Java version among all the various Windows-only or mobile only versions, finding out that the account had been archived years ago.
And that's not even getting into the mess that is the licensing that was Minecraft Alpha. That was changed even before Microsoft took over, when lawyers took one look at the license and realized that players getting "all future versions" [0] would include any sequels, spin-offs, platform ports, etc.
I lost my Minecraft alpha account apparently because I was allowed to “activate” Minecraft VR in the oculus store rather than the Microsoft Store. I sold my oculus and it’s impossible to launch Minecraft in the Oculus store without a VR headset, despite it being the full game!
Remember the Minecraft Alpha promise? It went something like "if you buy this game in Alpha you get all future minecraft softwares/ports/etc for free".
Use multimc.org. When the launcher changed to a microsoft app we moved to using the multimc launcher. It has far more predicatable and reliable behaviour than what microsoft is offering
I tried to play Minecraft with my kids yesterday. It forced us to migrate accounts, but after clicking lots of buttons, the presumably final Microsoft account creation part just hung and wouldn't finish. My kids were like "By why can't we just play? We paid for it!". They couldn't understand why "Microsoft accounts" were even needed for local network play. Neither can I.
It depends. Are you at work/university? Then that is a different Microsoft account than a personal Microsoft account. I think. Some Microsoft login screens won't let me log in with my work account even though they look the exact same as other Microsoft login screens.
I bought her a Minecraft account via my Microsoft one, getting her the necessary permission for multiplayer took an hour to do so, parsing through cryptic microsoft documentation which essentially consists of a maze of links that loop back to pages you already visited.
The funny thing is that one of my brother told me before I started that I could just download the pirated client, that way I wouldn't have to pay for Minecraft for the 938th time and the pirated client just works out of the box contrary to the official version.
It'd been years since I had to interact with anything Microsoft, I thought he was exagerating. What a shock when I realized pirates actually do a better job than MS at making their own products accessible.
I've been playing the same Minetest SMP server for 5+ years now. Minetest is pretty good, the engine is C++ but the game world is defined via lua.
There are some quirks that will drive hard-code Minecraft players nuts, but it's not that bad overall, especially if you like the building aspect of MC.
I've really been dreading the Microsoft account switch for Minecraft, which I run only on linux. Is it going to demand my phone number? A credit card (even though I already own the game)? I have no idea and I don't want to give them any of those things.
A year or so ago my son tried to activate his Minecraft account. He gave up. Said it was days and days of hell and he was really upset.
EDIT:
Reminds me of what happened years earlier when we turned on our XBOX and had to update. Basically, it took an entire day of logic loops in the login/verification system, which required several hours of being on the phone with MS.
It was a forced upgrade, so otherwise we would have ignored it.
I tried to use a different email address to sign in to Windows from the one associated with my Minecraft purchase, and what a nightmare that was.
Spent hours flailing with the Xbox store, Microsoft store, Mojang and Minecraft accounts, resetting passwords, etc. Eventually got it to work but I have no idea what fixed it.
The installation process was so difficult, I will never play again.