Recently Mojang clarified their stance on aspects of the EULA. Despite their insistence that there are now more ways to monetize a server, I feel these conditions will be detrimental to server hosting. Here's why.

Servers offer various things to players. Things like features (mini games, creative building environment, etc). One of the most important things a server offers is the ability to play with other players. Players want to play with other people, no one wants to play in a ghost town.

Servers cost money to run. There's the cost of renting hardware, bandwidth, etc. Until now, we have had servers that charged for gameplay features. This allowed a subset of players to (voluntarily) subsidize the experience for a much larger population of non paying players. This allowed servers to offer that large population that is in itself a draw.

With the new rules, this is no longer possible. Remaining possibilies are charging for access, cosmetics, or asking for donations. None of those will work as well as charging for features. Donations do not offer an incentive to pay. Relying on donations means fewer players paying less money. Cosmetics are an incentive, but a lesser one that features, again meaning les smoney from fewer players. Charging for access means far fewer players will play there, destroying a server's ability to offer a large population, leading to even fewer players playing there.

Now I understand Mojang's position on this. They don't want people charging for things Mojang made. I get it. But they lose me when they forbid charging for things they had nothing to do with.

As an example, let's take Twilight Forest. I don't know what TF's conditions are (since they can set their own), but think of a dimension like it for the example, or imagine the maker of TF has a server. TF is a new dimension, with new mobs, biomes, items etc. which were not made by Mojang. According to the new rules, charging for access to the TF dimension is forbidden. Why? They didn't create it. It was distributed to clients without any Mojang classes (modified or otherwise). People who couldn't go there would still be able to play Minecraft with no restrictions the same as anyone else in the standard dimensions. How is charging for access to this dimension in any way charging money for something Mojang made?

I have never attempted to make any money from the Minecraft mods I have made. I have no donation button, and have never put my mods behind adf.ly or anything like that. But I like playing on large servers with lots of people. I recognize that this is expensive. Previously I could play on such servers without impacting my own wallet thanks to a few people who chose to pay for something. Did I miss whatever they got in return? Perhaps, but so what! If it isn't a vanilla Minecraft feature, I didn't pay for it! I can live without, in return for having a crowd of people to interact with on a server that costs money to run.

If it was a vanilla Minecraft feature that was granted in return for payment, well yeah that would suck and be wrong, since I had already payed Mojang for it and the code to run it was their copyright, and it would be wrong for someone else to charge for it. I am fine with them clarifying that this is not allowed. But I remain in deep disagreement that server owners should not be able to charge for access to something Mojang had nothing to do with, and I'll miss some of the larger servers such practices made possible.