Does buying CTF classes break EULA?

To be fair, Hypixel blatantly breaks the EULA, so we're not that bad.

 

Spoiler: Every way that Hypixel breaks the EULA, in detail

First off, I don't really understand why I need to explain why all this, I can just show you:

When you get to network level 250, you unlock a permanent 8x coin booster. You usually need to complete somewhere between 15-20,000 quests in order to get to level 250. I've completed a grand total of 658 quests, and have enough boosters queued and gifts to open for me to get to level 300. Both boosters and gifts are purchasable for real money from their store - it's impossible to get these boosters without paying, and gifts are only achievable from a very rare daily reward. Not to mention, I have about 2,000,000 crazy walls coins (which'd take a regular at least a month of grinding the game to achieve), and I only have 6 crazy walls kills and not a single win.

However, here's why these things break the EULA:

• Yes, both the person who activated the booster and the person who tips you will get the same amount of experience and coins. However, Hypixel broadcasts to everyone on the gamemode that they should tip the person who's activated the booster. Although that message is purely aesthetic, the consequences are not - Hypixel sets it up so the person who activated the booster gets considerably more experience and coins than everybody else. And if you disagree - explain how I get half a million XP and about 350,000 coins from each booster I activate, but something like 15 XP and 50 coins from each booster someone else activates.
• Gifts - when you open a gift that someone has sent to you, you'll "radiate" the next game and give everyone in that game (including yourself) an XP bag, which you can open and get XP. However, this stacks. If two people in one game are radiating, everyone in the game gets 2 XP bags. If three people are radiating, everyone gets 3 XP bags. As such, people host "XP parties", which are the most effective way of exploiting this system. Everyone opens their gifts and goes into a mega skywars game (100 players), and everyone gets 100 XP bags. The only way you can get into these XP parties is by donating and getting at least 1 gift, and only people who buy gifts will ever be able to benefit from these XP parties. If you don't donate, you don't benefit. And these XP parties give huge XP gains - I got 14 million from the last XP party, and that was a really small one compared to the others.

Not to mention, when you complete achievements, you get achievement points. When you collect enough achievement points, you can get XP rewards. The objectives of these achievements are straight up "Buy VIP" and "Buy VIP+" and "Buy a gift". There's even a tiered achievement requiring you to open 500 bedwars loot crates - although this is possible to do without spending any money, no-one has been able to get this many loot crates. You can buy loot crates with real money.

And then we go on to housing. Housing is their version of a creative server, and you have a building plot where you can build stuff in. To begin with, this plot is small, and you need to spend mystery dust to make the plot bigger. Mystery dust is obtained by getting duplicates from mystery boxes (their version of cosmetic loot crates), and you can buy mystery boxes from the store. In other words - you spend mystery dust, obtainable by spending real money, to make your housing plot bigger. In the past, this creative servers were shut down for selling bigger plots for real money. Since then Mojang have allowed servers to do this, but Hypixel have been doing it for years.

Another thing with housing - you get new blocks to use by getting lucky in a mystery box, or spending mystery dust. When you start out on the server, you're really limited with what blocks you can use, and I never really enjoyed playing housing. Since then, I maxed out the housing shop (mostly from mystery boxes I obtained with real money) and housing has been much more enjoyable. You could argue that having access to more blocks is purely aesthetic, but the whole point of housing is to build cool stuff, and you can't do that unless you have a decent amount of blocks unlocked.

Don't get me wrong - I think Hypixel is a great server. I also don't blame them at all for breaking the EULA - they've spoken to people in the gaming industry and they've told Hypixel that they're making less $/user than they've seen in the last 10 years. The fact that they're still hosting an expensive Minecraft server, their own authentication servers (which are more reliable than Mojang), doing more to combat stolen accounts than Mojang does, releases more content than Mojang does, and is working on making their own standalone game with a team consisting of more paid employees than Mojang has is really respectable. However, it irritates me when people criticise smaller servers for lowkey breaking the EULA, even though the largest ones do too.

"You get what you pay for." You can play Brawl without giving us a single penny, but you can't expect us to give you absolutely everything for free. Life just doesn't work like that. You can't just "not intend to spend real money on the game" and expect the same benefits from those who do. That's unreasonable and that mindset just doesn't work. (Which, by the way, is why most servers break the EULA as much as they can get away with doing, as that's the exact mindset of the EULA).

Every server that I know of, with just 1 exception, did everything they could to break the EULA until the very end, until Mojang forced them to change it. Almost every single server owner you ask will tell you that the EULA is a terrible, unreasonable idea - even the owner of Hypixel and the ex-owner Mineplex have criticised Mojang for it. It's obvious Mojang isn't listening to the community and they're doing nothing but harming those who give more content for the players than Mojang do - this is why servers aren't willing to change, even the largest ones. There's a reason why Hypixel is no longer going to rely on Minecraft as their main source of income as soon as they've got their standalone game out - it's just not reliable, and the EULA is a terrible idea.

I'm a voluntary moderator for a Minecraft server - I'm expected to act mature and professional to an extent, however ultimately I've found that my general unprofessionalism is one of the things people have praised me for the most. There's times when you need to act professional and times when you don't - as long as I'm not being dumb while in a heated argument with someone, or when dealing with people breaking the rules (other than hackers, we're allowed to troll hackers ), or other similar situations, unprofessionalism is fine.

And, if you're expecting such a high level of maturity and professionalism from me, wait until you see the owner of Hypixel on Twitter. I'm not criticising him either - there's a reason why I follow him on twitter.

Or even when the staff team of Wynncraft turned a terrible suggestion made by a new player into a huge meme and ended up making the update just because of this meme. The community loved it.

We're currently relying on our ability to break these rules to survive. Wanting us to stop breaking the EULA is wanting us to shut down - we're struggling with revenue enough as is, so closing our major sources of income is digging our own grave.