Hytale accused of giving away usernames

Some different ones Hytale players seem to have had their unique usernames ripped away from them and given to streamers and other content creators, resulting in some bad feelings in the community. Hytale appears to no longer engage in this practice, but only after its support team was called out on it via social media.

After launching into early access around mid-January, Minecraft-inspired gameplay Hytale has been making waves since launch, peaking at around 2.8 million concurrent players. With its intentionally blocky visuals, various biomes and procedurally generated zones, it has drawn many comparisons to its primary source of inspiration, with both its sandbox style of gameplay and its RPG-like adventure mode attracting fans with a variety of playstyles.

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Hytale is accused of removing players' usernames and giving them to streamers

With Hytales various features have quickly attracted so much popularity, specific usernames have been difficult to lock down, even less than a month after the game's early launch. Now, reports claim that members of the game's staff have given preferential treatment to players with more social reach by giving in to requests for usernames already claimed by other players. Reddit user Mutated-Nut has compiled a few such instances of “honestly disturbing” behavior that appears to have been carried out by at least one member of the game's support staff.

In one such case, YouTuber The_Horizon shared on Twitter in early December that they had secured Hytale account username “The_Horizon”, although they would have preferred to have claimed “Horizon”. On January 28, they shared a follow-up message showing that their username had been changed to “Horizon”, even though that account name had previously been claimed by a completely different player. In a second instance, YouTuber MashClash made a similar post, although this one indicated that he had obtained the username “Mash” after making a request to Hytale support team, crediting said team with a “shout-out” for helping him match his in-game name with his YouTube handle. In one of these cases, the investigative source on Reddit found that a player who had been stripped of their username was left with the generic-sounding “CoralShield434”, which is a stark departure from the one they had claimed when they signed up for the game.

Just hours after the original Reddit post was made, Simon Collins-Laflamme, founder of Hypixel Studios, also took to social media to report that the situation was being handled and investigated, to ensure players can continue playing Hytale with friends without fear of losing their chosen usernames. “If a YouTuber or streamer wants a specific username that's already taken, they can't claim it,” Collins-Laflamme said. If a player wants to request an existing username, they can still do so and the owner of that username can be notified via email, but they retain the right to refuse, either by outright refusing to accept the request or by ignoring it entirely. Further, Collins-Laflamme said he plans to “personally investigate what happened,” indicating that no player should be stripped of their username unless it contains profanity or otherwise violates Hytales terms of use.

For their individual parts in the case, the two particular YouTubers named in the Reddit post have both said they would be willing to return the usernames they received from Hytale support, and MashClash posted on Twitter that he had already successfully returned the username “Mash” to its original owner. He also included photographic evidence of a text exchange that showed no bad blood between the two players, “so hope everyone can relax.” Such interaction is a positive sign of camaraderie between players, and given that more than 1,900 fans successfully petitioned to save Hytale after it was first canceled last June, the sandbox game may be on the way to building a thriving gaming community.