Hytale is Being Accused of Giving Away Usernames

A few different Hytale players appear to have had their unique usernames snatched away from them and given to streamers and other content creators, resulting in some ill feelings in the community. Hytale seems to no longer be engaging in this practice, though only after its support team was called out for it over social media.

Having launched in early access around the middle of January, Minecraft-inspired game Hytale has been making big waves since its release, peaking at around 2.8 million concurrent players. With its intentionally blocky visuals, variety of biomes, and procedurally generated zones, it’s drawn a lot of comparisons to its primary source of inspiration, with both its sandbox-style of gameplay and its RPG-like Adventure Mode pulling in fans with a wide variety of play styles.

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Hytale Accused of Stripping Players’ Usernames and Giving them to Streamers

With Hytale‘s various features quickly attracting so much popularity, specific usernames have been hard to lock in, even less than a month into the game’s early access launch. Now, reports allege that members of the game’s staff have been giving preferential treatment to players with more social reach by giving into requests for usernames that were already claimed by other players. Reddit user Mutated-Nut has compiled a few such cases of “honestly worrying” behavior that seems 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,” though 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 an entirely different player. In a second instance, YouTuber MashClash made a similar post, though this one indicated that he had been given the username “Mash” after making a request to the Hytale support team, crediting said team with a “shout-out” for helping him match his in-game name to 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 sharp departure from the one they had claimed when they signed up for the game.

Mere 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, ensuring that players can keep playing Hytale with friends without fear of losing their chosen usernames. “If a YouTuber or streamer wants a specific username that is already taken, they cannot claim it,” Collins-Laflamme stated. If a player wishes to request an existing username, they can still do so and the owner of that username may be notified by email, but they retain the right of refusal, either by directly declining to accept the request or by ignoring it altogether. Furthermore, Collins-Laflamme stated he plans to “personally investigate what happened,” indicating that no player should be stripped of their username unless it contains profanity or otherwise violates Hytale‘s terms of service.

For their individual parts in the matter, the two particular YouTubers who were named in the Reddit post have both stated that they would be willing to give back the usernames they acquired from Hytale support, and MashClash posted to Twitter that he had already successfully returned the username “Mash” to its original owner. He also included photographic proof of a text exchange showing no bad blood between the two players, “so hope everyone can chill out.” Such an 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 track for building a thriving gaming community.