Prior to these updates when your game client saw a player in game, like me VodkaDK, it would download my skin from mojangs servers. It would literally visit this url: https://s3.amazonaws.com/MinecraftSkins/VodkaDK.png and get your skin.
Now this is really simple, you need to see a skin, you download it. This also meant if a player in-game was disguised as a player (like I was disguised as Stephanie_W) it would download her skin because I have her username.
Same with heads. If you had a Head named VodkaDK when you placed it on a wall your client would download my skin and put my face on that head.
So this is how things used to work. But not anymore. In 1.7.6+ this has now changed and your skins are now served not from Mojangs server but from the game server (like play.renmx.com) that you're connected to.
They are doing this to save bandwidth because they want the servers to serve the skins to players instead.
This would be fine except ... they do not want servers to meddle with a players skin. By having the server send players skins it would enable us to modify your skin. They do not want us doing that. So they are digitally signing the skins and making them expire every 24 hours.
A digital signature is a bit like a real signature in real life, it is a way to say "This is legitimate" like when you sign a check the bank can see if your signature on the check matches what they have on record.
So why is this bad? - It's bad because if you do not login to our server in a 24 hour period for us to get your skin and its new signature we cannot display your skin to other players.
This means all those heads you've collected that you have in your house? Those are now worthless. The skins on them wont load unless the player they are for logged in within the last 24 hours. It also means we cannot have NPC's (we don't yet but other servers do) and we cannot disguise as players.
It means our director rank which you use to make videos on our Creative server won't work anymore either. You wont be able to disguise as other players to do funny videos. You won't be able to look like notch or dinnerbone or herobrine.
If you hate this and want to have your voice heard I urge you to sign this petition: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/brin ... -minecraft it is quickly gaining traction on reddit.com and Mojang will see it. I feel this is a very important issue that needs to be addressed.
By the way if you're wondering why this problem happened this is why:
The issue that caused this was to do with Hypixel's changing of all users skins to one skin, which Grum (Minecraft developer) got very annoyed about. Also, apparently Youtubers have been complaining about people using a disguise plugin to pretend to be them in order to promote their own servers. And we all know how much Mojang values Youtubers.
So it would appear that one developer got butthurt about servers changing players skins and this is the result, a total overreaction that fucks up one of the best features of our servers. By the way player profiles are not accessible in offline mode anymore, which means our bungee system on the server may also need to be removed and/or re-written completely to work with this new skin system.
