Talk about the servers you hosted in the past! [The Server Graveyard]

Server Discussion
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I don’t know if this is the right section for it, but I think this is really interesting. Let’s talk about forgotten servers, the ones you hosted in the past and are now offline (or private).
This is not about advertising active servers!

Just some inspiration:

  • What’s your Minecraft Multiplayer history? Why did you host your own server, and when? Start date/MC Version?
  • The story behind the server’s name?
  • Gamemode? Plugins? Mods? Maybe your own special plugins?
  • How did you advertise it?
  • Who paid the rent? And how many slots did it have?
  • Did all players have a similar rank? Or was it based on experience, or even pay-to-win?
  • Was there an active community, with forums or voice servers?
  • What did you experience as a leader of a community? Stories from your server!
  • Screenshots!
  • Why did it shut down? And when?
  • Do you plan to host a server again?

My small public creative server is still running after 2 1/2 years (I guess it will shut down soon), so I won’t be the first one to post here.
I want to read your stories to find some new inspiration. It’s so difficult to talk to other experienced server admins :wink:

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What’s your Minecraft Multiplayer history? Why did you host your own server, and when? Start date/MC Version?

  • Server from March-June 2013, mostly for friends. I guess that was MC 1.3 or 4, but I forget. You guys can do the googling… Then ran a no rules server. Literally no one got banned (and I didn’t care wtf happened on it). Took it down because everyone migrated away.

The story behind the server’s name?

  • “Anarchy” – meant to not be like most anarchy servers who actually have rules and staff. This one was actually anarchy.

Gamemode? Plugins? Mods? Maybe your own special plugins?

  • Survival only. No one was ever OP, except I was a couple times when I broke a plugin and had to run a few commands. No one was ever in creative. RandomSpawn plugin as well as a shit-code custom plugin I made quickly for custom help menu, greentexting, and /r (replying).

How did you advertise it?

  • Hah. That’s a good question.

Who paid the rent? And how many slots did it have?

  • Had like 20 slots or something, not that it really mattered since I could always change the slot count… I paid for it out of my pocket (server did not have any bs pay-to-win donations or whatever::no $ gained). My friend paid $4 for the first year of the serve’s domain name.

Did all players have a similar rank? Or was it based on experience, or even pay-to-win?

  • Made this with the thought that there’s people (like me) who absolutely hate pay-to-win servers and 12 year old staff serves. And people who aren’t skids (well, I just thought of that. it’s impossible to prevent skids). All players had the same rank, as well as myself.

Was there an active community, with forums or voice servers?

  • Nope.avi; Players tended to want to stay anonymous.

What did you experience as a leader of a community? Stories from your server!
Screenshots!

  • What did I experience? People from 4chan. 10 year olds from PMC (who quickly left after they found out that no one was staff / creative mode). Offensive stuff that I’d rather not say here ;). 1337 bypasses to NCP that I also will not talk about. Stuff like that. Stuff that happened? At first I had accidentally forgotten to install NCP, so people were flying around and my dumbass thought that everyone had one of the private bypasses that not too many people had (at least no public clients had/have it). Then a couple hours later I realized I forgot it, so it got installed. Over the next few weeks, there were many lava casts and swastikas. A lot of the swastikas got griefed. There were also a lot of crosses, but someone decided to pour lava over them haha. A group that I was with from another server made a safe haven on an island about .5 km from spawn. We made a 4x4 tunnel all the way to spawn, but no one really knew about it besides us. Had some DDoS threats from some skids (they made it really obvious that they were skids, not people with botnets)… Didn’t care. My host had some ddos protection, but these skids didn’t even DDoS the server’s IP haha! They tried to DDoS the domain, which I had on Cloudflare. KEK. I’ll update this if anyone’s interested.

Why did it shut down? And when?

  • As previously stated, players lost interest. Meh. Shut down a couple months ago I think.

Do you plan to host a server again?

  • Yes, but probably on beta 1.8.1; coding a server mod for it (inspired by the other guy who has a beta 1.7.3 server). Had to patch MCP 4.4’s python sauces since it was broken to even decompile it haha.
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That’s nice. I did the same, but my server was a creative server. I just wanted to let players build, so I offered them the most powerful tools.

You never received any donations? That’s sad. I found out that there were many (older) players wanted to help me with a few dollars. Maybe not because it was an Anarchy server?

In your case, no staff was needed, because there were no rules. Did you meet anyone who had the qualifications for a good staff member? Or would you only accept people you know irl?

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For my first server, I accepted a guy or two who were okay. Then this asshole plays nice and proves to have staff qualities, so I admin him. He was the worst. He was so annoying to players that they left and he also abused stuff. He also donated but the payment never went through, oddly.

That was my 2013 server. I’ve learned since then.

For anarchy, yes there were a couple players who would have made great staff (mature and knew Java or could manage a server). I never gave anyone staff of course. In the future, if my next server is not anarchy, I have an IRL friend who is a great admin (past had managed a big hub server with hundreds of active players) and a couple who could probably be web or plugin developers. I’m still not a fan of too much staff. If this ever happens, they probably won’t even get a title saying they are staff – but that’s something to be decided in the future.

Did you have any big fuck-ups with your server? Or did you luck out with an amazing staff?

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What’s your Minecraft Multiplayer history?

You know, I think me and my brother may have started our multiplayer experience on your server around the time of 1.4.6. Did it have a jungle spawn? Anyway, since then we moved to a less ‘violent’ community of players to a somewhat famous national server where we are now part of staff.

Why did you host your own server, and when?

I’ve hosted plenty of own servers, usually just for funsies with 2-5 friends. It was mostly session based, though.
One of my favourites was this post-apocalyptic themed survival server with Disastercraft (no longer updated) and Flan’s mod, ah those were the days. I would love to recreate that some day, perhaps when Sponge comes out we can create a world like that in multiverse…

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I’ve had multiple servers. I started administrating servers in beta 1.7.3, after acquiring basic Java knowledge. It was just a home-server so it didn’t become too popular. I then became moderator on a few average-sized (~20 people at that time) communties. Later, in 2013 I became developer on a server that had around 20 players at any time. I got promoted quickly and the server grew. A bit later the server had around 70 players at any time. We got up to 100 players until the other owner decided to fusion with another community and to create a hub. That basically fucked it all up. Right now I own a beta 1.7.3 server again.

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I confess, I helped start up one of Australia’s first MC servers, Naisto’s Chill (The Chill server). That would have been around January 2011, I paid for and setup the initial hosting (with the late Molten Servers, who were pretty good), and Naisto did the installation and configgery. We started with the earliest builds of Bukkit, and I remember mcMMO being in there. It got hundreds of visitors every month, from all over the world.
It didn’t go all that well. It relied on donations to keep going, and volunteer staff, and too many jerks got whitelisted so griefing was a constant. There were some good staff, but the rules, worlds, forums, and plugins were inconsistent. I threw in the towel after a couple months and set up my own server, Celeano (also at Molten). That’s when I started learning how to make craftbukkit (and plugins) work.
Coincidentally, Chill and Celeano both closed down in the same month, after 6 months of operation. Sadly Chill vanished forever, but Celeano was transformed into Yggdrasyl server (thanks Spider266!), home-hosted, which I still run to this day.
(I’ve run a few others, including helping Porkchop Sammiches (PCSMC) when their admin went AWOL, and Wgen-extravaganza Sirius on Owexz’s former Hub server, Arcturus. All gone now)

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I started my own server in the summer of 2013. It was a Tekkit Lite 1.4.7 server griefing server where nukes where allowed. The server was called EngineerCraft but ya their isn’t really a story around that.
For my server i wrote tekkit-permittor, QuarryPermittor(Private plugin that I sold to fantasycraft) and some patches. I advertised it trought Tekkit server list and some forums.
But trust me getting players isn’t the problem. Making them stay is more it.
Omfg The rent. I hosted it on a oversold vps (that whas before I knew about OVH) and paid 60$/m for 2 cores and 6 GB of ram.
Player ranked up in time, but the ranks didn’t gave them any more profits. The community was pretty active. The raids where also pretty heavy. On Tekkit Lite it takes a while to get yourself setup. Most players that got raided rage quite, But ya smarter players don’t place anything on the same place. So I had an average player base of 30 players.

My experience ? STRESS, STRESS and STRESS. Lies and betrayal. I loved my server because of the technical side. Being a leader is not my job. (Funny enough are the people that don’t want the , lead the best, my community literary adored me :smirk:)
Screenshots? It was a griefing server XD or do you wanna see screenshots of the spawn griefed by team lixo?

I shut it down because I didn’t had enough time for it and because I was sick about the crap.

I do not plan to host a server again. I rather like to help other people with their server.

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I needed a lot of staff members for my creative server. I started with about 3 players I met on a different server, and found about 20 or 30 players qualified for staff in 2 years (usually the server had about 10 slots).
3 of them joined in the first 3 days, when the server was really crappy, and even after 2 years, they are still active and my best staff members (and excellent builders). Many of them also donated, and we played other games together.
One time I promoted a very nice player, but later he started griefing. That was not really a problem because I had automatic daily backups of all server files (thanks to my hoster).
There were also some other accidents (minecart spam, worledit crashes), but I was always able to restore it.

There were staff member meetings to decide about the future of the server, and all staff members (including me) had the same rights.

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What’s your Minecraft Multiplayer history? Why did you host your own server, and when? Start date/MC Version?
The story behind the server’s name?

I started playing Minecraft Multiplayer around 2.5 years ago. I started my server in March of 2013 and it ended in March 2014, it was launched when 1.4.7 was out. Quite a long history leading to the name of the server, actually. Had ran a couple of shops on an older server with a few friends called VR, and we ended up calling the server VRWorld. Really, no idea why I named it that.

Gamemode? Plugins? Mods? Maybe your own special plugins?

So much. We did Survival, Creative, PvP, Mini-Games, etc, all over time. Eventually, near the end, we even had a custom mini-game.

How did you advertise it?

Forums, server lists, we even had a premium spot on a list once.

Who paid the rent? And how many slots did it have?

We were run through donations. The slot amount varied over time, it was at 18 originally, I think we ended with like 120.

Did all players have a similar rank? Or was it based on experience, or even pay-to-win?

Wasn’t exactly pay to win… players had perks like /god /fly though if they had a rank.

Was there an active community, with forums or voice servers?

Yes, we had it all.

What did you experience as a leader of a community? Stories from your server!

I gained so much experience for plugins, designing, and knowledge of players by doing this, I’ve also experienced haters, drama, and hackers.

Screenshots!

Too lazy :stuck_out_tongue:

Why did it shut down? And when?

March of 2014, it got worn out, and I started a new one.

Do you plan to host a server again?

Already am :slight_smile:

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I also loved the technical side, and spend a lot of time on programming instead of playing. I also loved building, but after 2 years it gets boring. I guess a server admin is always someone people love. The problem is that my server is really centered on me, so when I am inactive, it slowly dies.

I also experienced some trouble with parternships. First of all, other servers never followed the same philosophy and quality standards (like providing a proper ban reason, and map persistence). So why should I recommend a player to enter a server that I can’t control, if I can make it better?
What happened to the players, the staff and the worlds when the servers were merged?

I also learned how to make advanced, well-designed Java applications. When I started, I looked at the WorldEdit code, and didn’t undertstand a word. Now, after 2 years and countless plugins I made, it’s all clear to me.
What was your worst experience on the server? What went wrong?

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We “merged” into a hub. So we had seperate servers, but it looks like our playerbase didn’t like that.

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That sounds very organized. Nice job on doing that.

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Nah sorry, that would have been a different server. I’m hoping to relaunch it as a never-updating beta 1.8.1 server… I’ll see if people want that though.

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I started playing MC around the alpha 1.0.1 days. The first bukkit server I ran was a 1.2.5 server which I just used for plugin development, experienced in java programming I figured I would try out my skills at plugin programming. At version 1.3.2 I opened the server to some of my friends, I configured the server to be full creative with mostly plugins that I made and some plugins from BukkitDev such as the TARDIS plugin. I never dealt with permissions as my friends were pretty trustworthy. At version 1.5.2 I opened the server as a public server for my local minecraft community, this was sort of a shock for me as I needed to install many of the permissions, grief-protection and essentials that a public community expects. Dealing with griefers and hackers was certainly stressful. Around 1.6.4 I partnered up with an almost complete stranger to me to help with the server including plugin config, moderation and building. This was even more a stressful time as I dealt with trust issues with him but he ended up being pretty good. Also around this time he convinced me to break down and actually buy a full out server host for the server as our community and plugin base was growing rapidly and my home server had neither the bandwidth, processing power or RAM to handle it. Finally at the start of 1.7.5 we totally renovated the server with many custom plugins and plugins from bukkit, totally rebuilding all the structures, regenerating special worlds and using custom plugins to make a very unique minecraft experienced that streched the capabilities of what the bukkit server could trick the minecraft client into doing. Following this we started advertising and started local fundrasing including selling t-shirts which was pretty successful and for a while we had a rather large community. Then bukkit died. After that occured we kept up our community but we kinda stopped all our advertising and adding new stuff so our community dwindled into nothing. As of about a few weeks ago the server has been pretty much dead. We do plan on coming back at the release of sponge as I will port all of my custom plugins and any custom plugins that the developers themselves don’t port but give permission. Overall its been a fun and educational experience.

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Thats exactly the same problem I had. My admins couldn’t entertain players enough. So I had to be online, and that sucks if you have school and other things to do (and lost interest in the server in general).

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Nice, sounds similar to my server. Were you able to play the rent with donations and fundraising?

I know what you mean. When my server started, there were a lot of “grief teams” with hacked clients (I think it was called Nodus). After about a year, it completely stopped though.

Maybe we should all team up? With 5 entertaining admins, you only have to be online for 2 hours/day :wink:

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I really hope I never have to come back to this thread and post about my (surviving for now :smile:) server…
:expressionless:

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Same here - I’m hoping this won’t happen to my Beta 1.7.3 Server.
Why?

  1. It’s 1.7.3 mane!
  2. There’s no such thing as viewing how many players are online, so you’d have to join to check that.
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The thing is I only play modded minecraft :sweat_smile:. And I would be surprised if you have a server that has thaumcraft + ttkami :stuck_out_tongue: (Thats what I am playing with in single player atm).