Hi All,
This April we passed our 6th anniversary of running Minecraft at 3decibels.net, and it's been a incredible 6 years! When I started up this server for myself and a few friends it was running Minecraft Beta 1.5_01. Back then animals spawned wherever there was light and you could watch nighttime race across the land as the blocks updated their lighting in sweeping waves. Boats were piloted the old way (and weren't totally broken yet), food restored your health directly (there was no concept of "hunger") and there were rumors that a future update would make the light from torches only temporary (players would have to craft lanterns to get a permanent source of light).
We have hosted 6 different worlds now, usually resetting for big updates that bring changes to the terrain generation. The two most popular worlds by far were "Shenanigans" which ran from September 2011 to January 2013, and "EFD" which ran from January 2013 to November 2013.
This server went from a small number of players up to its peak where it hosted 45 different regular players, typically seeing 4-5 online at a time. Now it has calmed down and come back to a small base of core players. Today we see a weekly average of about 3-4 active players, sometimes less. Most days the server sits idle, waiting for anyone at all to log in.
Running this server is really enjoyable. Malaclipse and myself have put work into this place to make it run well and have nice features like the auto-updating map, forums and an image gallery. I'm very happy with what we have built but I'm also a little sad that it doesn't see more use. I'm always excited to see what cool things people using the server are building and what collaborations are in the works. Lately though many of our biggest die-hard players have either moved on to other servers or lost interest in Minecraft altogether. We still have a handful of people doing some really neat things, but that number continues to dwindle.
For years this server has been strictly a word-of-mouth operation. We've never had to use a whitelist. If a player joined it was because they knew somebody who already used the server. That's helped to keep our community small but vibrant for a long time. The vibrant part has sort of died off though. To rekindle the flame I have been toying with the idea of listing the server publicly as a way to get some new players interested in our world again. This weekend I started taking steps to revamp how certain things are run in order to prepare to accept some new players.
Alright, enough babbling, let's talk about...
What does this mean for the server?
- Whitelisting: Putting the server address out onto the internet publicly can be risky. It could make it a target for griefers or trigger a big influx of new players that could overload our poor little server. To keep things under control I'm going to enable whitelisting. New players will be required to fill out a form in order to be added to the whitelist. Keeping with the spirit of our word-of-mouth tradition, existing players will always be able to message me to have anyone they want added.
- Spigot: A few years ago we moved the server from using vanilla Minecraft to a high-performance version called Spigot. It worked really well but soon after we started using it, the Spigot project faced some tough challenges that delayed the 1.8 release for a long time. As a result we abandoned the use of Spigot and returned to using the regular, unmodified Minecraft software. Now, the problems have been resolved and Spigot has a very normal release cycle, usually only lagging behind official releases by a few days. We will be returning to using Spigot to get the performance gains and ability to use block logging software if necessary.
- Gallery: The current image gallery will be taken down and replaced with something better than can easily integrate with the forums. I'll be moving all the images over so that none are lost. I'm hoping this will encourage more use since it will be simpler to share screenshots with everyone. The current software was never really meant to be used the way that we do.
What do you guys think?I wanted to post this here for all to see because I care about your feedback. I would be really excited to see some new faces on the server. Do you feel the same way? Please let me know your thoughts.
My guess though is that this post will probably go unnoticed, which is part of why I want to make some changes ;)
I'm okay with making the server public knowledge, understanding that this means there is a chance of people interfering with our builds. As long as nobody plants bombs in my places, I'm willing to deal with a lot...
Space problems usually aren't an issue. I can only think of 2 times in 6 years where people have gotten angry about other people building too close to them. Those were easily resolved, so I'm hoping it won't be a problem.
I'm actually less worried about having somebody come in and blow everything up. I don't think it's likely to happen and if it does it's very easy to restore the affected regions from backup. We actually had an event on this server, a few players decided to TNT another player's castle in retaliation for some IRL drama. After I banned them they logged back in using a different account and blew up anything they could find. It was all very easy to fix using backups and my guess is nobody even realized it happened.