Category Archives: Announcements

Server issues

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Overnight I got 2 reports of abnormal crashes of minecraft clients. I just updated the server to the latest version, please let me know if you see any other weird behavior.

I am on the road and not sure how fast I can react, but please make sure you report everything you see.

Minecraft 1.10

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I just wanted to let everyone know that I have made the needed preparations for minecraft 1.10. The new blocks will be tradeable in the shop as soon as we ca upgrade.

I do not expect this upgrade to have any issues. We should be ready to go as soon as the new spigot version is released which should be sometimes before the weekend is over.

Will announce when it happened.

Status update

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Hey everyone!

I wanted to give a short status update! First of all, sorry for not being around a lot. I am very, very busy at work. On top of that, I want to finish one of my other projects ASAP since it concerns my hobbies (photography) a lot. It’s a WordPress gallery plugin that is specializing on photo blogging. The base functionality is there, but I need to do some more work on indexing and searching of photos & locations. From what I can see, the stuff should not be too complicated, so I do not expect it to take a long time, but with the current work situation, it’s hard to make accurate predictions.

Those of you who have been around a while know by now maybe that I am working in batches or spurts, meaning I do a lot for some time on one project, then take a break to work on something else, then come back for more. I know that there are some to-do’s on the server, and I hope you all can work around the issues. If there is something where you are not sure if I know about it, please just send me a ticket. I keep all tickets in my inbox until I have time to fix it, even if I do not reply right away. It’s very helpful if you let me know.

Something that I saw today that really reflects how I am working on the server (from the Oatmeal, click image to view source).

3So for those who are interested, I wanted to share what happened in the meantime with my photography hobby, since it seems I have reached a kind of milestone with my underwater photography: My photos are online on my website (for which I develop the aforementioned WordPress plugin), but I have been sharing now every single day since January one photo on Instagram. With that, I will reach today 800 followers because of a photo that I shared yesterday which reached over 430 likes. Considering that my best photos so far only had maximum ~200 likes, this is quite a difference, specially because the high ranking photos so far were more popular subjects such as Octopi. I am not sure why this spike in likes happened, but I am quite happy about this as you can imagine. I assume that there was some kind of critical mass in my followers count that allowed me to get ranked higher in the Instagram feeds.

Anyhow, the wordpress plugin that I am writing has one main purpose, and the same as so many things I wrote for this server here: To reduce the amount of manual work that has to be done. So my hope is that once I consider it as finished (if there is such a thing in software), I can come back to fix and enhance stuff here again.

Thanks for your patience!

New lottery prizes!

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The voting lottery has now 2 new prizes:

  • a small (0.1%) chance to win a free deposit slot
  • a medium (1%) chance to win a vanity title saying “I won the lottery!” for randomly 7-14 days.

Thanks to LukeCreative for suggesting it. Good luck!

Story signs now allow user mode changes

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You can now switch people to Adventure / Creative / Survival modes with story signs. Creative mode works only in Flatlands & City of course. Please note that people do not switch automatically back to Creative in creative worlds once they are in adventure mode.

So in your stories, please make the last sign so that they switch back to the right mode. There are new signs now in City spawn that allow people to change their modes manually.

New /vote command & IRC back online

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We now have a /vote command that lists all the voting websites (provided you can vote already).

I will work on this command so it will also tell you when you can vote next, but for now it just shows the available links.

Also, IRC is back up. It still throws errors on the console when someone logs in, but that does not affect users in any way,

Voting stats now live

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I have now added a voting statistic to the users list. It’s also visible in the /who command. It shows if a user was active on the server for a number of days and voted for the same number of days. The significant amount of people who did not vote at all despite being active on the server is showing that we need to do something to incentivize voting more than just the 100 Uncs & lottery.

Some people in chat already proposed a voting competition of sorts, but I am afraid that this will reward the top-voters to vote more, but not those who otherwise never vote. Any suggestion on getting people to vote more are welcome.

[Update] Something that I decided to do is create an achievement list like the one in-game where you get rewards for doing something for the first time. Like this we can incentivize new users to try out voting, shopping, depositing etc. and at the same time teach them about server features.[/update]

Server list votes

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Here a quick statistic about server votes:

In the last 12 months, we got 783 referrals from minecraft-server-list.com where we used to have a very prominent 2nd place in the “whitelisted” category.That is 65 per month, 16 per week. In the last 2 weeks however, we got only 7. That’s one quarter of what we were used to. Why? There are more and more larger servers pushing into this space, and we are now ranked 5.

We currently have in average 40 unique players per day. If everyone of them voted, we could have had 440 votes on that list, which would rank us #3.

So one thought to fix it is to give higher incentives to vote a specific server list where we think that the impact is highest. We could introduce to not being able to do certain things on the server if you have not voted for that one list in the last 48 hours, for example usage of the deposit, shop or other things. Being able to be ranked up for example.

I am not 100% certain about this, but it’s a very tempting proposition.

Opinions?