Thoughts on Minecraft and servers

So Mark, Ben, and I decided to play Minecraft again. Mark started up a remote server and off we went to explore and build our cities. It had been maybe half a year since we played Minecraft and I wondered why the game wasn't appealing to me to the point where I wanted to actually play single player and actually "beat" the game like I would in Terraria.

It's really fun to build things in Minecraft, but it feels wasteful to just let it sit there without anyone else seeing it. Multiplayer it was. 

It's hard to find a good server.

on our old server i decided to recreate the 'bastion' from a game of the same title

The first thing the three of us did before starting our own server was finding a decent sized server (~10 - 20 regulars) so that building towns and interactions between towns would be feasible. We found a bunch of medieval themed RPG servers which suited our different criteria. Our top-picks soured almost instantly.

First off, the application process for servers: I guess a basic literacy/comprehension test is a good thing to have, especially with Minecraft's community, but some of them are ridiculously tedious. Make up a name to role-play as, what's your job status in-game, what's your lore, make up a country from which your character came from and explain its lore, etc. etc.

We would find entire essays people wrote just so they could get a glance at the server.

Another thing we found consistently was server admins coming up with a "no meta game allowed" rule. I had no idea Minecraft had a meta game, let alone how would one figure out if someone was meta gaming in Minecraft. 

According to one server we looked at, an example of "meta gaming" would be: 

"For instance a massive bandit raid is being planned for your town (OOC [Out-of-Character]) and you dislike that idea to prevent the raid you and your friends build a massive wall (IC [In-Character]) to balk this. Simply you take something you learn either on the forums, or the wiki (Cultures of races can be a good example, along with languages) and use it to give your character an advantage, or strength to a situation."

So in short, a lot of the servers we looked at looked down upon being knowledgeable, even if it is for the sake of role-playing. And because we're all illiterate we didn't want to write an essay either. 

Creative servers didn't exactly do because we still wanted a theme to build around so that our structures would look nice and have rhyme and reason to them without being giant square boxes, so that made pretty much crossed off every other server from the list.

and i think it turned out pretty well

Long story short, we didn't find a good server that just let us go online to gather resources and build things that looked nice and fitting.

Then we just thought, "Hey, let's just make our own server and build stuff." 

And then we did. And then we had a lot of fun. 

I still wish we could share our creations with other people in-game, but then I realized that I stopped caring about all that. I still do wish I had taken screenshots of some of our other buildings and structures. They were pretty neat.

texture pack is jolicraft

And I guess the problem extends beyond Minecraft to any game. Take Team Fortress 2, for example: It's difficult to find a server where you just hop in and play without being bothered by ads, server offers, and pleas of donations to the server.

People complain about not having good servers to play on, but I say to them: Just make your own. Take the time to learn how, it pays off in the future. You have to take action to change things you don't like. And eventually, you find like-minded people and you form a community.

These days, server owners are trying to compete really hard for attention with ridiculous ASCII server title banners and flashy signs when really, all people want to do is to hop in and play.