Thanks to those of you that helped out at the Halloween, to those of you that didnt but could of easily helped! Shame on you! May you die a horrible death in Minecraft!
Theres still loads of potential for future projects here and it makes me sad that more wasnt done, but it's time to close this project as it's been ongoing for way too long, maybe next Halloween it can be used again!
We will be hosting some hide and seek and maybe some treasure events this weekend at the halloween area, we will announce them in game half an hour before they happen, so keep an eye on chat!
-0- I have fire, portal nor weird things in the upper right corner of some blocks?!
Don't forget to patch with MCPatcher or to install Optifine!
You don't know what MCpatcher and/or Optifine are? Read this little guide.
UGH, I don't WANT to download MCpatcher or Optifine 8(
Thanks to those of you who helped me out earlier by starting the park area in maplehold, thank you a million! :D Now we just do to decide whats going on the other bigger area and build it. :)
Team Monkey in 1st place (Fugitive_Jackel, d8g4cnd24_h7 and DevonHD)
Good points:
The tower had a centre to it, just like our current spawn tower and world.
The outside water river is a nice addition, we liked the gardens.
The fact that there's glass on the balconies so you can look straight down.
There was ample space for everything.
Interesting use of forcing people to read the rules by having to physically move past them.
Nice ceiling on the very top floor where you would spawn.
There's a centre point block.
Bad points:
While some of the floor colour schemes where nice, the rules room in brown did not paint a happy picture.
Ceilings are only 4, would have been better if 5 as 4 feels too low.
Floor ceilings could have had something other than stone, maybe stone slabs like our current one.
While we like the garden area, we would have like to have seen the river bed have sand or clay or something instead of just stone.
Didn't like the green wool floor of ground floor.
Spawn station is on level 56, it should have been 55 or at least show signs of it merging.
With runners up as follows (In no particular order, we did try and have 2nd/3rd/4th but we couldn’t come to an agreement on positions so it's joint position)
Team Tiger (nams cupcake, aoelos_ and DreadPirate_Duo)
Good points:
Nice welcoming area at the top but you can jump over the fences.
Floor themes looked like they could have worked but seems unfinished, not sure if this is a roll back issue.
Themed stations are nice.
Nether fort warehouse, only team to do the warehouse floor.
Your station level merges with level 55.
Bad points:
Unfinished ceilings on floors.
One block gap between floors, possible due to the above.
No centre. block
All the ores in the station.
Team Panda (Captain_Marbles, changingtuna88, zmoo, kolayhe)
Good points:
Nice exterior design, we all really like it.
Nice grey carpet on the floor.
Detail above windows.
You cant jump spawn tower.
There's a centre point block.
Bad points:
The top station is fun but its a monorail system which we don't have and members will run away quick!
The water drop.
Potential for red stone failure.
While theres a centre point block, the piston drop is miss-aligned.
No station, cant tell if would have been on level 55, but seems not.
Team Lion (missmo, Nikki_Nutta, Lord_Verigan and HugoCahill
Good points:
Unique design attributes.
We really like the floor compass though it certainly takes up a lot of space.
Diagonal stairs are a nice touch.
Viewing platform balconies.
Spawn station is on level 55.
Bad points:
You can jump spawn tower, this is achieved by standing on one of the corner bricks on top of spawn and doing a run jump over the fence.
It's a bit in your face with all the signs.
The floating glass thing.
Water is very annoying, especially going up.
Lacking room for signs.
Bottom floor of station is small.
There's no centre point block.
Rail paths are 6 wide not 5, so tracks would have to kind of merge with our existing ones.
If you would like to come and see what they did, type: /warp spawntowers.
You will want to type /gm 1 - To go in creative and fly.
But please bear in mind only way back is to type /gm 0 - Then kill yourself, so you will loose any items/exp you have on you. You have been warned.
On the 18th of February of 2013 we will have been living in our current world for 1 whole year, before that we lived in another world which is sometimes called YAMS v1, we journeyed to the world we live in now on The Ark which you can find in the north east ocean.
I’d like to invite you all to celebrate our achievements throughout the past year in this world, not by revisiting the old world as this has been done before, but instead by celebrating what we have now in our current world. Though there will be some off world explorations.... :D
So from now till Monday the 18th be on the lookout for some upcoming events that will be posted in the forums.
On the 13th the server was invaded by wave after wave of clones. I managed to capture some of these apperences on camera. Watch out for the imposters...
Just a reminder about all the events happening tomorrow! [list]
[*]The one mentioned above.... secret!
[*]The resident evil events - see event section of forum
[*]The pvp survival game - see event section of forum
[/list]
Please try and sign up to as much as possible!
[quote name='d8g4cnd24_h7' timestamp='1357910597' post='18202']
mwhahaha, /me liked steer's post! It does make sense (in some buildings)
stone....in stone town
if it doesnt go to Perivale, it should at least go to Maplehold >.>
[/quote]
I don't think so for maplehold and as promised I will now be banning you.
Today the 9th of January 2013, YAMS is officially 2 years old - wow!
I have interesting things to tell you... but first I'd like to tell you somewhat the same story from last year about about how I started playing Minecraft and how YAMS was born, as we have new players who may not have seen that post.
A brief story of YAMS
In October 2010 I was watching my brother play Minecraft Classic and Alpha round my house and it looked quite interesting, something we could both play together. I’d always wanted to play a sandbox game where I could build anything. So on the 9th of October 2010 I purchased the account “darrenstraight†and started playing Minecraft properly with my brother on a home server, we built quite a few maps together while he was over at mine, it was very fun, I remember building my first minecraft track that went on for ages cutting through the land and water.
Between November and December 2010 I started looking for various servers I could join, servers came and servers disappeared, it was hard times in the minecraft server world. I eventually came across one I quite enjoyed however it annoyed me that they kept changing the spawn point every time the current spawn town got griefed, so instead of trying to fix the town they just moved on to another part of the map and built a new town, this meant I was doing a lot of walking between my old house and new house if I died. However I managed to shorten the time it took by building a connecting tunnel between my houses, however people of course bumped into them from time to time and ended up at my house but only if they took the correct secret path! Eventually I gave up on this server because of these issues and though my memories of it are slowly fading away I still remember the good times.
One server I found in December 2010 was called Something Super Awesome, it was fairly well setup so I was hoping this might be the one; I read the rules and found a place to build. I went about meeting new people and such however it was not meant to be, as I was banned without explanation or reason. I tried contacting them but no luck so knowing my blog can get good traffic I decided to make a [url="http://www.darrenstraight.com/blog/2010/12/28/banned-from-minecraft-something-super-awesome-server"]blog post[/url] on them to attract their attention – it worked! Better than expected actually, if you loaded up Google and searched using phrases such as “banned from minecraft server†my blog post was top. So I certainly grabbed their attention. However I was not unbanned and to be honest I didn’t really care if I was they had already shown what type of server they were and I didn’t want to be a part of it.
In January 2011 I decided it was time to put a plan into action, I was tired of finding servers that kept resetting the map every week, appeared and disappeared or were just disrespectful. I knew there was an increase of Minecraft servers out there now, but I thought to myself if they can do it so can I, maybe even better especially with my IT and leadership/management expertise.
On Monday the 9th of January 2011, 3 months after first having purchased my minecrfat premium account, I purchased a basic Minecraft 8 Player Slot server running hMod, it was what we had before bukkit. Take that Something Super Awesome I thought!
I gave myself a deadline of the 14th of January 2011, by which point I had hoped to have everything setup and ready with the help of my brother "Brainsss". However sods law that around this time I was having internet connection problems and then Minecraft Beta 1.2 was released! It seemed as this project was doomed to fail! I didn’t however let any of this hinder my spirit so I invited those that wanted to join to request so in my blog post comments so I could send them the ip address and at least get some sort of player base started.
On the 21st of January 2011 the server ip was still not publically known and unfortunately "Brainsss" was also having internet access issues preventing him from helping out, so I decided to get [url="http://www.darrenstraight.com/blog/2011/01/21/january-2011-screenshots-of-my-minecraft-server/"]some pictures[/url] out there on a blog post hoping to get some attention from people to come and help before it went public. It worked, I received two comments one being "TheTubbe" who was our first ever member!
On the 26th of January 2011, Yet Another Minecraft Server better known as [url="http://www.darrenstraight.com/blog/2011/01/26/yet-another-minecraft-server-yams-now-public/"]YAMS went public[/url], it didn’t have much at first, just a very basic cobblestone town but that was the idea of it, right from the start the number 1 rule was always be a part of the community so I hoped people would get involved in expanding the town.
On the 9th of February 2011 YAMS had a total of 50 users and from a basic cobblestone town we had grown into a nice little community, on the 12th of February 2011 I decided to put what I had learnt from past communities I had managed into action by setting up the forums, it proved a success amongst members as it gave them somewhere to discuss how we should progress with YAMS.
Things from then onwards started to get busy on YAMS, our little 8 player server with 500MB of RAM was maxed out every day/night. So on the 25th March 2011 I decided it was [url="http://www.darrenstraight.com/minecraft/index.php?/topic/32-25-03-2011-server-upgrade"]time to upgrade[/url] and we upgraded to a 12 player slot server with 1024MB RAM, this helped a lot and allowed the community to grow and by June 2011 we had 1100 Players ever join YAMS, of course there was a fair share of bans just as there is unfortunately still today.
On the 6th of June 2011 we appointed our first CSO and also had another [url="http://www.darrenstraight.com/minecraft/index.php?/topic/197-06062011-server-upgrade-and-cso-news"]server upgrade[/url], this time to what we have now which is a 24 player slot server with 2048MB Ram, not everyone was happy about this and some felt it was taking away the little community we had, however I don’t regret the decision to upgrade we are still going strong as a community and them extra player slots along with the extra processor allocation and RAM has helped us be able to play around with plugins more for events, before we couldn’t do this without putting a strain on the server.
On the 27th of August 2011 [url="http://www.darrenstraight.com/minecraft/index.php?/topic/827-27082011-restructuring-towns-on-yams/"]I announced[/url] that big changes were coming to YAMS as towns were going to now be more restructured with town moderators and a continuation of using more plots instead of live anywhere you like. 6 months before this I hadn’t expected that we would have this many people, so these changes while not all welcomed were necessary in order to keep YAMS tidy instead of turning into another dead end server filled with random mess everywhere, which was staring to happen in some areas as we didn’t know if players were coming back or not. I also knew this was a chance to see if this would work for future plans I had.
On the 9th of October 2011 [url="http://www.darrenstraight.com/minecraft/index.php?/topic/1090-09102011-new-test-build-area-open/"]a test build area was opened[/url], I still wanted to allow player to be creative as I knew we had restricted them in towns somewhat now. It was wasn’t hugely successful however due to its location being quite far out and the fact that a lot of players didn’t want to use their own materials, along with the fee you had to pay, though this was shortly removed. The test build world we have today accomplishes what back then I couldn’t.
Shortly after this on the 18th of November 2011 YAMS had it's [url="http://www.darrenstraight.com/minecraft/index.php?/topic/1164-18102011-mining-world-now-open/"]first mining world[/url]. Before this people could mine anywhere in the normal world, however it wasnt long before people kept hitting peoples basements and messing up all the YAMS terrain and there were also the issue of not having new ores, this problem was solved by creating a section that I could regenerate time and time again and people could only mine there. This worked well for some but was time consuming for me and wasnt really that fun to mine it. This is why the mining world was born.
Now that we could have multiple worlds, we started having more fun events, castaways, halloween, christmas and lots of others!
On the 9th of December 2011 it was time to announce to the members of YAMS [url="http://www.darrenstraight.com/minecraft/index.php?/topic/1439-09122011-the-future-of-yams-for-2012/"]the next big change[/url] for YAMS, I had been informing members that a bigger change was coming for some time. The change was a new main world, it was time to say goodbye to our current world and start a fresh world with everything setup much better for new and current players. Of course there were a lot of people who were very sad because of this, but it's something that needed to happen as you can read yourself from the post I link to above, our current world was falling apart.
It wasnt all sad though, a lot of fun was had building The Ark and filling it with items for the new world. Every player was allowed to take 2 double chests full of items to the new world. Deciding what to take was interesting. You can find more info about The Ark at [url="http://www.darrenstraight.com/minecraft/index.php?/topic/1482-new-world-the-ark/"]this post here[/url].
Also we had a chance to say one big goodbye for the old world as in January 2012 we celebrated [url="http://www.darrenstraight.com/minecraft/index.php?/topic/1579-06012012-yams-1st-year-anniversary/"]YAMS 1st Anniversary[/url] in style, as we time travelled through time seeing YAMS at different stages throughout the past year. It went on for a bit longer than expected but was certainly a very enjoyable experience and even had a little twist to it at the end in which the whole of water around spawn was lava and dirt was netherack! Not to mention other things… but I’ll let you read the post!
On the 18th of February 2012 [url="http://www.darrenstraight.com/minecraft/index.php?/topic/1439-09122011-the-future-of-yams-for-2012/page__st__40#entry9712"]we finally moved to the new world[/url], the world you build your house in today. It was a fun and interesting experience especially as every single member had to go through sandbox including myself and all staff, a lot of us had never gone through sandbox before, the sandbox process was setup quite a while back in the old world but we still had loyal members who had been here before that.
On the 13th of September, nearly 7 months after having moved to the new world, it was time to give the community another chance at remembering where we had come from. [url="http://www.darrenstraight.com/minecraft/index.php?/topic/2693-13092012-yams-adventure-back-in-time/"]The YAMS Adventure back in time[/url] event happened, we visted the old world as it was the day we moved.
On the 6th of October nearly a year after the initial attempt at creating a test build area, I gave it a second shot, this time as separate world with extra "features"… In my opinion this has proved a success, of course you have to find the portal to it, which is a problem for some people but if you read the posts, such as the [url="http://www.darrenstraight.com/minecraft/index.php?/topic/2782-06102011-new-test-build-world-open/"]main one about it[/url] and the [url="http://www.darrenstraight.com/minecraft/index.php?/topic/990-yams-server-information-and-commands/"]YAMS Server info post[/url], you'll soon find it, it's really not that hard. But hey here's another clue for you.... Did you know it takes just under a minute to walk to the entrance from the bottom of spawn tower but it's not as a nice of a walk as walking round the outskirts of spawn, it only takes 6 minutes and 15 seconds.
So now 2 years on since YAMS was first started, we have now had over 3000 players join us and while we have lost many good people along the way, both for being banned (we try not to invoice bans but sometimes they leave us no choice) and leaving on their own accord (time to move on), we have gained lots of new interesting, fun and exciting people too. I believe YAMS is what you the YAMS Community make it to be, you will get as much back from YAMS and the community as you put in, if not more!
YAMS the dictatorship
Something that sometimes gets brought up by the community is how we can be too restrictive on building permissions; well yes we are certainly are more restrictive than what we used to be, but for good cause. Before you could pretty much build anywhere but that was when we had a very small community.
I stopped the build where ever fashion very early on to some extent as people did just that, they started building all over the place in no orderly fashion and not as a community as I had hoped, I decided that Id approve peoples locations on an individually basis around landmarks/big builds, this worked well to some degree but was very time consuming.
So sandbox was invented along with town plots, this freed up more of my time letting me spend more time with my community and plan events and such. I just wish more people would post in the town topic forums with what they want to see in each town and even get involved in their town projects more, or even help out in other town projects for that matter; maybe you could all make that your YAMS New Year resolutions? ;)
Anyway I bring this up as recently I was told as I have been in the past that YAMS is a dictatorship, this is quite upsetting as I truly believe I do the best possible for YAMS to balance an orderly server while still providing some freedom, I don’t want us to just be like other servers out there where everything’s a mess.
There’s plenty of projects out there you can help out on, I make sure of this as I know you are somewhat restricted with your town houses, so if there’s anything you want to build in a town you only need to get it approved by a town mod (posting in the forum topic) and out of town projects by myself in the community build section.
Sure I don’t always approve everything but I do take everything into consideration and point you in the right direction if I thing there’s something else you could help out on, I also combine peoples various ideas into projects.
So to those that think YAMS sucks or is a dictatorship, maybe you should investigate what we have first and fully understand how we run things before making a judgement, whats interesting though is how many people get banned then regret doing what they did and try and plead their case to come back saying they haven't found another server out there like YAMS with a community.
The future
I could go on forever there’s so much more to say… but how about we celebrate instead and look towards the future of YAMS.
The celebrations
I would like to invite you all to celebrate 2 years of YAMS with me, this Saturday the 12th of January 2013 at 4:00pm GMT / 11:00am EST / 10:00am CST / 8:00am PST (time zone converter [url="http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html"]link here[/url]) for a very special community event.
If you plan on attending this event please tell us in the comments below so we can get some idea of how many people are turning up and who.
But hey you don't have to wait till the weekend to celebrate, why not celebrate now? Create your own celebrations with the community? It doesn't have to be something complicated, it could just be: Treasure hunts, boat/running races, capture the flag, pvp and spleef games, hide and seek and whatever else you can come up with! If you need any help, just ask! :)
More details about the main event will be revealed on the day but for now why not take a look at over 2623 screenshots of yams, taken by me over the past 2 years ([url="http://www.flickr.com/photos/darrenstraight/sets/72157627030523694/"]see this link here[/url]) and discuss the past 2 years of YAMS in the comments below.
Thank you for being a part of the YAMS Community. :)
P.S. Each town will be receiving a present from me this afternoon, you will have to find it (wont be hard), but please don't ruin the surprise by opening/touching it, there will be instructions for your town moderator on what to do with it, they should follow the instructions with community members present and share whats inside with their towns community how they best decide, could be fair sharing or made into a game or anything really. :)
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