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Let me tell you a little bit about how I started playing Minecraft and how YAMS was born.
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 blog post 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 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 with hMod. Take that Some 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 let any of this hinder my spirit though and I invited those that wanted to join to request so in the comments and id send them the ip address.
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 some pictures 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 YAMS went public, 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 time to upgrade 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.
On the 6th of June 2011 we appointed our first CSO and also had another server upgrade, 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 strain on the server.
It’s now nearly been a year since YAMS was first started, we now have had over 2000 players join and while we have lost many good people along the way, both for being banned (not respecting new rules) and leaving on their own accord (time to move on), we have gained lots of new interesting/fun/exciting people too. I believe YAMS is what you the YAMS Community make it to be, you can get as much back from the community as you put in.
Something that sometimes gets brought up by the community is how we can be too restrictive on building permissions; well yes we are certainly 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 very early on stopped to some extent as people starting building all over the place in no orderly fashion and it wasn’t very community oriented, I decided that Id approve peoples locations on an individually basis around landmarks, this worked well to some degree but was very time consuming. That’s when sandbox was invented but of course sandbox was before town plots still. So you guessed it town plots were made, this has freed up more of my time letting me spend more time with my community and plan events and such and in the new world there’s an even better approval system if we can get it in place (more about that when its time). I just wish more people would post in the town topic forums with what they want to see in each town; maybe you could all make that your YAMS New Year resolutions?
Anyway I could go on forever there’s so much more to say… but how about we celebrate instead!
I would like to invite you all to kick of the celebrations with me, this Saturday the 7th of January 2012 at 4:00pm GMT / 11:00am EST / 10:00am CST / 8:00am PST for a very special community event. To check the correct time in your time zone you can use the following link here.
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. More details will be revealed on the day but for now lets listen to some music (see song below), take a look at over 1717 screenshots of yams over the past year (see this link here) and discuss the past year of YAMS (in the comments below).
Thank you for being a part of the YAMS Community.
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