09/01/2013 - YAMS 2nd Year Anniversary

[darrenstraight 2,330]

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. :)

[ryanfenton 192]

Happy 2nd Birthday YAMS!

I definitely plan on attending the event. Can't wait to see what will be going on

[madrad 362]

Ill be there,
So I wont be square,
Just a cuboid person,
On this anniverary.

MadRAD - Loving YAMS since 2011

p.s. Anyone know where we can get some Cotton in Minecraft for the anniverary?

[d8g4cnd24_h7 102]

Happy 2nd Anniverary YAMS!!!!

This server has been the best server I ever joined and love it so much!
Unfortunately, I cannot make it to the celebration because I am gone on Sat. from 2:30pm (GMT) to 7:30pm (GMT) for high school entrance testing. :/

Have fun at the celebration! Tell me all about it.

Take millions of screenshots! Just take some so I can see xD

[Nikki Nutta Palmer 185]

That was very interesting reading. I feel like I have just studied for a degree in YAMS history

I am working night shifts at the weekend so shud be able to sort out my sleep time around sat for being here at 4pm.

Can't wait to see what the town presents are too it's like Xmas all over again.

Happy Birthday YAMS!!
Ps such a lovely 6 mins 15 sec walk it is too

[Devon_HD 97]

Happy 2nd birthday YAMS, unfortantly I won't be able to be on at 4 as going to a birthday party but will be on later that day

[nams cupcake 117]

Happy birthday YAMS! I'm sure that I will be able to come to the event! Cant wait! And thank you for all you have done with YAMS, Darren

[Captain_Marbles 249]

It seems only yesterday since I joined the server, I can't believe the time has gone so fast. It's been a great year, and I'm looking forward to the next one
And I should be able to make it for Saturday, though will post in here if anything changes.

[12_zombies 20]

Happy birthday YAMS, 2 years... I've only been around for about 6 months and as for the event... I might be able to make it not sure... as it's going to be 6:00pm for me..


EDIT: at least I think... XD Edited January 9, 2013 by 12_zombies

[aoelos_ 78]

Happy two year anniversary YAMS! I'm definitely attending haha-I've had so much fun since I joined and I can't wait to see what darren has up his sleeve

[Crispy BartyJnr Barras 227]

I'm at work til 5 on Saturday.

[benjamine12 32]

Hmmm 11:00am Ill be a little tired but it will be worth it

[changingtuna88 168]

Happy birthday YAMS I had a brilliant year last year, I am sure this one will be better.

of course I will be there for the event
Oh and new year resolution accepted.
And can't wait to see present


And last but in no means the least, Thank You every one, not just staff, for making YAMS what it is. Every one is important in this community!!!!!!

P.S. Likes all around Or not I have reached my positive quota for the day....

[Bigtycoflex 26]

I will get up for that as this year I don't have a test

[Lord_Verigan 52]

Hmmmmm, 9 am is cutting it a little close, but I'll hopefully be up for it. See ya then!

[changingtuna88 168]

I don't think I can make it, have fun guys, be sure to post your pics!!!!!

[d8g4cnd24_h7 102]

I would like all the posts, but I get maxed out with positive views
Didn't feel fair if I only liked some, and not others.

@tuna, we can both be surprised by all the screenshots; I am sure everybody will post for us right guys?!!!

[Devon_HD 97]

Change of plans I will be on!

[changingtuna88 168]

[quote name='d8g4cnd24_h7' timestamp='1357782145' post='18183']
I would like all the posts, but I get maxed out with positive views
Didn't feel fair if I only liked some, and not others.

@tuna, we can both be surprised by all the screenshots; I am sure everybody will post for us right guys?!!!
[/quote]


You here post your pics!!!! and I am going back to like the other ones now such a sly fish I am

[darrenstraight 2,330]

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!

[Kolayhe2 28]

Happy birthday YAMS !!! I may be able to come but if I can't make it have a fantastic time !

[darrenstraight 2,330]

The celebrations begin in under 45 minutes time!

Get ready!

[url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GwjfUFyY6M"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GwjfUFyY6M[/url]

[Dynamo12xr4 38]

Im definatly attending!

[Captain_Marbles 249]

Well, after about 3 hours of uploading, the video of yesterday's antics is finally done! I couldn't film the Walls event, because I had to leave, but perhaps another time eh?
Anyways, here it is. It's 20 minutes long, not bad for 2 hours worth of event.
Hope you enjoy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZWC35RN8UQ

[Devon_HD 97]

Nick is there Anyother way I can watch that video because it won't let me on my iPhone and my Internet never loads, is it on YouTube?