Please note: This is not to piss anyone off, this is meant for discussion as to why things are the way they are now.

Hey guys,

People have complained for a while about the state of MC servers, how most are the same and follow the generally same cookie-cutter format with things. There's a reason MC has changed so drastically over the past few years, and I'm going to highlight the main points below, but first I'm going to start with a statement that is going to make a lot of people mad:

The Minecraft Community as a whole is dying.

Whoa there Billy, you can't say that. There's servers with thousands of people on right now, how can it be dying? True. There are servers that have thousands of players on right this very instant, with Hypixel, the Hive, and Mineplex being the most well-known. But even these mega-servers have issues, which I'm going to hit below. I know this is going to be a massive wall of text, but please bear with it, there's a good point to all this at the end.

Mini-Game Servers

Lets start with the most well-known of the server types. Hell, most of us probably play on them fairly often. They started out with mini-games like Spleef, King of the Ladder, and Hunger Games, to mini-games now like Paintball, DeathRun, Pig Jousting, Race the Dragon, and so on. Most of these servers have hired plugin developers or modders to make the vanilla server seem much less than that. Over time, plugin writers and modders have gone from doing most of their work for free to asking for a payment, almost like a job. Server owners who want to have the mini-games based off plugins have 2 options: pay out the money themselves, or figure out a way to use the community to pay for them. The latter happens more than the former, as we see things like cosmetics, VIP ranks, and others on these mini-game servers. All within Mojang's EULA, so all is fine. But there's a problem with this I'll hit later.

Prison, Anarchy, Faction Servers

I'm lumping all these together mainly because they follow one simple format: if you're not good, you die. A lot. So two ways to get past this massive barrier if you're not good, like 99% of the community: go on the server when no one is on, or pay money to get the gear you need to survive. For some cases, the server even gives you end game armor to start out; this kills the grind for the game, and just makes the server meaningless without a true goal. Addressing this more below.

Modded Servers

Modding is huge for MC; some mods have even been applied to the game, see horses and pistons as primary examples. The modding community has said time and time again: "We keep the drive for MC alive." In some cases, yes, this is true. But if you want a modded server, you're needing two things: a host that can withstand the community's brute force of tearing down the server with the mods, and a payment method to keep that host up and running. Modded servers more often than not run with the owners losing money; it's out-of-pocket, for the community, not for personal gain. Again, will touch on why this is an issue further down

The Pure Community Servers

You don't hear much about these guys, mainly because they're just scraping by. They don't advertise often, but they've had a community going for a while. These servers don't have the fancy bells and whistles, they just have a server about playing the game, and working together in MC. But these servers are few and far between because of the appeal of the servers I mentioned above; I personally have been an admin for a dying community server for about the past 2 and a half years. Within the past 6 months, less than 30 people have shown interest in playing on the server I'm running out of pocket for them. My own community is dying, and I know it. But what is there to do? I'm like most people who own the smaller servers – not enough money to get the bells and whistles to make people interested in MC again, but enough to keep those few hardcore fans coming back from time to time.

What are you trying to say?

Through all these different servers, there's one massive thing that keeps being hinted at, but never explicitly stated at, so I'll let you think on the main points: Major mini-game servers have plugin writers that ask for money for their work to be on a server now, when the work in the past would be put on for free. Most PVP servers require you to either beat OP players with next to nothing, or shell out money to get OP gear. Modded servers require communities to have larger servers to handle the load of the mods, which all cost more money. Smaller communities lack the funds to make themselves larger, which leads to smaller more tight knit groups of friends. The main point I'm trying to make for the Server Community is that the greed of money has literally destroyed what use to be a fantastic community. People asking for money when before they did things out of the goodness of their hearts, that's what is slowly killing the MC Server Community, and there is no way to fix it. This is something that can not be reversed.

Most people will tell you I don't know what I'm talking about. Most will say that I'm stupid and don't need to say things about the community. But if you look around, and you see the same thing on every server, just painted a slightly different color, with a slightly different brush, you begin to see issues and problems with how everything is set up. Yes, this is a long post. Yes, I want people to go back to the smaller communities to find joy in MC with people who care about the game again. Yes, I want people to play the game knowing that the owners of the server are in it for the players and community more than the money at the end. But there is no way to reverse what has happened…all we can do now is draw attention to it and try and make changes.

I don't want to TL;DR this. If you care about MC, and the servers that everyone "loves", you'll read it in full. You won't agree with everything I said, which is completely fine. I would rather have discussion rather than blissful ignorance