Intro
I have been with TheOne's / Blocktopia since April 2010 - and ever since the first Beta server we opened we have had a track record of them seldomly surviving longer than 4-5 months.
The reasons for that have been numerous: Gamechanging differences in Minecraft versions, failed server concepts, poor acceptance by players, overly perfectionistic server Head Controllers, and so on.
Every time we said "next time it will be better, next time will be the one time we do it all properly". Primordia was planned to be such a "proper" thing. We worked on preparing it for 3 months, had countless brainstormings, drove myself, Malcovent and others into insanity and stress and ended up with a product we seemed fit to be ready for an eternity.
And now - 5 months later - we will close Primordia again.
(At least we are straight in our track record again.)
Why?
Three main reasons:
What now?
Over the last 1,5 years we have realised what we are really good at: Small, unique fun servers which have a game character. Taken from our own history - looking at Lava, Zombie and TNT - we are best with servers that have a clear team based fun focus.
Last week we have started testing the Tournament&Adventure server, as well as Army of Darkness. Next to that we have had Solitude running.
Those three servers will be fleshed out into proper servers and will remain running. We will focus to extend Army of Darkness into a server with mab submissions and other fancy things, we will focus to organise proper Tournaments on the A&T server like Skylands and turn it into a cool and unique Minecraft game server. And we will keep Solitude running, changing themes as needed, to give those wanting a Hardcore experience close to vanilla and survival a server to play on.
But that isn't all - we have two more projects to be launched in the near future. Again - those wont be huge servers like we tried with Primordia, but small ones. We will extend our server portfolio to have something for everyone, but wont try to put it all into one single server experience anymore.
---
There will be many open questions now, and are still. Please understand that we cannot answer all of them currently, as we are still doing many discussions amongst Head Staff and other staff about the coming weeks.
Just be assured that we will keep you updated as transparently as possible.
Do not ask about staff changes / rank changes / etc as of now, kay?
Outro
It was an honour to work on Primordia and the other Blocktopia 'beta servers' before that, even if it were certainly some of the most exhausting months I have experienced in my life. They were filled with great experiences and moments. Together with SMP v1, v2, v3, Treasure hunt server, vampire server, spleef server, phantoms build server, CMP, and many other episodes of server works, it was an always exciting time which I had fun to oversee, initiate, fix and update.
I want to thank everyone of the staff for the incredible hard work over the last 5 months on Primordia, but it was us all fighting against windmills like poor Don Quixote, and draining our all energy - stopping us from accomplishing the things we actually hoped for.
And all this for you - the players, giving you the best experience possible within the small framework that Minecraft is giving us. Bear with us, it is 'only' Minecraft after all.
Even if I will arse around constantly still (someone has to do it, aye?) - this marks a very weird spot in my time with Blocktopia. Luckily, as I dont leave, I dont have to make a very emotional good bye post, thank god! :D
I'll leave you with a nice song though:
I have been with TheOne's / Blocktopia since April 2010 - and ever since the first Beta server we opened we have had a track record of them seldomly surviving longer than 4-5 months.
The reasons for that have been numerous: Gamechanging differences in Minecraft versions, failed server concepts, poor acceptance by players, overly perfectionistic server Head Controllers, and so on.
Every time we said "next time it will be better, next time will be the one time we do it all properly". Primordia was planned to be such a "proper" thing. We worked on preparing it for 3 months, had countless brainstormings, drove myself, Malcovent and others into insanity and stress and ended up with a product we seemed fit to be ready for an eternity.
And now - 5 months later - we will close Primordia again.
(At least we are straight in our track record again.)
Why?
Three main reasons:
- 1.2 will break almost everything that is at the basis of Primordia. We use many custom plugins, most of which work for our server but are not upgradeable for 1.2 any time soon. It would take weeks to adapt the server to 1.2, an effort that is not currently feasible
- Primordias concept isnt working out. (there very many reasons for that, we will not blame anyone or anything, nor will you) The server is - objectively seen - a mess already and even more chaos is bound to happen. We hoped for uniqueness, and got an unfocused thing of constant work and fixing, which lead to many of the staff turning their back, stress, and bad feelings. We do not want to pay that price anymore, even if it means springing this extreme measure onto everyone.
- I am, as of today, stepping down as official Primordia Server Tech. Before you cry out - this does not mean I will leave Blocktopia. I still 'own and pay for' the dedicated server and VPS, I will do the Forum work an webpage work and whatnot, and so on. But I will not work on Primordia anymore. There are multiple reasons for that, mostly rooted on real life, and it was a step that was planned since 3 months. It leads to the problem though, that we do not have someone to move Primordia forward anymore.
What now?
Over the last 1,5 years we have realised what we are really good at: Small, unique fun servers which have a game character. Taken from our own history - looking at Lava, Zombie and TNT - we are best with servers that have a clear team based fun focus.
Last week we have started testing the Tournament&Adventure server, as well as Army of Darkness. Next to that we have had Solitude running.
Those three servers will be fleshed out into proper servers and will remain running. We will focus to extend Army of Darkness into a server with mab submissions and other fancy things, we will focus to organise proper Tournaments on the A&T server like Skylands and turn it into a cool and unique Minecraft game server. And we will keep Solitude running, changing themes as needed, to give those wanting a Hardcore experience close to vanilla and survival a server to play on.
But that isn't all - we have two more projects to be launched in the near future. Again - those wont be huge servers like we tried with Primordia, but small ones. We will extend our server portfolio to have something for everyone, but wont try to put it all into one single server experience anymore.
---
There will be many open questions now, and are still. Please understand that we cannot answer all of them currently, as we are still doing many discussions amongst Head Staff and other staff about the coming weeks.
Just be assured that we will keep you updated as transparently as possible.
Do not ask about staff changes / rank changes / etc as of now, kay?
Outro
It was an honour to work on Primordia and the other Blocktopia 'beta servers' before that, even if it were certainly some of the most exhausting months I have experienced in my life. They were filled with great experiences and moments. Together with SMP v1, v2, v3, Treasure hunt server, vampire server, spleef server, phantoms build server, CMP, and many other episodes of server works, it was an always exciting time which I had fun to oversee, initiate, fix and update.
I want to thank everyone of the staff for the incredible hard work over the last 5 months on Primordia, but it was us all fighting against windmills like poor Don Quixote, and draining our all energy - stopping us from accomplishing the things we actually hoped for.
And all this for you - the players, giving you the best experience possible within the small framework that Minecraft is giving us. Bear with us, it is 'only' Minecraft after all.
Even if I will arse around constantly still (someone has to do it, aye?) - this marks a very weird spot in my time with Blocktopia. Luckily, as I dont leave, I dont have to make a very emotional good bye post, thank god! :D
I'll leave you with a nice song though:
san00b wuz hur
