So I've been thinking. We voted to keep main world, clear and update "update map," and make a 1.0 map. I never understood the whole specific 1.0 thing...it's just a point rev of the game really. Do we need a permanent map there?

Then I got to thinking. I'm loving 1.0 single player...hunting for stuff like a noob. Why can't we bring that to multiplayer? It brought me to the idea of treating the 1.0 map as a protected environment to play the actual game as a group.

Here's some parameters I thought of for this experience:

• Everyone works together towards a single goal; the map isn't just for going into and diggin. We have other maps for that.
• No bringing resources, with the exception of tools or armor, into the world. If we need it...mine/grow it.
• Admins/owners spawn no items in this world. Game becomes pointless otherwise.
• No warps allowed. No setting homes either. We build a house at spawn...when you die you go back to your real world house and have to map switch back to spawn.
• When we find the portal to the end...we plan to go in as a group. No renegades. Everyone that helped get there gets to help in the fight.

Basically, we go in as a group, set up a necessities-only shop, make as-needed teams (think "you three...we need a lot of wood" "you two, hunt for ender pearls" "can the four of you make a wheat farm and stock us up?") We could even have a planned out nether expedition (for a 1.0-specific nether)

What think you?

Man, 1.5 sure is awesome isn't it? Doesn't it suck that we're without commands though? There's several ways we have to handle updates, and now that bukkit has taken OVER a week to make a recommended build for 1.5, a conversation needs to be had.

First, a brief explanation. Bukkit edits and overwrites Minecraft's code, so a Minecraft update often means bukkit needs to be greatly re-written. They have 3 statuses for builds of bukkit: Failed, Stable, and Recommended. Here's the difference:

• Failed: They made code changes, the program basically doesn't load
• Stable: It works, and most plugins work, but it's not fully tested or there's a few bugs
• Recommended: The build is thoroughly tested and has no bugs

For the most part, a stable build works well and doesn't have many errors, you just typically download the .jar file and put it in your minecraft directory, and it works. The problem is, our host uses a service called "MCMyAdmin" which ONLY allows automated install of recommended builds. This is usually a good solution for a host; it's easy to use and you're not putting potentially broken code running on your server (imagine if some untested code goes into an infinite loop and uses a ton of resources...badness). This is why we've been running without commands or anything since 1.5_02.

In theory, we can submit a ticket to the people at our server host and ask them to install a stable build. They should be willing to do that, however the issues are that the stable build can get updated every few hours when they're working on it, and the turnaround for getting it installed may be half a day or more. It begs the question how often do we want to have to update bukkit AND all our plugins. Also...these are essentially testing versions, they could cause errors to make the game unplayable OR potentially even corrupt the world.

The other option is to not upgrade to new versions of minecraft AT ALL until a new recommended bukkit is out. We keep the server at the current version, keep the current bukkit...and users would NOT be able to update their clients or they wouldn't be able to connect. There's tutorials out there how to keep 2 versions of the minecraft client on your computer, but it's a bit of a pain...at least we'd have the tools to stop griefers and such.

With that explanation in mind...what would you prefer?

Despite our recent issues with Obsidian Hosting, we had submitted a ticket to them almost a week ago to have bukkit activated in order to install some griefer protection. We wish to poll you all, the users, about which plugins you'd like to see installed.

There are 2 groups of plugins we're talking about: Essential server-management plugins which don't change the gameplay that much, and fun plugins like minecart mania that change the function of the game. We've split them into 2 separate polls.