Well, maybe not quite 99, but a lot.
Creeper player damage is now ON. This means that if a creeper explodes close to you that you will take a degree of damage. The creeper explosion WILL NOT damage any blocks though. The game is currently on HARD difficulty so a single explosion will kill you if you have no armor. The damage will not effect VIP* players with god mode. TNT damage is unchanged and has no effect on players or blocks. Creeper player damage will also not occur in the spawn region (vine boundary).
Our staple plugins, Worldguard, Essentials and Worldedit have all
recently been updated and are still working flawlessly. This ensures the
best experience for everyone.
Our main control panel, McMyAdmin, has also updated. A couple of
the admins are having time-out issues but other than that all is great.
The system seems to be managing RAM and CPU better than ever so there's
less lag than I've ever seen on an SMP server! I've also increased the
user limit to its maximum level of 50 to reflect this improvement in
performance.
After some discussion with players I've switched the minestatus.net voting reward from $100 to 3 diamonds. This seems a significant reduction since diamonds are only worth $10 to sell, but in reality you can't buy them in-game and they are much more useful for general play (tools, armor etc) than $100 with which you can only buy relatively few much less useful items. The diamond armor is also really essential now creeper player damage is on.
Few things to tell you about that are linked to each other now.
I've installed Multiverse and Multiverse portals. These plugins let us have more than the normal 3 worlds (normal, nether, end). The portal plugin lets you go between them through physical gates. Rob (djdowse) and I have been discussing at length what sort of worlds we could add but for now there's only one additional one while we check the server can handle 4+ worlds (seems good so far actually).
We've got a creative world. VIP rank and higher (VIP,VIP+,VIP*,MOD,ADMIN) can access the creative mode world through the portal directly to the right of the main spawn room, out on a branch.
The small area inside the vine boundary is protected but outside of that is there for you to create whatever you wish! We're hoping not to have to protect any builds in the creative world since it's VIP and higher and you guys are awesome but please do not grief. We have the same block logging system in place as in the survival world so if someone does go griefing we can and will ban them. Your game mode will switch automatically between the creative and normal worlds.
The creative game mode is limited by a plugin called creative control. This stops people spawning mobs or entities (boats, minecarts etc) which would lead to massive lag and other issues. 99% of items are allowed though.
Your inventory will reset in the creative world but will go back to as it was when you go back to the survival world. In effect you'll have two separate inventories. However, there are some glitches with this which I've been trying to solve. Your creative inventory will never go into the real world, but it might swap the other way. If this happens just type '/spawn' and then head back through the portal. If you experience problems with your inventories, just tell a mod/admin and we'll try our best to help.
Anyone can view the available worlds by typing '/mv list' in the chat. You can also see who's in which world by typing '/mv who'. Any player can go back to the spawn of the world they're in by saying '/mv spawn'.
As previously mentioned, we're hoping to add maybe a game world to the server. Possibly something along the lines of Hunger Games, Skyblock SMP or some sort of other quest-based game. If you know of any amazing plugins or have an other idea for a world please email me! (
t_m@dowseworld.co.uk).
Rob (djdowse) and I were also hoping to have a sort of time limiter to stop people spending their entire time in the creative world. It's possible we could implement something like that in the future or even charge people to enter certain worlds/games. This would be to keep the normal survival world populated and active as people would have to collect funds in survival to enter the alternate worlds.
Lastly, we're looking for new players! We only have ~200 regular players and another 100-200 frequent visitors and we're looking to increase this over the next few months. If you've any suggestions of how we could do this or want to help promote the server please email me:
t_m@dowseworld.co.uk.We'd be particularly happy to accommodate a Youtube series if you're looking for an awesome server to start your Let's Play/Survival/Build series on and could give you priority mod support and server access if your series brings us a lot of new players. Again, email me to discuss.
t_m@dowseworld.co.uk.
Think that's all for now. Thanks for reading. See you online soon!
