My Rant About Servers

Within the past year or so, there has been a great increase in the amount of Minecraft servers. With so many servers, you can pretty much categorize them into groups. The way I see it, there are the typical survival servers, the mini-game/prison servers, the raw creative servers, the PVP/factions servers, the creative/educational servers, and the oddball/unique servers. Of course in the mix there are plenty of hybrid servers that link multiple types together through o hubso , but I will not include that here. Please correct me if I missed anything. So, with a variety of server types, which do you prefer? Obviously, everyone is going to have a different opinion on this, so what I am going to do is break it down into two sides. The first side is the Typical/Simple survival server. This is the server that everyone has seen, and most likely consists of a lot of smaller servers. This server typically has a friendly community and a close-knit staff, and their primary objective is to minimize the game to its raw origins, which you all know as Minecraft. This server simply lets you play the game how it was meant to be played. The second side consists of all the other servers out there, the servers that go out of their way to be unique. They tend to try new things that are often wacky and experimental in order to find the ideal Minecraft experience. These servers also include the servers that use Minecraft as a platform for other types of gameplay, including mini-game servers, the island and sky servers, and the hybrid servers that combine several types. And, with the advancement of the Bukkit plugin community, servers are becoming more and more capable of doing things you never thought you would see in Minecraft. With the right combination of these intelligent plugins, a server can become something no longer Minecraft-relatedo it becomes a unique offspring of the game you thought you were playing.

So with all that out of the way, do you guys prefer servers that try new things by using Minecraft as a platform, or servers that stick to the original Minecraft experience? Personally, I have tried creating a server that does something new. It was a modern themed server that allowed players to experience a modern life, by living in a city, renting apartments, starting businesses, and making money. It was a new take on the typical prison server. It was a controlled environment that allowed me to manipulate how the players experienced the server. It was very ambiguous, but people seemed to love it. They left comments like, "This is the best server ever" and "Fresh server feel". After I had finished with this server, I decided to create a more typical, medieval Minecraft server. A server with the original Minecraft feel, yet with the latest bukkit plugins that allowed for a more enhanced experience. This type, although I put way more thought into it, didn't receive as positive results. Even though my team had spent a long time developing it and making it beautiful, it seemed like people generally didn't care as much about the server. They didn't see anything as unique, so they pretty much decided that it was a boring server.



Personally, I could go either way on this subject. A good server is a server that pleases the players, and the way it does that does not matter. But a lot of players seem to have a preference. It is hard to break it down to two sides, but for the sake of this post, I am going to say "Unique vs. Original". Do you prefer a server that attempts to create something never done before, in a way that goes out of its way to provide the ultimate experience for you and your friends? Or do you prefer the server that sticks to its origins, but lacks the "pop" that attracts a lot of players? I would really like to see what the community likes more, in order to enhance my perspective on Minecraft and allow me to make my servers better.