Prologue
Hello everyone!
You're probably curious what this is and why it might have appeared in your sub box.
“A blog? BUT I DON'T SUB BLOGGERS! BLARGH!” errr... Normally I do projects, such as castles and amateur Worldpainter maps. This blog is my first and will probably be my last one. Sorry for the bad English, I'm still a learner. So let's start now, shall we?

What is this all about?
As said in the Title this blog is the story about the Minecraft creative community, how they (d)evolved and where that might lead to. The goal of this is to explain how the creative community works. I'll start with Me, continue with a little bit of Minecraft history and then go slowly into the present till we reached the near future. This blog is based on my experience and therefore contains only my point of view. I do not advertise any of the the servers or groups that are named below. Also, some of the statements i'll make might seem drastic, so if you can't take critique please try to stay calm.

About me
I played Minecraft for over 4 years now, so you can say I played at least SMP from start. I started with Minecraft classic but switched to SMP quite fast. Even back then I played with “cheated” materials, meaning I didn't farm them and just built whatever I liked. Yes, these buildings were really bad compared to Today's standards but it was Alpha, so what? I just continued and soon I traveled from Server to Build teams and back; an restless traveler, curious to see new things. First within the German communities, soon international ones. Well, now you know me, and if you're bored: It'll get more interesting in the following part.

The beginning
At the beginning there were many Minecraft classic servers for the building community and some SMP servers for the “main” game. The servers were manly populated by Students and young Adults. Age from 15 till 30 were most common. This was probably the most important time for Minecraft, because at this time people realized it has huge potential, created mods, texturepacks and soon it was no longer an insider tip. Back then “Citybuild” was THE big thing. My mind was blown when the server plugin WorldEdit was released, it opened a window for what we could expect from the future. Oh, the nostalgia :')

Rise of an era
After Minecraft got opened to a bigger audience - thanks to social media (I'm pointing at you, Let's plays!) - more and more young people populated the servers, the Minecraft fandom grew and so the first big servers were born. Probably one of the most well known servers still is FyreUK. Thanks to their “Timelapse” Videos they became very popular and an inspiration for the minecraft building community. Also a server that should be mentioned here is of course the Voxelbox. Very popular for their server plugin “VoxelSniper” and their incredible creative world with several building styles, they left a unique mark on the builder landscape. But also Mithrintia, Hypixel, Gazamo and other building communities stand out.

Later Planetminecraft.com offered a platform for everyone to share Builds, Skins, Resourcepacks, mods and more.

A little digression to creative server concepts
At the start of the building servers the already above named Voxelbox amazed me the most. Well, most people might know them from the open server days, where they showed people in groups around the microcosm they built. You could basically say the voxelbox was a less a server than more a closed world to explore. A huge world where they built Castles, Spaceships and even entire Cities. Huge worlds instead of many little builds still is an unbeaten concept for me. Sadly, the Voxelbox shut down the server. They're still alive but as much as I know they won't reopen the Voxelbox as we know it. They just build project after project in a closed build Team now.
But if you really want to experience the concept of a world to explore you still can visit the Steampunky Sanacraft server or Westeroscraft.com. (You might have seen one or two of their Game of Thrones builds somewhere.)

Today most creative servers are based on a plot world, where you just apply for a higher rank by building on it. After that, there's a second plot world with bigger plots and probably another creative world with terrain to build on. You just build project after project to get promoted till you reached a point where you can't get a promotion anymore because of lack of skills or just because you already have the highest rank. Oh, some servers have community projects or commissions to do from time to time but that's basically how 90% of the creative servers work today. You always start with a plot build.

Besides the creative servers, there are also build teams. Sometimes they're pretty much the same, but there are differences. Unlike most creative servers, most build teams aren't open for the masses.

So much to that for now, let's go further.

The other side
It's true, with creative building you can get famous. But the money was always made with minigames. As Youtube gamers promoted the many kinds of minigames you can play in minecraft, the minigame servers got literally flooded with people, who were willing to even pay for premium ranks up to $50 a month. And soon big servers hired  building teams to build their Hubs and minigames. Hypixel surely was the most succesful Adventure redstoner. With collaborations between Hypixel and build teams and his name, that stand out in the community a huge minigame server was opened. The people came and probably left a lot of money there. Minecraft was a serious business within the community now. And since building alone didn't make the building teams rich, most of them kept their community alive with doing commissions for other, financially successful minigame servers. With time more and more minigame servers opened to get a piece of the cake and the build teams built for them. Happy coexistence? Probably for some, but most minigame servers and build teams dissolved after a few weeks. If you want to be successful you have to offer more than the casual minigames.

When a community comes to an end
It's not a new thing that servers die like flies at the moment and so the server I built and played on past away recently. It was the well known Creative-Node server and about a year ago most people wouldn't have thought about it closing down after they even won the first place on a PMC contest and were known for breathtaking buildings. How did it happen?  Well, the Owner quit and disband the server. Most servers end like this you might think now, and you're right, but Creative-Node was kind of a big player for a not sponsored server. Most fairly successful servers end by split after ugly fights or merge with others when the money and players ran out. Most of the time the big audience doesn't know why a server merges or dies, but very often fights or lack of money (sometimes both or fight because of the money) are common reasons.

Even once huge servers like Mithrintia aren't resistant against the flow that keeps servers coming , going and merging. Apparently they're merging with pwegoable and change their name to “Athion”. Something many other servers did before to not die. And sometimes it helped, but sometimes even a merge can't stop the expiry of a server. Because the building community is an ongoing evolution. With new blocks, resourcepacks, possibilities the buildings evolve as well and once you are left behind by other teams it's a matter of time till you're not good enough to compete any longer. And that will cause a fighting if not dying community.

But where do people go after one server closes? Well, they pretty much split, some join other communities, some try to open own servers and some just quit the game. That's how it works most of the time.

The Aftermath
After we went through this little history lesson and took a look on how it is now, I still can say the creative community is strong. It becomes more of a focused hardcore fan base every year, since Planetminecraft gets more and more important for builders to share their stuff, while most creative servers have less visitors. In a year or two, 2 or 3 big creative servers/teams will probably dominate the scene And the not so new anymore EULA pushes the extinction of the little servers, since the little “shy” Servers follow the rules, the big servers do not care much about it and continue making money. It's been a while since the EULA update, still there are plenty of big servers offering premium ranks for real money. probably the EULA is way too imprecise and Mojang does not do much about servers which violate these rules. But that could change in the near future when microsoft is in charge of the copyright questions. But even if, that won't stop the trend of focusing the community to a few big servers at the end.

I hope it wasn't too boring and sorry for my bad English again. I know it might seem quite random, but I think the blog speaks for itself. Anyways, if you have a question or simply want to correct me, leave it in the comment section! I'm aware of the fact that some of my “information” might be wrong. :)
 
Thanks for your attention! :o