Hi, my name is Robby. Let me begin by saying; I am really not a very friendly person. This blog post may offend you, or it may help you. How you take my advice is totally up to you. Let's begin.

I decided a few weeks ago that I wanted to start a Minecraft server. It had previously attempted to start multiple in the past (approx. 2 or 3 I have tried to run have failed), but this time was different. I had actually spent days, if not weeks, in advance planning the server. All this beautiful work, I knew would soon be lost once I opened the server to the public. Not all of it was my work, though. I had quite a large pool of people actually helping me build it along the way. Actually, a funny story about when we were building our spawn city... a player had actually saved diamonds in chests throughout our whole world. You can see where this gets ugly, right? I'll bring it back up later, when it's more relevant. But then, it wasn't before long we got distracted with what plugins the server is going to offer to our players... actually, distracted may have been an understatement.

My fellow co-admin and I had spent hours on Bukkit, researching plugins, and what we would add. We knew what we wanted, we just didn't know how to materialize them. It was tough, and if I look back now, I really wish I would have changed my mind on a couple plugins. They make me gag seeing them in place where they are now. It's a shame I rushed to put the server live so quickly. Because you know what I forgot about? Those damn diamonds. They were still out there, waiting to be found by the players. But enough of that back story, let's get in to the guts of this blog post.

You think your players keep you busy? I own a hardcore clan vs. clan server. Hardcore, as in hardcore. We kept as vanilla as we could, with some goodies on the side, just to keep people playing. Let's define hardcore for a moment. This could be a number of things. But ultimately, my server decided on the following:

• Minimal combat-changing plugins (meaning: no mcMMO/levelcraft/etc)
  
• No PVP rules, anything goes.
  
• Griefing and stealing ARE allowed.
  
• Killing within your clan is not allowed.
  

These were all prime factors when we decided how to run this thing. For one, we had to make sure we had a great server to run it on. Check. We had an 8GB RAM dedicated server at our disposal, it's covered. What we failed to notice was our 0.5Mbps upload speed. For you less-than-average tech savvy folk, that's pretty damn bad.

Now let's step back and see what has gone wrong so far...

• We have a god-awful connection line
  
• People are complaining left and right about griefing/stealing
  
• The players had found the modded diamonds
  

...... Okay. So we're not doing too hot. Let's just take a step back, breathe in, relax. Maybe soon all this will just be over. Wait, what's that? The faint sound of a person complaining... about the lag. But I told them, Monday, everything would be better Monday! We just have to wait, wait for our connection line to be upgraded...

Okay, so maybe I can't cope with being a server admin. But at least I can write.