I feel that it's time to begin blogging about my personal experience as a server administrator of an SMP minecraft server. In this blog, I'll talk about the mods I use, the players I play with and the trials and tribulations I go through on a daily basis related to Minecraft.

I plan on breaking my posts into two sections. One for my interactions with the player base, and one for the technical side of things. I will try and talk about both as much as I can, but still have enough brevity that it's interesting each read.

PLAYER SIDE 2.5.2013: A time for OP, a time for grief.

On my server, I am Owner. End all, be all. I set rules in bedrock, and I follow them, no matter how much it pains me. In one particular instance, I spent hours working on a medium size church with some redstone bells/whistles in my crafting world, called Creative. Then brought it over to one of my 'real' worlds (where creative is not allowed) as a present for one of my players. I do this every so often as it generally gets wonderful feedback and causes random partying.

However, this user did not protect the entire creation I made with Towny, and left about 1/4th of it in Wilderness. One of my mods (and these guys will be detailed later) discovered this, and with his friend proceeded to grief the creation. The unprotected part of it entirely missing. I logged in mid-grief, and immediately freaked and jailed the user based on the fear he was exploiting something. I was pissed. Less than 24 hours this creation had been around, and it had been destroyed.

When he and my mod informed me that they were in the right, and allowed to do it... I was just taken aback that this was in fact, not technically griefing, as according to my server's rules, which I wrote.

Rule 1: Protect your shit with towny or mychunk, lest it be griefed. Unprotected items are unprotected.

I quietly sat bounded by my own rules as it was unmade. Later, I rolled back the grief, and then claimed the chunk for the player. But it was wrong, and I felt angry and sad. I did not punish either of the griefers.

Forward to today:

Today I logged in, happy as ever. I generally check my logs only when there's an issue or when I meet a new player (call them s3). Today I met a new player whom I had never met, but had 38000G in the bank, and all permissions my server offers. S3 asked if they could be a mod like another mod whom I had given the privilege to. Definitely an eyebrow raise. 1. Never heard of this player, 2. What would my mod be doing that would let this other player know that they were mod. (a different mod from the first)

When I give op out, I have 3 rules which each must agree to: Make changes to the world ONLY for the better, never modify another players data, never do anything considered as exploiting.

So I start investigating this S3 to find out more. I find that this user, with the help of my mod, changed the game mechanics of my shop, and exploited chestshop buy/sell to give themselves about 10 inventories worth of diamond blocks. (she changed the sign to Buy 10; Sell 1000 for him, and forgot to change it back, after the deed.), changed game modes in real worlds multiple times, and created (what I term) Vaults: a room full of chests with stacks of diamondblocks or other real items which should be impossible to obtain.

Damn. Okay, time to read through logs.

In the last 4 days, she had basically created about 360,000G worth of items, and /eco gives. Then, out of sheer luck, notice that her IP is the same as the new player, and of about 2 other players on the server.

S3 had bought and sold 50k worth of items. Fortunately, I have a failsafe for that kind of behavior. I only stock my server account with 50kG, and feed the account with other money sinks, like plot taxes, or buying items from the shop, or buying permissions.

Bricks were shat. I was floored. This is a person whom I had had multiple conversations with, whom I thought I could trust with keeping such a huge responsibility. But I did not rage. I waited.

So, the new user logs on in reply to my mail to him asking for an interview. I say, before the interview, I'd like to know how you acquired such wealth? What follows is the log:

sicariusdracus: so... I have to ask before I get started. How did you make 50k in a day?

s3: selling the diamonds c5 gave me
s3: i sold them to a player
me: at 10 per, he would have had to have given you 5000 blocks?
s3: idk but he gave me like 10 chests full then i used some to make swords im a weaponsmith
me: damn. I was hoping you'd tell me the truth.
s3: i am. oh and they sell for 1000 in the admin shop
sicariusdracus: actually, [MOD] changed the shop sign to S1000, and you bought and sold them until SERVER ran out of money.
s3: exactly
me: this is not what you told me. You said you sold them to a player.
s3: just assumed that i could sell them for that much. half i sold half
s3: the truth is i didnt sell them to a player i just didnt want u to change the sign back
me: that's EXPLOITING.
s3: i didnt know i got the diamonds frow crow and saw the sign in the admin shop when i went to sell them
sicariusdracus: so, when the next player comes in and sees that, and uses it, is that okay?
sicariusdracus: do you think it was okay for you to?
s3: i dont know i just thought it was part of the server. so i used it

He didn't get to become Op, and I removed it from the associated mod. But, I will never ban a player. I made the promise. Banning players gets you negative net players. And on a server with 6-10 constantly, it hurts to lose one.

Oddly enough, this conversation dejavu'd me from the time I removed another previous Op, but that's another day.

SERVER side 2.5.2013:

My server runs with 48 mods, all intended to enhance the gameplay, or provide minigames, or permissions/economy stuff. Often I find myself learning too much about the development of these plugins, and while useful, is ultimately frustrating. I find myself HATING the new dev.bukkit plugin waiting for approval and having to use only official plugins crap. It's not useful, it's frustrating to the dev and to admins (who don't necessarily share the same skillset).

I didn't really do jack today,because work was busy, and because of the removal of a trusted mod.

Closing: Tomorrow is another day!