It all started with an amazing, small little server named, S.H.F.T (super happy fun time). It started way before i joined, i heard it used to be a few different things before i joined, but i joined when it was a faction server. Infact you could say this server was litteraly the reason i had bought the paid minecraft. My cousin texted my mom and said she wanted me to join a server her and her friends played on and at the time i only had a cracked minecraft account because i never thought it was worth it to pay 26 dollars to join a few big servers (like hunger games at the time when it was EXTREMLEY popular). So i spent a few days earning a few exra dollars here and there until i got around 30 dollars or so, then i went to gamestop and got me a minecraft card. Infact i still have the card on my wall. With it i made my account (bummercheese) paid. I joined the server and it felt different than any other server i had played on before. Before all the cracked server owners were usally rude or empty or just didnt respond to anything you said, but in this server, everybody was friendly. That supprisingly was a huge change for me. I played about every day. Also at the time i didnt really know what factions was either so i had to learn. I eventually got kicked out of the faction i was first in (that my cousin invited me to) because i stole a few things. So then i went and made my own faction and made a house (i didnt really know that you were supposed to make a "base") and it never got raided. Then the server changed to a peaceful building server. I had fun on that too, not much else to say. Then one day on my own little private server i had with me friends (also im not sure if SHFT turned back into factions or not, this happend a few years ago) A few of the owners friends came on and thought it would be funny if they griefed and ruined my server (Since i op'd everyone who joined because i only let people i knew join) So when they did it they acted clueless. I was about to force shut the server without saving but the force saved. After that i was upset because i hadn't backed that map up in forever. So i went on to SHFT to work on my farm or something and bam. For no reason, banned. I don't know exactly who banned me (probably the owners friends) and i messaged the owner asking why but never got a response so i just gave up. After a good while (close to a year maybe longer) the server reset and i found out a little while after it happend and i joined. Everything was different and new peole were there along with old friends. I became to love the server more the more i played on it. The owner apologized about what happened and said he should have unbanned me earlier. So i kept playing, having fun, making memories and friends until something called 1.8 happened. The owner said he would update it to 1.8 but there was a HUGE delay about craftbukkit because of some legal problems. But after months of waiting spigot made a full 1.8 release with supported 1.8 blocks! But the server never got released. Instead it shut down. For a good while at that. It finally came back up as a peaceful server again but died almost instantly. For some reason nobody enjoyed it, not even me. We all were waiting for factions to come back up. Even though we all requested peaceful. It was planned but never happened. Since then me and the owner have been messaging eachother back and forth and he said that he lost interest in owning a server and it probably would not come back up for a while or ever. I was very upset and frustrated and angry at the same time. He majorly announced this in a blog post (like this one) and i chewed him out in the comments. He deleted the post almost right afterwards. That lead me to believe that he was working on bringing the server back up, a month or 2 passed and i got the message that it isnt. Thats when i realized, it was dead. I told him that i realized you cant revive dead memories or reinact them. Everyone on the server has found new interests and mostly grown apart. But i guess that is life. And that is why i believe 1.8 was the death of minecraft. I know what your thinking "It was only the death for you! Many other people still enjoy it" And while thats true, not as many people do. It seems that minecraft has lost its peak of popularity. Even on mineplex it isnt as crowded as it used to be. If you go to the servers sections, most of the new servers either have only the owner or is empty. I don't think this is goodbye for minecraft from me, deffantly not at that. It is this close to dead, but the memories we all had as friends will never die.