As you probably know, I'm alodapotato (more commonly referred to as 'Aloda'). I've been playing on Novscraft (or NOVS12's survival Minecraft server, as it was called back in the day) since some time around March 2011. I've been around here for a long while, and I have a lot of experience playing on these servers. I'd like to use this thread to talk about my experience with Novscraft, what was good, what was bad, and looking forward to its yet-unamed spiritual successor, what aspects should stay and what should be changed. If you have any thoughts of your own, please make a comment and tell me what you agree/disagree with. Also, it's about midnight here now, so I'm tired. I apologize for any poor grammar that results.
SURVIVAL
So I guess I should start when I first joined. Way back then, we only had a small survival server. It was simple, almost vanilla (only lwc and a few other essentials), but it was still intriguing to 13 year old me. Back then, it was more about just having fun with my friends, building, mining, etc. I had no interest in the rest of the community until I accidentally dug my way into a city run by migs and some other kids whose ign's I don't remember. Not long after I found this city, migs got banned (for shit talking novs or something I don't remember the details) and the rest of the kids left, so I proclaimed myself the new owner, and set out to make it thrive once more. I would invite random other players to come and join me, and I slowly repopulated it like that. It was a great feeling, being able to support this random group of players (even though someone else had already done the hard work for me), and I think that's where I gained my mentality of wanting to help the community however I could.
Although the survival server was smaller and simpler than the faction wars that you're all used to seeing, I think I enjoyed my time on there a lot more than I ever did with faction wars. There are a few factors in this; I was always with my irl friends and I was always doing what I wanted, not what my faction wanted, but I think the biggest reason was the switch from the cooperative nature of survival, to faction wars encouraging a more hostile environment. I wanted to help the community, not fight it.
FACTION WARS
Back when faction wars first started, it was a little different to what you're probably used to. Raiding techniques were still being developed, and base security was rarely considered. Also, our spawn was a very different place. We had about 9 chunks of safe zone then wilderness. I remember when I first joined eagerly creating my first faction, walking a couple of hundred blocks straight out of spawn, claimed the land and started building. I hadn't considered the 'war' part of factions wars however, and was quite surprised when a group of diamond armour clad
Now, this may seem weird to you newer kids, but looking back, I loved the fact that the spawn was so tiny. Why? Because, inevitably, newbies would build their base right outside the spawn, and inevitably, the bigger factions would come and teach them a lesson. The area just outside of spawn became a wasteland, the ruins of old factions scattered everywhere, TNT holes and just general chaos. As much as this may have sucked for the new players, there was a constant reminder just outside of spawn that this was faction wars. We didn't have safe zone stretching on forever to 'protect the new players', we had an even better reminder not to fall into the trap that so many other newbies have.
Also the view from the spawn shop was amazing, if anyone remembers that.
I didn't really participate in faction wars after that map was reset. From the reset on, Novscraft became pretty much purely about the community to me. As the community continued to grow, there were more and more newbies. Around here is where I think the community was at its best. There was a bunch of cool people, cool people are good, there was a bunch of newbies, newbies are good, they help the community grow, and there were few immature idiots, immature idiots are not good. Now, somewhere along the line (early 2013 I think) I was accepted as a pre-mod on the faction wars server (probably just because I was online when the rest of the mods were asleep lol). Great, now I can support the community better. Being a pre-mod was cool. People looked up to me, people respected and, and best of all, people would turn to me when they had a problem. Now somewhere along the line here, things took a turn for the worse. More and more immature
I think there's a lot we can learn from novscraft as we go forward. A lot of what we had was solid. I feel that, in general, the core faction wars premise was solid, but there were some other minor things that made things go awry. I think that looking forward, we need to have a bigger focus on the community. Stricter rules to ensure a better experience for those who want to support the community, and to deal with those who want to harm it. Look to this thread from way back in 2012. It sums up what I'm talking about well enough.
Now there's a little more that I wanted to mention about the overall mood of the server (what a faction wars server should look and feel like), a little bit about donations, and some other stuff, but I'm too tired right now, so I'll leave it for some other time.
Thank you for reading. As I said earlier, please tell us what you think about what I've said and about your experiences on novscraft and suggestions for what can be done to make our new server something that has all the good parts from novscraft, and fixes the few problems we had.
Goodnight,
Aloda
