How did YOU find VeteranCraft? | VeteranCraft General Discussion | Forum

Let me tell you the tale of how I came to Veterancraft. One day, about two years ago, my editor asked if I could look into Minecraft as a possible programming topic. The intent didn’t initially pan out because of hMod’s unstable nature, but the game stuck with me. For the next few months I hopped around a few servers fraught with technical and administrative problems, finally relegating myself to playing single player and delving into the bowels of reverse engineering Minecraft to write client hacks. My inner nerd was happy.

I didn’t return to multi-player until I was snubbed by two elitist pricks, err… friends of mine, on their BulletProof Pixel radio show for not playing Minecraft SMP. After relenting to give it another try, I was fortunate to become a member of a server hosted by their friend and had a ball of time crafting and tweaking the game. Things went well until fiscal problems caused a “civil war” amongst its denizens. Sadly, after the battles were fought the resulting compromise wasn’t what I had become accustomed to.

While my friends decided to stay, I trudged through the wastelands a broken Minecraft player with no home desperately searching for glimpses of an oasis; casting searches on Google and Yahoo and pouring through mind-numbing posts on PMC and MCF desperately seeking keywords such as mature, professional, community spirit, and so on.

After a few false leads, I had composed a Top Ten list of things that I cared not to see in SMP. Unsurprisingly, for most servers visited it wasn’t hard to tick off many items after only a single hour of play. After my 10^th try, I thought I had finally found a potential home, but chose to hedge my bet by looking for at least one more.

By now, I had become an expert at sifting through recommendations weeding out overblown, delusional descriptions and gauging the maturity level of system admins. But seeking another potential home seemed bleak; link after link, description after description were quickly whittled down to nothingness. I almost missed Veterancraft if I hadn’t glimpse out of the corner of my eye, Meatballwz blurb – “not run by a 12-year old.”

Intrigued, Veterancraft became my 18^th stop, and in hindsight, my final one. It was within minutes of logging on that I met ryanpitts offering to give a tour of the land - a good sign – prompting me to print out a fresh copy of my check list. After another hour of play I met Meatbawllz, still with nothing checked off on my list. Three more hours and the list was still as pristine as when it was first printed. I found my second potential home!

My decision between the two was going to be based on a week-long evaluation of both servers. Fortunately, server #10 committed Harikari the following day. The kids, who included the system admin, were out of school and my check list was marked up within 30 minutes of logging on. Good bye!

After another week on Veterancraft, playing 4-5 hours per day for a solid week, it only had 1 check mark against it, and of all the other 9, it was the least offensive. I couldn’t believe my luck. Short of a few server hiccups, which are easier to fix than people problems, I knew I had a new home.

Ten months later, which seems like a lifetime sometimes, Veterancraft is completely ingrained in my life style. Rarely is there a time that server logs aren’t scrolling by in a window on my computers at home and work. I wish I had more time to actually play and build in the game, but nonetheless I’m building behind the scenes, underneath the game. With 34 plugins and continuous releases of new features, I have plenty of opportunity to build or fix things either ourselves or in conjunction with other plugin developers. It’s more important to make sure that our server(s) are ready for everyone else to play and build and be ready for things coming down the road. But sometimes, late at night, I secretly yearn to place blocks and let the creative side of my brain have a chance at play.