Minecraft Survival Servers

Hello EMC. This afternoon I temporarily disabled "The End" world on all servers. This is because of a duplication glitch involving end portals that some chose to exploit. A few have already been banned (including two Diamond supporters) and I am doing a large search on all logs this afternoon, and I promise you any one else will be banned. We will not tolerate this on EMC.

Two requests we commonly get are the ability to purchase rupees and the ability to donate more to the server. Today we have launched this ability in the Rupees section. We recognize that the ability to purchase rupees is somewhat controversial.

For the past 6 months we have played with many different scenarios and I have tracked data very closely to try and measure the effect of allowing more rupees into the system would have. I measured the impact on prices of different items over several servers. Things like the big Christmas giveaway, and the 1,000 rupees per player give away we did when we hit 10,000 members were also experiments to test the fluctuation of the economy.

We want to prepare even more servers (including the new hardcore SMP, Dystopia), and we want to upgrade smp1-4 to the better hardware setup that smp5-6 run on. This of course requires money, so the more people contribute the more we can do! Every dollar ever brought into EMC has been spent back on it. We didn't even take back our initial investments to get it started.

I will continue to measure the health of the economy closely. The worst case scenario is the economy suffers and we remove the ability to donate for rupees.

Over the next week I will be working to prepare our code for MC 1.2. From the backend MC 1.2 is a HUGE change and will require a lot of plugin rewriting. After I am done with that I will be working on a secret update involving animals....

The site was down for over a day. I want to start by apologizing, this length of down time is not acceptable and I am taking steps mitigate the future risk. The website side of the EMC platform lives in the Slicehost/Rackspace cloud. The reason I chose to do this is that you can scale it easily and it is very reliable (hah). I will say I have used them for over 2 years and never had a problem before. During the downtime the game server were NOT affected, as they live on their own dedicated beastly hardware in a different data center.

What happened is that the machine the website was living on crashed hard. It ended up with corrupt file system and took them over a day to recover. Once it was back up I had the wonderful task of reparing database corruption. Some I had to patch in from backups. The only data (that I can see at this time) that was lost was rupee transactions (history). These were purposely not backed up because they are large (millions and millions) and loss of them does not hurt us.

For those of you that have been here for awhile you know that one of my top goals is to provide as much uptime as possible. I plan feature releases and updates very carefully so we don't need downtime, especially on the game servers. You can be assured I was going nuts and could barely sit still over the last 24 hours. I wrote more angry emails and had more angry phone calls than I think the rest of my life combined. Once again I apologize, and thank you all for sticking around.

Today we launched the first phase of our community moderation system. This is the in-game reporting system that we have been talking about for quite some time. One of our biggest challenges as we grow is enforcing the rules and maintaining a fun and safe environment. We share this burden as a community, so why not involve the entire community in moderation?

All players now have the ability to report rule breakers in-game. The command to do so is /report. Reports are sent to Square where they are processed by the system. The trouble maker is flagged and online moderators are notified, even if they are not on that server.

All of above is the base of the system (phase one). We will spend the next few weeks working the kinks out of it before we move into the next phases of the system. Future phases will include a system that is smart enough to take automatically take temporary action against reported players. The logic for this will take into account many variables such as how many reports the player has, reputation of the players who reported them, how long they have been a member, etc. Temporary action would be a ban that is put into place until a human moderator can review the flagged player.

Like I said before, this system is new and NOT perfect. We are learning together and will tweak as we go. I think this will get us started down the right path. Thank you for your time!

I know it has only been two weeks since smp5, but it is already time to launch smp6! This server is running on improved hardware just like smp5. Eventually we will migrate smp1-4 to better hardware as well. Soon we will also be kicking off discussion for our next special server. It is going to be a hardcore SMP server (without a Town) geared towards those in the Empire that want more of a survival challenge. So look for those community conversations starting soon!

Below is a quick FAQ for questions that I know are going to be asked. If you have a different question please check the Empire Guide first before asking it.

What is the address of the new server?

Can items and blocks be taken between servers?

Can I can claim a residence on smp6 even though I have one on a different server?

Can I check who is on another server?

This is a big update, mostly around XP (experience points).

First of all, XP/Levels are now cross-server. This means you have the same in-game XP, no matter what server you are connected to. If you leave one server and go to another, your XP goes with you. Think of it like you rupees balance.

Secondly, you no longer lose your in-game XP/Levels when you die. This is something many players requested during our last community survey. This also means you don't drop XP orbs when you die. This was done because of community requests as well as to support some other things we are doing with XP to not allow boosting (next paragraph).

Finally, the most exciting part! Many players have asked for a way to compete friendly with leaderboards. This is something Minecraft is kind of missing. We played with many different ideas over the past few months. The goal was to find something that is fair for everyone, is technically plausible, and would not impact players that don't care about it. What we finally came up with was a new concept called Total Earned Experience Points, TEXP.


Every time you pickup XP orbs (killing things) your TEXP goes up. Your TEXP never goes down, even when you spend your XP/Levels on enchantments. So even though TEXP is based off of XP it doesn't affect its use in any way. This EMC exclusive just gives you one more way to play.

A new Leaderboards section has been...