hmm... Thought I would comment on this. I have seen it done, and in some cases it is useful. But most of the time it isn't. Because each empire server is in essence identical, unlike this other server where each server is drastically different, then there would be no extra benefit from being able to easily change to another server. Although it would be a cool feature to have, it is not the most beneficial. If aikar put effort into creating something like cross server chat or private messaging then that would be very, very useful. Although something like this would be useful for those lazy people who just can't be bothered to press escape. Or then there are people like me who somehow broke their escape menu...
It's completely possible, in fact, I'm Administrator on a server that does this. https://github.com/ElasticPortalSuite/BungeeCord There is the GitHub for it, still not sure if that works, but Justin and EyeCar can update it.
It would say you would have to log out of one of the empire servers.. I'm Sure Aikar could code something like this, so this is why I think we should have this.
I don't see much point unless someone is trying to do something rather impressive with macros, which is a no no anyway and is probably why only Town was included in the suggestion. The only useful purpose I can think of for something like this would be to avoid the Minecraft login and session servers when they go down. In that case it should include all the worlds.
Bind some individual keys key with.. /server smp1 /server smp2 /server smp3 /server smp4 /server smp5 /server smp6 /server smp7 /server smp8 /server smp9 /server utopia
https://github.com/ElasticPortalSuite/BungeeCord#readme Just leaving this here, to prove it is possible.
To me, it just seems like more work for whoever works with plug-ins... I mean, though it would be a little more easier, it also isn't much work to disconnect and reconnect to another server. Also, if the minecraft servers are down, and you use this.. I don't think it'll make much of a difference. You'll still need to go through the connecting screen probably, and that's basically the same as if you logged out and tried logging into a different server.
Not being funny, but Aikar has a long list of far more important / critical changes and implementations he needs to work through. It takes me between four and six seconds to hit 'Escape', hit 'Multiplayer', pick the server I want, hit 'Join' and load the server up. We don't need this.
I always thought the ability to change servers either with a command or automatically when using a command to visit a residence on another server would be awesome. This is also something I have looked into many times over the last year. It is possible (will get to that in a minute) but not practical. Currently Minecraft doesn't support a way for a server to say "hey disconnect from this and connect to this". This would be far the easiest and cleanest solution to this problem. People have made client side plugins in the past to support this, but of course everyone would have to install the plugin. I personally emailed Mojang about this (and another suggestion about updates) but of course received no response. The truth is that this would be VERY easy for them to implement into the game (prob a few lines of code). The way other servers have gotten around this is by proxying traffic for the servers. Basically the way things like "BungeeCord" work are by having everyone connect to one server, and then BungeeCord on that server routes the traffic to whatever server it needs to. So basically you would have something like play.empire.us and then that server would route the connection to things like smp1.empire.us. This works in theory, and several servers have used it. However it also presents issues, for one EVERY (or most) connections have to be funneled through a single proxy server. This creates a single point of failure for people playing on EMC, if that connection gets slow/overloaded/broken then every server suffers. This also means it creates a single point to attack us from (like a DDoS) and yes we get these attacks constantly by jealous rival servers. Additionally you are relying on a third party program to properly handle and route all Minecraft packets, this just adds yet another place things can go wrong and bugs can be introduced. This also means you are relying on BungeeCord to update and fix bugs with each Minecraft update (causing even slower updates). When I weighed the pros against the cons I decided that it was better to not introduce a bunch of unknowns just for the sake of not having to click on the server list. I will of course keep an eye on this in the future and if a better solution presents itself (like Mojang adding it to the game client) I will look into it again. Disclaimer: If you are a tech nerd yes I did simplify the explanation of BungeeCord. Yes I understand you can do things like run more than one proxy. But in principle the cons and my reservations are still valid.
