VIP Chalet Changes

A couple of you already noticed but I've made some small changes to the VIP chalets whilst adding this months free items etc, nothing major really...

1) The bed has been replaced by a non-functional one due to a glitch.
2) The colour scheme has changed slightly.
3) The views out of the left hand windows of Chalets 5 & 6 have been improved somewhat.
4) Signs have been added near the portal and in all chalets allowing VIP's to set the time to day.

Enjoy!

You've Named Our Currency!

It was very close for a long time with Credits, DiggyDollars & Shards all having a similar share of the vote until the last couple of days, but in the end Shards won with 42% of the vote, DiggyDollars came second with 37% and Credits third with 22%, in fact every single option had at least 11% of the vote!

So... our currency will be known as Shards from now on!

Beyond January

Ok so quite a few players have contacted me about ways to try and keep the server going next year, I was actually surprised just how many!

So, don't give up just yet, maybe something we can all be happy with will be worked out by January.

I can also confirm that there would have been 2 VIP spaces left for this quarter, I'm not going to post the donation links but as two players renewed even after knowing the servers future was uncertain and after receiving a couple of requests I'm willing to email a paypal link to anyone who would still like to be a VIP until the fees are due in January. 

The limit of 12 will be staying so it's first come first served I'm afraid, sorry if you see this message too late! 

You would also be doing me a personal favour as I've ended up covering over £40 of the fees myself (me and Diggin usually contribute £15 each, with the VIP donations covering the remainder). 

As a forewarning if the server does carry on beyond January it's likely that we'll switch to annual billing as this would give us a 20% discount (we currently get 10%) saving about an extra £45 a year, factoring in everything else this would mean that VIP would probably cost £25 for the year, £1 a year more than now but by also increasing the number of VIPs to 16 it would cover the entire years fees. Alternatively I have been looking at trying to reduce memory overhead to reduce the servers requirements from 4GB to 3GB without too many big changes, this would lower costs by a significant amount and would mean that the number of VIPs could remain at 12 (billed annually) and still cover costs. 

Another idea that has been suggested cost wise is that we have simple donations open all year with rewards given, then the remaining costs are divided by 12 near the end of the billing cycle and VIPs pay the difference, i.e. the VIP donation would be £25 a year if no-one made small donations through the year but could be significantly less if a lot of small donations are received, essentially making the VIP system a 'safety buffer' to make sure costs are covered.

One thing that would have to go in order to lower memory use is Marble End (and multiple inventories), it's not the world it's the plugin overheads and maintenance involved, however the minigame plugin we have now is capable of much more than we are using, for example Team Deathmatches & automated Parkour (jumping puzzles), so Marble End could be replaced with a world specifically for games, with certain commands disabled to prevent cheating (/sethome, /heal etc) and containing multiple arenas using various weapons etc as well as spleef. I've got quite a few options to weigh up and test when it comes to optimising and automating maintenance, including testing a new, more lightweight, multiple world plugin which would allow us to keep The Vault & VIP Island for emergencies with considerably less overhead, it does however mean that portals would have to be replaced by a warp type system.

As for the actual running of the server I don't want to say too much at this time, I'm still considering options that have been suggested and offers to take the world over but if it does keep going there will have to be some changes to make it more self-managed as at the moment the maintenance required is a lot for anybody to take on, this is something I've been working on anyway and will continue to do so for the time being.

I know that was long winded but I wanted to put my thoughts out there and give everyone some kind of update, well done if you managed to read the whole thing and please do give any constructive feedback you might have on the situation!

EDIT: 12:15 - The two VIP places are now taken, thanks again!

A Thank You To VIP's

As a little thank you for all your support over the last 9 months all VIP players can now use the following commands:

/heal
/feed
/repair <hand/all>

I've also added them to the commands page.

Enjoy!

EDIT: And no you can't use them in Marble End ;)

DDoS Attack / Internet Issues

Our hosting companies data centre is experiencing a massive DDoS attack which is being investigated now, hopefully they will manage to resolve this very soon, I'll update here as I know more.

UPDATE: 18:25 - From our hosting company;
"LINX (London Internet Exchange ) seems to have some routing / network issues. At this point we can't do anything from our side, but wait until this is resolved."

VIP Donations & Sad News

I've decided not to open general donations this quarter.

I apologise for the last minute notice but things have changed drastically in the last 18 hours and the future of DiggyMinecraft has become very uncertain.

Most regular players are aware that I was intending to make DigginChickin an Admin very soon, unfortunately due to personal issues she will no longer be playing Minecraft, so she can concentrate on other things and has asked me to remove all her stuff in world. 

What most of you probably didn't know is that the intention was for her to take over the server for most of next year as my study increases to 60 hours a week and with everything else I just won't have time to run the server.

I'm sad to say it but DiggyMinecraft will therefore be closing in January and may be whitelisted to existing players only before then, I'll be keeping the website and a small whitelisted vanilla server going but for at least next year that's it. 

It's sad but just one of those unexpected things that life has a habit of throwing at us, it's been fun though and hopefully we can all continue to enjoy the last few months and perhaps meet again in new worlds for new adventures.

If anyone would like to continue hosting the map/s beyond January please contact me by e-mail, please be aware though that suitable hosting will cost around £100 a quarter.

If you're an existing VIP that has renewed already I understand that knowing this beforehand may have changed your mind about renewing so if this is the case please contact me and I'll arrange a refund asap.