As some of you have no doubt gathered, I am a fairly private person not given to sentiment, but I just felt that it was appropriate to say a few words. I find it to be incredible that through the creation of this server we could bring such a diverse community of people together. For that is the defining characteristic of our little group. Beyond Minecraft, beyond nationality, we have created a community.

With the completion of spawn, we have proven that this community can work together in a way that is truly impressive. And I am truly proud and humbled to have been a part of.

With that being said, I am hereby announcing my retirement. Effective immediately.
I have already discussed things with the senior-most staff and, I am turning my title over to Migas. No one else has shown as much dedication to the server as he, there are no better hands for the server to be in. Please treat him as well as you have treated me over the years.

Thank you.

I will be available on Skype if anyone needs anything.

The new world name has been decided.

The new world will be called Fedgardia

Thank you for all those who voted.

Now that we are officially moving, and a date (tentative) has been set, we will start polling for plugins.

We will pretest plugins that pass our internal vote. (to weed out the terrible/game breaking/ redundant/ ect)

Once they test well, and we have an idea of how to implement them, we will put it to a vote.

Stay tuned folks!

Poll 1: Quests (Vote during 10/24 - 10/27)
Poll 2: Parties (Vote during 10/25 - 10/28)
Poll 3: MythicMobs (Vote during 10/25 - 10/28)
Poll 4: Holographic Displays (Vote during 10/26 - 10/29)
Poll 5: Easy Elevators (Vote during 10/26 - 10/29)
Poll 6: Trading Cards (Vote during 10/27 - 10/30)
Poll 7: Chairs (Vote during 10/27 - 10/30)
Poll 8: Global Market (Vote during 10/28 - 10/31)
Poll 9: Grief Prevention (Vote during 10/28 - 10/31)
Poll 10: Postal Service (Vote during 10/29 - 11/01)

Okay, so the poll for using a temporary world is gaining a larger and larger majority, and based on what I have seen for reasons, most people just want a bit more time in Pern to finish things up. That seems fair enough, although I dont know where people get the idea that it was happening this weekend or whatever, obviously its going to take a bit to set things up.

So this poll is to decide on a date to transition to a new world/temp world. Depending on how things go we may be in a temp world for just a weekend ranging to a week or two, it depends on how soon we transition to it, and how things go with testing.

1.10 / 1.11 Update

Alright friends, so since there has been a lot of talk around the water cooler... cauldron, I figure I will dispel some rumors.

Now, our general policy is to update as soon as we have a stable version that doesn't sacrifice any of our functionality. Sometimes this can take a while as the plugin authors are not the most diligent at updating plugins. We have spent a lot of time looking into the current plugin situation, and the jump from 1.8 to 1.9 or 1.10 is substantial. A lot of plugins that we have been using for years are simply dead. There is no more support, or if there is it is spotty at best.

Based on this, we have been considering a new path.

We are thinking of opening a new chapter in SentinelCraft history, but we want to know how everyone feels about it.
One of the biggest hold-ups, is towny. It has been buggy for the last two builds and it has yet to be updated past 1.9. To put it plainly it is a dying plugin. Unfortunately getting rid of it with our current situation is impossible. So we have tried to come up with the best possible alternative. Here is what we have come up with:

First we would remove towny, but in order to do that, we would need a system to protect things that had already been built, since there isn't a way to integrate any of the more modern protection plugins, that was our first hurdle. So we thought, what about a new world? One without chunk errors, without depreciated regions and fewer and fewer new areas to explore. So we settled on a new world, but to get rid of Pern would pain me greatly, as I have spent innumerable hours building there. So I want to keep Pern, but as something different. I want to turn it into a mausoleum of sorts. A place to explore and visit, where we can create landmarks for people to visit, see what others before us have built.

With this idea of a new world, it seemed best to clean things out entirely. Start a clean slate, McMMO, Inventory, Money, Economy, Everything. This would set a clean slate for everyone, I know that for some of us that have been around for a long time that sounds terrible, but after thinking about it for a while, it has started to grow on me. Its kind of exciting to think of the new challenges that come with starting over. For those players that are starting currently, catching up to the powerhouse players in McMMo is basically impossible, same with the economy. With a fresh start, we all have the same opportunity to be the number one player. This would also give the opportunity to allow people to reinvent themselves. Everyone would be allowed to change their names during this transition (cracked and premium alike)

We haven't yet hashed out all the details, we have just looked into which plugins are dead, and worked to find plugins to replace things. This gives us an opportunity to add new plugins, features, and ideals to the server that we previously wouldn't have been able to. We can choose a new name for the world(s) you can suggest new plugins and features, we will revise the rules based on your feedback.

This is your server, and as a community, we can make it whatever we decide.


Here is a list of the proposed changes:

-   Preserve Pern as a mausoleum world. (No editing, just visiting)
-   Remove towny
-   Add Protection plugin
-   Revise rules accordingly
-   Reset Economy and rebuild with new features (Global Market, new shops plugin possibly)
-   Add Quest/adventure aspects (Something we have wanted to do for a while)
-   Add new McMMO features
-   Re-enable stats tracking (highscores and such, for bragging rights)
-   Find new plugin for clans/tribes/groups/parties (possibly)
-   Your suggestions here _____
 

As many of you know, Elle has decided to leave the server. This probably comes as some level of surprise, because of her long tenure here. I know it came as quite a shock to myself and the other senior staff. She has informed many of us that she will not be coming back at any point.

Lets go over the events leading up to her quitting:

January 20th

Rich was tracking down an ax that was... Impossible  It had enchantments that you cannot get on it through fair game-play. After a few hours of checking Rich followed the trail back to a few of Elle's Chests. Upon further investigation it was found that this was not an isolated instance. We found that multiple things had been duplicated. Below is a link to a sample of one such instance.

http://pastebin.com/Bt4ymqN5

After finding these occurrences, we continued to investigate how extensive the abuse was. We found 2 more notable instances.

The logs and screen shots show how she copied Signs that Rich had used to store his XP, Broke them to retrieve the stored XP and then created signs of her own. Which were then repeatedly copied, broke, and then re-pasted in.
When there is an entry for a placed sign, it has should have the content of the text written like this example:
[[Trade]] [$200:0] [825 exp:643500] [Ellemenopea]]
When it just says "created wall sign" without having the text of the creation, that means it was pasted in using W/e. You can see what I mean in the screenshot below. (remember, read logs from the bottom to top, since it is backwards in time.)

http://s2.postimg.org/i2i7n1b7d/ell_1.png
http://pastebin.com/NF53hMJn

Below are screenshots of when she pasted in her Skyblock farms. (The clue here in the screenshot is that all the blocks were created the same second. Obviously you cant place blocks at the exact same time, so we looked at the logs and it showed she pasted the entire construct in.)

http://s25.postimg.org/9eb4xwjcv/2015_01_20_18_09_47.png
http://s25.postimg.org/zb4tain0f/2015_01_20_18_09_59.png
--Complete Skyblock View Below--
http://postimg.org/image/vze8h6nar/

These screenshots represent one more occasion where she abused W/e. She placed these items in her chest in the Overworld, copied them, and then pasted them into her Skyblock world. Check the time-stamps and the Placed/Removed chest contents.
(The unspecified action is because Logblock doesn't understand what the commands W/e use are doing. It recognizes that items have been created, but not how)

http://s25.postimg.org/ebopj0lbz/2015_01_20_18_09_02.png
http://s25.postimg.org/l0v8z16nz/2015_01_20_18_08_48.png

January 24th

After Discovering all of this evidence I had all of the senior staff reconfirm what we had found (Just to make sure we did not make any mistakes) All four of us agreed that there was sufficient information to confront her. So we waited until we could all be online and tried to ask her if she could explain all of this. At no point were any of us trying to gang up on her. We all went into this meeting with the hope that we had missed something or that there was some explanation for all of these incidents.

Elle quickly said that she could not explain them, and requested to step down. After talking with her for a few hours we were left with making a decision. She said that she had not done these things. It boiled down to something very simple. Elle is our friend, and we have played together for almost 2 years, we trust her, and so we decided not to have her step down. We told her that it would be okay, we would not hold it against her. Everything (I thought) was put behind us.

January 26th

I was notified that Grizdale builds had started to disappear. Along with Embassies from Lomari. Now obviously this is alarming behavior in any situation. After that Grizdale the town fell. Migas informed me that the fall of Grizdale had cost him 2.5 million because when a town falls it has a tendency to destroy the protections on signs (IE Storage and Money signs). Armed with this information I took immediate action to stop further damage to any of our members. I Banned Elle under "Account compromised" until I could talk to her about what she was doing. I had/have no intention of not allowing her to leave. I just want to make sure that no one is harmed because of it. She made it very clear that she did not feel comfortable being here anymore, and has decided to leave.

February 1st

I have been waiting for the time to write all this down, I was hoping that Elle would reconsider, that she would want to stay in the community that we have built. I also planned on not posting this at all, or not in this format. I never wanted to drag all this drama out in-front of everyone. But since enough rumors have flown about what the cause is, and who is involved. It has forced me to make this a public thing. Elle has stopped returning my messages, so that pretty much where everything stands. If anyone has questions, you can find me on Skype, ill be happy to clear things up.