Hey! I'm getting a 16GB server on Friday. What plugins are you using, I'm targeting those who have big servers. Do you use Essentials? If not, what do you use instead? Chat plugins? Anti-grief? Factions? You name it. I need a good base of plugins. The server will have one default world and probably two other worlds aswell. My goal with the server is to gain money to be able to exactly go around, in other words, gain same amount of money that the server cost each month, I'm not interested in profit, and if I did get profit I would still use it on the server. So yeah, I need some tips and advices from plugins to donations. Also, it would be awesome if players could aswell leave feedback on what a server MUST-HAVE. Got any tips on what the other worlds should have? Perhaps a PVP world? BRAINSTORM! /Fred
advice* PVP world, Minigame world, Construction world, Adventure world, Creative world, The ideas are endless put remember people will donate if they want it. So take suggestions, make it fun and happy
yes, i use essentials, along with essentialschat, and most of the time, coreprotect. pretty much all i need.
Shit, I spelled advice wrong, sorry for that! That looks like a really good setup. Then I will need quite alot of plugins. Is Essentials recommended or should I use others? Oh okey, great. EDIT by Moderator: merged posts, please use the edit button instead of double posting.
I use essentials on my server and it works great. Here's some suggestions: For chat plugins, you need to decide what you want. If you want chat channels, try HeroChat or mChatSuite. They seem to be the best. I highly recommend mChatSuite as it has a lot more formatting options. Anti-grief--- use LogBlock. At least for now. It is integrated into other plugins and is quite easy to use. Let me know if you need help setting it up. Also keep an eye out for Guardian. It's a new logging plugin coming out that is replacing LogBlock, Hawkeye and BigBrother. Factions is good if you want a PvP aspect. Towny is good if you're looking for more of an RPG aspect. ChestShop or QuickShop are both great shop plugins. Quickshop allows you to make a display of the object as well. Citizens is a great NPC plugin (actually it's one of the ONLY npc plugins). You can make NPC's which are able to give your players quests, trade goods with them, and even build things for them. Very good roleplay plugin. Jobs is a great plugin as well. It lets your players do all kinds of tasks to earn money, which they can use for buying anything you want them to. This is good because it allows players who mine and players who enjoy PvP to both earn money respectively. Lottery is a fun plugin which allows your members to purchase virtual lottery tickets, then the winner gets announced once or twice a day (or whenever you want). MobArena is a plugin which allows you to make Arenas where players can join and fight mobs to win cash and other prizes. Fun mini-game plugin. SimpleSpleef is the best spleefing plugin I've found. You can make all kinds of Spleef arenas and players can win money and prizes. The best part is that you can make it so players pay a small fee to join, then the winner takes the pot, so the more players that join, the bigger the pot will be PetitionPlugin is a must. It allows your players to fill out petitions (or tickets) which admins can deal with at their own pace. This prevents users from spamming chat with their problems. SpamGuard-- self explanitory. Protects against spammers and can be configured to automatically ban a person after they have been kicked too many times for spamming. Protected my server against many attacks. Votifier is a plugin which rewards players if they vote for your server on various sites like PlanetMinecraft. WorldEdit and WorldGuard are both essential to any server. Worldedit lets you easily modify large chunks of land and WorldGuard is good for region protection. VoxelSniper is great if you enjoy making custom landscapes. It's tough to get the hang of, but very cool. I can also offer some suggestions about donations, since I know where you're coming from. If you're going to have a PvP server, don't make your donation rewards things that will give players a huge advantage. I've seen some PvP servers offer creative mode for $50. As soon as you have a person buy that, you have immediate imbalance and players will quickly leave. Offer "fun" or "quirky" rewards. On my server, you had access to the MyWolf plugin if you donated, which allows you to tame a wolf and train it and level it up. Very cool! On my server you could also have permission for DisguiseCraft, which allows you to disguise as a mob or player. Certain permissions were in place to prevent exploits. The biggest suggestion I have is that you shouldn't spam your players with DONATE DONATE DONATE. Players want to feel like they're on your server because the Owner and Admins WANT them to be there. Players don't want to feel like they're just a source of income for the server. On my server I never stressed the idea of donating, but always made it an option. I also treated my donators very well (in rewards I mean). I did pretty well, and accumulated around $900 which went towards buying a dedicated server computer, which I now use to host my server. I hope these things help you out, and I'm sure you'll make a wonderful owner/admin. Happy hosting!
Donations are always a hard topic, on one hand you are trying to pay for your server, but on the other hand you have people making insane amounts of money off of them. I would suggest not spamming your players telling them to donate, but suggest that the server needs to stay alive and the only way to do that is by donations. Another bit of advice for you, before you go out and purchase a 16GB server look into many hosting companies as some may have a better deal than others.
Wow! Awesome reply! I will send you a PM, check your inbox! I got your PM, too bad it's in USA. I got a pretty sweet deal already! EDIT by Moderator: merged posts, please use the edit button instead of double posting.
I doubt you'd need a server with 16 gigs of ram right off the bat unless you plan to have hundreds of people on at once the day you release the server. Other than that, most large servers like that tend to run custom private plugins which is how they attract those many people.
PhoenixNAP are the best dedicated server provider in the US. You can get 16GB on a 3.8Ghz Quad Core CPU and 1GB/s line for $133. I use them for my server.
We are using www.kimsufi.co.uk , core i3, 2 tb of harddrive space and 16 gigs of ram for about 60 USD a month. Its dedicated, not VPS.
I can get that for 0$ a month! With bandwidth almost the same. Only difference is that DDoS mitigation is zero for me, but hey atleast I save 133$ a month? Your absolutely right, that much ram is ridiculous for most servers. I have 16gb of ram on my server machine and even with 40 players on at once, it barely uses 2.5gb of ram. I could use it for a ramdisk if I wanted but my SSD will suffice for files. As far as custom coded plugins, servers that pride themselves on only using custom coded plugins are a little bit cocky. Theres nothing wrong with using great pieces of software such as LWC, Logblock, Worldedit and those who refuse seem like they feel they are too good to use them because they have a big server, the "optimizations" they make which let their server hold that many probably make negligible difference. On that note, they usually have bad TPS anyways (15-17TPS). I agree, I accept donations yet my server expenses are like maybe... 200$ annually? Yeah a lot of the money just pools in my paypal and I don't know what todo with it, I feel like pocketing it robs the players, but then again I put atleast 5 hours of work a day into the server and it's basically a job. So people can justify using donations for themselves if they actually actively work on their server, my definition of work for the server would be: Managing terrain, keeping the server performance intact, introducing new plugins and further configuring of current ones, and other stuff. Now for the actual OP's post. I'd suggest building your spawn and stuff privately with some close people who can build and set up a spawn area. Make sure to have a means of area protection such as Worldguard. Think about the server you would want to run, and how you will make your rules. My general rule of thumb is to make a server I would want to play on, yet being realistic. Along with never taking action without proof, which basically means don't ban someone for something unless you have indisputable evidence. I would just enable PVP in all worlds and have a creative only world with separate inventories so people can build if they want to build. Get a set of plugins which go along with your server ideas and don't let people try to make your server into something it's not. You don't want to wake up one day and look at your server and be ashamed that you run it, run a server which you like and will stand behind. If your server is roll playing, get RP plugins, pvp get pvp plugins. You get the idea. The basic plugins have already been listed. A big thing is to always have something to fall back on, make daily backups. Make backups of your configs before you change something. Make a backup of your mysql databases. Make sure nothing can ever be tragically lost in the event of data loss. This post took like 20 minutes and it's 2:30am, if it sounds silly I apologize, I'm about to head to bed.
Sorry that I accidentally discredited your affiliate post, I just think 133 dollars a month is a little steep for a game server, especially for a new server who probably won't get 130$+ of donations in the first month.
+1 on this. However I would suggest SimpleHelpTickets instead of PetitionPlugin as well as AntiAd instead of SpamGuard. SimpleSpleef - no Use BattleArena and create your own arenas including spleef, heck you can create spleefCTF or SpleefDeathMatch if you want to! And you should consider MCJobs and not Jobs since Jobs is outdated and not userfriendly. Hard to configure and setup so you cannot exploit. MJobs have fixed all that =) Lottery+ is my recommendation for lottery plugins.
BattleArena provides Spleef and loads more, why use one plugin for one thing when another plugins gives you everything?
Because I highly doubt BattleArena has the amount of versatility that SimpleSpleef has. Sure, the plugin only does spleef, but it does it right. Not knocking BattleArena, its a good plugin too.
Playing the opposite side, why have a plugin that has everything when you only want 1 thing out of it?
Such greedy people. In all seriousness, if you only need 1 thing, and find a plugin that only does that 1 thing, it "might" be less resource extensive than getting that "everything" plugin that has everything except that 1 thing ignored. Depends on the plugin though.
Excellent point. If you only want a spleef plugin, why get a huge plugin with all this other stuff when you can get one with JUST spleef.
