Bukkit, Communities, the future

If I can give my opinion: many people have been speculating about "the end of bukkit" since DB & EvilSeth (and more? I don't know) joined Mojang. I always thought "bukkit people working at mojang is good, it means bukkit updates will come out sooner". I'm afraid that was wrong to think, as far as I'm aware, bukkit updates (RBs) are released slower than before.
A huge issue I have at the moment is the snapshots: back in beta, they were called pre-releases, very bugged and only a small amount of people wanted to play them, to really test. Today, snapshots do have some bugs, not more than a major update like 1.5 (1.5 really had more big issues than 13w05a for example). Many youtubers (probably the biggest part of the MC community) update their minecraft to snapshots, "spoiling" the fun for players who want to wait. I was one of those players in 1.3 and 1.4. 1.5 was the first snapshot-race I went with, and I must say it didn't disappoint: we had each week a small update, we had the chance to discover 1.5 in the course of weeks and it was very stable. I even was able to report one or two bugs on Mojira which were fixed later.
Here comes the issue; because of all those snapshots, what should bukkit servers do? I decided to stop using bukkit for the time being, and start using the snapshot servers. I already ran a vanilla server though, so it wasn't a real problem for me because I didn't loose any plugins.


This is in my opinion the first bukkit issue: it is not possible (not for any mod btw) to keep up with the way mojang updates the game.

Next comes up the "need" of bukkit. In my opinion there are two kinds of servers: just normal MC servers (survival, HC, creative, with or without plugins) and the "game within a game" server, thinking of survival games, dwarves vs zombies,.. This second group heavily relies on plugins. Players who play it don't care if the server is up-to-date, they don't need the latest redstone update, they want to play their game. This is where plugins are just awesome. And this has been the strength of bukkit the past year(s).
The second group however, also relies on a lot of plugins, mostly multiple worlds, permissions, some extra basic commands, some pvp action stuff, and more. They encounter issues with every update, because they have to wait for a bukkit release, or their system breaks. The solution for them? community management: most of those plugins are written to restrict players from doing stuff (permissions), to guide them through a system (I think of factions, iConomy,..) and many other stuff. All these things are not necessary if you have a community which you can thrust and speak openly with. If so, you don't need to restrict players from using certain commands, because they know they aren't allowed to. You could just decide some rules on a pvp area, have an active pvp and a passive pvp phase (day/night is very easy) and more. This requires more work from the whole community, but it works out like a charm, even better without any plugins if you can make it work. I know this from experience, I'm hosting a pure vanilla server now for about 6 months, we don't even have 20 players, but we're a nice small community, not relying on any plugins or mods, just playing by the rules.

Community management starts with deciding who is allowed on your server and who isn't. I for example have a web form in which players can contact me and explain why they want to join my server. I also ask their age, not because I only want a community of adults, but because I want to know how to anticipate on each player individually. You could say this isn't possible with a server with, e.g. more than 50 players. Indeed. I see often 200+ servers, and for sure, that is not a manageable community. Question is: do you NEED this many players? And if so, why? For money? because I know much more better ways of earning money than hosting a MC server. Because you like the big community? say you have 80 people online, what are the chances you can talk with someone individually without your chat being spammed with other people's messages before you can read the things you want?

This is the second issue I have with bukkit: it is not necessary, except if you're hosting the "game within a game" server. But I'm sure many will disagree, let me know your opinions!
zip

JOPHESTUS and JWhy

 

tl;dr

Bukkit will never end, it will be here even after the end of time, also I was never here.

 

wat?

 

zipron Good point on the small communities, but isn't the minimalistic way a very special one? You're going to trust all of your players, when you have a vanilla server and don't want any griefing over there, I think the most of the persons you don't know at least in real life is going to destroy property at some point. Still declining bukkit there? (I think WorldGuard is always up-to-date, if you know build.sk89q.com ;D )

 

I know 50% of my players IRL, I got some Belgian players, also a few American. I make a rule of it not to accept more than 2 players per month, just so I can monitor everyone individually. (I thrust myself more than worldguard, yes). It's definitely the best working setup I believe. Take examples as Hermitcraft & Mindcrack: without any doubt you know them, very popular on youtube, why? because of the nice small and close community.


You're right for large server, you can't go without plugins, but like I said, why would you want a large server? As an server owner POV, or as a player POV? It's an interesting discussion, and I'd like to hear everything what people have to say about it.

I believe bukkit will stop in the far future, that's the whole point of the modding API (at least, that's what I understood from minecon)

 

zipron https://github.com/Mojang/Minecraft-API/commits/master ;D

 

Yes, but is it already stable and fully useable? I'm not really following the development btw

 

Less than 20 commits in total and last changes 7 months ago

 

So it's not the updated version I suppose Oh well, something to look forward to =)