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From my point of view: The whole thing

GeckoGoggals

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Sunday, May 03, 2020 was the final goodbye event on MCGamer

Just wanted to say how awesome it was to talk with y’all again. I couldn’t stop smiling the whole time, hearing familiar voices after so long. Like so many others, I grew up on this server. I was around from day-1 to the end and wouldn’t trade a second of it. Like I’d mentioned in the event, I tried out everything we had to offer. All the gamemodes, forums, teamspeak, clans, you name it. I don’t want to forget this place so I thought I’d put my memories in writing. Below is a little autobiography of my time here that I thought I’d share.

Discovering the Server
It all started on a baseball diamond on April 16, 2012. My 11-year-old team was practicing in the evening, and a friend and I were discussing the new Survival Games (SG1) map that everyone was playing. We had tried to find a good server but none were very good. Another teammate suggests we try us1.mcsg.in. It was the official server of the map and it was fully automated and 24/7. In my first game, the map was obviously SG1, and I fell into one of the lava holes near spawn and died. Pretty exciting, huh? Back then it was all direct-connect to the lobby, and the chat looked like this:
2012-10-30_20.22.32.png

That screenshot is from my first win, which wouldn’t come for a little while. I wasn’t great at PvP, heck I was playing with a trackpad on a $200 laptop and had satellite internet. It wasn’t ideal for winning games. Usually I could avoid the mobs, but not the players. I didn’t play often at first, but then SG2 was released and I fell in love. It was difficult to get into servers, since they all filled up so quickly, and donors would kick you if you were one of the last ones in. I would have all 30 of the servers in my server list so I could see when one of them was restarting. When they added 48-slot servers, I used them to avoid this problem since they didn’t fill as fast. My go-to server was US26; me and a few others that frequented that lobby had our own little community. Bluebird13 was our leader, and our team won maybe 1 game together. I still often played with my baseball teammate Fir3P0wer239. I played to win, but was and always would be more of a casual player. I enjoyed talking with other tributes and forming chat alliances at a time before skype teaming and teamspeak were popular. Amazingly, I was rarely betrayed, but usually my teams didn’t make it to deathmatch. I was having so much fun, though. The server was barely 2 months old, but I was hooked.

The rapid growth of 2012
In July, I joined the forums in the wake of the hype for SG3. I’d browsed as a guest before to view Chad’s frequent updates, but finally decided to join. Little did I know it, but that opened the door to a community I would come to love. I didn’t post a lot, but I read nearly everything. I also kept up on Chad’s livestreams. Despite their strange obsession with 'Call Me Maybe', the staff were like gods to me back then. People like g33ke, SixZoSeven, slashrxtreme, and Joshkey were rare finds and I always had to get a screenshot when I saw them. Once I was banned for an hour for block glitching to the top of SG3’s mountain. That was the longest hour of my life. In the fall, the first community maps were added, and I was amazed. Normal people like me had maps accepted to the server, it was unheard of. I still played on 48-slots, so I saw more of Overgrown Arena and Kharmunrah than Breeze Island and Fortress Pyke. I liked them all, but Breeze was wildly popular on the 24-slots. My poor 48 slots were switched to 24 in late fall, but I didn’t let it get me down. Around this time, FyreUK had started Fyregames for a bit, and that was an interesting spin on SG with a grace period. The release of SG5 was an apocalypse themed map on December 21, 2012 (Mayan doomsday), so that event was a blast. The map selection had widened to 17 and things were more stable than before. Games crashed all the time compared to today’s plugins, but it was normal and everyone tolerated it back then.

2013 and MCSG 2.0
New year’s brought about the CA region to add to the already existing US, EU, and AU. The 48-slots came back as well, Chad had listened to my pleas haha. The 2012 MCSG lobbies had been the original city lobby, and then a spruce wood kind of lobby with parkour and Chad’s pirate ship. However, they were looking for a new one and holding a build contest. I entered, but wasn’t a finalist. Mine was pretty good compared to most but Team Elite’s balloon lobby blew everything away. Then they dropped MCSG 2.0. Along with the lobby, they added sponsors, new chest tiers, staff’s gamemaster, deathmatch arenas, and achievements. The achievements were extra cool to me as a completionist. They could be as simple as playing a game on US or as tough as killing 23 tributes in 1 game (which I was able to do in a 120-slot once). The original deathmatch arena had been in effect since July 2012 and included a big sandy coliseum that would get smaller as the timer went down. Sand on the edges would fall and players had to fight in close proximity. It looked like this:
deathmatch.png

I loved this, but it got replaced since it was laggy. The deathmatch arenas with lightning we know today took its place. They even had ones for SG1 and SG2 for a while! Keep in mind, all servers were still direct-connect at this point, so I still had all 104 servers in my server list.

A side story: US69 was the developer server at the time, and it was something called a “cracked server”. This meant a modified client could bypass the authentication process and join as another player. Oh boy did I have fun with this. I joined as the devs, Chad, Dave the admin, and just messed with players. I’d drop op items, take stuff from people’s inventory, and tp players around the map. I had full access to all the op commands, including /kill. One of Chad’s few wins was me doing /kill on everyone in the server on a game of SG5. I didn’t do any banning or anything, and everyone got a good laugh out of it.

MCSG’s 1 year birthday party brought out one of my best memories. Chad’s avatar would leave cake everywhere he went in-game. #ChadPoopsCake was shortly followed by #ChadStuckInCake2k13 and the plugin was never heard from again. The forums also got a nice update to the color scheme we’re familiar with today. We started to get new gamemodes. Zedchase and Survival were hot off the press, but I think I only joined survival once. Zedchase was fun, but not as popular. We got a hub too, so no more long server lists! The remainder of 2013 was fairly uneventful, I played games with my baseball teammate Fir3P0wer239 and had tons of fun. Things were great, but one event in November would change how I played the server.

SG Classic
In November of 2013, an archive of MCSG v1 was brought back as the SG Classic gamemode. It only had SG1 and SG2, two of my favorites. I immediately fell in love. It had separate leaderboards, so I battled with the likes of Mikag35 and Alphie_ for the top spots. I’d upgraded my hardware to… having a mouse! So I was much more competitive. While I never held the #1 spot, I loved climbing the thrill of climbing the leaderboards. I hardly ever played regular SG now, only for events. During a Chad livestream I fought the owner 1v1 with fists, but he was sponsored a bow and arrows and he sniped me down. Later in that same stream, on a 120-slot game of Forsaken Ascension, we came together to put a bounty of 300,000 on AmyGlitters, the highest bounty ever outside of the many points glitches that happened over the years.

Back on Classic, I got wrapped up in some other drama. The_Arena_Master, famously banned from MCSG and a former ranked player, had rejoined on an alt by the name of CrystalKnowledge. Just being associated with those kinds of players could get you banned, so I kept that quiet until now. Arena was a good friend to me and he showed me a lot of the secrets on older maps that I would use for years to come. We also escaped SG2 and SG4 together. After a couple weeks he revealed himself on the forums, got banned on everything, and I never heard from him again.

Pillars of Community
Summer of 2014 was peak community time. Forums were thriving and community events were happening all the time. The Community Games, a 12v12 staff vs community tournament was a popular event at the time, and I made it into the 3rd edition. It was a great time and I was able to meet players like radion2001, arsenalfcgunners and Giggity69Goo (Andreas) that I’d become good friends with. That summer, I applied for moderator twice, but was declined because 14-year-old me didn’t have a good enough computer to record hackers. And I had a tempban for bypassing filter (which was just a misunderstanding thanks to KitMencha for clearing that up so I could re-apply). I kept playing though, and made tons of friends in the community. Iron donor went on sale, and I donated for the first time. Community Games 4, 5, and 6 were a blast, props to Sean for putting on such great events with custom maps! I applied for staff a 3rd time, and was declined again after reaching the pending stage. I was making a lot more reports and liked the idea of keeping the servers clean.

That fall MCGamer took over AntVenom’s network, adding a bunch of gamemodes including a fan-favorite deadly descent. MCGamer got a big update to their servers with MCGamer v2, and things were looking good. Until one day they weren’t. My IRL friends didn’t play anymore. Winning games felt like a chore, and I just struggled to find enjoyment in it. I took a 2-month break in February and March of 2015, and came back rejuvenated and as lively as ever! I even joined a clan for the first time, the Angels. We went 17-2 before disbanding, a pretty good record I’d say. The clans scene was wild and fast-paced. Difficult to follow but amazing to see it operate in total organized chaos. The forums got an update to the style we still have today, and the Quarter Quell gamemode came out for MCSG’s birthday. In May, I thought I’d try for staff again after I’d given up several months before.



Blood Donor

My application wasn’t the 10-page monstrosity that I had last time, it was actually about half that size, and a lot more concise. I made it through pending for the first time. When I saw I got an interview my veins went cold and I was in shock. I was new to teamspeak at the time, and I wasn’t as talkative as I’d wanted to be since I had strict parents that thought every stranger on the internet was a 40-year-old creep trying to steal your identity. I did a lot of listening, though, and enjoyed all of the conversations I was a part of. My interview was on May 23rd, 2015, and was conducted by CAm, Vanicle, Jodimo, and croe97. The mod crew I got accepted with isn’t in the discord, but shoutout to Jeffrey, holidays, kiwibeans, Imanol, & koalaties for learning the ropes together. We were trained by Chandelle and fully adopted into the staff team.

For those of you who never saw the staff side, here’s how it went down. After a successful interview, you get tagged mod, and sent back into the waiting room. A bunch of mods will scream at you and congratulate you. It’s an incredible experience. Mine was after midnight, so there wasn’t much of an afterparty, but there often was one. We used the slack app to communicate outside of Minecraft, so you were added to that right away, and more mods would congratulate you. You need to get trained before you can moderate, so you get trained within a week after hiring. It takes an hour or so, but the Sr Mods knew their stuff and you were ready after that. Staff perks were cool, there was a staff island in the hub at that time, it just had everyone’s head and it was where we hung out when moderating hub chat. There was staff-only chat, too, which made it easier to make friends in the staff. Teamspeak had its own staff channels, which we usually kept to. They were the place to be and most nights we’d play games together. Sometimes a few non-staff would join in as well. The punishments were pretty simple. There was a table of what to do for each broken rule, like how 1st offense spamming was a 1 hour mute or something like that. Most mods used macros to get it done quickly. There was also shortcuts next to players’ names (thanks, devs). A punishment website called XIME was used to keep track of it all, and we’d use that to ban if players were offline. There were biweekly meetings that were pretty much required, and we got all the news from Chad or Dave or Col_StaR there. It was fairly professional, but there was a lot of silliness. We were a bunch of teenagers, after all.

Before I could really get into moderating, I took a shot to the gut. SGClassic was removed on June 20th, 2015, and I was livid. That was my thing, I put so much effort into keeping that alive, only to be ignored and have it shut down. I expressed my disappointment on the forums, and the devs and Chad took notice. They were not happy. Chad wanted me off the staff team, but thankfully Col_StaR talked him out of it. I’m forever grateful for that. I got over it (kinda) and moved on to moderating the network.

It was hard work, but I loved every second of it. I felt like I belonged, and most players liked and supported me. I’d accumulate over 1000 bans in my time at MCGamer, always wanting to keep the hackers at bay. Reports from the /report command were the best. Moderating the hub had a work-environment feel to it. The staff would have little side jabs at players in the staff chat while we interacted with them. It was a great time. It really sucked when your friends resigned, like my mod buddy kiwibeans did after a couple months. We were tight since we were accepted and trained together, so losing him was tough. New staff would join, though, and I’d befriend them. Yanr00s and Edog were two that I spent quite a bit of time with. I tried to be a bit of a mentor like Amber (row row row), Axanite, and Sedrazo had been for me. Yanr00s quickly surpassed my mentorship though and moved all the way up to admin!

Banning and muting was never a chore for me, and neither was helping out our members in the hub. I genuinely loved all the mod work I did. I was clan staff for a time, it dealt with a lot of toxic community members, so it was a little tougher job. Usually the best mods would be promoted to Sr. Mods. I thought about this often, but really didn’t know if I wanted that. Sr. Mods focus more on facilitating the staff team and handling ban disputes. I liked what I did, so a change would be weird. I never had to choose, though, since I was never offered a Sr. Mod position. I often joined events, Open Mic Night was a notable event at the time, so I joined once. There were lots of trolls that I had to take care of and I spent the entire time dealing with them. I never went back to OMN after that. Another fun event was the Presidential Games, a spin off of the community games with teams of 4. The team leader or ‘President’ was required to stay alive for your team to stay in. Community Games were fun too, since I was on the staff side it was a little tougher, but we won every once in a while. Leafygreentea day was another fun event on the anniversary of the infamous hacker’s ban. A big group would wear leafy skins, no armor, and craft hoes, shovels, and pickaxes to kill people with. A 12-man leafy swarm was a sight to see. Demonsushi was the head of that and he did a great job. Another one was gamemode spotlight, I was one of the heads of that event, and it was fun getting to play other games on MCGamer for a change!



The sappy part

At this point in time, I didn’t have a lot of IRL friends. I had my 7 cross country teammates, but cross country didn’t last all year. I had MCGamer though, and that was enough for me. Most people genuinely cared to be your friend. It was something I hadn’t experienced before, and have only experienced once since (shoutout to Boys State). Yeah, the scum of the earth played on the server too, but it was worth it. While I never was a good player, I enjoyed this place for the thrill of SG and the fantastic community y’all helped create. A lot of you may not know me that well, but I did my best to get to know all of you. I spread myself a little thin by branching into so many areas. For the ’15-’16 staff team, y’all were my rock for 2 years. Thank you for that. We would have mod quizzes to make sure we were still properly trained, and once I missed 3 of the 10 questions, and had to get re-trained. As a veteran staff member, this was a little humiliating, but everyone was so supportive about it and nobody thought less of me.

The sad part

Chad had been AWOL for a while as we moved into 2016. We kept on, business as usual, but there was a certain tension surrounding the server. The staff team could operate just fine without an owner, but there were a few things that we couldn’t do. We didn’t make much forward progress as a server in 2016. Things stagnated, players dropped a little, and we kept on doing what we could. CAm and the developers were the highest rung on the staff ladder, but sometimes that just didn’t cut it. Things didn’t look good, they didn’t feel right, but we did what we could to keep things as normal as possible for the players. In September, things began to crumble. I can’t remember for sure, but I think the teamspeak went down first. It was without warning and there wasn’t anything we could do. Several days later, October hit and the entire network went down. Just the forums were left, and a lot of confused players. Chad released a message, shown below, to the entire community, same for staff and community alike.

1.png


Life after MCSG
The Sr. Staff made a new slack for us, and the staff slacks fell silent and disappeared. Forums went to read-only shortly after Chad’s notice. There was a few leftover staff members that kept active in the new slack, but it wasn’t long before we went our separate ways. I was one of the last to fall silent in that chat, as it was all that was left of something I’d loved for so long. At this point, all of my favorite servers were closed. The time of small community servers was long gone, so joining a new network community would be too much work. I didn’t log into Minecraft much over the next few years. I went off to college, made new friends, and eventually moved on. I often reminisced about my time here. I didn’t have any IRL friends that cared about it like I did, so I just kept to myself about it, quietly remembering the good times. In summer and fall of 2019, I was starting my sophomore year of college and my first season on the university’s cross country team. Collegiate sports in the USA are very time-consuming, so I didn’t know MCSG had returned. After the season was over and I was on Christmas break, I stumbled across the MCSG twitter account. Something was different. It was active.

The Revival
I immediately hopped on the forums. All the big guns were there, oldies like SixZoSeven and Kezzer were on board, as well as newer admins like Col_StaR. The community had rekindled itself, and Chad was back at the helm. The game was buggy, and players weren’t as patient as 2012. I joined the discord and saw so many familiar faces! It was incredible, MCGamer was the gift that kept on giving. It all came crashing down again in January, when Chad announced that the servers would go back into shutdown mode. Our small playerbase disappeared, but the discord stayed active and the servers stayed up until the end of April. In my last game, I played on Valleyside University. It was fun, I went on my route, got a couple kills and made the deathmatch, and then the final 2. We had a good fight, but I killed him. However, his hit hadn’t registered yet, and then I died in a bang-bang moment. The games ended in a tie, the first real tie I’d been a part of on MCSG. I thought it was a good way to go out.

The reunion event was scheduled for May 3rd, but the servers had gone down at the end of April. Thankfully Forairan, a longtime developer and the owner of our host, opened it up temporarily for us (Thanks, Ava). We joined together for one last screenshot. It reminded me of a story Lively_ had written in 2013. A few of us stuck around afterwards to chat for a while, but in the end, I too signed off for the last time.
 
Last edited:

clart

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i remember you dawg, dope to see your story :)
we'll all remember the journey of the great MCSG, but I wish this wasn't how things had to end, this is one of many great stories without a happy ending.
 

Dzbs

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Great story man! Brought back so many memories. I had a great time being on the staff team with you, and it's great to see you continuing cross country in college! Keep in touch
 

4non

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reading this brought back a whirlwind of memories
i'm really going to miss this place
fun fact: I'm IRL friends with Alphie_/EpicAlpha64, I'm sure he'll appreciate seeing his name on here one more time lol
 

Cayz_

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reading this brought back a whirlwind of memories
i'm really going to miss this place
fun fact: I'm IRL friends with Alphie_/EpicAlpha64, I'm sure he'll appreciate seeing his name on here one more time lol
shut up
 

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