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Hello MCSG players! I just want to take the time to start off by wishing everyone a safe and happy New Years eve! It's been a long, interesting year for our community but we are still going strong and believe it or not, still consistently growing every month. We still are not even a year old yet as we only opened officially in beta on April 10th, but we have since seen over
6 million Minecrafters on our website alone! Becoming so big so fast caused a huge challenge for our Dev team and I to create a system while players were using it actively. Also the constant challenges of the game itself changing dramatically since the 1.2 days (good times). Since then, we now have been pushing our efforts for new upgraded versions of MCSG.
Starting off the new year in January, MCSG will see some dramatic improvements on areas you all wanted to see added. We have listened to your requests and spend the last few months planning to upgrade our servers to what we call MCSG version 2.0. This post will be announcing some new changes that you will see start as of tomorrow or sometime within January:
New Canadian servers opening as of January 1st!
"MOAR SRVERS" was the biggest request that MCSG players wanted. Well in the last week, you have seen new lobbies on our servers page open up for our existing locations. It's been awhile since we opened Australia, but now we are announcing officially CA1-8 will be online starting midnight tonight. These servers are located on the east coast of Northern America (Quebec), so even people in the US may want to consider trying those servers for the best possible connection for your PvP ping times. We will watch these servers closely and calculate the demand if we need to add more in later this month. So here are the IPs you will want to add for later when they come online:
ca1.mcsg.in
ca2.mcsg.in
ca3.mcsg.in
ca4.mcsg.in
ca5.mcsg.in
ca6.mcsg.in
ca7.mcsg.in
ca8.mcsg.in
New advance leaderboards and stat tracking system!
"BETTR STUF TO TRAK" was the second biggest feature request that MCSG players wanted. This area was one of the harder challenges to face but we have a system in the works that will revolutionize how we track stats. Our plan is to now track players progress daily to see your trends compared to your overall score. So if you want to see the best of today, that will be now possible with this system. Same with who was the best of this week, or this month, or even like our old system, this year currently. This system will be slowly transitioned to this month as we make sure it's completely solid. I just want to clarify, NO ONE will lose any player data in this process. If we need to separate and start fresh worst case scenario, your 2012 scores will still be accessible via another table (same with the beta scores as they might pop back up again). More details about this once we get close on publicly releasing this.
Return of the 48 slot with style!
"BRNG BAC THE 48" was something we always hear from everyone. The 1.3 version of Minecraft had killed the larger servers as how inefficient they were running. 1.4 wasn't worse but was an improvement compared to the past. Now we finally think we got these servers running stable enough to handle the larger sizes. Sorry 120 lovers, you will not see this any time soon due to the cost factor, but could be a possibility for future weekend events. Hint hint. More details later in early January on the lobby numbers what will be 48 slots in each location.
New network sponsor accounts now available starting as of January 1st!
"CHEPR DONATINS" was on the top lists of people wanted to see. With our sponsor system right now, you can only pay per month for 1 location at a time. If you wanted to upgrade to all of the servers at once including the new location in Canada, it would cost minimum $40 a month which is very expensive for most people. So the question was to us, how do we make something cheaper and knowingly have enough sponsors to continue to pay all of our 14 dedicated servers every month consistently?
As of January 1st, any new account upgrades placed on this new system will be network wide. So that means, if you upgrade to iron level sponsor, you will have the rank in US, EU, AU and CA (saving $30 if you used our current system a month for each location). A frequently asked question through our support email was "can I pay longer for a discount?" Well now with our new system, you can now pay 1, 3 and 6 months at a time with a discount for how many months you pick. Any current sponsors will transition to this once they renew after their current subscription runs out.
Vote for bounty!
"FREE WAY TO GET MOAR POINTS" was another thing that we heard here and there from our members. MCSG has never really advertised on any Minecraft lister sites because of all of the word of mouth we have been getting from the YouTube community which has been amazing. Our number one referral to MCSG by a huge margin has come from YouTube.com, which we thank our community for as we always love watching your videos while you play on our servers. Since we have other "like MCSG" servers out there, we want to now reach out to the other 88.5% of Minecrafters who has never discovered us. If you don't know what the these sites do, you vote for your favorite servers every 24 hours to get a reward in-game by typing in your MC username. Well MCSG will have 4 listings (1 per location) where you can vote every day to get a small bounty boost as a thank you for supporting us. The amounts are unknown until we figure out how many lister sites we will be on.
Better staffing panels and ban dispute processes!
"I WAS BANND 4 NO RESON" comments will soon stop with with our new ban panel in the works. You will be able to enter in your username on a website to give the exact reason why you are banned, how long you are banned, and who banned you. If you feel your ban or temp ban was unjust, you can go ahead and dispute it within the same system. Staff will also see more cool features, but really nothing that concerns the players unless you become a "blood donor".
Whew, that is only some of the features you will see in what we call our MCSG V2 goal. Some things that are coming soon but not completed yet but they are more level chests (level 3, 4 and 5), better server AI for voting and map tracking, instant restarts, fireworks (for some boom boom pow), tournaments, charity event system, new improved server status page.... You get the picture, we are starting this year off with a bang by implementing some long overdue features! Again, thank you for choosing MCSG over our pay to win competitors and helping us improve with your suggestions and feedback.
