Closing of Tekkit 01.01.2013
Posted: Wed Dec 05, 2012 7:21 pm
Our summer long fling with Tekkit is about to come to an end. There are a lot of reasons for this which I will go through below. But before I do, I just wanted to say our world map on Tekkit will be made available on the day that our Tekkit server closes. You are free to download and play this in single player or re-host it online for a multiplayer server.
So why am I doing this? People still play on Tekkit, granted. But I do have some good reasons.
First of all, our heavy focus on Tekkit has lead to our other servers (Survival especially) becoming deserted. This in itself wouldn't be a big problem if Tekkit was still very active, but it isn't. And players have left because we cannot deliver a satisfactory Tekkit experience.
Tekkit is very CPU intensive but it doesn't make good use of our multi-core processor. To help deal with the immense amount of load we experienced we disabled condensers. This is a much loved feature and it litreally drove players away to other Tekkit servers which did have condensers available.
Lag that made the game unplayable or condensers? The choice was pretty obvious we would disable condensers and hand them out one per person instead. Unfortuantely this wasn't good enough for the more seasoned Tekkit elite and they left to other servers which provided unlimited condensers.
With this in mind it has become clear what we have to do and that is get rid of Tekkit so we can refocus on Creative, Survival & Anarchy. I'm giving you guys a month to do whatever you want on the Tekkit server at which point it will be closed and the map made available for download.
I understand this may be very annoying for some of you and you may find it hard to see things from my point of view. That's okay and I can only apolagize but we did have fun and if the servers population was good I wouldn't need to close it so I don't think too many people will shed a tear over it.
Moving forward our Survival server is going to become our main server again. It will be heavily promoted through paid advertisements that I am going to pay for in the new year. It will also be retooled for maximum enjoyment, already yesterday I introduced the "new player inventory" system designed to give new players much needed tools to incentivise them to play longer, more changes will be enacted such as this.
Our creative server has a new Spawn which has already been built by Freakboy & Rick. It is in the final stages of tweaking and we just have a few things to setup before that launches. This is not a new map, we have simply created a new spawn and moved it to an area so far away from all other constructions that it will feel like a new map. This has the added benefit of providing players with new areas while maintaining access to all their old builds.
Anarchy will largely stay as-is, An almost entirely vanilla server with very few plugins, it creates almost no load and doesn't take any effort to maintain. Perhaps some of the new players we hope to entice next year will prefer a more hardcore environment that Anarchy provides with all mobs enabled and no coddling. This is of course opposed to Survival which is more keyed towards community building in safe mob-free defined areas.
Thanks for reading this and I hope everyone can understand why Tekkit is closing and what my intentions are moving forward. I believe we have a strong foundation in our Survival server and all it needs is some promotion to get going again.
One last thing I wanted to mention is in the coming months Mojang will be releasing their Server & Client Modding API. This will provide an avenue for us to integrate Tekkit like functions (Redwire, Railcraft, IndustrialCraft etc) in to vanilla Minecraft without the need for players to use modified clients. We will take full advantage of the forthcoming plugins which make use of the new Modding API to provide some of the functionality that players enjoyed from our Tekkit server within our traditional Creative and Survival servers, so stick with us as the best is yet to come.
So why am I doing this? People still play on Tekkit, granted. But I do have some good reasons.
First of all, our heavy focus on Tekkit has lead to our other servers (Survival especially) becoming deserted. This in itself wouldn't be a big problem if Tekkit was still very active, but it isn't. And players have left because we cannot deliver a satisfactory Tekkit experience.
Tekkit is very CPU intensive but it doesn't make good use of our multi-core processor. To help deal with the immense amount of load we experienced we disabled condensers. This is a much loved feature and it litreally drove players away to other Tekkit servers which did have condensers available.
Lag that made the game unplayable or condensers? The choice was pretty obvious we would disable condensers and hand them out one per person instead. Unfortuantely this wasn't good enough for the more seasoned Tekkit elite and they left to other servers which provided unlimited condensers.
With this in mind it has become clear what we have to do and that is get rid of Tekkit so we can refocus on Creative, Survival & Anarchy. I'm giving you guys a month to do whatever you want on the Tekkit server at which point it will be closed and the map made available for download.
I understand this may be very annoying for some of you and you may find it hard to see things from my point of view. That's okay and I can only apolagize but we did have fun and if the servers population was good I wouldn't need to close it so I don't think too many people will shed a tear over it.
Moving forward our Survival server is going to become our main server again. It will be heavily promoted through paid advertisements that I am going to pay for in the new year. It will also be retooled for maximum enjoyment, already yesterday I introduced the "new player inventory" system designed to give new players much needed tools to incentivise them to play longer, more changes will be enacted such as this.
Our creative server has a new Spawn which has already been built by Freakboy & Rick. It is in the final stages of tweaking and we just have a few things to setup before that launches. This is not a new map, we have simply created a new spawn and moved it to an area so far away from all other constructions that it will feel like a new map. This has the added benefit of providing players with new areas while maintaining access to all their old builds.
Anarchy will largely stay as-is, An almost entirely vanilla server with very few plugins, it creates almost no load and doesn't take any effort to maintain. Perhaps some of the new players we hope to entice next year will prefer a more hardcore environment that Anarchy provides with all mobs enabled and no coddling. This is of course opposed to Survival which is more keyed towards community building in safe mob-free defined areas.
Thanks for reading this and I hope everyone can understand why Tekkit is closing and what my intentions are moving forward. I believe we have a strong foundation in our Survival server and all it needs is some promotion to get going again.
One last thing I wanted to mention is in the coming months Mojang will be releasing their Server & Client Modding API. This will provide an avenue for us to integrate Tekkit like functions (Redwire, Railcraft, IndustrialCraft etc) in to vanilla Minecraft without the need for players to use modified clients. We will take full advantage of the forthcoming plugins which make use of the new Modding API to provide some of the functionality that players enjoyed from our Tekkit server within our traditional Creative and Survival servers, so stick with us as the best is yet to come.
Tekkit was fun, thanks for it. Nothing's forever.