Ninja is Fixed! + KitPvP Blue Map? + Extrillius Hub!

Hey guys,

It's been a while since I've actually made a normal post for the servers. This is a 75% normal post -- one that does not involve Extrillius and hubs and holidays and stuff like that.

If you've been on the server since August, you've probably noticed that there was a new kit that nobody really noticed in KitPvP: Ninja. Ninja was supposed to come with black Protection III armor and a wooden sword with Sharpness I. What!?

First off, Ninja didn't even work because KingKits refused to make the armor black when I created the kit. Even after recreating, the armor was still an ugly brown, which that in itself kind of ruined the kit. Next, even Squid is stronger than Sharpness I. I kept on saying "I'll get to it" but I never did, so for a while there was just this kit that was $100 and not worth it.

However, this Christmas, I tried recreating it, and KingKits started to cooperate. Here are a few screenshots of Ninja:

As you can see, the sword comes with Sharpness II, which is pretty effective but not worth more than $100, and Knockback III (have fun with that!) The armor is finally black and has Protection III. Do you think it's worth it?

Let's move on from Ninja to another KitPvP topic: The Blue Map. What do you think of this idea? A lot of our staff (and some default players) have been asking us to create a blue map. That means we would have the red map, the green map, and the blue map! What would the blue map's design be? Tell us! We want your ideas!

Now there's one more thing I want to talk about: The new hub.

After we switch to Extrillius, we obviously want a new hub. The one we have right now was just slapped together by a few of our staff members (including me), and since our goal is to make Extrillius as professional as possible, and the current MCFun Central hub is far from professional. We have hired someone named Noah10messi to build the new hub. He just started today and it already looks like this:

You can already tell it's gonna look GREAT. That being said, I found him a little late, and to get the most out of this build will take him 2-3 weeks. Until then, we will have a basic hub in Extrillius.

Remember that we begin the switching process on January 2nd, and we all can't wait!

~ Matthew

Christmas + Extrillius Release Date!

Hey guys,

Merry Christmas! I have some big news about the servers!

Let's start with the Christmas update. If you join MCFun Central, you will notice that the spawn is decorated almost as heavily as the 1 year anniversary. But this time, there's no holograms (A.K.A. LAG GENERATORS). The spawn is covered with snow, the beacon lights changed from blue and green to red and green, and Santa is even driving a sleigh with his two reindeers (the others died, but I'll resurrect them when I get the chance).

Now, let's talk about something a lot more important: Extrillius.

We've always been saying "yeah, it's coming soon!" But that's getting annoying, right? That's why we are going to cut the crap and actually switch. That's right!

Now, let me set set something straight: I tricked you in the title. We don't actually have a full release date for Extrillius. What we do have is a date for when we are going to privately switch to the network. What we need to do after that is set everything up and make sure everything is working the way we want it with these new network servers and stuff. There's a lot of background work that goes into that, and because of this, I don't even have an estimate for when we are fully going to go public. However, we are buying the servers on January 2nd. Make your own estimates.

I'm glad I finally succeeded in making a shorter blog post. What did you get for Christmas? What have you done so far today? What do you plan to do for the rest of today? Hopefully joining MCFun Central is part of your plan!

~ Matthew

1 Year Anniversary!

On December 9th, 2013, I decided to create a minigames server. I had nothing planned at all. The only thing I wanted to do was to start a server. Today, we are on the verge of becoming a big network full of many different minigames.

I just want to say how grateful I am to have this server and our partner servers. Even though not many people join the servers, it has been an amazing journey and I cannot express how great I feel about this.

If you go into the spawn now, we've added some amazing things for you!
1) 1 Year Anniversary! in big rainbow letters
2) Signs at /warp anniversary
3) A few quadrillion holograms that say 1 Year!!!
4) Added lag (because of the damn holograms)

Unfortunately, I have some homework that I need to get to today, but starting Friday and continuing up until Sunday night, we will celebrate the 1 year anniversary by doubling everything you earn (e.g. gold parkour reward = $40, Diamond = 200, Emerald = $1000, $20 per kill in KitPvP) <--- all lovely stuff, and we are also going to make all donation packages half-off ($500,000 ingame = $5, KitPvP Wizard = $2.50).

k i have to do homework now bye and join the server and make your clients crash!

All Bugs Fixed! + MCFun Building Plaza is Rising Again

Hey guys,

I plan to make this a quick blog post, but we'll see how things go.

I'd like to start off by saying that every bug that was mentioned 2 posts ago that had to do with our recent update to Spigot 1.7.10 is now fixed! We first fixed the Citizens plugin, which was mentioned in the last post, by downloading a snapshot provided by the Citizens development team that supported a 1.7.10 jar. Since it isn't a stable build, you may notice some glitches going on with the Citizens skins sometimes on the server, but overall it still works and we're happy.

The second plugin we fixed was the HolographicDisplays plugin. If you read the last post, you will see that our "fix" for holograms was to just switch our hologram plugin from HoloAPI to HolographicDisplays because HolographicDisplays supposedly offered support for a 1.7.10 jar, and it did, but the problem was 1.8. No holograms would appear. To substitute for the holograms were some flying horses up in the sky where the holograms would normally be. Fortunately, the developer of HolographicDisplays is an active developer (unlike many other developers on Bukkit, some who still haven't updated their plugin from 1.5.2) and, along with releasing a fully 1.8-compatible HolographicDisplays plugin, released a patch for 1.7.10. The patch was made a while before 1.8, but I mentioned in the last post that this patch required you to hack your Spigot server with a protocol hack. With the 1.8 release, the only other plugin now required besides the patch (the patch is a plugin that you can download from BukGetPlugins or using Installer) is ProtocolLib (not the ProtocolLib hack!). So, long story short, after downloading the updated patch and ProtocolLib, holograms look nice and pretty on both clients!

The last small, but super annoying "bug" that I had was that with the same code in the Essentials config and the book.txt, the book worked normally and you could read it just fine on 1.7.10, but when you opened it in 1.8, it said *Invalid Book Tag*.  The only thing that I knew was that there's a difference between the way books store data in 1.8 vs. 1.7. I've been searching since our Spigot 1.7.10 update for a fix to this, and nothing worked, until today. A lot of people said to add an author to your book and you should be set. I tried that, and it didn't work. This morning, I found out that 1.8 doesn't like Essentials book with a space in the title. The title of the info book was MCFun Central - Info. MCFun Building Plaza's info book is called Info+. So I tried to change the title of the book to Info+ and added a lore just for fun, and the info book now works! So basically just make sure you have at least 3 NBT tags on your info book (title, author, book) and that there's no space in your book title.

One more quick thing before I wrap up, MCFun Building Plaza has been updated to full 1.8 and everything appears to be going great! Players love the 1.8 update and MCFun Building Plaza has seen a lot of players recently. The owners of MCFun Building Plaza are also all set for the switch to Extrillius! Unfortunately, because of this, the server is still whitelisted and they don't plan to take the whitelist off until the Extrillius switch. However, that's not such a big problem. We still want to do some plugin work and make the town and spawn and stuff look pretty so that when we switch, you don't spawn in a world of nothingness.

Alright, that's about it for today! The development and planning of Extrillius is coming along very nicely, and we all can't wait to make the switch!

Just a side note: Citizens has also released a dev build for a 1.8 jar (that means FULL 1.8). If you want support for that, download Citizens 2.0.14-SNAPSHOT and upload it to your server. If your server runs a 1.7.10 jar, steer clear from 2.0.14 because Citizens will break due to that fact that it is 1.8. Stay at version 2.0.13-SNAPSHOT.

Spigot News + Full 1.8?

Hey guys,

It's been about a week now since MCFun Central updated its server jar from Bukkit to Spigot. We did this because Spigot was exactly like Bukkit and just as easy to use, but it offered expanded support for large servers with many worlds and plugins (that perfectly describes MCFun Central). As you remember if you read the last post, we ran into a few problems upon updating to Spigot 1.7.10 (with added support for 1.8, but not the 1.8 blocks). The first problem was that the Citizens plugin broke because it didn't support a 1.7.10 jar. Fortunately, the developers who made Citizens were hard at work making this, and they had a hidden but publicly released Citizens 1.7.10 dev build. If you are running your own server on a 1.7.10 jar (this does not mean Bukkit or Spigot 1.7.9, check your jar) and Citizens doesn't work, update your Citizens plugin manually by downloading the Citizens 1.7.10 dev build from their Jenkins website and Citizens will work again: http://ci.citizensnpcs.co/job/Citizens2/1168/

The other problem we ran into was that our hologram plugin, HologramAPI was secretly broken (A.K.A. it appeared green when you typed /plugins, but you were unable to make holograms and no holograms showed up) for the same reason: it did not offer support for a 1.7.10 jar. Fortunately, another plugin called HolographicDisplays did offer 1.7.10 support.

However, the hologram problem still isn't completely fixed. You are able to create and view holograms when your Minecraft client is on 1.7.10, but when your Minecraft client is on 1.8, the only thing you can see if you look up and look closely is horses up in the sky with the holograms going through them. So they don't really appear. There is a fix for this but that involves downloading a ProtocolLib hack, and I don't want to do that. I'd rather wait for one of the plugins to update with 1.7.10 jar support.

Overall, things have been going really well on MCFun Central after the update to Spigot.

We also have one question that we want to ask you: what do you think of full 1.8 support on MCFun Central? Just a side note, this would mean that the only way you'd be able to access MCFun Central would be if you had a 1.8 client, but it would also mean that everything on the server would be about 1.8, so you would have support for 1.8 blocks as well. What do you think? Tell us on Twitter @MCFunCentral or in the comments!

~ Matthew

1.8 Compatibility, Spigot, and a KitPvP Update!

Hey guys,

MCFun Central has gone through a lot of changes tonight.

Tonight, we switched our plugin API from Bukkit to Spigot. The reason for switching was that back in September, Bukkit, Spigot, and Cauldron went down due to money riots and stuff like that. Eventually, Spigot and Cauldron went back up, but Bukkit never did. This means that no new plugins and updates were released since September because none of the staff was on to check the plugins for bugs.

The other reason was that, since MCFun Central was a little unstable and big, if we wanted to change even the slightest thing with a plugin and that plugin didn't offer the option to reload its config separately, we would have to do a manual restart of the server, which took about 1 minute. It was very inconvenient. Since Spigot is designed to help reduce lag and server performance, I thought it would be a good idea to take advantage of these features and put them onto MCFun Central. And some more good news was that since Spigot is basically just an improved Bukkit, most plugins transfer right over from Bukkit to Spigot!

However, upon switching to Spigot, I immediately noticed some problems. The first problem was that our NPC plugin, Citizens, was broken. After doing some research, I found out that since Spigot supports both 1.7 and 1.8 (I'll get to that later), and the latest version of Citizens was not supported with 1.8, it didn't know what to do and broke. Unfortunately, there's nothing we can do about it. We will just have to hope for some kind of update to Citizens or an alternative to come as a direct Spigot resource. Sorry about this. Temporarily, we will use heads to visualize our staff members at /warp staff, and if you previously had an NPC on your server, you will have to use /head as a replacement for your NPC.

The other problem that I ran into was that HoloAPI, our newly-installed hologram management plugins, was not working in a very weird way. When you typed /plugins, nothing seemed wrong. The plugin was shown in green. However, all of the existing holograms on the server were gone. When I tried to recreate them, the commands worked, up until the creation of the hologram. It would just do nothing.

I was getting some strange errors related to the plugin in my console, event though none appeared in-game, so I tried the Spigot forums. Conveniently, I got multiple replies within 2 minutes of my question. What I found out was that HoloAPI had not yet been updated to support 1.8, just like Citizens, but instead of literally breaking, it kind of broke itself in a weird way that took some time to notice.

Fortunately, I also found out from the Spigot forums that there was an alternative to HoloAPI called HolographicDisplays. I installed it and found out that I actually kind of like it more than HoloAPI.

Long story short, we now have Holograms again, and a new hologram plugin.

Now, on to the KitPvP updates. What happened with KitPvP? If you go on the red map and look really closely, you'll notice how obvious it is: fall damage is now disabled in KitPvP. That means that instead of falling into a pool of water, you can just jump down from the spawn and not take fall damage. However, you still take damage from anything else.

At first, I set it so that instead of water, there was a certain area that you could fall in and not take fall damage. But then I realized that there was no harm in disabling fall damage for the whole KitPvP red map, so that's what I did. You'll notice that if you go on top of a tree or something and jump off, you will not take fall damage. I will post a tutorial on how I did this this weekend on my channel, TechieGaming, as well as a full review of Spigot and a comparison of Spigot vs. Bukkit.

Since MCFun Central is a big server, I probably didn't catch some bugs with Spigot that exist. If you find ANY abnormalities when playing on the server that you didn't experience before today, please report them immediately to us. You can report to us directly on Twitter @MCFunCentral, post a comment on this blog, or email us at mcfuncentral@gmail.com.

That was a long post. We hope you enjoy these changes!

UPDATE 11/20/14: I have been made aware of a few bugs involving 1.8:
1) The info book in /kit starter shows *Invalid Book Tag* but shows the book like normal on 1.7.9/1.7.10

2) Holograms don't show in 1.8, but if you look closely enough, you can see the holograms 100 blocks up inside some invincible horses (that's actually true)

Let us know if you find any more bugs!

Holograms, 1.8 News, and New Staff Board!

Hey guys,

A lot of things have happened on MCFun Central since my last post, which was pretty recent. However, they do not need a lot of explaining, so this is going to be a fairly short blog post.

First off, we now have holograms in the spawn! It's not a big change, but it's still pretty noticeable.

If you paid close attention to the spawn before Sunday night, you probably noticed that there were signs on the ground indicating the minigames. These holograms replace those signs, and they look a lot cooler!

On to the second news: a new /warp staff! Our newly promoted admin, Allison (yoshisrawesome) pointed out that we needed a new warp staff. The current one at the time was much like the old spawn (which you can see by typing /warp oldspawn): just a quartz box. Since we made the new spawn back in March with the intention of making it intriguing and not just a lame quartz box, we decided to do the same with the new /warp staff. Check it out:

All of this was Allison's idea, including the design for the build. She built literally everything you see here (except the dome, that was done by WorldEdit and me (we make a good team)). We don't plan on changing this anytime soon.

There's one last thing that has been brought to my attention that I wanted to talk about: MCFun Central and 1.8.

As you may notice, MCFun Central still runs the 1.7.9/1.7.10 Bukkit jar. If you know your APIs, you'll know why MCFun Central isn't on 1.8 at the mention of "Bukkit." In case you don't know, let me talk a little about it.

If you've been playing Minecraft recently, you probably know about the sort-of riots at Bukkit (and Spigot, since Spigot is a variation of Bukkit). The developers at Bukkit and Spigot were working for free and thought it was a volunteer job, and they found out a few weeks ago that actually Mojang was paying some developers to make plugins, so really, money was flying. This resulted in almost everyone quitting plugin development at Bukkit and Spigot and therefore, nobody was there to update and test the API for 1.8. Since MCFun Central is entirely dependent on Bukkit, I don't want to risk breaking or losing all of our plugins by switching to another API. Therefore, MCFun Central is stuck on 1.7.9/1.7.10 until either Bukkit developers start developing again, or once the new Sponge API comes out. The reason I am waiting for the Sponge API to come out is because they mentioned in their forums that the API will be able to run previous Bukkit plugins, so the plugins we already have won't break. By the looks of the homepage and the forums, it looks like the Sponge API will be released in the near future. That being said, it shouldn't be too long before MCFun Central is updated to 1.8 with a new API!

A lot of things have happened. Come and check them out now!

Minigame Update + Halloween + MCFun Building Plaza Update

Hey Guys,
It's Matt, the owner of MCFun Central.

Many things have happened since October 12th.

First off, Happy November! I swear 2013 was just a few months ago. I can't believe how much has changed!

Let's start with the minigame update. If you go on MCFun Central right now and walk to some of the minigame portals, you might see some signs that say that the minigame is going to be removed soon. Those minigames are currently Redstone Rebelling, Jailbreak, and Build It! The reason for these removals is because either the minigames have no way of working, or are just a bad idea. Let's take Jailbreak for example. In case you don't know, Jailbreak is basically a game where you are in a prison and you have to avoid all the various monsters and find the escape door. That sounds pretty fun, right? Well it is... the first time you play it. I build Jailbreak with a little bit of redstone and a minigame plugin, so that means the position of the door never changes, so once you know where the door is, the whole game just becomes a race to get to the door and avoid the monsters, since you know where the door is. It's not fun. The only good thing about Jailbreak is how well the prison was built. It was built in December by Xander, Xenlow, Calvin, and probably some other people that I forgot (I didn't make a credit list in the castle, sorry). I might keep the world somewhere in my local filesystem because of how well the castle was built, but other than that, there's no reason to keep Jailbreak in MCFun Central, because it is simply a bad game.

Let's move on to Build It! Built It! was added to MCFun Central because we thought that since people loved the game Build It!, if we added it to the server, more people would enjoy the server because it has at least one super-popular game. Unfortunately, the plugin that we have for Built It! isn't very good for these reasons: every time the server restarted or reloaded something, the plugin would also reset most of itself. That means that it would keep all the words that I had stored in it, but it would remove all of the maps. That means I would have to go to the arena and manually recreate it. Since MCFun Central restarted a lot back then as it was in beta and we were implementing new things, that wasn't very helpful. Eventually I just gave up, and now the admin commands for the new update on the plugin is very confusing and I don't have time to learn it, and neither do I want to put in some time to learn it. Creating maps used to be very simple (after you built it). All you had to do was stand on one corner, type /bmt pos1, stand in another corner, type /bmt pos2, and then /bmt create <arena name>. Now the plugin owner has removed those commands, and I don't want to spend a bunch of time on a plugin that breaks every time I restart the server. Today, restarting isn't a problem for MCFun Central, but we still have to do it sometimes.

Now, let's talk about Redstone Rebelling. Redstone Rebelling has always kind of been a favored game of mine. It was a great concept. It would be set in a big castle, but in the small corridors of the castle. Each new door that you pass would signal a new level. To open each door, you would have to go through  a series of puzzles that are very risky and that require a lot of thinking. If you die just once, you're out of the game. In the first level, you had to guess which lever to flick so that the door would open. In the second level, there were some opening and closing doors, and you had to walk through the right one. In the third level, there are password hints on the walls, and you have to find out what the password is (it's really complicated, but it doesn't make sense anymore). Then, in the last level, a random player would be teleported to a control room. You had to go through a series of puzzles to open various doors for the other player(s). You can either lead them into the right door (which you don't know either) or you can lead them into a trap. The first person to go through the right door and reach the end of the level wins $500, and the person in the control room wins $250 for opening the right door. So what's the problem with Redstone Rebelling? There are a couple of major problems. The first one was the same problem that we ran into with Jailbreak. It was a great game at first, but after you knew the door and the puzzles and the patterns in the control room, it just became a pointless race to see who would finish the game first, which made it really bad. The second problem made the game unplayable. Redstone Rebelling was built with redstone, but it also was built on the Minigames plugin, which doesn't allow people to teleport. This means that nobody would be able to teleport into the control room to open the doors for everyone else. Also, even if it had worked, the random teleportation was off of a pressure plate, so if nobody stuck together, more people would be teleported to the control room. I know there's some way to get around that with 1.7 commands, but Bukkit didn't allow 1.7 commands until the release build, which didn't come until around June, and by that time, I was already trying to make it playable. Unfortunately, that's not possible. The code inside of the Minigames plugin does not allow for a change in permissions while playing a game. So that means it's not in the config, meaning that nobody can ever teleport in-game while using the Minigames plugin. Removing the game as a minigame from the minigames plugin would result in complicated redstone that would be unnecessary and too much hard work for a game that isn't fun after the first or second time you play it.

This was a long post so far, but there's more!

Whether you went trick-or-treating last night or not, Halloween was last night! Unfortunately, where I live, the weather decided to become really mean. Snow and ice was blowing in everyone's faces and I couldn't show off my amazing Doppler Effect costume because I had to bundle up with a winter jacket. I hated that. But I'm sure all your Halloweens' were amazing, whether you decided to go trick-or-treating, or whether you decided to stay at home and do nothing. If you've been on MCFun Central lately, you've probably noticed that it was decorated for Halloween! This was great, but the decorations are going to be taken down tomorrow, so come on MCFun Central now to see the decorations for the last time!

I also have some news on MCFun Building Plaza. After the unnecessary reset, Orion decided to whitelist the server to bring it back up to where it was. That means make a new spawn and remake some of the houses. It will be off of whitelist soon, but for now, the server is whitelisted.

Ok, I'm getting bored of typing, and you're probably getting bored of reading, so I'm going to stop here. k bye

Halloween Has Come to MCFun Central! + Overhaul Update

Hey Guys,
It's Matt, the owner of MCFun Central.

If you connect to MCFun Central right now, you will notice a big change: Halloween decorations!

We have decided to start switching the server a bit every holiday to keep up with holidays while still keeping the mood of the MCFun Servers. Since Halloween is approaching at greater speed than we thought, we have decided to start decorating for Halloween.

While we want to continue to make the server especially exciting by switching the server theme every major holiday, we didn't want to make a complete change to the server. Therefore, we will only decorate the main spawn and not any of the minigame spawns. However, you can always voice your questions or concerns in the comments section or on Twitter!

Big thanks to our co-owner and decorator for every theme, sharpdomino. She knows what she's doing when she starts decorating.

Now, moving on to a bigger update: The MCFun Overhaul.

Back in August, we announced that we would be turning the MCFun Servers into a network linked with BungeeCord. Some major changes included that the servers would be connected with portals, we would be making our own plugins for our minigames and possibly our own minigames, we would hire builders to revamp our spawns to match the theme of our new name, The Extrillius Network. We announced that changes would start taking place in October, but we ran into a few problems:

1) All the plugin APIs are crumbling down due to riots involving money, so there is no way that we can get new plugins until the new Sponge API comes out.
2) Switching from Elementary school to Junior High has put weight on my shoulders that I have not learned to deal with, and as a result, is keeping my busy even during the weekends.
3) Because of the busyness and the fact that Codecademy doesn't have Java, I haven't set my mind on learning Java or the Bukkit/Spigot API.
4) In addition to me being busy, all the other staff members of the MCFun Servers have been busy as well, and since Bernard moved, it's more difficult to find a good time to talk to him.

Therefore, while we want the changes to start taking effect now, we can't have that. We are trying to plan the overhaul, which includes both ideas and money balance over the (currently) three servers. The changes might start taking effect next month or even in December, but what I know is that we will try our hardest to get the overhaul out for the MCFun Servers' 1 Year Anniversary, which is on December 9th.

We're sorry for all of this trouble, but we'll find a way to put the overhaul onto our calendars.

~ Matt

The MCFun Overhaul Project

This post is probably going to be the post with the biggest news for not only MCFun Central, but for the entire group of MCFun Servers.

Go on any of the MCFun Servers right now. Count how many players are online with you.
If you counted 0, that is about as many as we get on average, and even if we do get any players, it's usually people we know, or staff members. On top of that, we have never gotten a single donation, except for MCFun Survival, which did a great job at advertising. It was a relaxing and fun environment to play in, and it made people want to donate. The only thing MCFun Survival was missing was stability, and that was because Daniel had trouble paying the bill, and there were hacker problems on the server constantly that forced Daniel to reset the world over and over to the point where people just gave up on playing, since it was almost certain their work would be wiped away again. The player count dropped significantly, and Daniel shut the server down. Since then, the MCFun Servers rarely received players. Especially MCFun Central, which had 8 minigames, eventually just died out. It is a small server with an unoriginal spawn, and minigames that just "don't" after a while.

We want to completely redo the MCFun Servers. Don't worry, this won't affect MCFun Building Plaza, other than the name, but I'll get to that. This is mostly going to affect MCFun Central.

Here's a simple way of putting it. We want to redo EVERYTHING, including the name. When the MCFun Servers first started, I came up with the first name that popped into my head (MCFun), and it just stuck. We want a professional and original name, along with professional and original servers. No, that was not a typo. I said SERVERS. Why? We are going to become a professional network, meaning that there will be a different server for each minigame, all connected together with BungeeCord and sub-domains (e.g. KitPvP.mcfuncentral.net (we are not going to be called MCFun Central, that was just an example)).

Since we are going to turn into one big network, we will not have separate servers. This means that MCFun Building Plaza will join the network, and will be part of the nine minigames, even though it is not counted as a minigame, at least to us.

So, what is planned so far for the overhaul? Here's the list:

1) Separate all minigames into different servers linked with BungeeCord

2) Remake all spawns (minigame spawns and server spawn)

3) Change the name to something original, yet has a good theme, and draws the attention of potential players

4) Don’t download any plugins (except for Essentials, WorldEdit, and WorldGuard), and make an original plugin for each minigame

5) Make original minigames (we are not sure about this)

6) Make a donation system that complies with the Mojang rules, but that will still attract players

Any other MCFun Servers that may join in the future will be part of this network.

And finally, what are we going to be called?

Our big network is going to be renamed to The Extrillius Network.

These changes will begin to take effect starting next month and it will probably not be until the end of the year until the changes are finally finished. For now, everything is normal.

If you have any questions or concerns about the overhaul that I didn't mention in the post, don't hesitate to tweet to us @MCFunCentral, PM me on YouTube (TechBug2012), or just leave a comment on this post!

~ Matt

MCFun Central - Another Relocation, Twitter, and a New Member!

Hey guys,
It's Matt, the owner of MCFun Central (I know, shocker, but we'll talk about this further in the post).

This is a pretty late post, since MCFun Central got relocated last week (Aug. 12), but we have relocated once again. Why would we relocate twice within 2 days?
If you have experience with domains, you know that if your Minecraft port is not 25565, the default Minecraft port, you will have to connect to the server you want to connect to with the domain followed by :whateverporttheserverhas. Since MCProHosting servers come with a random port, you will have to purchase their Dedicated IP package to change your port to 25565.

Once we relocated to Chicago, I had some connection trouble with the server. Everything was fine, I was getting 20 TPS like normal, but it started with you having to wait about a second before your chat message went through. That may not seem like a lot, but go on any lag-free server, and you'll notice that your chat message goes through immediately. MCFun Central has always been that way, so I was a little bit concerned once I noticed this.

By the next day, it had reached a point where you couldn't even connect to MCFun Central, even though the server was running fine and the connection was good. I contacted MCProHosting about this, and they told me that they had screwed up when they gave my dedicated IP to me and that it overlapped with another server. If I wanted a dedicated IP again, I would have to move again. Since the server originally was started in Ashburn and things were fine there, I decided to switch back to Ashburn. However, in the time that I was in Chicago, someone had already taken our old IP, 23.235.224.10, which included both the IP and the 25565 port. Unfortunately, unless the owner of the server that took my IP decides to get another IP (or move, if they are on a server host), we will not get our old IP back.

But as I was trying to move to Ashburn, MCProHosting told me that they had run out of Dedicated IPs in Ashburn as well! Since Washington DC is fairly close, we are now in Washington DC. However, I'm trying something new. Since there were so many IP changes going on, I am not going to give out the new numerical IP. If a bunch of IP changes like these happen again, I want people to be on either the sub-domain or the domain, because I immediately point the domains to the new numerical IP after the IP gets changed, if that decided to happen again.

That being said, if you see "Can't connect to server" for MCFun Central, please edit the server on your server list and change the IP to one of the following:

play.mcfuncentral.net

mcfuncentral.mcpro.co

In other news, we have a new member to the MCFun Servers that has just gone public! Remember MCFun Survival and MCFun Building Plaza? MCFun Building Plaza has become the new MCFun Survival! As some of you may know, MCFun Building Plaza had existed for a while, and it was originally designed as a "creative plots" server, but you could build anywhere in the world. So why is it still called MCFun Building Plaza? We have a new feature to our survival server: Build to Rankup! We have 6 ranks: Beginner (default rank), Stone, Iron, Gold, Diamond, and God! The better you build, the more access to kits and commands you get! But don't get so excited yet: you've got to be an outstanding builder to earn the god rank. Start practicing now! mcfunbuildingplaza.mcpro.co

Lastly, I want to mention that MCFun Central has a Twitter! Most of you come here for updates on the MCFun Servers, but most of these blog posts are pretty long, and infrequent. If you want quick updates on MCFun Central, follow us on Twitter @MCFunCentral

For now, the only twitter account with the MCFun Servers is the MCFun Central, but we will soon add a Twitter for upcoming servers! Also, Orion, the owner of MCFun Building Plaza, will start posting updates about the new server, since MCFun Building Plaza became public.

We hope to see you on our servers!

~ Matt

MCFun Central - New IP!

Hey guys,
Once again, it's Matt, the owner of MCFun Central.
As you know, we finally got our new domain play.mcfuncentral.net to work. However, some of you still may notice "Cannot connect to server." This is because you either are connected with the long IP (23.235.224.10) or you are connected with the sub-domain of MCProHosting (mcfuncentral.mcpro.co). I have some good news and some bad news.

Bad: My server has been reloacted, and because of this, we have a new IP, meaning if you are connected with 23.235.224.10, you will never reach MCFun Central.

Good: play.mcfuncentral.net still works and is still pointed to the server.

Good: The sub-domain is still pointed at my server.

Bad: If you live in Europe, you'll have a harder time connecting to the server, since it's 400 miles further.

Good: If you live in or near Chicago, you'll have a BETTER time connecting to the server =)

Sorry for all of this,

~ Matt

The Domain Is Ready!

Yep,

Today I tried connecting with the domain, and I finally got it to work! We now have a professional domain! Check it out:

So finally, after all this BS starting in June, MCFun Central FINALLY has a domain: play.mcfuncentral.net. All this time, I've wanted a .com domain, so I might switch to that... or we could just get used to the .net domain... let us know which one you want!

Having a domain of our own provides even more benefits: I plan to have a separate server for each minigame. I could use the one "mcfuncentral.net" to connect the servers with different domains. For example, play.mcfuncentral.net, kitpvp.mcfuncentral.net, colorshuffle.mcfuncentral.net, etc. I can do all that with just the one domain, which is useful. The only reason I haven't set up separate servers yet is because right now, I pay $25/month for my server. The cheapest plan with MCProHosting that allows Bukkit (and sufficient memory for the separate minigame) is the Dirt Plan, which is 5/month, + 8 (soon to be 9) minigames. That's $40-$45/month on its own. Then I might setup some other things that take up money, which is also adds on to the price, but we'll see.

Just to clarify, I did not delete the numerical IP or the MCProHosting sub-domain, so if you still have those IPs, you won't need to type the domain just to be able to connect to the server. You can still connect to MCFun Central with these three IPs:

- 23.235.224.10

- mcfuncentral.mcpro.co

- play.mcfuncentral.net

We hope to see you there!

~ Matt

play.mcfuncentral.net + New KitPvP!

Hey guys,
Once again it's Matt, the owner of MCFun Central.

So, you know all this crap I've had with GoDaddy about my domain? It turns out, all along, the domain I was dealing with was mcFUcentral.com (that's not a typo). And even when I was trying to add mcfucentral.com to my server, it just wasn't working anyway. So I decided, screw it. I am now introducing a whole new domain: mcfuncentral.net. But this isn't going to be just a regular domain. I am going to make a website with the domain mcfuncentral.net, and you will be able to connect to my server with play.mcfuncentral.net.

Currently, if you try connecting, it will say "unknown host." This is because GoDaddy is still in the process of pointing the domain to my server. I will notify you once it's ready to connect.

On another note, KitPvP is new and better than ever! Normally, I don't like using KitPvP plugins, but this one was great! It's called KingKits, and it includes everything I've always wanted for my server:

1) Getting paid everytime you kill someone
2) Better payment system (being able to type /pvpkit (kit_name) and still have it taking the money)
3) QuickSoup (doesn't take hunger while you have a kit, but if you right-click a soup when you are missing some health bars, it will heal you, and you can also refill your bowls with /refill)
4) When you select a kit, it puts on the armor for you
5) YOU CAN'T COMBINE KITS! (finally)

We also have a new kit: Ghast! Kit Ghast is available for $250 ingame money per use. Yes, I know, it's pretty expensive, but it's worth it:

I know, it looks kinda weak when you see the enchantments, but come and try them out yourself, you'll see that it's worth $250/use!

I guess that's it for this blog post. School will be starting soon and I won't be able to focus on the blog as much, but I'll keep trying!

~ Matt

MCFun Central - Creative Plots is Back! + Problems with GoDaddy

Hi guys,
Once again, it's Matt, the owner of MCFun Central (you can't be more surprised).
It's been a while since a post was made on this blog, so I thought I'd update all 0 of you reading this blog about what's going on.

First off, if you've been on the server recently, you've noticed that I had a lot of problems with Creative Plots recently. One of them was just a stupid not paying attention jar thing on my part, but the other was a little more serious:
I guess I could say what it is, now that it's resolved. If you didn't know, from the start of Creative Plots on MCFun Central, you weren't allowed to use certain things (like lava, water, maybe tnt (I forgot), spawn eggs, etc.). However, if you put those things in a dispenser or a dropper, it would dispense the item out.
Because of this, we had major lag (in the 0 fps sense) in the Creative Plots world and ghasts flying everywhere. It took a while to get rid of the ghasts. However, this made me realize the serious problem that was developing in Creative Plots. Last evening, I went through some config files until I found the blacklist part of Essentials. You are now not permitted to use spawn eggs of any kind, dispensers, or droppers. I'm sorry if you were planning to make some amazing redstone creation or something with the containers, but it's just to keep out the rule abuse.

Onto the second, more frustrating problem.

As you know, back in the beginning of June, I purchased the domain mcfuncentral.com from GoDaddy. Here's a little word of advice: if you want to purchase a domain from GoDaddy, don't purchase it when you're on vacation.
Just yesterday, I finally got my account unlocked. They deleted my domain, but they refunded it and told me it was up for repurchase. When I got back into my account and tried to repurchase it, it told me it wasn't available. I tried asking a Live Chat support if sometroll else bought my domain or if it was just a glitch on their part. Because of "technical difficulties", they couldn't get my account details.











sigh

MCFun Central - Domain Change DATE + Staff Changes

Hey guys,
It's Matt, the owner of MCFun Central.

First off, I've finally got a (estimated) date for when MCFun Central will be mcfuncentral.com!
So, what's been happening to the domain for the last two weeks?
As I mentioned in the last post, since I'm in Romania right now and I'm using my mom's credentials to purchase the domain, GoDaddy thinks I'm a Romanian hacker who obtained my mom's personal information. Keep in mind that she's not here, so that makes it even worse (yes, I was sent to Romania alone as an unaccompanied minor). It makes sense. My mom is using the card online at home, at the grocery store, restaurants, etc. etc. and all of a sudden someone's using the same card to buy something from Romania. While this is really frustrating for me, I'm still happy all these sites (it's not just GoDaddy, Beatport is actually the only site that doesn't) take these extra security measures. Nevertheless, because of this, I will not be able to purchase anything until I arrive back in America, and even then I have to go through all the identity solving crap that I started here. The flight back is on July 7th, separated into one two-hour flight and one eight-hour flight with waiting in between, so I probably won't be back until July 8th. Then I have to get used to the jet lag. Luckily, the way back to America is easier than coming to Romania, so I'll just sleep for 14 hours and I'll be good. Then I have to resubmit the identity and call GoDaddy. It's a lot to do, and it mostly involves my personal life. With all of this, I don't think we'll get the domain until July 11-12th. We're also having problems with our sub-domain after we purchased the Dedicated IP, but that shouldn't be too long to be fixed. For now the only IP to connect to MCFun Central is 23.235.224.10 . I know, it sucks, but we'll get it, and it's the first step to making MCFun Central the best it can be!

Aside from all the problems, we've got some great news too! Shannon (stan5370) has become an admin instead of a moderator, and he definitely deserves to be an admin! He has experience with programming and we are sure he will help in the new MCFun Central!

Daniel has also moved up from the Admin rank, and has taken The5Llamas's place in Co-Owner! Daniel is the co-founder of the MCFun Servers, so why should he not be the Co-Owner of MCFun Central?

If you have any suggestions, questions, or comments about the MCFun Servers, leave us a comment! We read all of our comments and try our best to do what others want for MCFun Servers!


I'll keep you posted on everything!

~ Matt

MCFun Central - More Domain Change News

MCFun Central has just received a dedicated IP from MCProHosting. This means our sub-domain no longer exists, and you will have to connect via 23.235.224.10 (no port) for a few days until we finish changing our domain.

As I said before in the last post, we are working to get an actual domain from GoDaddy and implement it to our server so that instead of using an MCProHosting sub-domain or a long IP, you would be able to connect via mcfuncentral.com or mc.mcfuncentral.com. However, I am currently in Romania, and I bought the domain with American information. Because of this, GoDaddy is taking extra security measures and asking for a photo of our identification and a picture of our credit card, just to make sure I'm not a Romanian hacker who got access to our identification.

As I said in the first sentence, we have received our Dedicated IP from MCProHosting. Right now, this means good news and bad news: the good news is it is the first step into connecting to MCFun Central via mcfuncentral.com. If we had not purchased a Dedicated IP, you would have to connect via mcfuncentral.com:25576. A Dedicated IP removes the server's port. The bad news about this is since GoDaddy is taking these extra security measures and my GoDaddy account is currently locked, you will have to connect via 23.235.224.10 (with no port) for a few days until we provide proper identification and the account is unlocked. Even then, we still have to wait approximately 24 hours for them to check the identification, and then we still have to wait another 48 hours for the domain change to take place. Man, domain changes are hard. Here's a tip: if you're going to change your server domain to a domain from GoDaddy (or any domain-selling company, for that matter), make sure you're not on vacation out of your country, and make sure you don't do it as your server is starting to rise.

I'll make another post when our domain has finally taken place, and when you will finally be able to connect via mcfuncentral.com. Thanks for reading this post, and thanks for playing on the MCFun Servers!

~ Matt

MCFun Central - Domain Changes

Hey everynone.
It's Matt, the owner of MCFun Central.

While MCFun Central is back up, we are going through a long and difficult process of changing our IP so that you wouldn't have to connect with 23.235.224.10:25576. It's true that we do have a subdomain for that, but I feel it would be easier to connect via mcfuncentral.com instead of mcfuncentral.mcpro.co. I like advertising MCProHosting, since they are definitely worthy of being on highway billboards, but as MCFun Central is growing, I would like to have an actual domain so that it looks more professional and doesn't appear to newcomers that we are noobs that are clinging on to MCProHosting. Long story short, we want our domain to be more independent and professional as the server itself is becoming more independent and professional. More news about this will come as we finish getting the IP.

Because of these domain changes, you may or may not have trouble connecting to the server. If you do, the server isn't down, it's just the domain change taking place. I've never done a domain change before, but I expect it to last an hour or two, maybe even less, if you are having trouble connecting to the server.

Thank you everyone who still reads this blog for being a great player on the MCFun servers! We have a lot more things planned for 2014, so keep reading for more info on the MCFun Servers!

~ Matt

MCFun Central is Back Up!

Most problems that occur to any small server like MCFun Central are just little tiny stupid hidden problems that I can't figure out for a month. Take the permissions file, for example. I spent 2 days straight, only taking breaks for sleeping, eating, drinking, and "potty breaks" trying to figure out why admins couldn't edit the full world. In the end, all I had to do was change 1 number in the Server Settings file. Today, all I had to do was update the server jar from 1.7.2 to 1.7.9, which now has a beta build. The plugins that I had updated were updated for optimal 1.7.9 use, so they didn't work on the 1.7.2 jar. All major problems and concerns that I had about the server are all wiped away. Horray for my crappy eyesight skills!

Join now! mcfuncentral.mcpro.co

~ Matt

MCFun Central Currently Down!

Hey guys,
This is Matt, the owner of MCFun Central. Since I've been inactive on Minecraft recently and haven't been paying attention to my server, some major things are going wrong involving permissions. I don't really want to go in depth of the specific problems that are going on, but I will say they are major enough to have to shut the server down or whitelist it until we troubleshoot and fix these issues.

There are some people who play on MCFun Central fairly frequently, and I'd like to give my sincere apologies for you. I am on summer vacation, so I will have time to figure out what the hell is going on with the server. I'm also visiting my aunt who is a computer scientist/programmer, so I can have a little help from her.
I promise I will have the server back up as soon as possible. In the meantime, if you have a lot of experience with Minecraft servers and are willing to help me out a little, please don't hesitate to send me a Personal Message on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/user/TechBug2012/about).

Sorry about this!

~Matt

Griefers + Updates - Servers "Down"

While we at the MCFun Servers have been focusing on our standardized testing for school and other interests non Minecraft-related, the MCFun Servers were almost like a thing of the past. This past month, we haven't really been working on our servers that much, and we noticed a significant player drop from our servers as well. So what happened while we were semi-gone?

First off, you may or may not have heard of Heartbleed, a hack that exposed critical security information, such as login information and credit cards, on about 2/3 of the web. Here's part of Mojang's post about it:

Two days ago a serious vulnerability (that’s been named “Heartbleed”) in the popular cryptographic software OpenSSL was made public. This weakness could potentially be exploited to steal information, such as login information, that normally would be protected by encryption. This software is used by roughly two thirds of the internet so a lot of services were or are at risk of being affected.

I'm not 100% sure about this, but I think Minecraft made an update or two to prevent Heartbleed from taking the security information from them, in addition to the name-changing updates. So now, with 1.7.9 out and all our servers on 1.7.2 (and one private one on 1.7.5), our servers are currently "down".

Yes, I know, Bukkit HAS released a jar for 1.7.8 (which also includes support for 1.7.9). However, it is still a development build, which means it's UNSTABLE AND UNSUPPORTED, as it says when you look at it:

I don't know about Daniel and his server jar, but MCFun Central runs a lot of worlds and plugins, and I don't want all of our plugins to break because of a Minecraft update. Some of you may know MCFun Central isn't exactly the most stable server out there, even with a more stable Bukkit jar. Therefore, MCFun Central and possibly the other MCFun Servers will not be available for users on 1.7.9 until the beta version is released or until 1.8 is released. To play on the servers, you will need to switch your client to 1.7.2-1.7.5.

There are advantages and disadvantages to being gone from our servers. One of the disadvantages for us is that we don't know whether or not someone's managed to grief our servers.

Today, I received an email from our Co-Owner, sharpdomino (some of you know her as Carmen). Here's a screenshot of the email:

You may have to zoom in on the picture a little bit to see it better, but the griefer not only turned all the ground to lava, but also spawned a bunch of NPCs of our admin, captainfreedster, everywhere, and screwed up the letters and the portals (you can clearly see it in the random redstone blocks that used to spell "Redstone Rebel").

Carmen was wrong, however. Using the awesome and highly useful CoreProtect plugin, which I highly recommend to quickly find out the whodunit and to automatically undo the griefs, I first found that it was two of our highly respected admins, ironhaan and pikmin822 (Xander and Jack). I was surprised, but I'll get to that later. I used CoreProtect to FULLY RESTORE the spawn. Come see for yourself. I don't want to turn this into an advertisement for CoreProtect, but I think everyone should have this plugin on their server, whether or not they are having problems with griefing on their servers.

I wasn't that surprised to find that Jack did it. He had griefed MCFun Central as much as 6 times since the server opened (12/10/2013) just out of rage or boredom, and always asked for a second chance.

I was surprised to find out that Xander had helped him, though. Xander was one of most respected admins not only on MCFun Central, but on MCFun Servers as a whole. I haven't talked to Xander about it yet, since the email was sent last night (but I didn't read it until today), but I'll talk to him and hopefully update you on what happened.

Wow, that was a long post. If you read through all of that, then thank you, because that took really long to type =P

Be on the lookout for more MCFun Server posts! Thanks, and have a great day!

MCFun Central - New Spawn + 2 New Minigames!

Big news for MCFun Central!

First off, we have a new spawn! Instead of the crappy quartz box in the sky, we now have a star-shaped HiveMC-like spawn!

Some of the portals you may have seen in the old spawn that said COMING SOON on them are no longer going to be minigames. Instead, we have two more spots for minigames. We decided to use those for KitPvP and Temple Run! Most of the staff really wanted KitPvP, so we are adding it. ACtually, we are building the lobby and the maps right now!

We're not actually sure if we will have temple run, but we are sure planning on it, because we want to have another singleplayer minigame. We noticed that whenever someone joins MCFun Central, most people just do parkour, because most other minigames are 2 or more players. We're not sure about Temple Run, but we will post more updates in the future!

~Techie

Water Based Portals, WorldGuard, & Hub!

MCFun Central is going through a lot of updates! First of all, don't you hate it when you are AFK in the spawn, and suddenly you hear a million nether portals? Even for me, it's SO ANNOYING! Earlier today, we changed MCFun Central's portals to stationary water, so you can step in and out easily without hearing the constant loud and annoying nether portal noise.

Also, we have switched most of our protection from GriefPrevention to WorldGuard, mainly because WorldGuard offers more control over what happens in the protected areas. But we are keeping GriefPrevention because of all its other features!

Also, now if you type /hub, a menu will open up saying all the minigames. All you have to do is click on one, and it will warp you to the minigame lobby!

We have so many other features planned, so don't forget to check MCFun Central's website and this blog for more info about each server!

We are off to a great start

Even with just two active servers, the MCFun team is having a great time with their servers. So many things are going well!

To start off, MCFun Central has been having trouble with permissions lately. As of last night, all troubles were fixed! Now Techie can focus on running the server, not on what other people can't do.

MCFun Survival, on the other hand, has been getting LOADS of new players! This is because Daniel signed up for a lot of server listing websites, such as minecraftserverlists, mineservers, and other sites. With the loads of people on Daniel's server, we can gain more experience on how to deal with players, and how to help players!

The only people who can make all of this possible are YOU. Thank you so much for supporting the MCFun team so that we can grow and get more experience!

Big Updates to MCFun Central!

    We have BIG NEWS for MCFun Central! Earlier today, we paid MCProHosting an extra 30 cents a month for a sub-domain. You can now connect to MCFun Central by using the IP mcfuncentral.mcpro.co - This is a lot easier than having to type a bunch of random numbers, wouldn't you say?
    Also, MCFun Central has JUST upgraded for more RAM. Instead of 1G of RAM, we now have 2G of RAM. This is good for everyone because the server will be quicker, less laggy, and easier to setup minigames and worlds without having to worry about limits.
    We try our best to make our servers better for you, and we take any reqests that anyone has into consideration. We want to create a fun, lag-free, professional environment for you. Thank you for playing on the MCFun Servers!

The MCFun Central server is proud to be hosted by MCProHosting - The leader in Minecraft server hosting!

MCFun servers were created by TechBug2012 and Danielator36

MCFun Central Is Now PUBLIC!

We are proud to announce that last night, the MCFun staff made a final decision that MCFun Central has enough fun to be publicly released. Keep in mind that this is still a beta server, and we don't have most minigames, but we DO have Jailbreak, RedstoneRebelling, Creative Plots, and Parkour!

Join now! 23.235.224.10:25576 or mcfuncentral.mcpro.co





The MCFun Central server is proud to be hosted by MCProHosting - The leader in Minecraft server hosting!
MCFun servers were created by TechBug2012 and Danielator36

Welcome to the MCFun Minecraft Servers!

    Congratulations =O you've found the MCFun Minecraft Servers! We are a group of small servers that focus entirely on building the best fun you will ever have on a Minecraft Server.

    We are seperated into 4 servers:

MCFun CENTRAL: mcfuncentral.co

MCFun SURVIVAL: mcfunsurvival.mcpro.co

MCFun/QUANTiM CITY: NOT PUBLIC YET

    Unfortunately, as you can see, the only two servers that are officially released to the public are MCFun Survival and MCFun Central. But that will change shortly, as it will be only a few days before QUANTiM city is released as well! Also, we are working to get custom domains rather than a bunch of random numbers, so that it's a lot easier to join. You would like that, wouldn't you?

    Each server has its own main focus. MCFun Central, for example, is a big collection of minigames as well as Parkour and Creative Plots. MCFun Survival is a survival server (o rly?) that also includes parkour and a small city. MCFun City (but we like to call it QUANTiM city) is a city (MIND=BLOWN) that is treated like real life. You earn money from the Minigames center, get a job, get paid daily, and use that money to buy anything from a little food to a luxurious palace! 

    If you want to know more about each server, please visit each individual server website! These are the only ones so far:

MCFun Central: mcfuncentral.webs.com
MCFun Survival: mcfunsurvival.webs.com

Or take a look at our next post and click the links to our sites, just so you don't have to copy and paste it into a new tab.

    The MCFun Minecraft Servers are still young and all servers are still being built, whether they are released to the public or not. We would encourage you to join and have fun on our servers, but please be cooperative if the servers need to restart for any reason, and please be cooperative when we are finishing our building. More posts regarding the MCFun Minecraft Servers will be added soon. Thank you for taking the time to read this post, and we hope to see you on our Minecraft servers!


The MCFun Central server is proud to be hosted by MCProHosting - The leader in Minecraft server hosting!
MCFun servers were created by TechBug2012 and Danielator36