Plans, Explanations and the Incoming Horzion

[Rarek]

There have been increasing enquiries as to exactly what on Earth is going on with our carefully-controlled RP Minecraft server Ahoy Minecraft! This will hopefully serve to let you all know what's happening, what we've been planning, what we've decided on and how all of this has affected and will affect you in the present and future. So let's kick off with the basics. Where have we been?

[h2]So everyone disappeared?[/h2]

Yes, a few of us did. Why? Other parts of Ahoy World and life.

The plan for Ahoy World is to be bigger and better than it is right now. Bigger, however, does not equal better, so there are a few changes and tweaks that have to be made along the way to ensure everything goes smoothly. It's mainly those changes and tweaks that we've been focusing on for the past few weeks and, though they took some time, we're confident that it will've be worth it.

[h2]What did you do?[/h2]

Planning, organising and setting things straight. Oh and a new logo too.

Especially in terms of the Minecraft RP world, everything was a mess. None of us had any illusions that the project wouldn't be a hard one, but I for one didn't realise until much later that we were only increasing the workload for ourselves by plodding on with a number of tasks and decisions that were made, to put it simply, wrongly. Some harsh decisions needed to be made with some time to think, without making constant knee-jerk reactions that, if left to continue, wouldn't produce the output that many of us have been working towards.

Other than Minecraft, we've been making plans for how to turn Ahoy World into a larger, all-inclusive community. Though you might not want to be involved in other decks of the Ahoy World ship (such as our World of Warcraft guild and ArmA II Squadron), it's important to recognise that they are there and need just as much attention as anything else. Minecraft is our priority, as that currently contains our largest active member and donation count, but the other parts need a little bit of care.

In regards to the logo, you'll be able to see it up top right now. Simple, on-topic and elegant. A masterpiece. Thanks to Dom for preliminary designs and @Fergus for the final creation, including an absolutely bad-ass animation that we'll put on the front of all of our videos. If you want to see it early, get in touch.

[h2]What decisions have been made?[/h2]

Firstly, the Minecraft server now has two worlds: the RP world and the Creative world. If you didn't know that fact, you'll be on the Creative world. The one we've all been building on for the past few months? That's now the Creative world. The reason for this was the messiness. The world was covered in structures that we just didn't want. With them being over ground, flying and underground it would've been near impossible to build the tightly-controlled RP world we wanted without having to painstakingly remove hundreds of embedded structures to another world.

The new RP world has been generated from the old world's seed, so contains much of the same landscapes as the old one. When we fully start the project, agreed buildings will be WorldEdited into the new RP world from the Creative world. This is how ALL structures will be created from now on: you build it in the Creative world, it gets approved and is moved to the RP world.

Secondly, we're branching out and four major additions are coming.

First, we're starting a weekly podcast in the near future. We'll go through recent news (in gaming, Ahoy World and our own lives) and a few interesting topics every week that'll be sure to have us all laughing. If you're interested in any way, be it taking part, how it'll work or who's currently involved, contact either me or @Fergus!

Next, plans are in place for our World of Warcraft guild to merge with another, bringing the two communities together and potentially doubling our userbase. The Guild Master of the other guild, currently named Runes of Valhalla, has been on the site for a while (say "Hi" Carl!) and plans are in place to start streaming the members over to Ahoy World shortly.

After that, much more YouTube content. We currently have a channel with ~250 subscribers that barely gets touched. There's a few videos on there but the plan is to have much more regular content being pumped into it. Once again, if you're interested in this in any way, get in touch. We're looking for people who want a little more responsibility around the place. If that's you, tell us.

Finally, a dedicated server.

[h2]A Dedicated Server?![/h2]

Yep.

Currently, our 1.5GB Minecraft Server and our 40-slot TeamSpeak server run on a single £20 monthly bill. Once we start expanding, the plan is to attain a dedicated server for ~£80/month. This will give us 8GB RAM to play with (4GB of which will go straight to the Minecraft server), a quad-core processor and an unlimited bandwidth usage. We can slap a 256-slot non-profit TeamSpeak server on there and have everything running from there. With root access, we can put up any game server we like, be it ArmA III, Battlefield 3, Race 07 or any number of others.

[h2]So there it is.[/h2]

That's the plan. That's what we've been doing and that's what we're going to do. If you want to get involved, message me and we'll discuss what you want to do. A lot of us have big plans for this place and have put a lot of work into getting it ready for those plans to commence. Take the opportunity now and help out: we're headed to the top!

[Guest]

this might be a stupid question but whats the address for the rp server? when i get bored of building would be nice to slip into rp lol

[Rarek]

It's exactly the same as the Creative one (mc.ahoyworld.co.uk). It runs parallel and you can simply teleport between the two.

For most members, however, this option will not be available until we properly set everything up and start the whole process moving.

If you want to see how the RP world looks, just check out the Minecraft Map. If you hover of the right-hand side of the map, a little overlay will pop out showing you all the worlds that are currently running on the server. Click on any of the views (the little cubes) under the RP_World title to see it. There's nothing much to see right now - purely landscape which will probably be terraformed to fit in with whatever lore decisions are made.

Once again, if you want to help with any of this and think yourself a trusted party please get in contact. We'll be making a big push on this soon and every helping hand would be appreciated.

[Guest]

ooooh well that explains it then not sure how helpful ill be though got allot of stuff coming up soon.. but if i find i have more time than i thought i would gladly help out in the future!

[Nanashi]

Does this mean that I can use lava again? Otherwise I doubt I'll return to AhoyWorld.

[Carl]

awww nothing about my stuff