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Let’s be real, 2020 was like playing apocalypse bingo. Weirdly enough, it was an excellent year for MassiveCraft. It’s never too late for a ‘2020: Year in Review’ post, right?

2020 brought many players, returning and new, to MassiveCraft, several of which joined the volunteer staff team and have contributed heavily to the recent content and course shift. It is incredible to reflect on how the server has changed course over the previous year. We would like to highlight several major achievements and discuss our plans for the future of MassiveCraft’s Survival Community.​

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Essa World Release
The Server Owner, MonMarty, along with the World, Game, and Tech Staff worked tirelessly to bring a second quality survival map to our server. We are overjoyed to see the new factions and incredible builds that have appeared.

MassiveRaces
MassiveRaces harkens back to our roots with the original version of the plug-in and at the same time updates it with modern races, progression, and abilities to create a unique survival and PvP atmosphere. You can choose a race, complete daily race-specific tasks to upgrade your level, and perform 4 unique abilities once unlocked! Roughly 300+ combined man-hours of work over the course of 10 months went into creating this plugin that lets you immerse yourself into the races of Aloria!
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MythicMobs
With the upgrade to 1.13 came MythicMobs and over 60 custom mobs at the time of release. There have been over a dozen contributors throughout the year and many large and small PvE events. Since the initial batch of mobs in February, Game staff in collaboration with Lore and Quest has developed hundreds of mobs for use in survival, events, and at festivals.

Gauntlet Dungeons
To cater towards our parkour loving friends, the Game and Quest Departments teamed up on this project to create a series of parkour levels with unique and special rewards that players must complete in sequential order. We released the first 10 levels and have 40 more planned over the course of 2021 and beyond!

Spoiler: Gauntlet Dungeons Photos

Server Update to 1.13 then to 1.15
The Server Administrator, CS_Birb, along with the rest of the Tech and Game Departments spent many hours testing and updating our plugins from 1.12 to 1.13.2 then to 1.15 versions. After languishing on 1.12 for years CS_Birb completed and deployed the update in February. He immediately began on the upgrade to 1.15 and by October it was tested and ready. On the day of the update, CS_Birb stayed awake to monitor the server for 24 hours straight! We received word he immediately proceeded to sleep for 24 hours straight.

Weekly Scheduled Events
We transitioned from randomly chosen, sporadically held events to 2 per week. Each week players can vote on which events are held in the faction's discord and expect them to be hosted on Saturdays at 4pm EST and Sundays at 3pm EST.

Concern of Economy
Our server has a unique player-run economy. That does not mean it is immune to oversaturation of regals and materials. Many factors contributed to abundant regal gain, so we have made efforts to reduce the frequency of the PvE events and amount of regal rewards. The addition of the World Edit Service has removed 154,963 regals from the economy, but it pales in comparison to the 400,000 regals removed by the Shady Merchant.

Staff Transparency and Focus on Player Retention
We have made efforts over the last year to increase our transparency with the players. Our Weekly Changelog posts have become much more detailed and the frequency of our Survival Announcements on discord and the forums has increased. We have consistently reviewed and updated idea-voting in the Factions discord. We added a channel to record implemented ideas. Thanks to our PR Department, which aids both Survival and Roleplay communities, our server is on 3 new voting sites, and server-wide voting is up by 60% over just 3 weeks! They have made incredible video trailers, conducted surveys with the leaders of factions, and are only beginning their efforts.

Quantity and Quality of Dedicated Staff Members
In addition to the current wonderful staff team, 2020 brought many experienced returning staff back to MassiveCraft, along with a fresh crew of members to provide our server leadership with different perspectives and skill sets. MonMarty, the server owner, appointed CS_Birb and Derpadillo to represent and support the interests of survival as Directors. On top of the projects and content, each Staff department has excelled at their routine tasks such as tickets, player investigations, and survival-world maintenance in Game, bug fixing and minor plugin changes in Tech, storyline writing and coding in Quest, and social media upkeep in PR.

It’s only going up from here. We have had a taste of what we can achieve when all departments are working together in unison, and we are excited for what is to come. Speaking of which, here are the projects we are prioritizing for 2021:​

1. Updated Lobby, Tutorials, and Website​
2. Server Update to 1.16.4​
3. Kingdoms & Sieges (or a similar feature)​
4. Addition of 40 more Gauntlet Dungeons levels​
5. Rework of KitPVP including maps, queue, and MassiveRaces ability testing​

Lastly, a note from a few of our Staff Members:

“My strongest accomplishment in 2020 was taking on the Mythic Mobs project. I am proud of the mobs we have today and can’t wait to release more. I hope to recruit more Game Staff aspirants and grow the department so we can shoot for player retention, more detailed mobs, events, maps, and of course, player-staff communication.”
-Sir_Daragon

“My largest accomplishment this year is bringing structure and purpose to the PR department. We witnessed an immediate impact. The department has grown significantly in regards to identifying and accepting new responsibilities as well as defining a sense of urgency and need for PR. We are getting ready for growth.”
-Spectec
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Your MassiveCraft Factions-Survival Staff Team





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