It could very well have been him, which is turbo neat!

I think it's really cool that the developer is so in touch with the community.

I suppose you're right. I started with -Xmx1024M -Xms1024M, which to the best of my knowledge tells the VM to allocate 1 GiB of memory, but perhaps Linux fakes it until it's actually needed. I know that the console log was warning of impending doom, which probably means that it won't run sufficiently anyway. Which is sad. I always wanted a game server.

Maybe. But I still spent 20 minutes gathering stone to help him rebuild.

What those guys did to him wasn't right. They tore down an hour of work in thirty seconds.

Griefing is going to be terrible in SMP. There's like five guys on now that are clogging the chat with hate speech. Calling people words I'd get shot for saying whenever someone logs in. It's really getting annoying.

At least they got bored of tearing stuff down.

It might help to make it harder to mine, therefore requiring more effort to grief, and leaving them vulnerable to attack for longer. Of course, that would slow the entire game down. Could always orchestrate the server into an ant colony, with worker ants to gather, farm, mine and build, and soldier ants to hunt down and kill griefers.

You basically just need administrators. Giving the players voting privileges helps too. It's no fun to abuse people if they can get you kicked and banned with a 30 second effort a minute after you start.

Minecraft servers will need mature admins and possibly a votekick/voteban feature for when the admins aren't around. Even more fun than getting them kicked or banned though is abusing them. For example, freezing them in one spot, or setting them on fire, or throwing them across the map. These are the things that generally work in Counter-Strike, so long as you have a mature admin around to use them properly.

If decepto doesn't come through today then I'll try to set up a temporary server and see if it performs well enough for a few people to join...

I was going to say just post it in this thread, but I changed my mind. I think for now it should be left private. In the future when the server software has more management features (passwords, banlists, etc) then we can make it public (if we decide). All it takes is one griefer to ruin things...

Aye, me too!

PM me the IP as well.

How hard is it to run a server? And how good of a computer and internet connection do you need? I wouldn't mind running one myself if it didn't require buying a better computer or dedicating the one I have to the task.

I've heard that the biggest problem with game servers is actually the bandwidth. Hardware is relatively cheap nowadays, but bandwidth is still a little pricey. I was going to try to run a Counter-Strike server on my makeshift server a year or so ago, but when I asked the owner of a Counter-Strike server whether it would be sufficient hardware-wise he said that it probably was more than sufficient (after all, quad-core with 8 GB RAM), but the actual limiting factor is usually bandwidth. Obviously, with my crappy DSL residential connection (and those always have really low upload speeds), there was no way I could handle the throughput required.

The only Minecraft server that I currently know about is running a dedicated server at a presumably professional hosting company, so the bandwidth is quite high compared to the average home connection (at least, here in North America...). It also has a pretty decent processor and to my knowledge is text-based all around (so no GUIs to power), but it's sharing that processing power with numerous virtual machines, and inside each, many service daemons. It also doesn't have that much memory. It was running sufficiently with 256 MB of RAM, but it now has closer to 400 MB.

The only hiccup that I'm aware of is when the gods gifted you 70000 stones at once. I'm told that it looked like a scene from the exorcist before the frame rate dropped to <1 FPS...

You have nothing to lose by trying (except loyalty ). I imagine it will probably perform better in Linux, as Java tends to do, but that's not to say that it won't suffice in Windows.

And framerates of <1 fps as the gods gift thousands of items at once.

EDIT:

But really, I was just wanting to fool around with the admin abilities.

I've gotta ask you guys, what do you think about griefing?

Over the last hour or so (in between doing other stuff), I've been arguing with a guy on the Minecraft forums. His claim is that griefers add extra challenge to survival multiplayer, making it a more exciting and rewarding experience. Do you agree? Disagree? Why or why not?

I suddenly feel like I'm writing homework assignments for high-schoolers. "Agree-disagree? Why or why not?" was a common trend in my high school.

Server is up:

97.107.134.80