Altitude Blog

As most of you know Minecraft will be updating to 1.20 on June 7th. We will attempt to update as soon as possible but it will likely still take a week or two before all the important plugins are updated and paper is stable enough for use on a live server. As you all know our community has shrunk since our last reset in which we went from 4 to 2 servers, and is now too small to fill even just a single server. In light of that and since the 1.19 and 1.20 updates combined are significant enough here are our 3 options for updating the server:

FULL RESET

Our first option is to completely reset the server and switch from two survival servers to just one. If we choose this option we would make the map download available like we have done in the past. But all data other than ranks and playtime would be removed so we can all start again from nothing. This will give any new players joining a good chance to fully participate in the community from the start. But we understand that this would also result in long-time players losing all their progress which many don’t want.

PARTIAL RESET

Our second option is to reset the world and go to one server, but allow players to carry over some money and items. Currently, the plan for this would be to add a temporary command which opens a GUI with 54 slots for you to put items in to take with you. You would be able to store shulkers in this, but not cheques as money transfers will be restricted. To give the players who have spent a lot of time on the server a reward for their time you would be able to get up to 9 pages of these GUI’s for transferring items. To avoid issues with players using alts, and because new players won’t have made much progress anyways the first rank to get a page in the GUI would be Peddler. They would get one double chest worth of storage. Every rank above them would get one more, until Esquire from where they would get two more pages per playtime rank for a total of 9 at Baron. To help everyone with being able to start building right away we would also give 5k per playtime rank starting at Peddler until Esquire where we would give 10k per rank for a total of 45k claimblocks. Players would be able to transfer maparts, but buildings would obviously not be possible. We would reset MyPet’s, McMMO, exp, balance, enderchests, and your inventories. When loading into 1.20 you would be able to retrieve your items and any slots you left empty would be worth $1k in game assuming you had enough money before the wipe.

EXPAND THE BORDER

Our final option would be to expand the world border and reset nothing. Due to the small amount of players we would merge the chats to make things easier for moderators. However this option requires us to keep renting 2 dedicated machines to host the servers on, each server is roughly $100 per month. We have around $100 in additional monthly costs for things such as our domains, hosting the old maps, our emails, our forms, and the google drive we use to keep evidence on punishments. This year we have made roughly $277.2 per month (before taxes), we used to have an additional server for hosting events and testing plugins which we have removed this year to reduce costs but the server is still losing money every month. This hasn’t been an issue so far due to the influx of money we got at the start of 1.19 but it’s not sustainable. This is simply due to us having too many servers for how many players we have. Therefore if we go with this option we will cut costs as much as possible and set a monthly donation goal that is equal to our monthly costs. If we do not manage to reach this goal (on a 3-month average) we will reset the server mid-update to reduce the costs down to one machine. I don’t mind partially paying for the server to keep it running, but I’m not willing to do that if we’re spending 1/3th of the money on a server that we do not need to support our community.

HOW WILL WE CHOOSE

In a few hours, we will start a poll in ⁠#polls. Everyone on Discord will be able to vote anonymously on one of the previously mentioned options. We will reveal the results on June 7th when Minecraft updates. We will go with option 1 or 2 depending on which one receives more votes unless option 3 wins with an overwhelming majority. This is because we believe option 1/2 to be the most sustainable for the current size of our community. However, if >70% votes for option 3 we’re willing to give it a try since you would be the ones supporting us through donations to make it possible.

WHAT ABOUT A WORLD DOWNLOAD?

We will not create the backup for the world download until the choice is made. You will have more than enough time to break down your builds for materials if we do go with a reset so please use the coming week to finish your builds instead of demolishing them so we can all enjoy the best map download possible in the case of a reset.

QUESTIONS?

If you have questions about any of these options or want to discuss how option 2’s item transfer would work feel free to ask about it in the thread on Discord (#announcements)!

FAQ

• What will happen to creative if we reset?
  • We’re planning on keeping it the same but can’t guarantee anything until we’re actually running the server
• Will we only have 1 server if we go with option 1/2?
  • Yes
• Will there be a new spawn and server name if we reset?
  • Yes, we will not announce anything specific about that yet though

Hi everyone! We just wanted to make an official announcement to say that the server has been shut down. The world download will be released within the next few days, so please be on the lookout for an announcement with those links! Thank you to everyone who has made these last few days special. We know that this is tough to accept, but we hope to see you all when we come back for 1.18.

You can still message the Altitude Bot (on Discord) or submit a contact form during the off period if you need to report a player and/or a situation. Please try to keep questions about the update in general instead of PMing specific mods or head-staff, we are happy to answer questions but like I’ve said multiple times, this is meant to be a break for us as well. Thank you for being here, and we hope to see you all very soon.

Hi again. As we said in last nights announcement, we were originally going to wait until Monday to post an official announcement to the community. Seeing as our private staff announcement was leaked, we were put in the unfortunate position of sending out a very rushed public announcement with very little information for you. We deeply apologize for this, this isn’t how we wanted this to go and I’m sure that it hasn’t made this news any easier. Please be patient with us.

We have a lot of information to give, so please be sure to take time and read the entire announcement along with the previous announcement if you haven’t yet. We will just refer you back to this if you ask a question that is answered here. To start off, our official shut down date is going to be Saturday, September 11, 2021 8:00 AM. You will have this week to log onto the server, complete any builds you may want to see in a world download, write down coordinates, and just spend some time with each other. We will be creating a poll so everyone can vote on whether they would like the world download to be from September 4th or from September 11th we shut down.

With that being said, the Discord will be open through the shut down, but a majority of the channels will be locked. We will be temporarily hiding every channel besides general and one or two voice chats, and we plan on re-opening off-topic and d-general at a later date. We want you to be able to communicate as a community, but we are also trying to allow the staff team to enjoy this break period. Along with this, we will be enforcing the discord and general rules with much more severe punishments. You all have access to our rules on the website and in the pinned messages, so you are 100% aware of whether something is allowed or not. Please do not test these limits and please keep this in mind when you’re speaking in the Discord. Again, general is only for topics about Altitude, any other topics will have to be postponed until after the other channels are back.

For those who do not have Discord, we will be communicating through blog posts and an occasional tweet (if it’s an important update). The latest blog post will always be linked when you try to join the server during the downtime. We will be releasing information on the event later today, or tomorrow, in a different post. Please be patient with us!

For those wanting to support the server during the down time we will be releasing alpha tester ranks at a later date. Players with this rank will be able to help test new features as we work on them to ensure the 1.18 launch will be as smooth as possible. There will be more info released on the testing phases and how to participate in them in the future.

There will be more announcements as we are ready to share throughout the downtime.

You will remain able to link your discord accounts even when the server is down. This will be done by joining it, and linking using the code you’ll receive.

Hi everyone. This isn’t the type of announcement we wanted to make, but after multiple very long discussions between the head-staff team, we’ve come to this conclusion. As many people have noticed and pointed out, the player count on Altitude (and the staff team) has been steadily decreasing throughout the majority of 2021. The pandemic caused a lot of temporary growth on the server, and obviously this has to go back down at some point. With this decrease in players, we’ve come to a point where we are way in over our heads in regards to the amount of servers we have and the amount of machines that Altitude requires. The server is quite pricey to maintain and unfortunately, the amount of players we currently have will not allow us to continue running the server as is.

We’ve decided that the best option for us right now is to shut down Altitude until 1.18. This obviously isn’t going to be a permanent shut down and we absolutely will be coming back, but this period of time is a perfect opportunity for a break. While the server kind of has to shut down, we also think that this period of time is incredibly important for the well-being of head-staff (and the rest of the staff team). We’ve been working very hard the past 4-5 months specifically and we all know that there has been a lot of problems. This has been very hard on all of us, we feel very burnt out and this will be the perfect opportunity to rework the way we run our team, and the server.

Our plan for 1.18 (at this time) is to fully reset. The only thing that will be kept from this reset will be playtime/playtime ranks/donor ranks. This is basically a necessity in order to completely reset the economy (which is also a part of our plans!!) and we think a fresh start will be our best option. With this, we are also planning on downsizing to two servers to better suit our communities needs.

As you might have noticed by the length of this announcement on such a big topic this announcement is being sent earlier than we originally planned. We had hoped to give our staff team (who we announced this to earlier) a chance to get ready. Sadly the announcement was leaked so to keep it fair to all players we have had to made a rushed announcement. There will be more announcements soon with a lot more detail and info on our plans. There will be world downloads for all the worlds that have been taken before this announcement.

We understand that you will have a lot of questions, but please save them for tomorrow so we can provide all the info in one go.