Pandora Newsletter Issue #4

Pandora Newsletter Issue #4

Hello all Pandorians,

I have returned from my break did you’ll miss me?
This months newsletter is being sent out early this is because I wanted to announce some of the new things that have occurred on the server and one way to get word out is to spam your inbox with the information by creating this newsletter another reason is because I feel quite refreshed and have lots of ways to pull players in, im going to hold fire for a little as I wanna make sure everything is in place to support the influx of players and we have a stable bukkit build more on that in the next newsletter but a little hint ... I am Dave!.

The main change I wish to talk about is the whitelisting of the server. This is something I would have preferred not to happen but it has become necessary due to a minority that wishes to cause us minor annoyances by griefing the server. I call them minor as they never really cause us many problems and us Pandorians are mature enough to just shrug our shoulders take the hit of a rollback and carry on.
Right now I’m trying to work out why players grief, my first thoughts are that they have a bad childhood maybe alcoholic mother, abusive father … maybe their uncle has a different meaning for the words ‘play time’ but I don’t think this will cause such immaturity I think the main reason is jealousy. They are jealous because they can not build very well on minecraft. They are jealous because they will never get the chance to play with a great group of online people and call them friends. They are jealous because we all get hours of enjoyment just by being on a server surrounded by people who do the same.
Greifers will never have the experience and fun we have, they will always be loners sure some may join a group or team of griefers but they will never experience the same type of friendship we hold. They smile when they destroy builds but that smile is short lived, when we build or chat we carry the smile and think about the build long after the computer is switched off.

Ok enough of that. Whitelist will stay active for quite a while probably even permanently. Please check the forums to make sure your name is added if not please add a post so I can do the biz.


Competition Time.
Yay, we all love competitions … I think :s. This competition is a creative build competition. It will run over the course of a couple of weeks, standard rules applied. The builds can be anywhere on the map but keep the build to one complete structure. The structure can be of any size and will not be determined by plots but built anywhere on a fresh map. I will announce the start of the contest very soon but if anyone wants to get a head start or do a test run then please do at /warp creative. Please make sure when you pick the area you wish to build that you contact an admin or owner so they can protect the area making sure it’s big enough to capture your complete build.
And the winner of the competition gets ….. (see info below)

New Pandora World Map.
I think we would all agree that the main world map we currently have is a little over crowded. Its particular difficult for when someone new joins they need to go quite far out to find an unprotected and fresh area to build. So we will be implementing a new world map (the current Pandora map will still be available via a warp). This new map will have a central hub at spawn that will be the basis for a tutorial, server rules, shops (showcase plugin), casino (fruit machine plugin) and lots of other things. Then stretching out in four directions will be a rail link going off into the far distance. The aim is that people will take a route and when they see a nice spot they start to build. Hopefully they will have the sense to build either close to the track or build a track off the main track to their house, town, city etc. As the world gets populated I hope we can try to link all the rails together so that a player can sit back and ride the rails looking at everyones build. And then we start a new map 
The winner of the competition above will choose the seed name for this new map, hopefully they will pick their username and not something like survival island lol.

Pandora Becoming a Gaming Community?
Is Pandora going to become a gaming community and not just a minecraft community is something someone asked me yesterday. This was after the news of me talking about renting a server for different games. I am not sure if that is what we will become but I do like the idea.
I talk about the first game I have chosen below but I am interested in what other games people play so please post in the forums or let me know on the server.

New Server Coming for TF2
An opportunity has come up for me to rent a TF2 and/or counterstike server. I have picked just TF2 to test the waters, and also it’s a free game so hopefully we will get quite few Pandorians to try it out. I will not be able to give the server the attention it will need so I am on the look out for a couple of Owners.
If you are interested in becoming an Owner please email the normal promotion address and keep the following in mind.
I will create a TF2 section on the forums and you must be active within this area.
The owners need to devise a ranking type system as I will be entering Pandorians into a league and cup games.
They will have full control of the server stop, start, change maps add plugins/maps etc.
You will need quite a bit of time on your hands and im looking for someone who would actually get enjoyment out of doing this kind of thing.
When applying please let me know if you have had any previous experience and what you think you would do if you became owner to make TF2 a valid game for me to pay server rental for.

Well I would like to end this newsletter by giving a huge thanks to Ben and Kie who done an amazing job while I was away. They were hit from every angle with every server problem we could possibly get like error messages, ddos attacks, griefers and mc updates. Due to their quick response the downtime was a very minimal amount of time.

Thank you guys.

Smidgers,
PAN1C

This message is to the griefers.

When you came on to the server, well better actually, when you griefed it, you claimed to be the most talented builder and that you had built the "best thing in creative". Bullshit, we have so many more talented builders than you: anders, jr, sher, pan, and anyone else who has the time to build nice things. Yeah, your build was nice, we all liked it, but the thing is, you had griefed your own creation, i think thats pretty retarded.

I must thank you though, from your nice grief we have found so many ways to beat the griefers, so all in all, i hope you read this positively as you have opened the doors for so many improvements on our server. Thank you griefers and good job on the grief, it was a good one.

Takao though, i don't understand, you were the griefer but you could have put that aside and play on the only server you would possibly be an admin in. Some people liked you, at times the owners thought you did a great job on keeping the creative stable, and i thank you for that.

Hope you read this, and possibly die in purgatory. I joke, you see, i have a nice sense of humour, i don't need to get amusement by destroying others builds, please search up any wow words, as i would say in year 4 in the dictionary so that you can fluently read this without any question.

But yeah remember, nice grief, i hope you can now move on.