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The frustration of Minecraft server hunting: an interactive experience

You ever had to sift through a bunch of Minecraft server ads on Reddit to find a good server you can settle in? Ever struggled really bad with trying to sift through a bunch of posts for servers you can't connect with?

Can't imagine that? Congratulations, you're a normal person and probably want to know how insane I am. Let's get started on that right about...

Now: A Server Crisis

Need to control those damn headers better...
Yes, titlecard. A server crisis.

In the traditional sense of "everything's on fire and nothing's going to get better", looking for Minecraft Servers is easy. Making friends, debatable... But finding a server is actually quite easy, you pop open your favorite Minecraft server subreddit...

What's that? There's a bunch of junk websites that host servers that give benefits such as teleporting to high paying players? GOD DAMNIT.

Clarifying...

This post is specifically talking about survival servers, by the way. Like plain SMP that your old streaming friends and you play to get together and goof off in survival, nothing fancy kind of Survival. Not the corpo server kind where they have ranks after ranks, lootboxes with crate keys, McMMO which i have a grudge on, by the way, buyable unbans...

We are talking strictly survival here. As it should be. Well, let's go look how the modern experience looks like without those kind of servers. Yuck...

The Old r/MinecraftBuddies

But first, we need to talk a bit more about what changed. Because the experience between 2022-2023 and ~2024 ongoing are completely different experiences.

r/MinecraftBuddies and r/MinecraftWhitelisted

Somewhere around September 16th 2024, r/MinecraftBuddies split up into r/MinecraftBuddies and r/MinecraftWhitelisted. While for any other person, this change seemed super insignificant, and possibly even very understandable -- this change marked something. The end of r/MinecraftBuddies being used for servers.

When I used r/MinecraftBuddies around 2022 and 2023, it was mostly used for finding servers. It had the main purpose of finding small friend groups, sure, but it was mostly a server hunting tool. Whitelisted servers were posting all the time there and it was mostly just drowning out people who just wanted a few friends. Unfortunately, that's the era I loved the most. But for a silly reason.

You see, when they had flairs, you had a flair for finding a buddy, when it was split up between "hosting for buddies" and "searching for buddies". So you could post saying you're looking for a buddy. But now that you can't do that, you can't really lazily post that you need a server and hope the good people come right to you. You have to actually post about wanting friends. And that kinda sucks.
So we're going to use r/MinecraftWhitelisted for this rant. Since that's most accurate to the r/MinecraftBuddies 2022 experience. At least, partially...

The r/MinecraftBuddies 2022 Experience

(retold with r/MinecraftWhitelisted)

(please do not harass servers you see here, they have their lives and reasons)

Here's how this little hunt works. You open the subreddit, sort by new and bask in random, varying degrees of helpful offers. I would use screenshots for these posts, but I'm too lazy to take a bunch of images. So let's do this way: I'll link the posts I find so you can look at the servers, and we'll go through together all the perks.
When you look at these posts for real, please be respectful! Sign up for any servers you like, but don't send them any hate. I am mostly just playing around here.

With that being said... Let's go look. We'll only sample just one, just for a reference on how we look into a post.

A sample size: Ordinary SMP

You will probably read the words "Hermitcraft-like" often. I don't know much about what it means in terms of expectations (and nobody's ever given me a proper explanation), but as far as I know, Hermitcraft-like servers:

  • Focus on tight-knit communities (with varying degrees of success)
  • Usually have plugins at all times, ranging from small to big depending on the server
  • Nearly always have a Shopping District (Diamond run servers is what you want here. Money/plugin based systems are also used by pay to win servers, so avoid them if you can)
  • Usually have their own "seasons" (they reset the server every once and a while for something fresh)

With these conditions in mind, we should take a look at what we're bargining for! Let's start with our fellow SMP here.
It appears we get Bluemap (okay, okay...), a voice chat plugin (these vary! I always avoid servers that make it mandatory because you'll hate them as an introvert anyway, but usually servers that force it either are likely dead or are content creation focused. some are fine though, and leave this as an option!), PvP and other world events (the PvP part has me worried), and, well... A server.

These kind of servers usually make you yap about yourself, by the way. It's pretty comparable to a job interview, but the only difference is that there's less pressure here. They don't expect you to say a whole lot of nothingburger and lie about your experience... Just that you write a few sentences every question so they can tell you're serious.

But this also puts strain on somebody like me, who doesn't quite always have the energy to sugarcoat an application for a whitelisted server. Dumb questions like "Tell us more about yourself" and "How long have you been playing Minecraft?" begin to feel really feel like they're just trying to find a way to gate you unless you tell them everything about you. I struggle to find the logic in it, and on a really bad day, it turns me away near immediately.

More examples

We'll rapid fire three more examples fast. These will mostly just point out things I notice. this ad doesn't list much helpful information other than "We have land claims and care about lore, join us!", this ad is for Bedrock (great for some! but i prefer Java), and this ad is for an 18+ server.

Kids game... not suitable for children?

Yes, you read that correctly. An 18+ server.

These things go around like flies. The intention is that the older a person is, the more mature they are. A good chunk of servers limit their player counts to people over 16, which in fact, I couldn't meet the age range for a while! And then the 18+ servers began overflooding the 16+ and 17+ servers, which meant I had to wait until 2024 to get 18...
And now the standard 13+ servers are all extinct, it seems.

I say 13+ because that's the age limit in 90% of countries to use Discord, by the way. Discord is a popular medium for these whitelisted servers, you do an application through Discord and if you've written enough for your job interview, they let you in and tell you how to get on.

But the thing is, there's a lot of servers that aim for people over 18. Hell, I've even seen servers for adults only for people over 20, 30... On a kids game. If this was ROBLOX, I would have crashed out, but since Minecraft is about a hundred times better (minus Hypixel and those other kinds of Minigame servers) with handling private interactions than ROBLOX will ever be. I mean, you can make a private survival world every time, for christs sake. Good luck getting that on ROBLOX on 50% of your favorite games...

But really, it's for maturity. The problem is that every teenager under that age range (13-15, or 13-17 depending on who you ask) can't join any servers with people in their age range. So that leaves the problem of having to skip 90% of the list. A problem I've suffered through in 2022 when I was still a Teenager. And now I'm an adult, so I see what I missed. But now my sibling is fresh 13, so... Shit.

Yeah, basically it's a pain in the ass.


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