Prepare for the 1.8 update

Prepare yourself and your server for the 1.8 update

It's one of the hardest decisions an administrator has to make: Will you reset your map, what plugins will break or will you keep the map?
This tutorial will help you decide this and adds some tips and tricks.

1. Plugins

Now more important then ever it is wise to start selecting your plugin for the 1.8 update. Mainly protection plugins should be checked. The 1.8 update will allow players to change there names, so make sure all your important plugins such as:

• Protection plugins
• Payment plugins
• Permission plugins
• Home plugins

are checked to support UUIDS. If they haven't updated to UUID's yet it is wise to start looking for alternatives.

1.1. Update speed

Check how regular your main plugins upload updates. You don't want to be the last server to update to the latest minecraft update. Again if the update speed seems slow try to have some alternatives.
If you have plugins that already store data such as home plugins try to look on forums for converters

1.2. The cleanup

Check your current plugins and see if there are plugins you could remove. Plugins keep getting larger, I see a lot of server using a teleport plugin, a home plugin and a spawn plugin while they both support these three features.

1.3. Feature requests

For big plugins a lot of plugin users will have ideas for 1.8 (examples: the title and subtitle in minigames,..) create tickets for these ideas BEFORE the game actually updates.

2. Worlds

2.1. A new map

A new map means a new restart. If you have reset your map in 1.7 I wouldn't recommend updating to a new map since it seems a bit fast for most players. Make sure to start building the spawn now! You can always copy it to the new map, but you might lose time if you wait for 1.8. Servers that have a hub don't really need to do this.
Try to look for compensations or advantages for players that are playing in the current map:

2.1.1. Transfer items

You might want to look into transferring items. The easiest way for both administrators and players is to use a plugin such as:
http://dev.bukkit.org/bukkit-plugins/playervaults/

This allows them to drop their items in a vault and you can just copy paste the plugin directory to the new server.
(No more chest copying)

2.1.2. Lower the price for ranks

Lower the price for ranks or 'shared donations'. In most cases this will result in a boost of donations. But make sure you mention it is temporarily.

Do not announce map resets more then 2 weeks before the actually reset!

2.2. Upgrade your map

Upgrading a map can be hard. You don't want existing players to lose buildings, but you don't want new players to think your still on an old map.
Also just upgrading without preparation will result in ugly borders. (This even happens if there are no biome changes in the update)

Watch this video to see how you can fix these borders:


LINK: http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/629884-a-tool-for-merging-alphabeta10-maps-mcmerge-v070/
WIKI: https://github.com/hetmankp/mcmerge#readme


2.2.1. Let players contribute

Now with the EULA removing most ways to gain interest in donating it is wise to let players contribute to things like updates an upgrades. Set donation goals for map sizes.

EXAMPLE: For every $5 we will increase the map 20 blocks (keep in mind the for large map this increases logarithmic)

2.2.2. Teleporters

Put teleports in the spawn that teleport to new arenas or locations. There are random teleport plugins available that allow you to teleport to specific biomes within a specific min-max radius. This way existing players can stay in there lovely 1.7 homes, and new players can enjoy the new map parts with temples and more!




3. YouTube

Some servers have a youtube channel. Make a little video showing the latest minecraft features on your server. Even if you think you are the worst youtube commentator in the history it might make a difference in gaining more players.



Thank you for reading this tutorial,
Maxim - MVdW Software

 

I dislike this one. Plugin developers do not know if they can or cant add certain features, they dont know if MC will properly handle them or not, will need to wait them to be added to bukkit API, and will most likely have other things on the head. This would most likely lead to these tickets being deleted due to not referencing an existing MC features

 

Personally I prefer tickets like that, as you may know chances are that the delays of approved updates can get big (some of my 1.6-1.7 updates took 14 days) If you can concentrate updates with both feature requests you can perform faster and better updates. Ideas can be more wild when they haven't seen plugins with new features.

Example: When 1.7 wasn't released I got tickets for ideas that seemed awesome. Some are indeed not possible (or hard) but that doesn't matter. Now I get feature requests of things that you can find in other plugin because there is no competition to get the coolest, best feature

 

So when 1.8 update comes my 1.7 map won't work correctly?

 

SandKastle
Expanding the map without preparation will result in ugly borders (as shown in the video). Existing parts will still work but you wont have the newly spawned temples, stone blocks,...

 

Agree 100%. with you.