Mikeland StarMade shutting down

[mikesheen]

Mikeland StarMade has been running since June 18, 2013, and has been one of the few Australian StarMade servers available, and certainly the longest running Australian StarMade server.

As numbers on the server have declined so much I find it no longer viable to pay the exhorbitant costs required to run such a server. I envy those overseas who have only a fraction of the cost to host such servers.

Below is a graph of the metrics I collected from the player numbers over time. I made a post here on how I did this, in case anyone else wants this for their server.

Thanks to K10wN for being the admin, and for enduring the flak that comes along with that - without you we would have never lasted this long.

For those wanting their work from the server, i'll be providing the server content for download after April 30, 2016 - which will be our last day of operation. Keep an eye on our forums or irc for information as it comes to hand.

If you are looking for another Australian server, I recommend craftau.

Yours sincerely,

Mike

 

[SuperWookie]

Ty for the recommendation

 

[RabidBat]

Yep, all your players are more than welcome to come to the server.
Best of luck for the future.

 

[Az14el]

rip mikelands, birthplace of the KBF

 

[BDLS]

Sorry to hear of another going down.

Who wants to start a betting pool on who's next?

 

[Comr4de]

Sorry to hear of another going down.

Who wants to start a betting pool on who's next?

50$ on LCB

 

[Endimmion]

I'm very sorry about this news. Mikeland has been a very active, serious server.

StarMade-Servers.com will regret you.

 

[Techiar Fallen]

Hey Mike, i don't know why but i feel like this is coming, i played on your server, player community was great...and when i mean great, i actually made friends there, not something like a tag on your facebook showing that you know this person and labeling it friend, but an actual friendship-gift, take, sacrifice, and memory-one of our friends died of cancer, 2 weeks before his time he told us Grim is knocking on the front door, and when he did came, we built him a shrine- a memorial stone on our main base. But now we had to go our separate ways, like life always does, but what im trying to point out here is that, have you ever considered those negative complaints on K1own? i dunno if your misguided, playing his games, or just...excuse the vulgarity-DUMB but alot, alot of people are complaining about his powers abuse, i never really got to the worst of it, no. Im an honest player, stick to the rules, but twice, i had hours of effort poured into this server...gone, being a student on environment engineering and 3d animation pulls a great amount of time and im constantly on-n-off. Sorry, this is getting personal, infact maybe i shouldn't go to far in this hate comment-that is if you could call it, but you had it coming. Deleting negative reviews, or drowning it in positive, heck im not even sure anymore-some of the things i read online are pretty obscene and unbelievable, but if a group of person approves of something, that something became knowledge-vote by majority. Thou you should know this might not became the reason why players left, but it does became a significant problem in this server. So Mike, goodbye, it was sorta fun while it lasted, will miss my friends thou.

 

[Az14el]

k10wn was... volatile
tbh I think his guidelines were reasonable for experienced players, and I had no real issues/run ins with him myself despite making plenty of pretty awful mistakes/rule breakings (which I did my best to remedy, probably helped), but the fact is there's far more inexperienced ones, and he simply had zero tolerance a lot of the time. In addition to his short temper.

On the flipside that server ran pretty stable for its whole duration with what, 1, 2 resets? and never database related? with more than a handful of 4m+ block ships on the server. Not a defense of his actions but maybe something of an explanation.

 

[mikesheen]

have you ever considered those negative complaints on K1own? i dunno if your misguided, playing his games, or just...excuse the vulgarity-DUMB but alot, alot of people are complaining about his powers abuse

Of course I considered them. I spent HOURS analysing logs from complaints to see if there was any wrong doing. That was one of my roles - the buck stopped with me. I'm no stranger to having others manage my servers, I had at one point 4 game servers running, and I had developed policy and procedure to review complaints and determine their merit. I've removed / fired managers when I did find conduct not within my policy of conduct or when coaching did not transpire to reform.

Many people may think I just took K10wN's word for it with the FEW complaints we received, but I did my due diligence and did objectively look at what the facts were available and not once did I find K10wN's conduct as abhorrent as reported. I recall several times looking through logs and finding claims made against K10wN were completely false.

Most claims were what I would classify as vexatious litigants, but the only time I had to coach K10wN was was when the word "fart" was deemed inappropriate. I stepped in and ruled that that was appropriate.

Saying "alot, alot of people are complaining" is rather vague. I value metrics and I developed a ticket system to handle complaints, integrated into our forums. There were 21 complaints through the ticket system for our StarMade server - only 2 of which were objections to K10wN's policy on banning (others were lost ships, et cetera), and 3 users with forum posts which were not lodged as a ticket which took issue with K10wN. We had around 5,000 unique players during our tenure.

So that's 5 people who had an issue, and I investigated each and every incident. In retrospect I wish I didn't as I'd have many hours of my life back.

K10wN was operating under my policies of "uptime is paramount" and "keep it enjoyable for all". If that meant he had to remove ships because they were parked on a planet (lag machine), or some fool had built their ship AROUND a shop, then he was compelled to follow the policy to minimise disruption to the players in general. And K10wN did that. He was able to identify problems with updates before we deployed live, as he tested things and found potential problems which I doubt many other servers would have.

i had hours of effort poured into this server...gone

It's not lost, I posted a link to download the universe and blueprints on my forums. You can find the link here. I took great effort to preserve players work, as I recognised the value to players.

On the flipside that server ran pretty stable for its whole duration with what, 1, 2 resets? and never database related?

Thanks for noticing. I did put a lot of effort into making it a reliable server, I'm not sure many people understand what effort goes into that. K10wN also had a very large hand in the stability of the server. He knows his stuff and he worked out potential issues and worked out solutions to keep the server up at all costs, and to avoid loss of work by players - as per my mandate.

I was careful and proactive with my hosting of the server. I used my skills as a professional to identify possible problems before they arose, and developed strategies and procedures to mitigate emerging issues arising before they became a problem to players. I made sure things were tested before deployed, and had contingencies in place for when things didn't go as expected. I documented my procedures and made that available to my admins.

I ran it like it was precious and irreplaceable, as did K10wN- and I'm proud of myself and K10wN for putting our all into the server.
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I'm very sorry about this news. Mikeland has been a very active, serious server.

StarMade-Servers.com will regret you.

Thanks... I think something may have got lost in translation there, but I understand the intent.