Hey Opticrafters, icooliam here with some news - and an interesting thing! I doubt many of you remember but a long time ago (probably a few years back now) I released the first unofficial Opticraft App (for Apple devices) and it proved a pretty big success. I'm hoping to release a whole new updated app called 'The Unofficial Opticraft App 2' soon, and I'm hoping to incorporate this information from this post into it! Anyway - I hope you enjoy this!
The History Of Opticraft!This is post that I'm hoping many of you will remember quite a bit of, it's a history of SMP Opticraft, right from day one when a beta was released! Please note that I did not include every bit of history and I also didn't include any new world history related things. Anyway - I hope you enjoy it!
4th September, 2011 - Relkeb posts the release on the new SMP Opticraft, beta! He posts about three new forum ranks, and the new SMP Server you can connect to via beta.opticraft.net (the iP that I noticed I still use to this day!). It's amazing to see people's first reactions, people were thinking that there would be zones for each player, others were wondering if you could lock blocks with passwords!
24th October, 2011 - After a long downtime and a chain of issues that caused it Optical introduces the 12 hour reboot, that will continue doing it's job without any input from anybody. Users were happy for the new feature as there had been a lot of anger and frustration over the long downtimes!
24th February, 2012 - The new initial donation rewards are now in place and have been announced by Optical - this is a great addition as many players have now started voting and this is great as it brings in more money for the server! Players are voting for the all new: mob disguises, XP, Money and hats. Optical also announces that there will be more donation rewards coming soon!
4th April, 2012 - After growing massively for a month (tripling in size) Optical announces some new changes! He is extending the world borders, making the world 2-4x bigger than before, and in the new area there will be new towns! Also Optical announces the new anti grief system, otherwise known as grief traps! The new anti grief system had only been put into place 48 hours earlier and had already caught over 200 players! And on the subject of grief Optical also announces the new City Protection, meaning large cities no longer had to worry so much about grief, and all this just one day before 1.2.5 was released!
21st April, 2012 - Optical announces some new features and changes, the most noticeable being the new Hero Chat (the plugin Opticraft uses for the chat), I remember coming on the server and speaking in the chat, I was amazed by the new look of the chat but I found it hard and pointless to start with - as did many other members. However over time I realised that it helped a lot and was actually quite easy to use. Also world borders were extended and the price of selling melons was halved, and you could no longer sell protection stones. Work was still going on for the new Member+ World and many users were excited for the new world!
22nd April, 2012 - Titles and teleportation had been added to the donations page, the most significant being titles probably - as so many people today have them! Both of these donations had been requested many times by many different players and people were happy when they were both released!
27th June, 2012 - The second home feature was added! Players could now create two homes - and everyone was very pleased with the result as it had been a much wanted addition! Many people now started finding and converting mob spawner into XP farms and suddenly there was many many players with XP farms, most offering some sort of access for money.
31st July, 2012 - With the release of 1.3 being just one day away Optical releases the much wanted new homes! From this date onwards you could then buy 5 homes for just $10! This proved a great seller and many players (including me!) rushed to buy it! Many players even bought the donation more than once, just in case they ran out of homes!
26th September, 2012 - Opticraft's official YouTube channel had been released, along with another great promotion video from xDeeKay. Before Opticraft's official channel came out xDeeKay had made another great promotional video for opticraft!
17th November, 2012 - After a lot of reminding from AwesomeAlicia the IRC was back for SMP! And, as Coolcrab put it - now we didn't have to bother coming on to talk to people
! Re-adding IRC was great as many players had never heard of IRC before so they got the chance to use it - and many players did use it, and still do today!
24th December, 2012 - The night before christmas! Nick3306 and a few other players grouped together to make the excellent video: 'The night before christmas'. As well as being a lovely merry christmas to everyone it was also another great chance to use the all new official Opticraft YouTube channel!
28th July, 2013 - After secretly building a few arenas pvp is released! This was a great addition to many opticraft players as it was completely unexpected. Players started making very good armour and swords to get ready for battle! I remember gavin offering people money and all his items if they killed him - and I don't think anybody ever did! Sadly after all the excitement caused by PvP I do believe that it is rarely used today.
8th September, 2013 - Probably one of the saddest things that happened in Opticraft, the ability to sell Iron and Gold was removed in the market. It was amazingly heartbreaking to see the effects this had on players, I remember a lot of people being very angry, and I mean very angry! If I remember correctly a few players even left over it. However, it did mean now that players with Iron and Gold farms were not incredibly rich compared to everyone else - and this was nice as it made the game fairer for everyone.
23rd February, 2014 - The Hall of Fame was announced by Tobs! Players could now goto the hall of fame and find out all about amazing builds that some very creative Opticrafters have made! I think this was a great addition to the server as it's a great way to celebrate and share the pure skill needed to make these buildings, and it's amazing that some players in opticraft are this dedicated and good at building! Although you wouldn't expect it on a survival server I think we do have a lot of amazing buildings on this server!
21st July, 2014 - TheWholeLoaf completes two fantastic new PvP maps, Valgate and Plaza! Now those more bloodthirsty among us can compete against each other in these fantastic new places! I personally think it's great that these two maps are very different, as Plaza is more about proper fighting whereas Valgate, a medieval village, offers many places and chances to hid and pounce on your unsuspecting victims!
Thanks for reading the history of Opticraft - I do hope you enjoyed it! If this turns out to be a success, which I hope it will, I might continue adding things to it, as I think it would be nice to have an ongoing history topic! I do understand that I did not include every piece of history I was meant to, and I haven't included any new world announcements! However if you think that I should have included something please post a link to the topic, or post a picture - and reply with it below. I hope your all looking forwards to the new app, I'll soon be taking orders! Thanks again, and goodbye!
icooliam
