It is no secret that OldHaven is in a state of decline. Gone are the days of prosperity, days of maxing out all player slots on the server and having to create more just so we could fit more people in. Activity has essentially reached a standstill. And that’s fine.

Minecraft is strange, and Beta is stranger. But we are no strangers to Beta. One can not simply play the game indefinitely and expect to get the same enjoyment out of it every day. It becomes stale, sooner or later. We do realize that there is a finite amount of things to do, even in a seemingly limitless game with infinite possibilities. Over all the months the server has been open in, this started affecting most of our playerbase. Everybody decided to leave and do their own thing. However, we did not really possess a “faucet” that could bring in fresh meat into the game.

Beta servers are like a leaky rainwater drum. If you do not have a steady stream of water filling your drum, it will eventually empty itself and dry out. Dejf, 2020

It does not seem like it, but there is hope. Light at the end of the tunnel. You may or may not have noticed this yet (there has not been much press about this yet), but we have been actively working on bringing the server back into its golden days. We are confident that with a few major changes and new policies, we can make things work.

Now, we would like to mention a few points, or “mistakes”, that we have been making in the past and we would like to change.

Near non-existent advertising besides the initial server creation

The first thing that we did wrong is the lack of publicity surrounding our server. For those who do not remember or were not around when the server was being created, it was born out of drama in Betalands, a similar Beta 1.7.3 server that had been changing ownership and bathing in a cesspool of toxicity. We had a mass wave of players migrating to our newly formed server. In fact, that is where the “OldHaven” name comes from — a safe haven for people who just want to enjoy the game in peace. This wave really helped our player counts skyrocket. But it was unsustainable.

We cannot rely on one single event to bring in all of the players that we need and that we will ever need. As we all know now, Beta has a really high turnover rate, meaning that people tend to leave quickly and they need to be replaced by new people quickly as well in order to preserve a stable player count. This is one point that we will need to tackle if we want to move forward.

For the longest time, we did not even have a proper website! How can somebody find the server if they type “minecraft beta 1.7.3 server” into Google and it doesn’t show up even on the tenth page?

Lack of unique and defining features

To be honest, OldHaven did not really offer that much that could not be had on any other Beta server. Sure, acting as a “safe space” amidst an avalanche of drama might have been a good sales pitch at first, but now we really need a proper “killer feature” that sets us apart.

Enter MegaMod. MegaMod is a custom in-house built client for Beta 1.7.3 that fixes most of Beta’s uncomfortable omissions (such as an FOV slider, some graphics settings, working skins & capes) and adds quality-of-life features (e.g. modern menu, multiplayer GUI, automatic server logins). More game changing features are also being worked on and considered. It comes with its own launcher, so you can say goodbye to fiddling with MultiMC. Thanks to MegaMod, you can be just a few clicks away from joining the game. It is currently in development, so stay tuned for more information.

No exciting event / mechanic / anything that could assist with player retention

We should be trying our best to get our players to continue playing and not get bored. We have a couple of ideas that could help listed below.

Minigames that run on their own without admin intervention with prizes and possibly a public leaderboard

XP and enchantments similar to modern Minecraft versions with enhanced functionality unseen anywhere else

Giveaways and tournaments

Custom OldHaven capes obtainable by a variety of ways

More interwoven Discord integration

… and more!

To summarize:

We firmly believe in the future of OldHaven and are definitely not giving up. It might not be fully apparent yet, but we are working very hard behind the scenes to bring you a fresh, brand new OldHaven. More blog posts will be coming to address some points in further detail.

Thank you for your time,

OldHaven™, your Beta server of choice