Greetings, everyone!

It's been a while since I made an announcement here, and I apologize for that. I had a series of life events pull me away from the Minecraft scene, but I'm finally ready to return. First, I'll briefly cover why I was gone for so long, discuss a little bit about what's going on in the Minecraft community keeping me from continuing the server, and then mention what we could do for our future.

Well, first off, in the past few months (from around June until now), I've been busy handling stuff in my real life. In June/July, I was focused on a summer study trip to Germany I took part in for a few weeks. Once I returned, I had a brief trip to Niagara Falls which took up more of my time. After I got back from that, I was focused on getting back into school and preparing to apply to colleges and scholarships. Then early last month, my computer's hard drive crashed and I lost everything on it (except for what I had backed up on Google Drive and Dropbox). The worst part is that this happened literally the day before a backup hard drive I ordered arrived. So, I've been spending the past month just getting everything back and I think I'm good to go on with my projects. All of these things have kept me busy these past several months. Thankfully, it's all starting to die down which allows me to focus on doing this again.

Now, while I was fixing my computer, apparently there was an incident regarding Bukkit and everything related to it getting DMCA claimed. This is pretty unfortunate as it includes MCPC+ and Cauldron, which are my favorite server software since they combine Bukkit (which has better plugins) with Forge (which has better mods). One of the members from Mojang said he'd personally update Bukkit to 1.8, but it looks like there's a better replacement for Bukkit coming up soon. It's called Sponge and is made as an extension to Forge and is being developed by the creators of WorldEdit/WorldGuard and MCPC+/Cauldron. This looks good because the developers of some of the plugins (like GriefPrevention) that I used on the server say they may remake their plugins on Sponge. This is great news as it means plugins like GriefPrevention will be able to protect against griefing much more effectively than it has been able to in the past.

Now, I would like to make a comment about FTB's official packs really quick. It seems that their flagship packs (in the past these have been Ultimate, Unleashed, and Monster) are always super big. This was fine in the Ultimate and Unleased days when they weren't incredibly large, but I feel they're getting a little crazy in size now. Modpacks that big require more powerful computers for the users to run and more powerful servers for the users to play on. So, unless 1.7.X or 1.8.X have massive performance improvements, I feel we shouldn't base our pack off one of these flagship packs.

So, what could we do for our future? First, I think we should wait for Sponge to become available. I just feel safer using software that I know has a future, unlike Bukkit which might as well be dead by now. Sponge looks like it'll be a huge improvement on MCPC+/Cauldron if they make it right. It'll be interesting to see what they come up with. As for our modpack, I think we should create our own list of mods independent of what the other modpacks have. We should make it more personal to us and get rid of the mods we don't care about. It is nice having the option to do whatever you want, but we should limit how many mods we have. If we ultimately do decide we want a modpack base, I think we should use the mods from Unleashed as our base as that pack was very good in my opinion.

Please leave your thoughts down below or in a thread in the discussion board in the group. I hope this has explained why I haven't said much here at all recently and I hope that we can re-launch our server sometime soon.

Thanks for reading!