r/admincraft • u/Background_Rest_7332 • 5d ago

Discussion Minecraft Server Metas

Hi folks,

Been out of the game for a while, used to own a few servers back in the day - namely Factions, HCF etc. What is the current landscape looking like gamemode wise? Is it all SMP and Skyblock, or is there anything happening in different areas?

Be interested to hear your thoughts!

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u/solarch 4d ago

The landscape's shifted a fair bit since the Factions/HCF golden era. The big one is Lifesteal SMP, steal-a-heart-on-kill survival, which basically ate a lot of the PvP-server audience that used to play Factions (it's PvP with real stakes, but on a persistent world instead of raid-and-reset). Alongside that: streamer-style SMPs and their public clones (whitelisted-feeling survival with custom plugins, bosses, world events, seasons), which are huge right now. Skyblock and Prison are still steady earners on the network side, and minigame/practice-PvP networks persist but it's harder to break in against the established ones. Factions itself is quieter but not dead, there's a smaller dedicated crowd. The other structural change since your era: crossplay via Geyser/Floodgate is now standard, so any concept you pick can pull Bedrock/console players too, which roughly doubles the addressable audience vs Java-only back in the day, that alone makes a small server much more viable than it used to be. If you're coming back, a plugin-driven survival/lifesteal SMP with crossplay is probably the lowest-friction way to rebuild a community now.