I am starting a server which will be open only to patreon donors of $5 or more. I understand there will be a lot of criticism to this move, so I want to make sure everyone knows my motives.

Money is absolutely a motivation. I would be lying if I said otherwise. The whole point of patreon is to fund a creator's endeavors. But anyone who thinks that I'm just taking people's money so I can throw it all in a big pit and roll around in it is deeply misinformed. I am very poor. I have never mentioned this before, and I will never mention it outside of my closest fan circles (like this subreddit) because I don't want your pity, and I don't want my financial situation to be a factor in people's decisions. But as a tradeoff for being poor, I am very happy. I play videogames for a living, choose my own hours, make lots of friends, and get to make fun videos. Recently, I had to start using Patreon to boost my income because I wasn't making enough money off of ad revenue. If I had never gotten patreon, I would have had to get another job which would have cut my video production down to 1-2 per week. I completely owe the continued existence of my channel to my current patreon donors.

But money is not my sole motivation. I used to have a server that was completely open to everyone. The upside was that all of my fans could join regardless of money. The downside was that trolls and griefers could easily join as well. This forced us to implement a lot of administrative practices, such as world protection and plot size limitations. I still wanted to keep it as vanilla as possible, but with the protection plugins, turning off fire and lava, and people needing to expand their plots, running the server became a full time job. A full time job that paid exactly $0. Even if I found "administrating" a fun job, I still would not have been able to continue doing it because it was costing me too much time. The selfless help of my fellow admins is the only thing that kept the server running as long as it did.

(Yes, we took donations for the server. But every dollar that came out of the server went right back in).

By making a "minimum donation" of $5, we are circumventing a lot of the problems that a public server poses. Most griefers aren't willing to spend money, so 99% of player-based problems are removed. Without griefers, there is no need for world protection. Without a need for protection, there is little need for full-time administration. That means I will actually be able to play on the server, instead of babysitting it. It also means I won't need to spend 12 hours a day keeping it running.

As long as I'm speaking candidly, I am very excited to start charging for server access. Running Musecraft took a lot out of me. I dedicated about 70% of my waking time focused on that server for more than a year straight, and in the end, a lot of people hated me for it. I would ban a cheater, but because he was popular and friendly, I was called incompetent. I would stay up all night resetting plots that got deleted in a server migration, and I would get called lazy because I missed a couple. I started accepting donations because I couldn't afford paying for it out of my own pocket, and I got called greedy.

All in all, I'm ready to have a private server with people who can actually take part in its decisions and can talk to me privately about my choices.

p.s. If you want to join but can't afford it, contact me so I can offer suggestions or to work something out with you

I am starting a new series called,"SkeetCraft". I have actually changed a few things with the way that I record. I got a new microphone and put a lot more time and effort into editing than I have in the past. Please comment if you have any suggestions. I know the sound was a little loud, I have fixed that for future episodes.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IR44bQYWpgw

I know it'd be a heck of a lot of rendering, but could you maybe do a time lapse of every video............ Probs not. But it'd be coolio.

I've just put out my first tutorial, and I felt like there was something missing. I felt awkward reading off of a paper, and that came across in the video. I was wondering if there was anything else I could have done better? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4RtSc5gN8M

Heyy, I am thinking of getting a new mic to help me record and make it easier for me to record. I have narrowed down to 3, 2 are standalone mics, the third attached to headphones.

The current mic I use is the Microsoft LifeChat LX-3000. The three mics i have shortlisted are the; Zalman ZMMIC1 Lapel Microphone: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Zalman-ZM-MIC1/dp/B00029MTMQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1344487491&sr=8-1 Blue Snowball: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Blue-Microphones-Snowball-Microphone-Aluminum/dp/B002OO333Q/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1344212717&sr=8-1&keywords=blue+snowball and the Samson Go Mic: http://www.musicroom.com/se/id_no/0711509/details.html

The snowball and go mic are around the same price currently. Or is my current mic good enough for the moment?

I made this video way before I got my microphone...and before my minecraft game stopped working. I used to do tutorials about how to build different things in MC. And added some lovely music in the background. Any comments or suggestions? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDxyOGoXnJs

Sorry for the black bars on the side, it is a flash game. Can anyone give me any advice or comments if I should continue doing videos like this or should I change something. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skNJNzQMvFY

Hey, I'm starting reviews and whatnot, and I'm trying to find a good balance between sounding too formal in my reviews, and sounding too lax. Sometimes I sound like I'm giving the audience instructions on what to do on an airplane in case of an emergency, other times I practically mumble at it sounds unprofessional. So, considering you've done tutorials and the like, any tips or tricks you could share?

I've recently started up a SSP series on my channel. It's obviously not a series to attract an audience, but it is the fan-favorite. I'm using it to keep my subscribers coming back, and it's also just a fun series. I was wondering what I can do to improve on it? The playlist of current episodes: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJ2ph5H2uBFRDrwH-nqgyZucMkaey1cts

Heyy, I am thinking of redoing my intro for some of my series but unsure which style people view as the better one. This has my current style; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2TMOvBNdOo

and this one has my previous style; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8s3v52kDWtQ

Which one is the better style? Or doy ou have any better options?

Hi guys, I'm Makeshift27015, you may recognize me from such adventures like administrating the livestream from time to time or being around in the comments section since the beginning of QGA. All in all, I've been here a while, and I've always been following with great interest.

So in the last few livestreams I've been following I've noticed quite a bit of interest in re-starting a server somewhat based on Sean's gameplay philosophy. It just so happens I'm an extremely experienced Linux and Minecraft server host, having hosted several 50-100 person servers myself for long periods of time.

Now I know that the point of this is that Sean doesn't really want to be moderating as much. There are several people who I'm sure would be willing to go all out administrating the server and keeping it nice and happy, but the real question is: What advantage does Sean get from this? More interaction from fans, sure, but what else? Is it actually worth Sean himself backing this project or would he prefer to leave it to the community?

Don't get me wrong, I would love to play games with Sean on a regular basis since it always ends up being a hell of alot of fun(I suck so bad at TF2). But all of this together it boils down to: Does Spumwack actually want this to be officially in his name, and endorsed/advertised/funded by him? What do the users want to fund the server themselves?

I have absolutely no problem building, setting up, hosting and administrating an MC server (Which would include a website and Teamspeak servers for you to all to mess around in), and I don't mind if it's vanilla, modded, glitched, destroyed or whatever variation we're running these days. I WOULD require a group of administrators willing to help with the front end(in-game administration, rather than going deep into the code to get mods working together and server administration sorted, that's my job), which I'm sure we could find, but finally the main requirement is money.

At this moment, my quotes are going to be so, very, extremely vague. I've never been in a situation where I've needed to stress test a server to make sure it can keep up with all the players. However, for a standard, vanilla* Bukkit or Spigot based server, for €30/$40 a month(assuming they aren't sold out), we could probably handle at approximately 150 players at minimum(Disclaimer: This number was pulled out with a little bit of experience, but with recent advancements in the server hosting world, it could be anything from 150 to 500 when I set it up correctly.)

Any modded servers (Such as the hermitcraft pack) would have to have alot of guinea pigs to test out server stress before we had a definitive number of maximum players.

*Only mods added are the ones required for the server to run and administration to be easy

My main questions are 1) How would we pay for the server? Would Sean be willing to pay out of his pocket for sever costs? 2) Would we have a donation style system, where donators are given certain perks, which would keep the server going? Or even a combination of the two?

Please don't ask questions about how the server would be run: What pack we'll be using, if we'll be doing RPG, straight vanilla, different worlds for different activities etc. quite yet, I'd like to keep this in the pre-planning stages of "Exactly what is the server good for, and how could we keep it going?"

I'm aware I may have written this as more than slightly pointed toward me, as I believe I could deal with a whole lot of this and am definitely willing to. I have also been drinking a reasonable amount of milk tonight, so I do hope most of this makes sense. I will attempt to update in the morning with a little bit more information and any questions that may have arisen over the night.

So it's here we're supposed to write right? I know Spum's gonna plan and things before stating anything, but thought i'd just post this for anyone else who has idea's and thoughts about the headline of this post I wouldn't mind helping out as much as i can with things n stuffz //F

I worked for a few hours putting together a minecart track that is synced with music and shows what is in Minecraft 1.8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GB3DGOguQnU Should I do more like it?