This is part of a miniseries of posts about my time running a minecraft SMP. It is recommended that you read part 1 first

The Aftermath

After the Crystal War, I had a choice: stay bitter about being “right,” or actually solve the problem.

I chose the latter.

The core issue wasn’t about crystals. It was about governance. My friends didn’t leave because they hated end crystals—they left because they felt unheard. The server had no framework for resolving disputes. No transparency. No checks and balances.

Just me, insisting I was right, while everyone else voted with their feet.

So I did what any sane reasonable person would do: I built a political system for a Minecraft server. Obviously.

The Infrastructure Play

First, I needed leverage. Not the dictatorial kind—the practical kind.

I migrated us from Aternos (free, laggy, terrible) to a real hosting provider. I funded 60%+ of the costs. I was the only one with the technical know-how to operate the backend, manage plugins, and keep the server running smoothly.

This gave me power—but not authority. Those are different things.

Power is owning the server. Being able to flip switches and ban people.

Authority is when people actually want to listen to you.

I had learned the hard way that power without authority just makes you a target. So I needed to build systems that would earn me authority—systems that felt fair even when they weren’t purely democratic.

The Layered Rule System

I designed what I called the Layered Rule System—a three-tier framework that categorized every server rule into distinct levels:

Tier 1: Constitutional Rules

These are the core principles of the server. Immutable. Foundational.

Examples:

  • No doxxing, real-world threats, or harassment
  • Administrative transparency was non-negotiable
  • Server owner retains final say on existential threats

Constitutional rules required unanimous consent to change. Not majority vote. Unanimous. This protected minority rights and prevented mob rule from nuking fundamental principles.

Tier 2: Guidelines and Procedures

These are the operational rules—how the server runs day-to-day.

Examples:

  • PvP rules (what’s allowed, what isn’t)
  • Client modification rules (what counts as “hacking” vs what’s a pvp mod)
  • Player conduct rules

These could be changed through weighted democracy (more on that in a second) but required a 60% threshold to pass. High enough to prevent frivolous changes, low enough to actually be responsive to the community.

Tier 3: Seasonal Rules

Temporary changes tied to specific seasons or events.

Examples:

  • “This season, the Nether is PvP-disabled for the first week”
  • “Elytra are banned”
  • “Crystals/Maces are banned for this seasons”

These were meant to experiment. It gave everyone a little hit of something fresh, and allowed the actual gameplay to be easily modifiable without hurting fairness.

The beauty of this system? Flexibility without chaos. People could vote for change without feeling like they were permanently breaking the server. We could literally turn the server into ANYTHING based on what everyone wanted to play, even non-SMP stuff. Like a sort of sandbox.

Weighted Democracy: The 33/33/34 Split

Here’s where it gets interesting.

I didn’t implement pure democracy (one person, one vote) because I’d already seen how that ends: the majority outvotes the minority into oblivion, and the people actually keeping the server alive (like me) have no extra say.

Instead, I implemented a weighted democracy:

  • Members (33%): Regular players. Everyone gets an equal share of this 33%.
  • Funders (33%): People who contribute to hosting costs. Split equally among contributors.
  • Owners (34%): Me and the other operators. Split equally among us.

This created a balance:

  • Members had significant power (they were 33% of the vote)
  • Funders had skin in the game (literally—they were paying for the server)
  • Owners had a tiebreaker (that extra 1% mattered)

Why this worked:

It prevented tyranny of the majority. A mob of new players couldn’t just vote to nuke the server’s core features.

It incentivized contribution. Want more voting power? Fund the server.

It preserved owner authority without making us dictators. We could be outvoted if members and funders agreed on something—but we had enough weight to stop obviously terrible ideas.

The Discord Bot: Automating Fairness

Manually calculating weighted votes would have been hell, so I built a custom Discord bot to handle it.

The bot integrated directly with Discord’s native polling feature and automatically calculated results based on:

  • User roles (Member, Funder, Owner)
  • Group weights (33/33/34)
  • Individual vote weights within groups

When a poll closed, the bot would:

  1. Pull all votes
  2. Calculate weighted results in real-time
  3. Post a breakdown showing how each group voted

Transparency was the entire point. No backroom deals. No “trust me bro” calculations. Everything was public, auditable, and automated.

This killed conspiracy theories before they started.

SpyCord: The Transparency Plugin

The other major issue I’d faced was OP abuse accusations. People didn’t trust that owners weren’t using creative mode or giving themselves items.

So I built SpyCord—a plugin that logged every sensitive command to a public Discord channel:

  • /gamemode changes (even non-command ones)
  • /give commands
  • /op and /deop usage
  • Creative mode item spawning

Every log entry was timestamped, included the player’s UUID, and was sent to Discord via webhook in real-time.

The result? OP abuse accusations dropped to zero, because now there was undeniable proof. When someone accused me of spawning items, I could point to the logs and say “show me where.”

The Principle: Transparency Kills Conspiracy, and Builds Community Trust

All of these systems had one thing in common: radical transparency.

  • The rule system was public and hierarchical
  • The voting bot showed its math
  • The logging plugin exposed everything

This didn’t hide power, it legitimized it, which is exactly what the server needed.

And it worked. When people can see exactly how decisions are made, they trust the system even when they disagree with specific outcomes.

This is a lesson that applies way beyond Minecraft:

People don’t need perfect systems. They need transparent ones.

Systems > Personalities

Before this, the server ran on unsaid rules, and unsaid norms. “We’re all friends, so we’ll figure it out.”

That works until the first real conflict. Then it collapses.

What saved the server wasn’t me being right about crystals. It was building systems that felt fair even when they didn’t give everyone what they wanted.

The Layered Rule System meant people could advocate for change without feeling like they were destroying the server.

The weighted democracy meant everyone had a voice, but not everyone had the same voice—and that was transparent from day one.

The SpyCord plugin meant that players no longer had to worry about players having an unfair advantage. There’s honestly nothing worse than grinding for like 5 hours, only to see somebody else attain what you have illegitamately at 100x the speed.

What Actually Happened

With these systems in place, people came back, and the server stabilized.

This didn’t happen because I’d “won” the argument. But because the server finally had a framework that felt legitimate. Disputes got resolved through process, not shouting matches. Changes happened through an agreed upon voting system, not mob pressure.

The server stabilized. Population started growing. We went from the “Aternos Era” of 5-8 players to a consistently active community of 15-20.

And then we merged with another SMP.

That’s when things got really interesting.

But that’s a story for Part 3.

This post was not generated by AI :)