A tribute to CityCraft, and Aces.

In the event anyone comes across and discovers this post; this was my first ever Minecraft server. I still come back here after a decade and 2 years and reminisce on a time when Minecraft was relatively fresh and climbing at its peak. One day, Aces posted the server IP on a youtube comment section with the ip Playcitycraft.com:25587. I was searching and scouring for a Minecraft server that didn't have too many players but also wasn't empty. This was the perfect fit, but I didn't realize what factions was and I think I built my first base on the factions world they had at the time in May of 2012. Before I ever made my first ever house. I even have recordings of me building the first thing ever in survival mode on Minecraft in THIS very server all those years ago. Because I was on a laptop with a trackpad, I was obviously spending alot of time in those earlier times getting pwned as soon as I'd visit the PVP arena they had which I remember vividly. I never improved at pvp all that well :p I would join random peoples factions and explore the survival world, I remember one morning staying up all night and seeing the sunrise come up as I was exploring a desert and communicating with random players. another time I remember joining a faction base that claimed a stronghold and immediately it was raided, lmao.

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Eventually, things started changing. I started learning the game and how to actually play factions, and I got my best friend at the time to join me and I think I had the most fun times of my entire life just messing around with my friend on skype during morning hours just exploring the factions world and expanding our base. Despite it being so close to spawn it never got raided somehow, one day we discovered there was a base from the factions PVPstars that was halfway unprotected underground and we were able to take over and obtain some of their armor and weapons and keep it as our own. We also got accustomed to Towny as well and had a joint plot thing going on. After a while though, the original factions world was reset and not too long after I got banned for a few weeks. I was eventually unbanned but to this day I don't know the reason why the admins (assuming roni or aces) took my account down, but during June I was eventually let back on the server.

During June I also started joining the Hunger Games server they had that was thriving, me and my friend would bounce back and forth between playing hunger games on this server and the old exploding tnt hunger games that allowed you to build anywhere on the map (kinda reminds me of fortnite in retrospect lmao) so my priority changed from going on the factions/towny server to the hunger games one, and eventually I applied and was promoted to helper. I befriended all sorts of other staff at the time and we'd solve problems the players were having or mute people spamming, pretty mundane things obviously, but I always looked forward to just joining to see what was going on and to talk to my best friend as well. At some point I stopped playing as much, and for the last time in August I visited the server to see it merged with factions and changed everything up, and then about a week later the server went down. Never to be turned online ever again.

I didn't talk directly to Aces all that much, honestly at the time he seemed to be quite busy with running the hunger games server which was constantly hitting like 80 players (and would be quite a stressful amount for 2012 minecraft.) But he seemed really passionate about the server. He had an admirable drive and vision to bring a small 15 player survival server into being apart of one of the minecraft servers that popularized the battle royale minigame genre that is in all sorts of games nowadays. I don't think that's too much of a stretch to make, and I'm glad I was apart of it while that was happening. Throughout the years I played through Minecraft servers that were exciting, but it didn't even reach close to the heights of what CityCraft was for me and my friends. As you can probably tell from the past posts, I even tried reviving the servers by starting my own CityCraft which was obviously not gonna work as I was just a kid at the time. After Mcorigins ended, the last servers I played on consistently from the early 2010s were pretty much gone. I could never find a reason to play Minecraft servers now these days cause I've largely grown out of the game, aside from playing survival. But throughout the years I would remember CityCraft bit by bit and the fun times I had on there and feel a little better throughout the day just knowing I got to experience all those memories.

I later found out last year that Aces passed away. I talked with his brother who was glad to discover people had some good times made on the servers that he hosted all those years ago, sometimes I still think about that. How unexpected you discover things like this can happen, I didn't know him that well obviously. But this was someone who was responsible for a formative experience I had in my youth. I'm sure he largely moved on long ago after shutting down the server as did most people probably did over time, but I hope when I told Aces in 2018 or 2019 that I had fond memories of playing on his old minecraft server all those years ago, that it made his day a bit better as his server did for me all those years ago.

Honestly I'm surprised this forum site is still even up, or if anyone will see this post. But if you do, thanks for reading this post. And have a good day. Shout out to Gnr75, Chkirby, JayJayez15, BenjoFTW, Kentuckybadfish3, Mofo_Baxter, and all the other gracious people I met and talked to back in the day all those years ago, feel free to message me if y'all ever wanna talk.

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