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You Asked, He Answered!​

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March 21, 2014​

http://tinyurl.com/nskubsg​

In Case You Missed It:
+ PVP Arenas Build Competition Registration Deadline is Midnight tonight! (See more)
+ Weekend lotto is back! (See more)
+ appleproducing’s 175k giveaway ends March 22. (See more)
+ Sign up for the ECC Olympics, scheduled for March 28-30th. Over $2 million ECD in prizes. (See more)

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By OnSceneReporter, Chief Editor
So you're wandering through your town checking out the plots, and suddenly the chat box explodes! You glimpse the[SERVER OWNER] as chat wizzes by, and your neighbor bumps into you. "Hey you, come on, we got to get to spawn!" You follow him to the town portal -- and a ton of people are swarming, flying, turning into livestock and waterfowl... all around this guy in a business suit? You might be asking yourself, “Who is andrewkm?”

Earlier this week we scheduled to do an interview with EcoCityCraft’s andrewkm, and we asked you (the members of the community) if you had any questions for the server owner (See more). This is how it went:

Andrewkm, thanks for taking the time to sit down with us. The EcoCityCraft community has gathered some interesting questions they have wanted to ask you!

Q: Waffles, pancakes, or pie?
A: Definitely pancakes, I'm from canada, and well... Maple Syrup... Yum!

Q: Ninjas, samurais, pirates, or vikings?
A: Pirates, not sure why but yeah... pirates.

Q: Do you like Science Fiction television programming, and if so, do you enjoy Stargate?
A: Yes, I love it. Stargate was my all time absolute favourite television series of all time. I've since attempted to watch a few series such as Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica but kind of just stopped after a few episodes. Nothing had me as hooked as Stargate, really wish it never ended.

Q: What do you do outside of EcoCityCraft?
A: I work for an insurance company called State Farm Insurance leading marketing campaigns for agents in the company. As well I did a bit of University studying Criminal Justice Public Policy.

Other than that, my personal life, well I enjoy mainly travelling, seeing the world, and playing poker.

Q: What games/types of games have you played, or do you play besides minecraft?
A: To be honest not much, I mainly just enjoy running the EcoCityCraft community, and running communities in general. My favourite game of all time besides Minecraft has to definitely be Counter Strike Source. I literally grew up playing that game and running servers for it.

Now however the only gaming I really do is my very small amount of time in Minecraft on our server. No wait! Tony Hawk... for, well for any console. I'll challenge anyone in Tony Hawk - still play it quite a bit, and when I do, I get absolutely hooked for hours. Pretty awesome at it too.

Q: How were you first introduced to minecraft, and why did you use the name "andrewkm"?
A: I was walking up the stairs back at my parents house when I still lived there about 3 years ago and decided to go see what my brother (michaelwm) is up to. I saw him playing some block game, breaking dirt/stone and placing it, and the first thing I said was, "dude ... what are you playing, those graphics are horrible" and went off to my room to launch my Counter Strike. (I grew up on FPS games with the constant talk being all about the latest graphics, etc.)

After about an hour I went back to my brother's room to ask him something and saw him still playing that game. So I sat down and said, "Ok, explain this to me... what is this?" - and well... after a good few minutes I was back in my room with my brother, bought the game, tried it, and well... that was that. I was absolutely hooked. Realized graphics don't matter at all because, This. Was. Epic.

When it comes to my name. It's absolutely nothing special. Just my name and my initials.

Q: Why did you decide to create a minecraft server? Did you know how to create a server, or did you ask anyone for help? From the get-go, did you want to make it an economy environment, and what led to choosing that?
A: My brother knew I was into hosting Counter Strike servers so he asked me to figure out a way to run a server so that his friends from the street we lived on can all play together, since everyone was so into Minecraft. That's pretty much the reason I started the server. I had absolutely no clue what I was doing, in fact I still remember googling "How to start a minecraft server".

When it comes to the economy aspect I had no intention of making an economy server whatsoever. My main goal was to allow my brother, his friends and myself to all play together in one world. That's all. After a while we kind of got bored playing with just 4-6 players so I ended up making a thread on minecraftforum.net. Players started joining and eventually I called my brother over to my room and said, what should we call our server? Our first choice literally was EcoCityCraft.

We talked about what the server should be about before hand and mainly wanted cities and money in it since we loved economy games. (Roller coaster tycoon, oh man I loved that) So we put economy and city together, and got EcoCityCraft. xD

Q: Had you ever run or managed game servers before starting EcoCityCraft?
A: Yes I was very much into running Counter Strike servers back in the day. I used to have some really awesome servers for CS. Tons of great plugins, etc. Never really had a website/community out of it however. Word just spread in real life amongst people that played the server I guess.

Q: What kind of computer do you use to play on EcoCityCraft, and can you share the specs?
A: i7-3960X overclocked at 4.5 Ghz. 3 GTX 680s in SLI. 32GB Ram. Asus Rampage IV Extreme Motherboard. I guess thats the main stuff that's really important.

Here's a picture:

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Q: What did you do once ECC was up and running? Do you have a favorite memory you'd like to share?
A: I never really "launched ECC" ... it just sort of started with my brother, his friends, and myself. Later on others started joining after the forum thread was started, and it just slowly grew from there.

Can’t really pick a favourite memory as there are so many... but one of the main things I remember was our old huge brick spawn store. We sold every block, like how we do now; the difference was that it was be closed, and only opened once or twice a day when I was online. It only stayed open for about 15-30 minutes. There were no /sethome's or anything so there was no way a user could get in without the store manually being opened.

Oh! I also remember a user, I believe his name was kraken(...) or something like that, exploiting the store signs making the equivalent of 50,000,000 ECD in today’s economy. I say that because our currency on ECC started out much differently. Basically it was two decimal points to the right. So 1 ECD of current money would equal 100 ECD of our old currency. Instead of a shout costing 1,000 ECD it would cost 100,000 ECD. (We didn't have shouts back then, but just as an example). Eventually the numbers got too big and I wanted to make things a bit more realistic so I moved every balance, worth, etc two decimal points to the left.

Q: EcoCityCraft has been here for over three years, things have probably evolved over time, can you name any stark contrasts to how things are today?
A: The currency change was a major difference. We have also had many other major changes such as spawn store, staff members (we had none before), donations (These didn't exists until a good few months into the server), terrible phpbb forums (we now have xenforo), and much more. I can't really remember off the top of my head but ECC definitely went through a lot of changes during its evolution.

Q: Do you have any screenshots of things you've built on ECC?
A: Sadly no. I am a horrible builder. The only thing I really built was EcoCityCraft's very first spawn. Well... parts of it at least. It was all very... ugly looking lol. Now that I think of it, I haven't really built anything... I'm really bad at it.


UPDATE: Phys found pics!

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Q: What do you enjoy spending time on ECC doing?
A:The #1 thing I enjoy on ECC is making the community grow bigger and bigger. I love running the server, maintaining it, and providing others an awesome gaming environment. Just the entire aspect of running a server is my biggest hobby since the days of running Counter Strike servers.

Q: What were your goals when you started EcoCityCraft? Did you ever imagine it would be so popular?
A: I never even thought of it getting this big. Ever!

It used to run off my personal home computer using our standard internet connection. Later on, more users joined after the forum post I made, and I started getting more and more involved with it.

The more players that joined the more I wanted to make sure everyone was having a good time, etc. Slowly players started calling it their favourite server, started bringing their own friends over from all over the world and slowly things evolved, player base kept getting bigger... eventually needed an actual server to host the game on, and well, EcoCityCraft just happened.

Q: What are you thinking about adding to the "Future Plans" portals section of the spawns? Are you thinking of adding separate game-modes, similar to survival games?
A: I'm currently very much leaning towards an Economy Skyblock project I have planned. First however we have a major website overhaul that needs to be done. Once that is all finished and settled I will begin focusing on the Skyblock project. No promises, but I hope it works out the way I want it to.

Q: Will you consider running an ECC trailer video competition?
A: I have indeed been thinking about this, however I already have someone who wants to try doing this themselves first, and I know their art skills are amazing.

Q: Would you consider bringing back WorldEdit applications, and if so, at what price?
A: No. These will no longer be possible.

Q: Do you have anything else you'd like the community, current, past, and prospective, to know? A personal statement you'd like to touch on?
A: I just want everyone to know how very happy I am that you have all stuck around for so long and enjoyed the work I put into the server. We have all had many ups and downs, some great and some frustrating changes, and yet so many players continue to enjoy the community and stay loyal to it.

The biggest highlight of EcoCityCraft in my opinion is its strong community. We have even had real life relationships and real life marriages that have started all from this community! It just goes to show that EcoCityCraft is much more than just a minecraft gaming server. It's the very best community I have ever had the pleasure of administrating. Thanks everyone! <3

Thanks again for taking the time to sit down with us!

Safe Trading and Business Partners
By Skylexia, Redstone Journalist
Finding a safe and trustworthy person to go into business with, or even just do a trade with, can be a bit of a hassle. However, with all types of scamming on the rise, it is as important as ever for the users of EcoCityCraft to do background checks on the person they’re doing business with.

Ask yourself this; “If this trade goes wrong somehow, would I be upset or would I have lost something of major value?”

If the answer is yes, then your first best course of action is to conduct a background check, and get as much information as possible in order to ensure that the person you’re trading with is trustworthy.

There are a couple major questions you should ask someone you’re planning to trade with:

• Do you trade with people often?
• Do you do this specific type of transaction often?
• Would you mind providing me some names of people you’ve done business with before?

How you interpret the answers to each of these questions is up to you, and is quite dependent on the answers to the other questions. If they trade often but don’t have anyone you could possibly contact to ask about them, there’s an increased risk of something going wrong. If they trade often, but maybe not this specific type of transaction, that doesn’t increase the risk of something going wrong. If you’d like to be more specific, you could ask if they’ve done this specific type of transaction with anyone else.

After you’ve done your little interview, there are a couple things you should check up on the forums.

• Do a forum search of the user’s name in the Ban Appeals/Complaints forum.
  • Don’t be immediately alarmed if anything pops up, make sure you’re looking through and seeing what the posts are for. They could be reporting things or are simply mentioned in another person’s issue.
  • Pay careful mind if they have ban appeals for themselves, and what the reasons for the appeals are. If they’re anything to do with a transaction going wrong, there’s your first major red flag.
  • Also pay careful mind to the number of complaints about them. If they have numerous complaints about transaction related issues, whether valid or not, those increase the risk of your transaction with them going wrong. Pay attention to their willingness to fix the issues at hand, and their attitude about the situation.
• Take a look through the stickies for Loans and Lending and Donation Transaction feedback threads in the “For Sale / Wanted / Feedback / Job Offers” forum, especially if the transaction is a loan or a feature purchase.
  • While these threads aren’t super popular or widely used, they do provide a very formatted system for giving feedback. If someone shows up there, they usually did extremely well or incredibly poorly.
  • Help contribute! If you do either of these transactions with someone, fill out the feedback form. If they were good it helps them build their trust and rep on the server, and if they were bad it gives people a heads up to be wary of that user.
• Take a look through the rest of the forums. Where do they post a lot? How do they post? Do they look to be trying to cause problems, or getting into fights a lot?

It’s important to note that not everything is black and white. You have to use your own best judgement when coming to a decision about a user, and there are many factors you’ll want to consider. Even if you find a little dirt, it doesn’t mean a transaction will go badly; it just means you have to be a little more careful and take extra care when collecting your evidence, or it means that you’ll want to set up a contract instead of just doing an in-game agreement.

Regardless of your decision to trade, the most important thing is that you have all of your information in order. Making an uninformed decision is a scam waiting to happen, and most scammers target people who they know don’t fact check and take a look past their username.

About
Catch up on past editions, our correspondents, and become a journalist by visiting our Information Thread.

 

Update: Pics added