Kill Your Admin 2020

Overview
With the server getting to six months old, Daenningas organised an event commemorating this milestone. The event occurred on September 18th, 2020 at 10PM EST. The time of day was chosen to coincide with US and Australia region play hours cross over.

Goals
Daenningas appeared in spawn deop'ed and in survival as a first time player would spawning into the world.

The goal was for Daenningas to escape spawn, while being hunted by all and any players online, and reach the 2k walls.

Many players went to spawn, many died before the event started. However, they set spawn points relatively close to spawn to get back in on the action.

Escaping spawn was not easy at all. Using a vanilla 1.16 client, with random spawns, many times Daenningas was up on the spawn ceiling and could only jump to his death. Other spawns he was on the bedrock floor and could not move fast enough away from spawn to escape detection through tracers.

During the event Daenningas streamed his Minecraft game, meaning he could not event enable F3 debug controls to see his coordinates and make the fastest exit from spawn.

The Contenders
Four players constituting the Moon In Gloom faction coordinated their attacks to win the event.

From the four players AL3CL was the primary to secure as many kills as possible.

Daenningas was able to reach the 2k walls once, and breach the 500 walls maybe 3 - 5 times during the hour the event ran for.

This event also included the first legitimate end crystal fight on the server between players.

The final tally of kills on Daenningas was:

The Victor: AL3CL
Congrats to AL3CL for winning the event. As a reward he received the shulker of loot. Notably containing Daenningas' head. Currently one of the raresty blocks available in the world. Second only to the Dragon Egg, due to it's whereabouts currently unknown.

The loot shulker also contained an Enchanted Sword, by Daenningas. While a legal item, this sword would normally be extremely expensive to enchant.

It is up to the victor to decide when and how to reveal the name and enchantments on this sword. Likely when he makes his first kill with it.



First Time Players
Amusingly as the event wrapped up, but before many players left spawn a couple of players spawned into the server for the first time. This was perhaps to the worst time in the history of the server to log in for the first time. The players were promptly hunted and killed.

Messages in spawn were: "worse time ever to join", "wurst time ever to join" and "impact time ever to join" among others.

TPS During The Event
While a fun engagement for the established players to gather at spawn, the event had a secondary purpose, server stress testing. While I can't claim to have thought about this prior to the event, it became immediately apparent as players started to gather at spawn TPS was extremely low.

While there were calls out from some players to upgrade server hardware, upon looking at the timings, thinking about this and discussing the issues seen at the time it is believed mob spawning by so many players flying with elytra all at the same time was a major cause of the TPS issues. The timings report shows chunk loading and entity spawning was the largest contributor to issues during the event.

It's much more likely that some configuration tweaks to do with mob spawning frequency and mechanics can enhance server performance in these kind of scenarios, as opposed to a hardware upgrade.

Shortly after the event, as players dispersed TPS returned back to 20.