Just watched that and came away a bit confused. I'm not a minecraft player, but I understand what it is and have seen videos of people playing. I guess my question is, in the case of this, did someone go around a build that whole world just to mess with players or is it the work of a lot of different people who want to make a difficult world?
I suppose I just don't get what they are going for.
The latter. The admin takes a completely hands-off approach to running the server (I'm not even sure if he plays on it). So the condition of the spawn is purely because many people over the years thought it would be funny to make it as inhospitable as possible.
I guess it's an acquired taste, but there's something fun about trying to survive in such a hostile world. How many game servers have 200+ page comics written about them? http://minecraft2b2t.thecomicseries.com/
We should carve out a small section of land, right at the spawn. One chunk, say. Fill it with useful things like farms, farm animals, resources. Then, guard it 24/7 by using a rotating staff system. See how long we can keep it defended!
It would take a single smart person to undo hours of work. Even if you guard it really well, there's only so much you can do in minecraft.
Someone can approach you from 200m high building a 1m-wide bridge from outside your radar and just drop lava (or active TNT) on you. In minecraft, you need a pretty high defender:griefer ratio to keep things intact.
I guess it grows naturally: the first players build a huge building near spawn, some griefer destroys it all, the next builders build a bit further from spawn, etc.
Also the resources you need for building are further and further away from the spawn. Everybody takes some and decides to build just a little further away.
That video also shows the prime failure in having an anarchy server: It's so easy to cheat. The guy has a radar and can spot any player before they could spot him.
Then there's loads of other plugins that people use to find ore, hidden buildings, track players, speedboost, fly even on servers that disallow it, etc... etc...
I wanted to like Minecraft. The hilariously insecure gameplay is what breaks it. It's not a game of survival, it's a game of trolls who can exploit the most.
I suppose I just don't get what they are going for.