I was getting bored of modding my single player world with Mo Creatures and such, so I really wanted to see what kind of communities were out there on public servers. The first two free survival servers I found had terrible rules and no way to way to integrate into the established groups. I ran for miles before I found any land worth claiming, but their rule systems were so haphazardly instituted that I abandoned them. I had also seen nothing in chat but asinine 1337speak, diarrhea humor, and sanctimonious moderators who were drunk off of their own self instituted power. On a lark, I found MineRealm and decided to check it out. I was instantly dumped into Abyssus as one of the old spawn locations, which took me down an awkward water slide, but I was surrounded by some decently well built structures.
Alright, so the Abyssus town players were incredibly
inhospitable people as well, so I ran off to some free land a good ways out and I just kept mining. I almost gave up on this server and was about to move on when I started building a small series of plots (REALMS), and decided to just do my own thing. I chose to stay ultimately for the land protection mods that Intelli wrote, because I found them to be the most fair and sophisticated but simple that I could find out in the interwebs. Eventually I found some fun people to interact with in Chat, talked with them in voice chats, and was invited to join a few guilds. While I wasn't one of the biggest personalities on the server, a good deal of people knew me to be a clever guy, a fair player, and a decent builder. Plus, I like to troll the trolls and get them to burn out fast so we don't have to deal with them for long!
Yes, there were some issues back then with people fighting
ABOUT PvP fighting, duplication schemes, Lightbulbs flickering out in the distance (he was JUST before my time, or maybe I just didn't notice what was going on at the time), Nether Wars, 70 + players on at a time, 4-6 Admins/Staff on at a time, etc. It was an exciting, albeit dramatic, time to be a MineRealmer.
