It has been nearly nine months since we started CivRealms. Many people with good reason have stated that we were doomed to failure. Even some of the most enthusiastic founders who were the first donors and contributors of ideas and content have moved on. In this time our community and it's leadership teams have overcome many challenges and obstacles. To these people I will say we are both grateful and proud that you chose to walk, with us, through the fires of this creative process. We would not be here today with out you. Thank-you.

For some time now I been analyzing and comparing the progress of CivRealms with the success of the previous servers I have founded. In doing so I have also had to take a good look at how a server like Civcraft got their start on ancap minecraft.

In short, this is what I discovered. We have most certainly taken on a mammoth challenged. In many ways we have become true pioneers within the civ-genre of minecraft servers. I will explain what I mean by this.

If you want to have a creative community where people can build civilizations, secure trade and have the freedom to move about promoting and/or gathering people to a particular political or social ideology there are a few things you have to have in place:

• Rules to prevent others from destroying the work of community members and/or rules that remove the incentive to project emotional distress on another party (greifing).

• If you do not have the above rules in place you then need a LARGER number of people who are at least united and like minded enough to uphold basic standards for the enforcement of "player rule". Even then others will seek to destroy the work of the community members and/or cause emotional distress to their continued progress. Again, this is off set by having a larger majority of like minded people to overrule this behavior.

The question then for CivRealms is what do we do in light of this? I want all of you in our community both near and far to see what I see when I look at this community. I want you all to understand the things I think about when I look at reaching the goal of creating emergent player directed civilizations and plugins.

From what I can see we really have about two options:

• We can either continue to push through as pioneers of this genre with the knowledge of the struggle that is before us, putting our differences aside to use the player numbers we currently have to find ways of building a grand civilization that the players of our server can defend and stay active in until we have the numbers to hold up the standards of expanding the civ genre on CivRealms with the future development of additional Civilizations.

• Or we can change the rules of the game and in some ways (not all) push the pause button on some of the rules or lack there of that make it so hard to develop a civilization community on CivRealms.

I have spent a lot of time in thought formulating these ideas and opinions. Please consider them and really think about what I have presented here. Are there other solutions other then the ones I listed above? I do not know, but I am open to hearing you discuss them as a community.

Again, I want to see the community collectively understand the challenges we face. I desire to see all of you all come together as a community to make a single, strong civilization under the present set of rules and ideas that we hold to. In doing so, accomplish what I have yet to see anyone else do when presented with the circumstances we find ourselves in (prior to this endeavor called CivRealms).

You have my support and as much of my time, money and labor that I have been able to personally muster. I hope you understand what I have presented here today. Even more, I so dearly wish that you take action and complete the challenge that I think will launch us into even greater success as a community.

Thank you for supporting CivRealms.

TL;DR - This is something you should read.