Even miracles take a little time

We have a lot of great stuff to cover, so here it goes–

First, I would like to announce the Guests and others who will be joining me, next week, for their personal tour of NEW HWS! Congrats and thank you to the following:

_Tony__Stark_, air4Christ, _MajorisBR_, brickynevada, RossDuffy and Its_Rolo!

All 6 of you will take a tour of the new park with me next week, starting Monday. All of you will have your own tour. Tours start after 3pm EST that day. It’s going to be a blast!

Now, on to other news – In order for us to update a few things, and give our Cast Members a well deserved few days off to have fun together, our servers will be going offline to Guests. This maintenance time can last up to 3 days, but our goal is to have it done sooner. This is the first time in over 3 years that we have voluntarily gone offline for any period of time. The list of items we will be actively working on are as follows:

We will be changing out a few servers
Many updates to our most popular plugins
Cleaning up and improving server performance
Website server updates
1.9 resource pack updates
and much more

This is big news because it means cleaning up a lot of things that have been gathering for years and improving on things we haven’t had a chance to focus on.

With this downtime will inevitably come the question “WHEN WILL YOU BE BACK UP!?!?!?” and the answer is: when we’re done. our goal is 2-3 days, but if it takes longer, so be it. It’s a needed break. And believe me, with what we have coming, you will be fine with it.

Also, to address the complaints about us asking for donations:

When I started MCMagic I was working a high-paying job in IT. I was able to afford the 5 figures (10s of thousands of dollars) it cost to not only build the server up, but to keep it going for the 1st 3+ years. However, due to my personal health, I was unable to remain at that job. Although I can return at any time, I am still recovering from the complications of heart surgery. That means that, for the past 2 years, MCMagic has been running almost completely off of donations. And those donations have dramatically decreased, as time has gone on. Of course, we’re looking into other options and possible revenue streams, but that takes time. In fact, I already took the initiative to try and remedy this months ago by releasing 4 stores full of merchandise for all of you to purchase. Sadly, to date, none have sold anything. Still, we believe in what we’re doing and how important this is so we keep looking into alternatives.

So, expect us to continue asking for your help, but also expect us to be offering more things like the recent “Personal Tour”, a possible PATREON page, more streams and other ways for us to get revenue. MCMagic is not cheap to run. Our monthly costs are in the thousands, but our donations are below $1000. It is very expensive and time consuming. The less we have in donations the more people like myself and other managers have to do manually. We are hoping for an angel investor or some sort of large influx of cash, but that has never happened in our entire history. Still, dreams can come true, right? We’re not here to make a profit, just to keep it running.

In fact, recent outages were directly related to our lack of income. With more in donations we could handle those concerns, but for now we just have to wait them out. Hopefully, soon, we won’t have that concern any more.

In other great news, the Developers, Imagineers and Managers will be holding more Beam streams, soon, where you can interact and ask them questions. Should be a lot of fun and I know they are looking forward to it.

Oh, and big changes will be coming to our rank system, soon. Stay tuned for that. No, sorry. We are unable to tell you or even hint about it, yet.

Finally, the best news you have been waiting months to hear – as of this weekend MCMagic will be the first and only Theme Park server on version 1.9! We care about all of you and this has been our biggest focus for months. We are so proud to finally be able to bring it to you.

So, lots going on and the majority of it is GOOD NEWS for YOU. See you this weekend, fresh and new and up to date!