It was 2012 and Minecraft had already become a popular game. As I was in 7th grade, all my friends were playing Minecraft. I remember how it was back in those days. As soon as 7 pm showed on the clock, we were all at our computers playing that game that still gives me nightmares today. We used to play on different server all the time, however, one that was popular was a mom server based on World of Warcraft. It wasn’t long before everyone got bored of the same adventurous server where you got to explore and kill things. I was also starting to get bored and did not know what to do anymore on Minecraft. I remember one night my internet stopped working, so I decided to try for the first time in my life the single player version of Minecraft. It was boring at the beginning when I was getting started, however I soon realised how challenging playing on vanilla survival mode was. You had to go through dark caves and explore, and did not get that op diamond armour and tool when you start a new world. I found the challenging part of vanilla survival fun and soon got more into it. My nights at 7 pm became single player nights, rather than nights where I would play on that WoW server. That is when one of my best and so far worst idea of my life came through my head: “Hey, what about I start a Minecraft vanilla server!”
It was hard to believe I could run a server by myself, but after watching some tutorials on youtube and downloading a program called Hamachi, my server finally was up. Next day at school I was excited to tell all my friends about my new vanilla server, and that if they wanted to join, they just had to get a software called Hamachi and join my server. At the beginning few people came, but more of my friends at school slowly started to join. It was fun making a small spawn with them for my new friends, and then continuing to build our giant bases on survival. Few weeks passed, and my server was getting some attention from some other grades too. Most things went ok, however some people were complaining that my PC was too laggy, and that Hamachi did not work from time to time. Others said to keep my PC open for longer periods so that they can play on the server when ever they wanted. I was really excited for my server to have grown, however I did not want my bad PC to stop it from growing even more, so I decided to go to a hosting site, and host my Minecraft server from there.
I spent a couple of hours researching and finally found a website that would host a Minecraft server with 50 slots for only 7$ a month. I was pleased with the price, and decided to tell my parents about it and see if they would allow me to spend that amount of money per month for my server. At that time my parents did not understand money and video games. They thought you should only pay of a game once rather than monthly, so the answer was no. I was annoyed and people at my school were getting pretty annoyed at my slow internet connection. I posted a forum on reddit making for help to host a Minecraft server that would not require me to pay any money. I got a reply from someone saying that he just started a hosting website, and is willing to offer me free hosting as his first “client”. There was no trick to what he just said, except one thing. He said my Minecraft server would only have 10 slots. I was pretty happy with that and decided to give it ago, since there were usually between 9 - 12 players playing at the same time on my server. I sent him my server files, and in about 10 minutes, my server was up. The IP he gave me to join the server was 85.4.200.179 The next day I told everyone in my class the IP change and about the man that gave me the server, and everything was good. For the next few days, people were happy with the server being 24/7 and all the lag disappearing. I rarely got any complains from people saying the server was full.
Things started to go bad as I heard some people come to me and tell me that all their stuff went missing. I was pretty disappointed about that and told all my colleagues not to grief anyone. Some days later I got more complains from my friends saying that a man in a white skin was griefing their home. I remembered my server was public and that I did not have access to the server console, as the person hosting my server never gave me access to his hosting site. I asked my friends what was the username of the person griefing their house. They said they did not know the username of that person. They said when they pressed TAB he was not appearing to be on the server, and when they saw him, his name was moving around as if he had used the &k command to hist name. I ha some hard time believing that, but I apologised to them, and said I would try to ban that person if I see him.
I remember going on the server when there were 9 people on. I pressed TAB to see who was on, and it was some on my friends and me. It was not long before one of my friend said “HELP SOMEONE IS GRIEFING ME!!!” I quickly teleport to him to see who was griefing him, and saw that man in a white skin with the moving name. I quickly tried to press TAB but accidentally hit F2 and took a screenshot. The player in the white skin vanished. When I pressed TAB, I noticed that all my friends were still on, and that the max slots available were still 10. I became confused and scared. Was that a hacker?, I was thinking. For the next few days, some of my friends complained to me that the man was still griefing some of their things, so I decided to contact the man I met on Reddit and ask him to White List the server. Even after that event, I heard the man was still coming on the server, so I decided to investigate further.
One night I was playing with my friends, some typed in the chat that the server was lagging too much. For me it went just fine, so I asked them to check their connection. Soon enough all of them were complaining about the lag, and then they all disconnected at the same time. I was left alone on the server. I was wondering why I was not lagging too. Soon enough, I could not move my Minecraft player anymore. I tried the arrow keys and nothing happened. I was stuck, looking in one direction. The player with the white skin appeared in front of me, he was slowly walking towards me. I tried to disconnect from the server, but when I click the “Disconnect” button, it said I did not have permission to do that. My chat opened up. I tried to exit it, but I could not. I could only type. I typed:
Me: “Who are you?”
The player with the white skin did not reply. He just simply walked towards me. I tried to do commands like /stop, but it said I did not have access. I typed again:
Me: “Who are you?”
This time, the player with white skin stopped walking towards me. He was standing still, like he was typing something.
“You will never leave!”
I was scared, I did not know what to do. I tried to leave but I could not. I ended up by holding the power button on my computer. When I reopened it, I went to the hosting site to contact the man I met on reddit, but the site was down. It was like it never existed. I opened Minecraft again and saw that my server was still up, it had 0 player on it. Eventually my friends stopped playing on the server as everything they would get terrorised by that man in white. The server is still up today. If you are courageous enough to join, the IP is still 188.61.177.208:25569 Good Luck…