Over the course of the first week, the server received 14 new players. Now you can tell from the graph that these people did not stay for too long. But I was impressed to see 14 people join a hardcore server, as I had anticipated only seeing 20 people in the course of a year. However, this could still be the case as the longer the march of time progresses, the more lost the server will become. For example, on minecraftservers.org, the server is on page 886/888. Already, a trend is showing that no new people have joined, and this will most likely continue if the server does not receive more advertising. Which I really have no intention of going out of my way for.
If you want to skip this post and jump right in the server address is:
mc.quartzcandy.com
Discord
If you want to be notified of any player deaths as they happen, or just to chat, go ahead and jump into the Quartz World Discord: https://discord.gg/vshgTCsmg5
QuartzGuard is a Discord bot that I made over the course of two weeks, entirely written in Python. The name is just the first thing I could come up with, Quartz (me) and Guard, as in guarding the Discord channel that I made just to create this bot. The original intention was to automatically check for player deaths, new players, and to announce them into a private Discord server of just me and the bot to notify me. However, I thought it would be so cool if I could have player deaths show up on the website, as well as display any player who joined the server, and thus I wanted to be able to share with anyone who would want to join the server, especially with all the work I put into it.
Why it took so long
This version of the bot is actually a rewrite of the first week. I spent the first week with noble intentions, but then got impatient and committed the computer sin of copying and pasting code, as after a couple of days, I wanted to be finished, as I did not want to open the server until the bot was done. I had achieved getting player deaths and announcing them by myself, but in order to upload to my website, I needed to programmatically create HTML and utilize the REST API built into WordPress. And while I am familiar with REST, HTML is not my strong point. So after about four days of Stack Overflow and copying and pasting, my code no longer worked, and since I did not write it, I had no clue how it worked. Programming is a hobby for me that I have done off and on for the last 6 years. I would consider myself at the intermediate level, and while not the most impressive I’ve done, this has been the biggest program I’ve ever made. Yet, I could not be proud of it, while it was a bigger program, I didn’t write most of it, and I had no idea what it did. So about 6 days in, I deleted everything and started over.
