Shockbyte Success Story: Powering PirateSoftware's BLOCKGAME

PirateSoftware is one of Twitch's currently most popular Streamers, even breaking some major world records such as Twitch's "Hype Train" record of level 106 over the course of three hours. For those less familiar with the Twitch platform, this required his audience to give him over 50,000 unique subscriptions, and each Twitch subscription costs $5 a pop. Backed by such an incredible community, PirateSoftware continues to do and create equally as amazing things in return for his audience.

What could PirateSoftware do to support his community and give back in such a capacity? In addition to his incredibly entertaining streams where he provides insight into the gaming industry, getting hired, producing game development projects, and much more; PirateSoftware is the developer of the title Heartbound, a story-based multiple-ending title with near endless replayability due to the love and care 'Thor' (PirateSoftware's personal name) puts into it. In addition, Thor and allies are also working on a groundbreaking Minecraft MMO, proudly supported by Shockbyte, with plenty of stories related.

Making a Dream Into A Reality

Thor's small development team has entirely created BLOCKGAME with one specific purpose in mind: To create a fully immersive, playable MMO experience that can rival traditional MMO gameplay, but all within Minecraft, AND all without the use of mods or excessive resource packs. This dream on it's face not only sounds difficult, but with a base Minecraft server sounds near-impossible.

The small development team behind PirateSoftware got to work, making custom plugins and adapting others to create a playable multiplayer server that wouldn't require players to download ANY mods prior to joining and could heavily rely on Vanilla Minecraft as much as possible. As the dream quickly became realized, the world started to take shape, with cities, PVP-safe/PVP-open areas, building, and even professions.

Bringing The Dream To The Masses

PirateSoftware began launching this dream to his massive online audience but there quickly became a caveat for BLOCKGAME's growth: The game was good. Too good. Breaking the server currently allowing it to be multiplayer, level-good. Not only that, but BLOCKGAME is a title that Thor regularly works on during his stream in addition to casual play. The MMO's infrastructure simply couldn't keep up with these new demands and was crashing at each peak of popularity.

As many MMO players may understand, MMOs thrive on their active community and require a consistent player base in order to survive. The usual 25 - 50 players supported on BLOCKGAME's servers weren't nearly enough and stability issues as player count increased was an unacceptable case at such a small number. After lots of internal investigation by both Thor and the IT team at Shockbyte...a fateful day arrived.

HERE WE GO! I don't know what's going to happen...We're gonna find out!

After a convoluted process that required Thor to update BLOCKGAME to Java 18 from Java 17 on the server, the threads were opened and the whitelist was dropped. An audience of thousands stared on at the PirateSoftware stream as BLOCKGAME was barraged with players...25, then 50.

What if we go to 100? What if we go to 100 Chat?

Making an MMO Massively Multiplayer

As the walls were torn down and swarms of Minecraft-hungry players were unleashed into Thor's magical multiplayer creation, every piece fell perfectly into place. No matter the player count, whether it was 45, 50, 95, or 100, the server had zero performance issues and players were loving it. Players began to roam Origin city, looking for ways to engage with the incredible masterpiece of modern online gaming as Thor celebrated this long awaited victory.

YES! It works! Everything works!

It didn't stop there however, PirateSoftware was able to open the server to even 200 players, but after 100, it was no longer about performance issues of the server; Difficulties that the Minecraft MMO would face moving forward would be design transitions, where instead of dungeons being built and optimized for 2-4 players, the world and dungeons would need to be created with dozens, if not more in mind. All in all, the MMO is not only surviving, it is thriving.