The factors that make it seem most like a work of fiction:
- No screenshots with players visible.
- Play only continues when all 30 people are online at once. Anybody who has tried to make something like this happen will immediately notice how difficult it is for this to occur with any kind of regularity whatsoever, yet the claim is that this was happening for weeks.
>play was only allowed to continue when all players were online at the same time.
I can't get the same 5 people together to continue a game of Civilization V. 30 people is ridiculous.
>“The loss of a resource such as clay was a small warning most players missed,” WordWorks notes. Within a week, trees were in short supply. Wood is essential for tool building in Minecraft, and so tensions began to mount.
Now, I know they're joking. How would anyone even know if all clay was gone (I never even use it)? Trees, by the way, are a renewable resource.
A raiding guild for 40 players is typically composed of no less than 60-70 regular players to deal with precisely this problem. Top guilds will often have enough players to fill three or more raid groups in order to have enough prepared players for the "main raid."
That's a bit of an exaggeration. A lot of guilds can barely fill their raid roster. They manage by strongly pressuring all raiders to show up every day on time, and to give advance notice if they need to be out.
Speaking personally, until very recently my regular raiding guild only had about 26 or so raiders who could show up every night (and another 3 or 4 who could show up for 1 or 2 of the nights). And yet we still managed to clear 8/8H.
And there's a reason they got rid of them. Spending two hours of your life waiting for people to log, relog, get add-ons, read and repeat boss fight documentation just to spend another 6 wiping with ninja loggers wasn't very fun.
Those of us that got heavily into EverQuest "back in the day" recall raids that involved these kinds of numbers (50+) and took place over 8-10 hour periods. It was possible to achieve with sufficient planning, a dedicated guild, and a compulsion overwhelmed the need to sleep, eat, or view the sun.
I'm not proud of those days, but it did help me realize the key to managing any large group of people: make it feel like work, make everyone believe that it is a job and not a leisure activity so that you feel obligated to stay despite a complete lack of anything resembling fun.
So, yeah, I can imagine this actually happening. If you could do it with EverQuest, you can probably manage to achieve it with Minecraft.
The main factor that makes me think this is fiction is the math.
A 350x350 world seems pretty small, but that's over 120,000 blocks per layer, or over 15 million total blocks within the barrier (including empty/air blocks). Using stats from some of my other worlds, I'd expect a world of that size to have about 6 million stone blocks, maybe 750 thousand dirt, and 75,000 grass.
And two players out of 30 supposedly managed to mine/destroy basically all 75,000 grass blocks in the level without others realizing it and fortifying relatively large safe zones? Those who banded together around tiny protected grass patches didn't manage to surround them with more dirt, thereby allowing them to grow?
There was supposedly a lot of strip mining, so where are the giant cobble structures? "Oh, it all fell in the lava" -- how does every single player manage to drop thousands of blocks of cobble in the lava, exactly?
Thinking about other resources leads to similarly absurd conclusions. I'd estimate 1,500+ diamond ore in that area, or about 50 per player. That's enough to make 16-17 diamond picks per player, which is enough to mine about 25,000 blocks. Yet it's claimed diamond was used "only for obsidian" -- so where are the giant obsidian structures that took multiple players multiple diamond picks to create?
Similarly for iron, gravel, and all the other resources -- what did 30 players do with it all in only a couple of months?
Whoever wrote this little piece of fiction simply didn't realize how much stuff there is in a MineCraft world that size. Anybody actually playing in a situation like this, even with a couple of griefers, would find they were able to manage just fine. It doesn't take all that much to build a self-sustaining secret base, and once one is running, it's not that hard to build another and another and another. The amount of resources available in a 350x350 space are way more than 30 players could use, or destroy, in 2 months of playing.
- No screenshots with players visible.
- Play only continues when all 30 people are online at once. Anybody who has tried to make something like this happen will immediately notice how difficult it is for this to occur with any kind of regularity whatsoever, yet the claim is that this was happening for weeks.