Poli's player board is now 2 PAGES!!! I didn't notice, silly me! This calls for a self-celebration! I'm going to treat myself with some hot cocoa and a snowball duel :)

Got another sneak peek at the Mecca Dragon and I'm getting more and more excited! Seems some other players shared the feeling too! Looks like /warp Dragon will be getting a whole new design which looks INCREDIBLE! Floating platforms, seemingly flat land for PvP, and an absolutely AMAZING dragon statue which will most definitely become a high-traffic area for facing off against the dragon. So it's answered some of the questions I asked earlier! It's a revamp to the map... will it be a revamp to the dragon too? I believe IC uses the DragonSlayer plugin (Could be entirely wrong) for their dragon fights. That means, they could do multiple dragons, They can give rewards based off of the damage dealt... it doesn't need to be money. Imagine killing a dragon with your faction and walking away with a random OP armor piece. I bet that would make the /warp Dragon even more heavily fought over. They could also change how fast the dragon respawns, heals, etc. They could even make the dragon's attacks give players the glow effect if they really wanted to, which would add a twist to the PvP as players wouldn't be able to hide really. A neat little detail though would be that with the plugin they could make it so the most recent person to kill the dragon is displayed somewhere as an NPC. Could be a neat little opportunity to add a tag of "Be the player w/ the most dragon kills at the end of the map". All of this, of course, assumes they use the DragonSlayer Plugin. If they don't then... maybe this convinces them to switch? Who knows! What I know is I'm getting more and more excited to see the return of the dragon!

Ignore the fact I just posted, I'm excited :D . JH has given us a sneak peak hinting at the idea of /warp dragon returning! This dragon is different though and is called the "Mecca Dragon", which has me excited! Is the name change a hint? Is Mecca meant to refer to the city and maybe they changed the /warp dragon map? Is it meant to reference a high-traffic area? Like Spawn? A Spawn event could be cool! A dragon flying around warzone... it'd be fun! Or maybe it's meant to refer to the center of something! Maybe a second KoTH style event where this OP dragon is repeatedly trying to hit you off? Either way, it has me excited!

There's so much happening in Factions this map that it's hard to keep track! It's exhilarating! I'll try to cover some highlights but I know I'll miss things. There's 10 F-top payout spots for this map, which has incentivized every player I've spoken with to go for F-top. Rogue, decided that they'll try to take all 10 F-top payout spots and then leave the server. Which, granted, would be a cool way to leave, but I find it a little toxic? Moving on from that though, there's a new looting EIGHTEEN sword released in the monthly crate, which lets you make hundreds of thousands from just from the spawners at spawn! Pretty awesome! There's another axe that's been released as well which doesn't drop on death, and the G-set this month is also incredible (It has mending 3!!)! I want to go back to axes though for a moment. Armor damage via McMMO axes has been nerfed (Finally!!)! Now, it relies on a higher sharpness level on axes to do more McMMO durability damage to armor. To counteract this though, now higher protection levels on armor will have more resistance against McMMO armor durability damage, so it evens out pretty well in my opinion. All-in-all, this season is incredible and this post doesn't do it enough justice to show the love that Factions has been getting.

GG Poli on getting your explosive snowballs. Don't take yourself down too much with them. Have a blast!

A minor sneak peak update coming to InsanityCraft Factions where /f shields will now display the time zone you're in, rather than GMT. It'll be cool to see the impacts such a small quality-of-life update does for the server. With it now being in your own time zone, there will be less frustration and even fewer mistakes. More people will likely have shields rather than giving up due to being unwilling to google the time conversions. I'll be watching closely to see how this impacts everything. With how much the shields are being updated, it's only a matter of time before something big goes down... like Rogue. I'll also be curious if I do /f shield to look at someone's faction who's in Australia, will I then have to convert Australian time to EST? Or will the code do it for me? In short, will this change the time for only my own faction, or for if I do /f shield for others, will it also do the conversions for those? Only time will tell, and I'd like to think I'll be patient enough to watch it unfold.

I would love to see some anniversary crates in the coming years. Do some big ones that get the server talking and excited. Like a staff-appreciation crate with Caly's frog hat, Jewik's safety sandals, and things of that nature. Maybe another year, at the end of the month, give a key where all the players open a crate and win a random reclaim from the past few crates. I don't know, I just wish the community interacted more with one another rather than three separate communities of Skyblock, Factions, Survival. You know?

I've been thinking about the "Breeze" mob for a while now and it's gotten me thinking about the mobs in Minecraft and their potential. Take the horse as an example. You can continuously breed to be faster, have more health, and jump higher. Given enough time, you could be a god with horses. Zombies can pick up any gear you're wearing. Imagine dropping a player into a pit of 20 zombies all in deathstalker gear... that'd be fun. Or llamas, who can have chests on them which can hold an extra 15 inventory slots. That's an extra 405 inventory slots with shulker boxes. Probably my favorite mob though? Guardians. They have 30 health, can do 4.5 hearts of ranged damage on hard mode which can't be blocked or dodged, and part of that damage is magic which bypasses armor unless there's protection enchants on it. Then there's their thorns enchant against melee attacks, and the fact they RUN AWAY from you (Up to 15 blocks). Keep in mind that these are aquatic mobs so before dolphins and faster swimming, you were in for a bad time in my opinion. Iron Golems can be healed, don't drown, can attack through 1 block walls, can deal a MAXIMUM of 32 hearts, and a MINIMUM of 11 hearts (On hard mode), plus the fact that two Iron Golems can attack simultaneously.... imagine a full g-set player taking 64 damage at once... Then there's goats which can knockback players up to 9 blocks via ramming them... and if you get the right goats it's only a 15 second cooldown before they do it again (5 seconds if you're really luck). I'm getting ahead of myself. What I'm trying to get at is that Mojang puts a lot of effort into these mobs and there's some features just begging to be utilized. Maybe some day I'll breed a 50 block per second horse that jumps like 15 blocks, or set up a trap using goats... who knows. The possibilities really are endless in Minecraft, you just have to have the imagination and willpower to see it through.

I'd love to see what Factions would look like in the new 1.20.60.20 coming out. Especially with Breezes now. A mob that shoots ranged attacks which deal knockback... I'd love to see what this will do for trap PvP, honestly. Plus Mojang supposedly reduced the delay on the menu screen loading for console players, so that'd be a nice quality of life update to see on IC. Honestly, I think keeping up-to-date with Minecraft's snapshots is great to do. It keeps you informed on all sorts of things, including the fixes that they intend on making. Now I know that apparently eating apples in 1.20 doesn't slow you down when walking like the other foods, which they intend on fixing. And apparently in 1.20.60.20, decorated pots will now support loot tables which will be neat if the staff ever do anything with that for things like events. There's a lot of neat little things coming are way and I'll be interested to see how InsanityCraft handles it.

You know what? I'm proud of the time I've spent playing on IC. Coming up this Christmas, I will have officially been playing InsanityCraft for three years and it's given me time to look back at all the fun memories. Like when I teleported underneath Warzone to where people can't attack me and tossed debuffs at them to annoy people, breaking duels on multiple occasions (Managing to teleport other people into the duel arena, figuring out how to bring duel items out of the arena). But quite frankly, it's the times I did things with others that I remember so fondly. Celebrating a players birthday, where even enemy factions agreed not to kill one another for the sake of having a good time, or the times I fought staff in /duels. Probably my favorite memories of all though is me standing in Warzone with no armor, as countless factions fought with everyone silently agreeing not to kill me. It's been fun, and I can't wait to see what the rests of my time on this server brings.