Draft:TubNet

TubNet (short for Tubbo Network) is a British-American Minecraft minigame server released in 25 November 2022 founded by Tobias James "Toby" Smith. Its Minecraft servers will be on hiatus on 12 January 2024.

About
TubNet contains three main mini games that can be played with other players:


 * Battle Royale - Players gather resources in a large map with a shrinking border to defeat their opponent. Last one standing wins.
 * Crystal Rush - Players are placed on floating islands apart from each other with a "Nexus Crystal" they have to protect while they destroy their opponents' Nexus Crystals. Destroying a player's Nexus Crystal voids their ability to respawn. Last one standing wins.
 * Light Strike - A team-based search and destroy game, inspired by Counter Strike.

The game lobby also features a collection of mini-games called the "Fun Fair"

Toby's past experiences with Minecraft servers
Toby, was amazed of the ability for anyone to create their own Minecraft server, after being invited by a server hosted by his school friends in 2015. He assumed that the only servers that exist were massive networks like Hypixel or Mineplex. Toby with permission from his parents, spent money hosting his own private server for his friends. However, the server lived shortly due to members losing interest. Toby would post the server IP address online, and was surprised that random people were joining his server. This sparked his idea of making his own Minecraft server.

Toby initially wanted to make the server void of pay-to-win features, as it was common-place for multiple of servers. However, he would decide to join into it after he realized the amount of money those servers were earning. The server was going decent, but would end after a partner of his deleted the server and stole all its current earnings. This event would demotivate Toby's passion of making Minecraft servers for 3 years.

TubNet's origins
After speaking to fellow people in the Minecraft server community, Toby decided to give another chance, especially with his recent success with streaming on Twitch and having the money to fund the server. Toby stated that the server initially was developed to be an RPG-inspired server. However, due to loss of motivation and more talks with fellow people in the community. Toby decided to turn TubNet to a mini game server.

In 2022, TubNet's development team grew to a size of 40 people. Toby announced that an office was set in Florida, United States; and flew the team over to the office, which resulted in a massive amount of progress being made. Toby signed a contract to an unknown hosting company which provided TubNet 152 servers, and a contract for Cloudflare DDoS Protection; for an allotted $50,000 per month for a year. The team set a deadline of 4 months to finish and release the server. TubNet also started working on the promotion and advertising of the server.

2 months from launch, the server's mini games were finished but some infrastructure components were lacking. Following the announced release date of the server during the TwitchCon Amsterdan event in July 2022 which was 26 August, 2022, the pressure from the team was very high, but were confident that the server would be ready for release.

Cyber attack
TubNet would get hit by a massive DDoS attack, due to Cloudflare disabling the server's DDoS protection after receiving 3 strikes. Toby stated that as the attack was happening, he saw multiple of his team walking past his office door. The server apparently peaked at 25,000,000 packets per second stated that the total amount of packets were around the billions. It was apparently so high that the software crashes just from the amount of packets. This forced the servers to be offline for 2.5 days

Launch issues
On 25 August, 2022, a day before the supposed launch, Toby released an announcement that TubNet's release will be delayed to a later date. On 16 November 2022, TubNet announced that the server will be officially releasing in 25 November 2022. Following the launch of the server, issues started to arise, so much so that the team had to completely rebuild the server's back-end infrastructure. This lead to parts of the server being neglected. Many issues with certain core features were reported, such as issues with the mini games' matchmaking system, and the friends list system.

With TubNet missing its initial launch date, the server suffered from a lack of players due to the hype dying down and with Bedrock cross-compatibility not available as promised. The lack of players resulted in multiple excess servers that they were paying for due to their contract with their hosting provider. Cloudflare also prevented TubNet to exit their deal. However, after some discussions, they were able to exit the deal and move to better DDoS protection service, which is unknown at the moment. With brand partnerships, TubNet was able to keep the server online and keep the team working. After issues have been resolved, the server finally started to receive regular updates. With more content and events hosted.

TubNet's cross-compatibility with Bedrock was promised to be released in early 2023, but was delayed until late 2023.

On 8 January 2024, TubNet announced that they will be shutting down their servers on 12 January 2024.