Hey y'all, Mr_Some1 here, though you probably know me as Starlight. Today I get to do a little guest appearance on this blog thingy and talk about one of my favorite topics! No, not equality, and not bad fanfictions either (though I do LOVE those). One thing I've asked myself frequently is "Why does BronyTales work? Specifically, why have I stuck around?" It's an interesting question that I and many other players may have had, and today, I'll be looking into solving that!

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One thing you might not know about me, I have a bad habit of joining servers, being super active in them for about 2 weeks, and then moving on to something else. I know I've been a part of countless pony Minecraft servers, or just Minecraft servers in general, but I never found one that I played on extremely consistently and frequently until BronyTales. One of the biggest names in pony Minecraft servers, known as Pony Concordia (you probably have heard about them) I played on from time to time. I remember specifically 3 different weekends where all I did was play on that server. The thing was, those weekends had at LEAST a year in between them. I did something similar with modded mlp servers, completely vanilla ones, and ones like BronyTales with tons of custom plugins. But none of them were more than just a short burst of fun.

So what's kept me around BronyTales so long? I've asked this a couple times, and every time, I think to myself, maybe it's the plugins. The races each have a fun level up system! Maybe that's it! But, I got to max level in unicorn after 5 days of playing, and now, I rarely have any reason to use any spells. Hmm, well maybe it's the stability of the server! Maybe it's because there's rarely lag, and the server almost never goes down! No, not exactly. I don't ever remember joining another server and having a ton of server issues cause me to leave. Not to mention the state of the server last month. Welp, scratch that one off. Maybe it's the player count! Bronytales has a decently large playerbase, but not so big that it's crowded! Well, actually, I've been in other servers with similar size, even servers that were much bigger or smaller, and none of them particularly stand out in my mind. Maybe it's because I'm staff, so I feel obligated. Well, I've been staff on plenty other servers, and I didn't stay on any of them for longer than a month.

Well, that's strange. I've covered just about everything that would seem like it's important for a server. Playerbase, plugins, staff, stability... those are all the things that should make up a good server, right? Wait a second. Isn't there one thing that's more important than all of that? Something that keeps people coming back, regardless of the state of things? Oh yeah, that's right, it's... COMMUNITY! One of the first things I noticed about BronyTales was how active the voice channels were, how active the text channels were, and how active the in game chat was. Every night it seemed, people would have what I called a "Voice Chat Party" where there were like 7 or 8 people in one big call on the server. The first time I joined one of those, I realized how likable the staff, the players, and even the owner were! It didn't really feel like anyone was disconnected, everyone was out and interacting with everyone else! On the actual server itself, it became apparent how friendly the community was when I realized that if you asked for any item, you would get bombarded with 3 double chests full of whatever resource you were looking for, so much so that it's a running joke to this day (looking at you, NoLife), not to mention that if one player runs the hug command, it starts a literal hug WAR. I genuinely believe that even if the Minecraft server went down, a huge portion of the community would continue talking, hanging out, playing games with each other, etc. And the reason for that? Maybe we just found a really great combination of people, who are willing to put themselves out there, or maybe it's just because everyone talks to each other, and it's as simple as that.

If you're a new player, and are kinda just keeping to yourself, well, you can do that I guess. It's something I can tend to do. As a lot of people who spend all of their time on the internet, I've got a lot of social anxiety. But just know that, everyone on the server is here to help everyone else have a great time. Sure this server's got a lot of shiny things, like fun plugins, a well moderated discord server, and a decent sized player count (not to discount those, these people work their flanks off for this server!). But the aspect that this server truly shines in is the community, the interactions between players, and the goofy antics, that lead to laughs, that lead to some friendships that I think will last much longer than could ever be imagined. Thanks for reading y'all, thanks for having me here Data, hope you all have a wonderful week, and make sure you don't let those cutie marks bite! (They'll getcha if you're not careful, I promise)