The History of oldest anarchy server on minecraft 2b2t
2b2t ( 2builders2tools )
2builders2tools (2b2t) is a Minecraft server founded in December 2010. 2b2t is the oldest anarchy server in Minecraft, as well as one of the oldest running Minecraft servers of any variety. Additionally, 2b2t's world is one of the longest-running server maps in the game, which has never been reset since its creation. As the server has virtually no rules or authority, griefing and hacking are common amongst players, with no risk of getting banned.
The server is permanently set to hard difficulty and player versus player combat is enabled throughout. The server has seen over 710,000 players explore its procedurally generated map, increasing its file size to over 12.7 terabytes.[7] 2b2t has been described in news media as the worst Minecraft server due to its playerbase and culture.
History
Founding
In a Rock, Paper, Shotgun article by Brendan Caldwell, 2b2t player James Rustles stated about the server's origin
The 2b2t Minecraft server was founded in December 2010. The founders are anonymous, choosing to remain unknown or known only via usernames; the most prominent founder is commonly referred to as "Hausemaster" or "Hausmaster", who was described as "a quasi-mythical figure both praised and trolled" by Roisin Kiberd from Newsweek. After being asked by Vice journalist Andrew Paul via email in 2015, the server operator stated:
The server was advertised shortly after its creation on online forums such as 4chan, Facepunch Studios, and Reddit, whose users populated the server by the hundreds due to the total freedom it offered. Members from different forums raided each other and their bases on the server. The founders eventually stopped playing Minecraft, though the server remained online due to the large player base that had been formed. Except in fixing game-breaking exploits, the server operator is relatively hands-off in administrating the server. A subreddit was created by a player on March 25, 2012. In June 2013, the file size of 2b2t's world map, which is procedurally generated, was reported to be over 500 gigabytes. In October 2015, storage usage had increased to almost 800 gigabytes, with the server costing US$90 a month to maintain.
New player influx
On June 1, 2016, YouTuber "TheCampingRusher" uploaded a YouTube video of himself playing on 2b2t. This caused a massive influx of new players from the channel's audience, who were at first mostly tourists, as the video gained over two million views in less than four months from its upload. The sudden influx overwhelmed the server and strained the hardware used to host and run it. A loose group of older players came together against these new players.
Although the new players, who called themselves "Rushers", largely outnumbered the older players at the time, the older players had years of experience and resources.[9] Some older players deterred new players by destroying the spawn-in area to make it uninhabitable and extremely challenging to proceed from. Some players built in-game contraptions designed solely to overload the server, with the intent of making it difficult for TheCampingRusher and his fans to play on it. Some placed obscene content around the spawn area and along player-built roads to get TheCampingRusher's YouTube videos taken down due to violations of YouTube's terms of service.
The new players, despite having been discouraged to do so by TheCampingRusher, had destroyed bases and monuments on the server that had stood for years, which is partially what had caused such a response from the player base. When Kiberd from Newsweek asked Hausemaster if he disapproved of the massive influx of new players, he responded by saying that "2b2t is definitely not ruined—in my opinion it's how it should be: absolutely chaotic."
In response to the inundated server and hardware, a queue to enter the server was added. The queue gave earlier 2b2t players priority over newer players, although this feature was removed after a year. The regular queue moves slowly and can contain over a thousand players. Waiting in the queue has been described as an onerous task. Players can pay $20 to access a separate "priority" queue for one month.
Nocom exploit
In 2018, a group of players called Nerds Inc. discovered a bug in 2b2t's server software that allowed players to query far-away terrain, which players cannot normally view. The loading of huge areas of terrain puts a heavy workload on the server, which Nerds Inc. used to repeatedly crash the server. This was done with the intent to incite a vulnerable bug fix into 2b2t's upstream server software (PaperMC), which now only responded to the querying of far-away terrain if it was already loaded, i.e., proximate to a player. The developers inadvertently gave anyone aware of the vulnerability the ability to test if any given area in the game world contained a player, and to read that area if so. Nerds Inc. could now locate all online players and remotely observe the terrain around players in real-time, including valuable storage of in-game items and player-built constructions.
Correlating the coinciding timing of player join/disconnect notices and the loading/unloading of locations let Nerds Inc. tell where specific players stood, not just that a player was there. The exploit became more effective with an adaptive tracking system programmed by a member of Nerds Inc., predicting the paths individual players would take using Monte Carlo localization. The data gathered amassed about 2 terabytes during the 3 years of tracking terrain, paths, and base locations.
One group that shared members with Nerds Inc. was supplied with the locations of numerous bases which they raided, looting 200 million in-game items. They kept the exploit secret, creating fake stories behind the destruction of bases and gaslighting. They named the exploit "Nocom", short for "no comment". In 2021, another group called Infinity Incursion independently created a more primitive version of the Nocom exploit, and, with their less concealed use of the exploit that included tracking YouTuber FitMC on the server, other groups started learning about the exploit by June 2021. On July 15, 2021, server admin Hausemaster implemented changes to 2b2t that patched the exploit. The exploit resulted in many bases and in-game item stashes being raided or destroyed, with a total of 15,000 bases being discovered by Nocom.
Images
Entire 2b2t History Timeline
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