Salutations Everyone!
I would like to start by saying that my journey with Potterworld has changed my life in more ways than I can remember. I have learned so many lessons, skills, and owe so much to this community we have built together. We officially celebrated our 10 year anniversary and I couldn’t be more proud of how far we have come! Potterworld has changed so much from the time of its inception in comparison to where it is today, and as such will continue to evolve into the future. Today, I would like to share what the next steps are for Potterworld and myself.
For ten years now, the Potterworld Staff Team and myself have given our best effort to treat our server like a live support game, constantly producing and releasing new content at normal cadences and at a rate that would rival any AAA game studio. This all being done by a team of volunteers that passionately gave their precious free time and energy to support this community we have built all these years. Because of this demand and expectation, we built a team very much like a professional game development team. Hiring and training our members to deliver content at regular intervals. I will share that this is not a trivial effort in the slightest, as it requires extensive training, guidance, leadership, and energy to pull off time and time again. Not to mention, our own desires to better our content, better our tech, and constantly create bigger and better releases for our community to enjoy. All of these things got us to where we are today, and it isn’t without a cost.
The cost of all of this constant pressure both from ourselves and our community to release regular content and also make it better than the last has built up over the years in the form of burnout. I will be upfront in saying that the Potterworld leadership team has done admirably over the years coming up with inspired ideas and content to help our internal teams stay motivated and creative, but even despite all that, our teams still get burnt out on the work. So to keep the health of the staff team in mind, we will be changing some things about how we run Potterworld moving forward.
For the rest of 2024, Potterworld will be finishing off its regular holiday events with Pride, Butterbrew Event, Halloween Event, and finally, the Winter Waltz Event. After the new year, Potterworld will be changing how it will be releasing content and changing how we will be supporting the server. I will make it clear that Potterworld is not going anywhere! We will continue to keep this community and server running. We are changing what we are expecting the team to deliver for the server in order to give ourselves time to reinvigorate as a team, get re-inspired, and “find the fun” again. We understand that this might affect the intervals at which content is released on Potterworld, but we have decided it is best to keep our team healthy. As the internal teams redefine how we want to change our support for the server, we will be releasing information closer to the new year on what that all is. We know that change is hard, but as we had to evolve to get to where we are today, we need to continue to evolve to ensure that we are here in the future. We hope that our community will understand our need for these changes and will continue to support us as we evolve our community!
The team aside, my own path for Potterworld will be a little different. I have always thrived off of exploring and developing ideas. It is to this end that I am going to be starting a new project! It will still be a future Minecraft server, but taking all the learnings and experience I have gained from Potterworld and infusing that into this new world and team. At this time, I won’t be sharing the details on this project, but my own support for Potterworld will be passed onto the very capable Potterworld Leadership as I venture off to these new lands. To be clear, I will still be around, but I will be diminishing my presence on Potterworld to make space for this new project. My decision to do so revolves around many factors, changes in my own personal life, my capacity for the regular cadence of support, and my own interests and passions. I want to thank the Potterworld community for allowing me to be a host all of these years and for supporting my ideas and putting up with my decisions. I couldn’t have asked for a better family to be a part of! Thank you all for these last ten years!
Please look forward to our future announcements about what support for Potterworld will look like post 2024 as we develop those plans and continue work on our server upgrade! Thank you all!
Headmaster Droobledore
