So it's June 2011 and I'm out of my part time college semester, and finally decide to see what minecraft multiplayer is like. I'd made a single player world, made a quarry that took multiple days to mine, and I was honestly bored.
So I check out minecraft forums. First thing that looks interesting, some small new server, not much to it. I join, and it's pretty much him and me for the first 3 days. I recall being amazed by him making a pillar of glass into the sky, wondering how he did such an amazing thing. I guess he had world edit. I built an igloo with my /give items. He gave me op a little later. Then I became bored with minecraft and didn't log in for about 3 weeks. The ip never worked again.
So I looked on minecraft forums again. Found another server, and logged in. Holy cow, so much stuff, an ice skating rink, something that looked like a Ferris wheel, a hideout for some group if people with 30 rooms, and who knows what else. I was teleported to the top of a tower and I remember the awe I felt as I saw how grandiose the server was. I got snuck up upon by a creeper and he exploded near the rink. I told the admin online and I just gaped as the hole was repaired before my eyes. I regretfully told them that the server was just too advanced for what I was looking for, and I was leaving to look for something more simple. They said their farewells with a puzzled tone, mentioning that they weren't that complex. So I left and went back to the forum.
And what would I find but a server title with the word Pokemon in it? Now the forum was undergoing maintenance, so everything was read only until the next morning. So I read through the applications, realized it was white listed, and resigned to the fact that I would have to wait until morning to apply and check it out.
Just for shits and giggles, I typed in the numbers for the ip and hit enter. Lo and behold, I log in and see the interior of a pallet town house. Appropriately surprised, I type "hello" to see if anyone is online. I get a response from Nightroado, and X_griffin_X saying that as long as I didn't mess with anything, I could stay. They had world guarded the places that they had finished, so there was literally no threat. So I made my way through viridian forest. And then mt moon, with no problems since it was onPeaceful difficulty during building. So I see the two of them, and one other player on an Ash skin (I was wearing Arcanine at the time) talking about how long the fence was by the Badge mans house. I think that it's cool, and since I remembered reading that someone had donated 30, I decided I wanted the record and donated 32. I then stayed around while Zombiedood dug holes in the dirt and tried to get me to fall into them. I couldn't retaliate because I didn't have access to the area.
The next morning, I think "what the hell, I can't build the city but I can contribute" so I go into the wild, chop down a tree, and grab the saplings and logs. I then start a tree farm outside cerulean city, grabbing saplings and replanting them, getting logs and crafting them into planks, and when there was no more to harvest, I built Nugget Bridge with my planks. If I ran out, my farm had more grown by the time I was ready.
It was only the next day that I learned that donating got you op. from there, it was a whirlwind of X_griffin_X teaching me how to //set things, how to make leaves above the ground for hedges, how to /give myself infinite items, building cinnabar gym, nightroado fighting me, telling me I suck at pvp, zaneakye fighting me and being my only victory in that gym, gladosexe taking too long with mobs-to-money and me finally learning how to install a plugin with MobBounty, trying to edit the Essentials Motd and using an apostrophe which broke the entire config, and broke all of essentials (aka the 1ce age) creepers blowing everything up, chat tags gone, money useless, so much chaos, and then the shiny red tag saying that I was actually part of the group in charge.
Tl;dr: I donated for admin and built nugget bridge.
