I've made this little diagram below to explain how our setup is now
In the image you can see we have three individual servers at the bottom and then they all connect to Bungeecord in the centre. This is literally how it works, instead of connecting directly to the server you want you instead connect to Bungeecord which acts as a "man in the middle" if you will. This allows us to do neat things like connect all the server chats together with nice colour formatting and allow you to transfer between servers as if they were just worlds on the same server.
The main benefit to having a setup like this over a single server with multiple worlds is performance. Minecraft isn't very good at handling multiple CPU cores so when you stuff a lot of stuff on a single server it tends to bog down. So what we do is run three seperate servers to maximise our performance on each server and then we run Bungeecord to make them all feel tightly integrated.
It's a very simple concept but it has taken me over a week to completely configure everything so that it works perfectly. This is where having a 1:1 copy of our main server on a development server comes in handy because we can now test anything and everything.
As you guys know from my previous posts about 1.7 there was a plugin holding us up, this is a server-side plugin that players don't actually see but it's a way to send and receive information with our servers over the internet in a secure way. It is one of the pieces that make our Admin Control Panel, Shops, Auctions, Cards and Referral system work so well and although we could have updated without this plugin it would have resulted in a poorer experience for you and some of our web features (like Auctions) would need to have been disabled.
I'm very happy to say that Adrian came through here and updated that plugin and I had the latest version running in our development environment last night. This means no features had to be disabled and we are running with everything the way it should be.
One last thing I wanted to mention is the removal of a few plugins, we did this not because they were incompatible but because they were annoying. The PVP Tagging plugin has been removed and so has the flying PVP plugin because it just didn't work correctly.
You may notice some plugins do not work, please feel free to report those in this thread or their own threads. Thanks and enjoy 1.7.2/4!
