I MISS (1.8) MINECRAFT PVP!

2/24/2025

I think my first 'competitive' game was minecraft. I played on multiplayer servers a lot-hypixel.net- and a lot of gamemodes like skywars, bedwars, survival games. I probably started like 2014-2018 (I started on minecraft on the Ipad), stopped playing then got back into it 2019-2021. (The gap between was caused by fortnite. I'm sorry I was a trend follower middle schooler, I just played whatever my friends did).

Minecraft was never really designed for player vs player stuff, so combat stuff was always really strange compared to other games. Btw, 1.8 means the version of minecraft, 1.9 was the version Mojang changed combat to be timing based rather than just spamming your sword. It was contreversial and for at least 5 years people would switch to the 1.8 verison if they wanted to play combat gamemodes. My favorite gamemodes were skywars: You loot chests on islands and kill other players, Bedwars: you protect your “bed” which lets you respawn, if it gets destroyed you can't respawn.

I mainly played the spam-clicking kind of pvp (because it was the most popular and objectively better back then), nowadays the 2 people that still play minecraft pvp probably do the timing, jump and click with shields stuff. The community was huge. Most of the minecraft youtubers I can remember from the top of my head: Technoblade, CaptainSparklez, and new era: Dream, tommyinnit, did some sort of pvp content (usually on hypixel, that server I played so much)


(old recordings i still have)

It probably reached its peak in 2019 and 2020. There was that Minecraft Monday event, then Minecraft Championships where YouTubers would compete. By 2021, minecraft pvp was basically on its deathbed.

I think the community was so big because parents were more ok with kids swinging pixel swords at each other instead of shooting guns (that was at least the case for my parents.) But then by 2021, all the people who used to play had grown up and moved to other things. The gamemodes also got really complicated and sweaty. It was just too hard for a new player to learn because everyone was rapid firing their mouses, mastering all these little techs. Like throwing eggs and snowballs or using fishing rods. I was one of the sweats lol, and I got pretty good.

I used to make minecraft videos… here's one to demonstrate what minecraft pvp looked like. It's from 4 years ago, and the first half of the video is just me whining about a bowspammer. I raged a lot.



Eventually all my favorite gamemodes just became insufferable though: way too many sweats, constant hackers, insane toxicity, and lack of new content, since most YouTubers had left the scene and Minecraft content had moved to DreamSMP (nearly every single member of that group of YouTubers turned out to be a shitty person) or Minecraft survival content. Players moved to hypixel skyblock, which is another whole can of worms that I also played.

Heres some player count data that I could find: In late 2021, skywars had around 6k-8k players, bedwars had 26k players, and the entire Hypixel server had 90k concurrent players.



This is from today, and every considering covid numbers, these drops are pretty crazy! Not to mention every other pvp server has died (hive is no more, cubecraft has 1000 players, lunar.gg, minemen.club are dead)

Goodbye to this era. I don't really want to go back to this because I remember how terrible 2020 and 2021 was. But the games were fun at least.