Middle East

Middle East

Map crop with irl borders

Launch date	14 February 2020
Historical era	2014–present
Map	Stongduke Middle East
Host	Onions
Length	2 weeks
Peak playercount	171
Plugin	Towny
Map download

Iteration chronology
i30	i31	i32

Middle East (i31) was a server hosted by Onions in February 2020. It was the second of his series of three servers in 2019–2020. The theme was the 2010s Middle East. The map crop extended from the Nile river in the west to the east of Iran, and from Turkmenistan in the north to the southern edge of the Arabian peninsula.

Background
Pre-launch
Post-launch
Flying pyramid incident
Backlash against Onions
List of towns and nations
Related articles

Background

Onions had previously been the host of Yugo Wars, or i30, in October 2019. This server ended with mixed success, with some criticism of the vehicle plugin and the low quality of the wars, but also lasting to 2 weeks of activity, the first for an iteration since Cold War almost 3 years prior.

The 2010s Middle East theme was actually decided for the prospective second Onions iteration at the same time as Yugo Wars was decided on, back in August of 2019. With the end of Yugo Wars, development almost immediately began on its successor. This time, more focus was to be put on advertising, to get the server population back up to Filicraft size. Onions also promised to completely rewrite the vehicles plugin, this time with 100% his own code (i30 had used a modified version of someone else's plugin, and had a lot of jank). The map was again made by Stongduke and was larger than the Yugo Wars map, being about 6k by 6k blocks.

Pre-launch

A mass advertising campaign was spearheaded by Onion Wizard, who spammed out multiple threads daily on 4chan and personally (according to the Discord invite tracker) invited more than 100 members to the Discord. Other members were encouraged by invite rewards to make and bump threads. This contributed to increased pre-launch interest in the server, as compared to Yugo Wars.

Some of the largest nations emerging in the pre-launch period were those led by the established metagroups, like stryker settling on Syria, Itsame on Egypt, Haan on Lebanon, Dab on Jordan, and LeiteArts on Israel. Some old groups also returned, like manslay3r on the USA (whose group had not played since Filicraft) and Brogrammer, a player not seen since 12.0, who would claim Kuwait with his friends. However, the largest pre-claimed nation by Discord numbers was actually a nation of complete newfags, Turkey, led by a TrenchByte. Turkey became somewhat controversial as their members were seen as bad newfags: spammers and underage retards.

Post-launch

The server launched on Friday, February 14th: Valentine's Day, but this was of no concern to the incel playerbase. Launch peaked at around 150 players.¹⁾

Most of the towns were settled around the Levant, so fighting was concentrated there. There were two major conflicts that developed: one centered on Israel, the other on Syria.

Arab-Israeli War

Conflict between Israel and the surrounding states was born out of larp. A mid-week conference was held in Lebanon, before the first war weekend, that saw most of the Arab world declare Israel their enemy and pledge troops to fight Israel in the first war window.²⁾ Exceptions were Syria, since their leaders were friends and had a meta-alliance, and some other countries who were planning to fight Syria or fight among themselves.

The “Six-Hour War”, as it was called, ended in astonishing Israeli victory, despite them being vastly outnumbered. The Arabs had made progress in the first part of the war. Lebanon even captured the northern Israeli town of Haifa. However, Lebanon prematurely logged off and so had their progress controversially undone by the admin. Egypt, Jordan, Palestine and others, who were struggling on Tel Aviv's southern and eastern walls, lost morale after this, and they were routed and their claim progress pushed back to near the pre-war border.³⁾

Syrian-Kuwaiti War

Syria, the largest and most powerful nation on the server (having many skilled players like XDA1 and Lemon_Shot in addition to the regulars of Strykergang) were perhaps overconfident, and made enemies of many of their neighbors to the east. Two of these nations were Kurdistan, led by Brass and TheBigKazM, and Iraq, led by Jonathan and Myron_N_Gaines, who were closely allied to each other and had allies in the west. There was also Kuwait and the USA, who were also closely allied to each other, and ISIS, led by the admin Onions.

Faced against this coalition, stryker, in an expert diplomatic play, exploited tensions within the alliance and convinced Kurdistan to change targets to Turkey. With Kurdistan's departure from the fight, Iraq also disengaged from Syria, focusing instead on the Israeli front during the beginning of the war. This left just Kuwait, USA, and ISIS in the fight: not enough to properly siege Palmyra. ISIS capital Ar-Rutbah was instead captured by Syria in the ensuing fighting. Kuwait, angry at the betrayal of their once ally Iraq, launched an invasion of Baghdad, but it was defended successfully, and then the attack was pressed on Kuwait City. Kurdistan, Syria, and the USA joined in the Iraq-Kuwaiti war in turn, but it ended in stalemate as the war window closed.⁴⁾

Sudan War

As Kuwait and USA quit the server after the first war weekend, most of the remaining players, including both Arabs and Israelis, united to beat up some newfag shitters in Sudan. This was the only war of the second weekend and had only about 40 players online at max. The server died afterwards.

Flying pyramid incident

The server was the canvas for one of the greatest moments in /int/craft history. On 20th February 2020, the Great Pyramid of Cairo (centerpiece of the city of Cairo) spontaneously floated into the air and caused so much server lag, TPS dropped to about 3 and everyone in render distance of the Pyramid lagged out.⁵⁾

The cause of this was found to be a config issue with the “BigDoors” plugin, which allowed players to animate blocks to move like a door. The “portculis” door type (blocks moving up and down, basically) had no size limit, so a player called “cupkaits” selected the entire pyramid and turned it into a door, and activating the door made it float. Cupkaits was later revealed to be an alt of Onion Wizard. The pyramid was rebuilt, floating in the sky and with engines.

Backlash against Onions

Already having some haters after Yugo Wars, the Middle East server ended with host Onions in huge controversy. He was loudly criticized for his admin decisions (such as deleting Lebanon), for being biased by taking part in one of the main conflicts, for various server config issues, and for his poor attitude towards the playerbase in general. He responded to this criticism poorly, ostracizing even more players. Some of the loudest critics were stryker and VivianJames.

Nonetheless, Onions would go on to launch one more iteration 3 months later, i32.