Fade, I recently checked and mathematically only 50% of the world has been explored. We do have a roofed forest and as for the iced features that you think were missing may be in the unexplored areas that Gruff mentioned.
Joco asked for a border expansion at 25% of the maps exploration. Turns out the biome he was looking for was just barely outside the previous worlds generation boundary.
I have been playing with the idea of a World Reset but I was thinking of it for different reasons. When I first started playing I thought I wanted a group that would never reset. Somewhere we could keep our builds forever. Since then I have noticed that players generally like a world reset over time. There are a lot of benefits to starting with a new world. To name a few everyone has a new shot at being the richest, new world attract lots of new players, there is no bad looks in terrain generation between versions, and we can rebuild spawn. A lot of players fear the other view of a new world being generated. They lose their builds, inventories, rankings, and stats.
Is there a right answer to this question? No. However there are ways to approach a reset and minimize some of these problems. Possibly moving over the contents of every players Ender Chest or copying and pasting players entire builds and chests with World Edit.
About rebuilding spawn. I think thats possible within our current world. Lets just choose a new location that we like (preferably on the PVE side of the PVP line) and then start laying out a new spawn. Once built I can move the spawn location to the new spawn build. Nether system would probably need a new hub built and then tunneling to the new location. This is just an idea for discussion.
On to the subject about two servers. So we can do something like that, here’s the problem. All our “trusted” users go to the new world to build all their cool stuff. Someone new joins the regular public server and sees that no one from the group is on to talk to or get help from because everyone is in the trusted server with the same rules. The world already contains more than 1.5 million surface meters. People have a very easy time going into groups and building. In fact we already have small cliches that use skype to talk even though we have a teamspeak server that keeps user information more anonymous than skype does.
About donations. I am not getting any monetary gain from this group. Trust me when I say I have a lot more outgoing expenses than I am getting from sponsors. That’s okay with me though because I did not start this group to make money (you can tell because I didn’t have any sponsor system for the first 4 months). Any money that does come in from sponsors goes directly to improving the community.
Gruffster is right on about his first and second points into the problem with copying from one world to the new. And honestly I don’t think that copying everyone’s residence (or even everyone active) is a project I could ever accomplish in a timely manner.
I kinda like the thought of having everyone trying to build a new spawn. Who wants to take lead on this and start a thread on the subject?