>I didn't play minecraft online until about 2 years ago
newfaggot..... you missed out :(
you'll never know how good it was.
i would go on a long ass rant, but a part of me feels like i need to put that somewhere and link people to it because of how passionate i am, but basically, back in the day, 2013 - 2016ish, we had many gamemodes that were still popular. gamemodes like factions, skyblock, prison (prison is extremely boring and would need a ton of work just to make it even remotely interesting, but to be honest, prison would go well for a soyjak theme, because of finding gems and stuff, mining coal, gemeralds, ironiggots, etc.), slimefun (its like gregtech if it was fun and not complicated) hive and mineplex minigames, because you're new, you might not have heard of "creative plots" but essentially, they were a gamemode where everyone gets like a plot, which is a 3d canvas and can build whatever they want. people would build rollarcoasters, houses, all kinds of things and even roleplay on those plots. i remember having a private server with about 10 people and we would have crackshot on creative plots, we would make like call of duty maps and have sessions where we would kill eachother with the most op guns ever it was so fun, me and my mates constantly called airstrikes on eachother (crackshot is a gun plugin for minecraft servers)
our private server also had skyblock and slimefun which were amazing, we'd create the most interesting and unique skyblock islands ever.
mineplex and the hive were the fucking goat, so many fun minigames, TERF wars (im not funny), cowboys and indians, dragon escape, castle siege, mineplex was amazing but died due to zoomers growing up and not caring anymore. i had so much fun back then, then 1.9 happened and ruined the games combat and microsoft continued to fuck everything up and add so much fucking bloat to the game and now hypixel is the only playable server for me.
i'm not going to explain all of this to you in full detail, because it would require me to make an autistic essay and post it somewhere and probably provide screenshots, which also sounds fun for me to do. but hell, even back then, there were servers that was just survival with an economy based off of how much ores you mine and there was an ore leaderboard for who could mine the most diamonds or something (legitimately, having a disproportionate amount of diamonds to iron and coal was an easy anti xray measure) and even that was more fun than the servers today.