not to mention a lot of people had multiple accounts on. So technically speaking there may only have been 150 players on. But yes, 500 at peak, people actually wanting to come into the server but couldn't because it was full and never dropping below 100 off peak. Those were the days
I used to play when the server used to be full... Oh how i miss those days. I even had a book on classic with all my Minecraft friends and i haven't seen them in years.
It was so hard to pay attention to chat during peak hours--you basically had to tune into a specific conversation or particular players to actually use chat. Sadly, greenbeans were basically completely ignored :/ It was just too hard to read everything. Nowadays you can read literally everything that's said most of the time. Some days when it's busier people say "omg it's so spammy" and all I can think is how it was a hundred times more intense in 2015ish.
