Minecraft had a series of "Hardcore" servers and in particular one named "HCFactions". Sadly none really worth playing exists today. It was the most fun I every had playing coop with friends.
The idea was that there's a time limited map (usually 2 months) and players team up as a faction. A faction could own land, paid through in-game money earned by mining ores. Blocks inside your land couldn't be modified by non-factions players, but you could give special permissions if needed. The hardcore part was that every death of any member of your faction would decrease some power value and once that crossed below zero, your land protection was gone and your base was usually grieved instantly. So there was always a thrill of going outside. There were a bunch of server wide events that encouraged going outside and gave you in-game rewards.
What made this server special was the permissions mentioned before in combination of everything minecraft, and especially redstone, made possible. We build all kinds of special contraptions live banking vaults, slot machines, trading machines and a lot more. That was in stark contrast of most other factions that focused mostly on PvP. In later maps be earned enough reputation and were usually not touched by major PvP factions. The combination of hostile environment and the ability to be really creative thanks to minecraft was great. In case anyone read all that, here's the bases we build: https://hcfluffy.de/bases/
I did a couple hardcore PVP servers back in the day, but no Factions servers.
There was one where if you died, you got banned for 48 hours. In another, if you died, you got banned for the rest of the month, which made it suck to die in the first few days of the month.
Despite PVP and griefing being allowed, most noob deaths were from starvation.
Oh. I’m a dummy. Totally forgot to mention the death ban. It had a scaling ban as well. The longer you played the longer you got banned. Capped at 2 days. You could purchase lives to revive though. I too remember those other hardcore servers. Especially the one that banned you till the end of the month. The primary reason we switched to the faction server was the land claiming. Having a place that couldn’t be destroyed was neat. Hiding anything valuable wasn’t really possible thanks to various cheat tools.
Our main objective for all maps was actually to build a somewhat safe place where noobs could get free food on automated machines. You can see the signs on the page I linked :)
The idea was that there's a time limited map (usually 2 months) and players team up as a faction. A faction could own land, paid through in-game money earned by mining ores. Blocks inside your land couldn't be modified by non-factions players, but you could give special permissions if needed. The hardcore part was that every death of any member of your faction would decrease some power value and once that crossed below zero, your land protection was gone and your base was usually grieved instantly. So there was always a thrill of going outside. There were a bunch of server wide events that encouraged going outside and gave you in-game rewards.
What made this server special was the permissions mentioned before in combination of everything minecraft, and especially redstone, made possible. We build all kinds of special contraptions live banking vaults, slot machines, trading machines and a lot more. That was in stark contrast of most other factions that focused mostly on PvP. In later maps be earned enough reputation and were usually not touched by major PvP factions. The combination of hostile environment and the ability to be really creative thanks to minecraft was great. In case anyone read all that, here's the bases we build: https://hcfluffy.de/bases/