PlayerPicked

The client came to us frustrated with the status quo of Minecraft server lists: server owners were constantly pushed to pay high fees just to stay visible, and the "top" servers were often simply the ones with the biggest advertising budget. The vision was a voting site where the ranking is decided by players alone.

We designed and built playerpicked.com around that idea. Positions on the list come purely from genuine community votes and can never be bought, so every server gets an equal chance to rise on quality. Players sign in with Discord, which keeps voting simple for them and much harder to abuse. A fair ranking still has to pay its bills, so promotion lives in a clearly separated Sponsor Spot that servers bid for in an open auction, payments run through Stripe, and every purchase is invoiced automatically through Billingo. An automatic blog system powered by Claude keeps fresh, search-friendly content flowing.

As the client's catalogue grew to eight paid Minecraft plugins, we added docs.playerpicked.com. Every plugin is presented as a card with its banner, price, version and supported platforms, and gets its own sidebar, copyable config examples and a Ctrl+K search across every command, permission and config key. Behind the scenes, a single command drafts a plugin's complete documentation from its source code with Claude, and another publishes it instantly — no rebuild, no redeploy. A browser-based admin panel handles quick edits, menus and media.

To show where those plugins actually run, we built stats.playerpicked.com from the Minecraft server all the way to the browser. Pickly, our own lightweight Java library for Paper and Velocity, sends small, fully anonymous reports every 30 minutes — no IPs, player names or chat, with a one-line opt-out. The web platform turns them into live dashboards, an interactive globe and breakdowns by version and server software, plus a self-updating 800×300 stats card for Spigot, BuiltByBit and GitHub pages. Rate limits, strict validation and short-lived hashed addresses keep it safe from abuse.

All three platforms share a single playerpicked.com account, so the client runs one connected ecosystem — built and maintained by one team that knows every part of it.