What about when 1.9 comes out?
I honestly hate that question. There hasn't even been released a 1.9 snapshot, and yet you use the term "very soon".
Then when everybody is sitting there panicking because their server will be down for a while while their devs are trying to dig themselves out of this whole, we'll be sitting on the top sipping on unimaginably expensive drinks that make us look all fancy
Just because you are the only (or one of the only) pvp networks that have fully updated to 1.8, it doesn't necesarely mean that you are the ones who are doing it right. Other networks do have their reasons for not fully upgrading to 1.8, and the main reason is that their community doesn't want the update. There was a poll done where the staff was asking us, the community, if we want a leaderboard update, and the majority was the one heard. In a previous thread, a staff member said that the majority of players were already using 1.8, so 1.7 was conisdered unnecesarry. If that was a true fact, all the moderators responding to threads like this would be using that argument. Either if it is a little server or a large network, they both deppend on 1 common thing: their communities. There is no block in the world that is more important than a community.
Honestly, it's good MCGamer switched to 1.8; not only did it introduce us to many new features, but it also got us MCGamer's used to the features, so when other servers do the switch, we'll be ready.
As I responed to Ceroria, there is absolutely nothing more important than the community. You say "We don't have many people who still worry about our servers still being on
1.8", but I say that they quit trying (or most of them). At first, people thought that you can make the servers run how the community wants. They realised that this is a wrong fact.
Also, an answer that I see al the time is that the developers can now do a lot more stuff. I am no code expert, but I do know that Java is not influenced by Minecraft at all. A staff member even said that pets cannot be possible without the 1.8 update, eventhough I have seen them on other networks (such as Mineplex) long before 1.8 was even released. This is a list of features that Gamepedia itself wrote:
http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/1.8
Looking through it, the only things I see that can be used for MCSG from that long list is: Spectator game mode, Possibly NBT tags, although I doubt there wasn't a plugin made for that already, blocks, which aren't really even noticed, food, that hasn't been added to the chests yet (looking back, not even new types fish were added to the chests, and those appeared in 1.7, so I highly doubt that new food will appear) and titles. There is absolutely nothing said in there that would suggest, and I quote, there beeing "a number of back-end improvements and fixes that 1.8 introduces as well. However, only our Developers understand the improvements, so I will just say that they exist.". Absolutely nothing said about any of this.
There are some missleading arguments that yoour staff team is bringing. KitMencha said: "1.8 allows us to have the great disguise", "These new pets in the hub, impossible without the update". 1.8 makes absolutely no difference - I have seen pets on older versions and the disguise feature has nothing to do with the update.
The only difference 1.8 is bringing to the developers is that they have to write the code somewhat different. It doesn't add anything new to it, though.