Mineverse Updates - May 24th, 2020. PvP - Fixed an exploit on the PvP servers, took about a week to figure out and fix. Not patched by any public plugin and exists on mostly all 1.8 servers. Was responsible for random disconnects and recently a group of players that would come on and do the exploit to kick everyone off the server, the best thing we had in place was something that auto ip-banned but the exploit would still technically go through. They would then get on a new vpn and account and continue. Our patch seems to work great so far. Lobby - Removed our strict anti-vpn restrictions since the above was fixed. Skyblock - Hopper limit has been increased from 100x to 150x.
Not sure exactly what you're talking about, there's many different packet exploits. Again, I had every reputable public plugin you can find that deals with exploits in general, limting/blocking packets, books, etc and it doesn't stop this exactly. The exploit can only be found on just a couple hacked clients. We were able to figure out which client and we tried it on very large 500+ player single servers (just to see if it was just us), and it works. It basically just kicks off like 70% of players for a few mins, if you get on alts and such you can bring the server to 0. It is only patched on 1.12+ servers or likely servers that have modified their spigot which we had to do, since a plugin couldn't stop it, it had to be patched internally. Honestly won't be surprised if what it is exactly gets out and it wrecks servers for a bit, kinda like how the book exploit was at first. But alright dude.
I personally like the 150 limit for the small island; however, I am not one of the large farms. People like @Halex00 already have found workarounds to the limit. I would, however, say that if it was to increase by 50 for each size up that would be a good compromise. Side Note: Overall as a new person joining the response to something like a hopper limit seems absurd as there was so much hate and anger that it makes it hard to play skyblock even when I myself was not affected. There are ways around it, yes it will mess up your farms until you fix it; but things break when stuff gets updated. Games have new bugs, Minecraft features come and go, things get fixed as people playtest them.
You were literally using regular spigot LOL, imagine. It's extremely easy to patch, don't even act like it isn't. Also you do not need a hacked client to kick the players when abusing this. Maybe if you actually knew how to setup the packets correctly this wouldn't have happened to begin with.
What? You don't even know what you're talking about. "How to setup the packets correctly", what does this even mean? Do you just do 'packets: true' to 'packets: false'? Huh. And no, we're not using regular spigot.