1.8 and the map.

[thiaZ]

If a player gets close to a new chunk for the first time, Minecraft generates it, trees, plants, ores, caves, dungeons etc. If the player leaves that chunk again (or is too far away from it) it won't be removed, Minecraft saves it on the HDD and everytime someone enters that chunk again, it is loaded from the HDD instead of being newly generated. The livemap we got at mineground.com shows chunks from the HDD. The problem is, 1.8 has a new map generator and possibly a lot of new blocks, this blocks won't be added to our world if no new chunk is generated and this means everyone has to go to a very far land and mine their stuff there, making the world even bigger as the new chunks have to be saved as well.

Why don't we let our players decide? We keep the old world and create a second world, generated with the 1.8 chunk generator, players won't miss their buildings and if there are players up to discover this new world they are free to do so, sadly this increases the HDD space as well, but instead of deleting the whole world we could limit it, as you planned to do, don't ask me how .