@PlumParrot Changing the "\u00A7"s to '§' worked
Mine crashes halfway through, however, I have an option to debug it. This only happens when I update mods however. If I debug it, it gives me this error: Unhandled exception at 0x76D9A832 (KernelBase.dll) in minecraft.exe: 0xE0000008.
I hope this helps.
However on server restart the MOTD is changed automatically and produces this:
And this is the new value of the MOTD
To clarify, I got the result before this by starting the server with the regular escape character "\u00A7" then changing it while its running and saving.