Abba Caving is a winner-takes-all caving game within Minecraft that was originally made popular by the Mindcrack Minecraft community that I'd like to share with the Cemetech Minecraft community. Perhaps we could get some games going here and there or hold official tournament events on the server if enough people like the idea.



=====GUIDELINES=====
This game requires a silk touch pickaxe to play, in the interest of a more leveled playing field due to the random effects of mining some ores, and especially using fortune-enchanted pickaxes.

As stated, this game is designed to be winner-takes-all, collecting all of the resources the other players have found. This is decided by who earns the highest number of points with each ore valued on the following score system:


20-30 minutes is a relatively good time limit for good cave systems. When time runs out, players must stop collecting points, and all agree to meet up at a location where separate chests can be placed and points be tallied up.

PvP is not allowed out of interest for keeping interest in the game. If PvP were to occur, there would be no interest to play to begin with since everyone would be killed from the start, and no game would ever take place.

Potions/enderpearls are optional. Based on the group of players and if everyone can play on the same grounds, it may or may not be a bad idea to allow them. As PvP is not allowed, you may use any potion to assist your efforts in caving.

Strip/branch mining is allowed. While it is highly encouraged to cave for maximum points, this is allowed due to the fact that caves can run out, and it allows you to find another. Additionally, it is generally not as beneficial toward earning points faster.

Use your judgement to find an ideally unexplored, big cave system that will last a while. As a lot of caves tend to dead-end above the most valued resources that are below y=32, it is also strongly suggested to explore a cave down until your reach near that level and see it branch off into many directions or drop into a large ravine, before starting the game, so you can judge if you think it is a big enough system of caves to allow the game to last.

Have fun! If you have any questions/comments/ideas related to this game, feel free to contribute!

This sounds pretty cool. I'd be interested in exploring this option for the server activities.

There's been some great fun lately in Abba caving matches that have been 3-4 people per match, ranging anywhere from 15-30 minutes long. This last one just happened today, and was rather explosively energetic toward the beginning. There's nothing like just diving straight into a cave, all speedrunning over gold and diamonds, and plowing through possibly tons of mobs. I'd love to see this possibly used as a caving tournament of some sort where a grand prize can be accumulated from all the matches played. i.e. 9 players could have versus matches, all leading up to a final match in which the winner's pot is filled with the findings of all players in all matches. Since admins have the ability to see cave systems, there wouldn't be any risk from starting games off in caves that are duds.

To get an idea of what this has been yielding from decent or good cave systems, I logged some stats from 3 recent matches.



If this was to be setup in some sort of tournament, the winner would take away roughly this amount, multiplied by the number of matches.

Also some screenies of a couple matches I setup... you can tell I enjoy decorating the meeting rooms where the match begins and ends

Definitely sounds fun. Can we do this monthly or every two weeks like the scavenger hunts? I can be an ore magnet on a good day

I would love to have this every so often as an officially administrative-conducted event. Kerm? Comic?
Unlike the unofficial events, it'd be easy to setup a game in a very large cave system so that everyone is on pretty even ground as far as caves to explore and not running out of cave and having to try to strip mine over to another system by luck. Perhaps we could setup another small world, kind of like a mining world, but would serve to facilitate the game. Else, it doesn't seem like a problem to have it on this map.

Also, another game was conducted today!
It was another match between KermM, Tifreak8x, and I. There was some difficulties to begin with since the cave system initially was good for a few minutes, but ran out. I was able to dig over to another system, and allow everyone to continue the game there. I had some rather exciting encounters with a challenging amount of mobs ganged up on me because of a very large room I found that resembles some of the rooms map makers use in adventure maps, namely CTM (Complete The Monument).

Tifreak won this one with a surreal amount of points due to the amount of emeralds, diamonds, lapis, and gold he was able to find.
30 minute match; Tifreak - 833 points, CharlesSprinkle - 565 points, KermM - 563 points on the standard point scale listed above.

Total accumulated jackpot found by all 3 players that Tifreak8x won:
20 diamond ore, 8 emerald ore, 62 lapis ore, 116 gold ore, 187 redstone ore, and 472 iron ore!

And some screenies!

The view into the ravine below from the starting area


A massive cave with 1... 2... 3... 6... probably more than 10 mobs welcoming me in the span of 30 seconds.




Great game, everyone!

Now that we're non-PvP I wouldn't mind exploring fun, engaging activities to have on the regular for 1.9. For the amount of materials yielded, I think bi-weekly may be too often but, as I said, I'm open to trying things out. Starting out every two weeks and adjusting the frequency from there perhaps.

On that note, if anyone has other activity ideas please create a topic about it!

KermM, tifreak8x and I all had another abba caving game today! And as usual, here are some stats and some cool screenies!



View from above the starting area through the skylight


View from inside the starting room, looking up through the skylight


Entrance into the cave


Looking behind into the 'treasure room' (the place where we meet up at the end to deposit our findings and tally scores)


The treasure room


Statue of Kerm, screenshot courtesy of tifreak:
"While finishing up the abba caving event point, I erected a statue of Kerm, staring thoughtfully into a torch"
[source: http://www.cemetech.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11289&start=52]


Any word on hosting official, admin-conducted games anytime soon? It's something I feel at least a few of us would be interested in, especially since finding caves are rolling the dice with how 'good' they are, but an admin with view of cave systems can determine what is a good cave system to use such that there's no chance of running out of cave.

Today's game was okay if I put it in terms of what is the overall quality, non-biased is. Even though I won this one, I found what looked like a massive cave system at the entrance being a big room, falling into a ravine that goes down to gold level, but there wasn't much more beyond that strangely. So, we all had to branch mine elsewhere in different directions to find another cave system. Ideally, the cave system could have been very widespread so that we wouldn't run out of cave and have to try our luck branching out.

On this last Saturday, November 8th, we held another Abba Caving match with the most players we've ever had in one match-- 5! We could have actually had potential for 4 more players, which had interest in playing, but couldn't make it... so we could have had quite a massive match with 9 players!

Here are some of the details of Saturday's event:


NEW - Cumulative Statistics
I've been keeping longer term records of Abba Caving gameplay, screenshotting everyone's chests of loot after the games are over since one of the very first matches played, if not the first. There has been a total of 9 Abba Caving games since January 2015 when it all began, and I've logged all of the game lengths, and points, and even how much of each ore each person for each game got. There is only enough data for 3 players so far: KermM, tifreak8x, and myself. Here's a taste of an average caving game for the 3 of us.



Here's some screenshots from the recent Abba Caving match. As usual, I love setting up an "Abba Caving Room" where we meet to begin our match, and also meet up to finish off our match and decide the winner.

The 5 participants



Abba Caving Loot (from everyone, for the winner)


Bonus Chest (Donated by ComicIDIOT, Monkey0x9, and CharlesSprinkle, for the winner)


The winner, claiming his loot



The Abba Caving Room


Thank you everyone for playing, a thanks to Monkey0x9 and ACagliano for some donations to the bonus chest, and to ComicIDIOT for both the donation to the bonus chest, as well as helping host the Abba Caving event.


Please leave your thoughts/ideas about this event if you have either participated, spectated or played a role in the making of this so that we can make them even more fun and hopefully fair for everyone (given that there is some amount of luck involved).


I would like to leave one question aimed toward the participants:
How long were you finding ores for, before you started to have significant trouble finding some unexplored cave? I am considering trimming down the game length from 30 minutes, to 20 minutes in light of this from both my experience this time, as well as my past experiences. Caving starts to become a lot more dry in the 2nd half of a 30-minute match.

This is why I believe it would be great to have help in getting admin help in finding a massive cave system, so that either matches can be 30 minutes long and be very ore-rich through the entire 30 minutes, or have a 20 minute game with like 9 participants, since a small cave with 9 people will not do any justice.

Today (November 14th, 2015), we had yet another Abba Caving Match between 5 of us: Monkey0x9, ChimneyChris, KermM, CharlesSprinkle (myself), and LennartVH01! Again, a couple of players who show interest couldn't make it, so of course there is still potential to have larger matches! A thanks for comic for the help with setting up the arena despite some troubles, and to KermM as well for helping with fixing those issues.

If you have any thoughts/comments/suggestions/questions, especially if you participated, please post them below!

Today's match was a very good one with 3 closer scores, and an overall 5-player average score that is higher than an average game. Here are today's stats:


Here's the simple Abba Caving Arena we setup

I do apologize for the hiccup. It seems the exit flag for regions is bonkered. Those who were on the border were stuck despite the flag being set to allow, then deleted, then the entire region being deleted. Took a server reset to fix it. I added the exit: deny flag because I didn't want folks to start exploring early, which I think one or two were venturing a few blocks out. So yeah, that was partly my fault and the other part the WorldGuards fault.

As always, you do a really good job setting up the home-base for the Abba Caving.

As much as I love to ~blame comic, that was definitely some weird WorldGuard glitch, and I'm sorry you had to deal with it while everyone was freaking out, comic. We should look into whether that has been reported. This was a fun match, as always, although I found it unusually frustrating. As I said on Skype, I found myself constantly mining right behind someone else, hence my pathetically laughable score. Then when I finally set out on my own, finding only the recourse of straight-line mining since every cave I went to had already been mined in the last few minutes, I did indeed dig into lava and burn to death. I suggest that if it seems like the caves in a particular system meet back up frequently, we consider the possibility of having two starting places. If Marudok doesn't mind me posting the idea he added on Skype, he advocated a team-based type of Abba caving match. I further propose that we could try 2-player teams, a member of each of which starts at each of 2 starting locations. The team with the highest combined score wins and splits the spoils.

He does not mind. I had in mind to have one starting location per team, and have all the team members start at their team's spawn point. Your idea seems more interesting though, as it removes luck out of the equation.
Participants can decide up front whether they want teams to be random, or if they want to choose their own teams.

It sounds much more like a WorldGuard issue, so while comic had good intentions of taking advantage of a very resourceful property to prevent players from starting in advance or wandering beyond the defined starting lines, it just didn't work out. The match that was held the last weekend on November 8th, also had the Abba Caving starting hub worldguarded, and it went perfectly fine, which I assume was because we didn't use the exit flag. That feature (currently a potential bug) sounds very useful though, and I like the idea of preventing players from leaving a defined starting hub before the "GO" is given.

On a related note, I would like to suggest the idea of having either a permanent command block setup at spawn (Kerm's idea), or having an admin encase a(some) command block(s) in bedrock near the Abba event, wherever it takes place. With a few command blocks, we could potentially do things like semi-automate the countdown process to start the game (i.e. "3... 2... 1... GO!"), and also take advantage of the 'scoreboard' mechanics to put a running 20 minute timer for all participants to see at all times during the game. This would make it so no one has to worry about any of the timing of anything after the single press of a button, which would be extremely simple once we just setup the proper commands on the command blocks, which isn't too hard in and of itself. I could be one of the people who could volunteer to construct the command block logic to make such a thing to use during these events which have certainly gained a little more popularity.




I have thought a bit about this, and I do agree that especially on cave systems which don't branch out enough, then there is some level of difficulty in locating caves that move away from other players, to avoid having 3 players all in the same general vicinity of each other, fighting over ores. At one point during the start, I did run into this trouble for a minute or two of fighting over ores with 2 other players present. If the cave system was much more vast and expansive, spreading out with many, many caves over a 200 block radius or something, then I wouldn't see much problem, if any, but the problem is that we can't always get these kind of caves without the help of an admin (thanks comic for helping to search for usable caves via gamemode 3-- sorry you couldn't find one easily!)

I really like the idea of going by teams sometimes, making for perhaps even closer matches in regard to point totals for each team, rather than every man for themselves-- which is still in a sense how you would play regardless. Let's consider trying this next time if we can hopefully have an even number of players... else we can multiply team totals accordingly to make the game "fair" regardless if one team has an extra player or not (i.e. if there were 5 people playing, the team of 3 would use their point total as-is, and the 2-person team would multiply their total by a factor of 3/2 to "equalize" the playing field as if they were a 3-person team).

The idea of multiple starting points, regardless of teams or no teams, may be a good way to help alleviate the issue of having a clash especially at the beginning in trying to fight over ores and feeling like you're always following someone in an especially not-so-large cave system. If we do teams, then I definitely agree that each team should have at least one member per starting point to make it more about skill than luck. Let's say one starting point is less ideal for ores than the other, and each team gets a starting point, the luck would literally be with your opponents, and it would honestly be unfair/unlucky. However, if we did spread out teammates to the different starting points, it would level the playing field for each team, since it becomes equal opportunity for all teams to avail themselves to the same resources and conditions the other teams have.

One additional idea of my own I would like to propose, is that future events have more incentives especially for people who don't win. Let's say in a 20-minute game, the average winner can expect to be earning around 550 points, and either a newer person or less experienced Minecrafter will average 200-300 points, then I can see Abba Caving games more easily discouraging players from playing, if they feel a sense of "I can't possibly win", and hence will not play anymore in the long run. In the interest of promoting more players to partake in our Abba Caving festivities, I would like to offer the idea that if there are no additional admin-supplied rewards, then a small but still appreciable percentage of the total collected resources by all players are split amongst all non-winning participants. Perhaps this percentage might be something like 20%, and maybe this percentage can also vary, depending on how many participants there are, i.e. 2 players = 5%, 3 players = 10%, 4 players = 15%, etc. And if everyone is grouped by teams, then each team would be treated as a player in this player-to-percentage formula.

Let's take for example this just recently played game today (14th of November).
There were a total of 5 players, equating to 4 non-winning participants. Let's assume 20% of the total winnings are equally divided among the 4 participants, while the 80% goes to the winner. In addition, since diamond, emerald, and lapis ore are relatively small in number, none of these are split to the participants, and each participant rather gets 1 diamond ore on top of the split winnings.
If the ore totals were:

030 Diamond Ore
028 Emerald Ore
041 Lapis Lazuli Ore
137 Gold Ore
241 Redstone Ore
570 Iron Ore

Then perhaps 20% of non-diamond/emerald/lapis winnings would be,

027 Gold Ore
048 Redstone Ore
114 Iron Ore

And with 4 non-winning participants, they would each get 1 diamond ore (fixed), 6 gold, 12 redstone, and 28 iron.

The winner's 80% would still amount to a significant portion:
26 diamond ore, 28 emerald, 41 lapis, 113 gold, 193 redstone, and 458 iron.

This is simply an example, and factors could be tweaked, but I think in general, the idea of incentivizing the game more for everyone would be good to keep activity healthy. Thoughts?

Oh and one more little detail. I also realize in the spirit of incentivizing participation, it could possibly be discouraging to an especially newer player that they don't have the means of participating, which would at least demand a silk touch pickaxe-- not quite a thing you can just get and go. With any admin-supported events, I propose that we offer a "silk touch pickaxe rental service" to anyone who cannot get their hands on one. The agreement is that an admin will "lend" the pickaxe for game usage only, and the tool must be discarded/destroyed when the game is finished. Or perhaps if we really want to level the playing field further, we can ask that everyone have the same gear, and provide everything for anyone who needs it, and ultimately standardize the gameplay so that everyone has the same resources. i.e. There could be an "Abba Caving shack" setup with the help of an admin if necessary, where there are sets of unenchanted iron armor, iron swords, silk touch diamond pickaxes, shovels, stacks of torches, and food which are for game usage only and must be returned (if player supplied) or destroyed (if admin supplied) after the game. Just another potential way to develop the game into a more level field. Currently the way we do things as of the previously played game is-- unenchanted iron armor, no potions, weapons/tools/items of choice, and silk touch pickaxe by requirement. It seems pretty fine, but perhaps there are minor details such as if one player has efficiency 5 on their pickaxe, and sharpness 5 on their sword, while the newbie might not have either of them.

It's all good. I think having a CommandBlock would be great! The Home base area can always be the same region name. That way the command block at Spawn or somewhere would just need to be activated allowing people to exit.

I think maybe in 1.9, so Abba Caving can be a regular and fresh experience a new, small, map can be generated for each game. Maybe that's something that's do able with a command block as well? After the world is generated it teleports the presser (aka an admin) into that world so they can find a good cave system. They set up home base and name the region the default name. Teleport interested parties in. Then back at Server spawn the Admin presses the "Commence" button and the game starts.

That way the timer is only present in that world. If that's even doable and any server chat (like the count down, 5 minutes remain, etc) are limited there. Also, after the timer ends the Command Block can set the construct flag for that world to deny, preventing any after-game mining. To be fair, have a cool down so the construct flag is set 30 seconds or so after the game to allow those who are currently extracting ore, unless the rules state you must stop at the end of the timer.

(I apologize if any of that is hard to follow)

I was able to participate in my first abba caving event this evening Even though I did not win (Congratulations again Charles) I had a lot of fun with CharlesSprinkles, tifreak8x, and TheRiverEye.

It was a good time, and my first Abba Caving Event as well. Btw, The_Rivereye is the name of the character in game, but in general, I am just referred to as Rivereye.

Today, we're planning to have another Abba Caving game, and hoping that at least a couple more players will show up! Perhaps it will be sometime around 3PM EST-- subject to change depending when players are on. There will not only be tons of ores for the winner to take away, but also an additional JACKPOT chest, which currently has 1 nether star, and 63 diamonds going to the winner of today's 20-30 minute match (there might even be more things donated by other people). Come on and join us!
Here's a sneak peek at the embarkation room for the Abba Caving match--





As usual, it will probably be a standard game-- rules listed on the first post of this topic, iron armor only, and any tools/weapons of choice. If you are lacking any armor or a silk touch pick for today's game, comicIDIOT has been known to generously allow players to borrow it for the game.

And of course, here's some statistics and screenshots I owe from the last 2 games that were played this week with tifreak8x, SelenaGiana, and rivereye!

OHHHHHHH, SNAP. Today's Abba Caving was quite a close match! Today, we had 5 participants: Monkey0x9, tifreak8x, SelenaGiana, The_Rivereye, and myself. We got relatively lucky with a more than decent cave system, which included a handful of caves, a good amount of abandoned minehshaft, and even some ravines. Here are some of the stats for this Abba Caving match--

22 November 2015 - Abba Caving
Time Limit: 20 Minutes
Standard Point Values

Point Totals:
570 - Monkey0x9
613 - CharlesSprinkle
615 - tifreak8x
420 - SelenaGiana
544 - The_Rivereye


WINNER: tifreak8x
WINNINGS:
049 Diamond Ore
028 Emerald Ore
064 Lapis Lazuli Ore
112 Gold Ore
384 Redstone Ore
584 Iron Ore


Congrats to tifreak8x for winning, and by such a close amount too! That's literally a couple pieces of iron right there between tying the scores.

Here are some screenshots of both the winnings, and our embarkation room!





These 3 pieces of gold could have won the match!!!!! :O

Literately! *points at screenshot* There's 3 iron right there :p

More pictures that show CharlesSprinkle was very close to winning! So close buddy...so close. Just needed this gold---right by the starting line! Great abba caving event today! I really enjoyed this cave especially Can't wait for the next one