Well Geostashing seems to be gaining popularity I've been thinking about new possibilities for server activities. What are some things you want to partake in? Keep it simple, I won't be adding any plugins to accomplish your ideas. Though mention it anyways maybe I'll include those plugins on the next server reset, whenever it'll be.
Please include any incentives you'd like to see as rewards as well.

Some ideas:

• Parkour
  
• PvP Battles
  
  • 1v1, 2v2, Town vs Town...
• Mazes

Secondly, there will be about 30 volumes to the location of the Ultimate Chest. I think offering some of these books as rewards would be neat.

Let me hear you!

=====Summary/TL;DR=====
-- Officially conducted PvP matches are a big yes, and tournaments to allow for greater rewards that are rare, unobtainable, and/or otherwise valuable.
-- Proposal to make an official arena possibly near spawn, preferably one more in tune with nature for both aesthetics, and for strategic PvP via both sword and bow.
-- Possible UHC (Ultra Hardcore) styled games where natural health regeneration is off, to add an interesting factor to gameplay.
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I would love to see more server activities, absolutely. Officially conducted PvP matches seem like the biggest of them I would like to see in my opinion. Abrum and I were just doing similar a couple days ago. It's fun to rope off a good area like a swamp that has very fair battleground, and has some character via a few trees to be able to use bows cleverly in combat as well (just swinging your sword at each other can get quite boring alone, and sometimes random who wins a sword fight). From my experience, non-enchanted (non enhancing; unbreaking and infinity are okay) iron armor and weapon with a bow works pretty well for a standardized match. Iron armor allows someone to be taken out more quickly, so perhaps diamond armor with an iron sword might be better for a match that is a little more interesting and isn't so quick to end. Enchantments could be useful if we want to make one aspect more leveled out, such as using projectile protection to make arrows less deadly, or general protection.

We could theoretically dedicate a good chunk of land near spawn to an official PvP arena that can publicly be used for both official matches on some basis, and unofficial matches on our own time, just for fun. If we do build a PvP arena, I think being able to use both swords and bows, and having an environment that can be used strategically for either weapon, would be cool-- preferably something more natural feeling rather than completely a man made coliseum in my opinion. However, having some sort of viewing area would still be ideal regardless.

On another similar idea, I really enjoy UHC games, and UHC-style matches. UHC (Ultra Hardcore) was a game invented by Mindrack where natural health regeneration is off, and you can only heal by other means such as golden apples, health potions, or regen (reference Mindcrack UHC on youtube). If it were to be conducted as an official game, usually it would involve being on a completely new, random map no one is familiar with, and would only be used for that match. All participants are scattered across the map randomly using a spread command, and everyone starts out with nothing. The point of the game is to put your survival skills to the test, gear up, and be the last man standing by surviving PvE, and winning PvP against others you find on the map.
Otherwise, UHC-style matches, which maybe more fitting and doable, are simply the same PvP matches that would be held, except no one regenerates health during each match, and all damage taken is final. This would prevent unnecessarily long matches of people getting hit, and running away to heal themselves to start fresh again. This can be achieved in vanilla MC using probably a command block, and running naturalhealthregeneration=false in some defined region. The regular command that could be run in chat for reference is "/gamerule naturalHealthRegeneration false".

=====EDIT:=====
Tournaments would be fun to have as an extension to single matches, so that good rewards can be given to tourney winners. Perhaps rare, unobtainable, and otherwise valuable items would be good to have as rewards.
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30 volumes meaning 30 different, unique clues to the location of the chest, or 30 of the same clues to the location?

On another server, we made a hockey rink and played a few games using a bowl as a puck and using the drop key to shoot/pass it. It was pretty fun.

Also, maybe an area to do building competitions? Like set time and/or set number of materials?

I love building as well, and think this is a very cool idea. It would encourage constructive creativity.

I really like this UHC mode and definitely feeling the PvP/Tournament arenas. I'm assuming there should be more than one arena. Various sizes and vertical paths. I'll explore how this can be done on a single server but I might just run the Tournament server on my dedicated. I can build a small/medium dedicated PvP arena on the main server no problem but finding room for a plethora of maps would be difficult. I'll talk with Kerm on the best way to approach this.



This idea was actually suggested but the poster deleted it. At first I was skeptical but this might be something I run on a secondary server? I'm not exactly sure I can enforce Creative on a per-world basis and if I can, how do I secure it so users can't game the system to alter Cemetech PvP. If I have two worlds on a new server, one for Tournament and another for Creative, I wouldn't have to worry too much about users gaming the system.

A seperate creative world would be nice. It would be very helpful for showing designs and prototypes, but maybe wall off the building areas and have a reset button for the testing plots, where unwanted people can't see it, and have seperate plots for people who just want to build and show off their creations. I feel that the mini games would be a bonus to the larger creative world.

My dedicated server is a cheapy. 512MB RAM and 20GBs of space. I only use it to host my website since there's no significant server side processes. It would take a good reason for me to pay an extra 5 bucks a month for 1GB, or even an extra 15 for 2GBs of RAM.

But let's keep churning out ideas, I certainly enjoy hearing what you guys want.

CharlesSprinkle, R1502, AlexStr, jayzonfire, Chauronslilsis, pyrotechnic, notipa and a few other members participated in an impromptu snowball fight! Complete with forts at -461, 80, -49!





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In addition to Geostashing, you could also hide mobs, blocks, and custom spawners. I know that some mobs and blocks don't exist in the world either because the biome doesn't exist, there is a bug preventing them for spawning, or they have all died off. Some examples would be wolves, cats, and villagers. As for blocks, hiding a few jungle trees around the map would provide the server with jungle wood and a possibility for coco bean farms. Custom spawners would also be fun. You could find a random cave, dig out a room, and place a spawner. These would be special finds varying from creeper spawners, blaze spawners, or zombie spawners that have twice the spawn rate.

Sounds like a great idea. I'll go exploring throughout the week and plant trees, create packs of wolves, prides of cats and populate some of the generated towns with villagers. Those should be done by the end of the week but mob spawners will take some tile as I'll explore dungeons and stuff and maybe put a few books in the chests that are in the same room.

wearing my MC server administrator hat, comic, I strongly, strongly caution you to not spawn mobs like wolves and cats. Certain players have shown a complete inability to exercise self-control in how many mobs they bred. Back in the day, I spawned a few wolves to placate our members, and I keenly regret doing so.

I think with the rules we have in place, users will be more strict with their mob breeding but I'll populate the world with the requested trees and think on adding Wolves and Ocelots.

I don't think that's something to hold the entire server back on. I can assure you that the certain player you're referring to has admitted their mistakes, and wish to change their ways.

In light of recent 1.9 discussions and general interest in keeping the server activity rolling along, since people have a tendency to come online when there are others online too (and likewise less people want to come on when there are less online), it would be cool to get some regular activities going, even while it's still the 1.8 map. And of course for the 1.8 map, since it is approaching the end, we should have bigger incentives to come online, such as including more significant unobtainable items, as we only have a limited time to enjoy them. By the same logic, when we start fresh in 1.9, any bigger rewards should be used more sparingly, and users should really have to work for them. 'Regular' activities would possibly imply setting something up not only monthly, but even weekly. I understand that these take some amount of time to setup, so I propose doing the following in the future:

• On a monthly basis, have bigger hunts made by an admin which could possibly take users on some adventure, following clues to eventually get some treasure. And if not hunts, which are very good activities to do, then something in general that might draw more interest. Such rewards could be obtaining an unobtainable item, i.e. an enchanted item one tier higher than the maximum possible enchantment. As an example of what I'd like to see more of, we had some stuff in 2014 here take place, which appeared to have a monthly frequency to it initially, but it quickly slowed down to a stop.
  
• On a smaller time scale like a weekly basis, have smaller hunts which could simply take place around spawn, in which one or multiple chests would be hidden around spawn based on a clue or two, encouraging both users to pop online more frequently, and also explore our spawn and discover new things. Since such a thing would take place more frequently and requires more attention, it can be limited to something that would only take 5-10 minutes to setup, but could take half an hour or more for users to find and figure out. Such rewards could be a handful of diamonds, gold, etc. Perhaps such hunts could have a single harder to find treasure, but other treasures scattered around which are more "Easter egg hunt" style, in that they are spottable, but smaller rewards-- whoever sees it gets it first.
  

Server activity takes a spike upward when such activities happen, and it would encourage a positive feedback loop of healthy server activity that I think is truly important to have if we want to follow through with our vision in where this server should go.

Another idea which I have been really wanting to go forward with, but would need some admin to help administer some of the events, is Abba Caving-- details and screenshots of some of the previous events can be found at that link. Quite a handful of matches have already taken place in the past months, and is still a relatively popular idea. The idea is that in order to make these events take place with relative satisfaction, it all depends on how good the cave system is, which is not always something that is easy to find or know for sure how it will pan out. Good cave systems are a whole mess of caves, ravines and even mineshafts, a good portion of which go down to diamond level, and look like a mess of spaghetti when either viewed from dynmap cave view, or in game using /gamemode 3. Matches are usually 20-30 minutes in length, but ultimately depend on how much time everyone has, and how good/big the cave system is. This is where an admin could help a lot in administering these events-- since a player needs to find the cave normally, it can time to find what looks like a good cave, but even then, the player doesn't truly know how good the system is, other than speculation of if the cave will go down deep and branch out a ton, and it's not like they can explore it, since that would defeat the purpose of everyone being on equal ground. An admin would be able to not only find the cave system much faster, but also see using gamemode 3 underground how good the cave system truly is. While I, and others, can continue to set these activities up on our own, it would certainly be nice to have them get official support.
Even though Abba Caving is its own reward in a sense, since the "winner takes all", meaning all ores found by the other players are forfeited to the winner, it'd also be cool to have the winner also get a 1st place prize, and 2nd and 3rd place, since it would be an official competition if admin-supported.
Related to this, we could also have official tourneys, where if we had let's say 8 participants, everyone pairs up and individually has matches against each other. The 4 winners would go on, pair up and face each other, and the final 2 winners would compete for the grand prize. Since it would be an Abba Caving tourney, this means that the winner of the entire tournament would take the winnings of all games played in the Abba Caving tournament.

On another note, I would like to emphasize that such activities that especially involve rewards, should be posted in the forum under some server activities area at least a day or two in advance, so that it's all fair game for everyone who would want to participate and have an equal chance at winning. Or perhaps make use of mc.cemetech.net and have a dedicated page for stuff like treasure hunts of any kind, in which everyone can visit, see the details of the hunt which will start at a certain place and time, and has any additional clues or details necessary.
It's not quite fun hopping online to find out a big activity is already well in progress, or already done, so I think advance notice is a good thing. Plus, it'll draw even more attention to the activity since people know about it in advance, and we would have more people participating.

I'm all for these. Regarding the hunts, I need to take some time to learn the mechanics behind redstone and set up some interesting puzzles. Perhaps puzzles that require 2-3 users standing on pressure plates to encourage cooperation, flipping levers in the correct order, etc etc. In the latest treasure hunt I did, I used regions to make the final area impervious to construction - placing and breaking blocks - so users had to brave the lava to reach the chest.

In activities where it's required to work as a group the reward would be appropriate for the amount of users it required. 4 players and thus 4 sets of armor or different weapons with different perks. I'd even be open to the idea of creating natural wonders. Either taking over an existing pyramid and rigging it up with puzzles and traps. Thus it wouldn't be a hunt but more in line of an Indiana Jones adventure. Leaving very few clues and letting users figure out the puzzles over a long time; maybe finding clues in other hunts, official PvP battles, etc etc. I think I tried something like that in 1.8 with Geostashing but my lack of motivation hampered the continuation of those events.

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Abba Caving is somehting I'd like to support move of. Do you know of any Abba caving plugins? Or if any exist? I'd love to use the website more, as I've mentioned bringing back stats to the site, and showing interactive Abba Caving results would probably incite some interest. I'll also look for plugins. But I'm kind of bummed the only use for the website is for the map and as a result it's relatively outdated, it still says we run a PvP server.

I'm a fan of the ladder style Abba Caving, but I'm not a fan of the Winner Takes All. Maybe the winner of each tier takes a percentage of the winnings against their rival, with the left over going towards the next winner, and ultimately to the grand winner. That way folks aren't competing for nothing. It could be something like First Victory: 25%, Second Victory: 40%, Third Victory: 60%, Grand Winner: Previous Pool + 100%.

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I'm all for regular activities. We now have PvP, Abba, Hunts and, anything else you can can come up with.

I would be inclined to say you probably should let that go, you took action "back in the day" and now is probably not a time you need to punish players for a player back in the day finding a clever way to beat the system (that also happened to cause issues for the server). I'd be interested in hearing Charles' opinion on that too.

I am not really sure whenther this would fit into the Cemetech server (not regarding the space, regrading the theme ) but personally I love buildings like roller coasters, big water slides and so on. Perhaps it would be possible to create a server "Fun park" with several roller coasters, shops and whatever. It would be a great way to show off creativity, fun to build and a good meeting place where people will hang around often. It might also be a major railway node, where people can change the line and just have a break from a long journey.
Alternatively, if huge roller coasters would be too massive, it might be some sort of park, where fountains, statues, plants and possibly animals are placed in creative ways.

I think this usage of worldguard, etc. to prevent users from doing things like breaking/placing blocks in an effort to force the puzzle to be solved the intended way is great. Be sure to limit your usage of it areawise, so that the player ideally doesn't know until they already know they're in the correct area. i.e. They shouldn't be roaming the surface and randomly find they can't break blocks, thus giving away the location of the treasure or clue.
I advocate learning a little more redstone to help with the hunts, since redstone makes for good puzzles. Of course searching YouTube will get you the bits and pieces of anything; here's a place to possibly start? If it's a little to basic, the second part of the video series might be better since it has logic gates https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzSpuMDtyUU



This is along the lines of what I did in my hunt. I took stuff like already present natural structures, and modified and enhanced them to fit my needs, such as a desert temple, and end stronghold. And my hunt was also intended to take a longer time over a period of at least a few hours, but ultimately spanned days.

For Abba Caving, the only plugin I am aware of is this one. It's outdated as old as MC 1.5, and also the preferred scoring system is not the same as which the plugin uses. Since it's only a plugin that seems to be based on ore collection, I don't think that it matters that it's outdated-- something we would need to test. And we could always modify the plugin code very easily to do something as simple as changing ore point values to something much more realistic and fair. I think this would be something cool to test on a weekend, or in general, Abba Caving would be good to conduct on weekends since more people have a tendency to be online.



I would absolutely visit the site on a regular basis if I knew that there would be more active/dynamic elements to the site such as daily updated or even "live" stats, rather than things that are static, like what type of server we are, and the rules. I think this is a topic for discussion in and of itself, and we should make a new topic for this when the time is right when we'll actively discuss what should go on it and such, especially when we open for 1.9. But meanwhile, I would say, update it for starters, include any server activities information week to week or month to month, repost the player stats, and in the future we can also include things like Abba Caving gaming stats if it pans out.



I really like this idea for tournaments and even for single matches where there are 4 people playing each other if we can get your (or Kerm's support) on helping to setup a cave system, and handing out 1st/2nd/3rd place rewards aside of the actual loot claimed. Especially on tourneys, that is definitely a great idea to have a percentage of loot claimed by the winners of each round.



You seem like you have great ideas for stuff to build on the server, and everyone builds their own thing, so I don't see why you wouldn't fit in. Try joining sometime at mc.cemetech.net, as we are still on the 1.8 map, and you can explore around, see what people have built, and build something while we are still on this map. More relevant to server activities, you can also join us in any activities we have on the server from time to time.

I agree that treasure hunts can be made more interesting with some redstone puzzles. Elementa already made some puzzles in his big treasure hunt, which made it great! It will indeed require some above average knowledge of redstone circuits to create something interesting though.
I also very much like the idea of encouraging teamwork with these puzzles! Afterall, playing together with other players is what makes the game so much more fun.


This sounds very interesting! Maybe we can go on an adventure in the museum world from time to time, exploring remnants of ancient civilizations. Lots of traps, mazes and puzzles (and a decent treasure ofcourse) can make this an interesting event. This would also stimulate people to explore the museum world, since most of the time, it just sits there without anyone visiting.




I've never participated in an abba caving match yet, but to me it feels like "the winner takes all" is indeed a bit harsh. Afterall, everyone spends time on the mining, and loses durability on his / her tools (not to mention the risk of dying in a pool of lava). The tiered system you're suggesting might create a bigger incentive to participate.

Would the PvP be part of the hunt? I think it would be rather cool if, at one point during a hunt, the next clue was only given to the winner(s) of a PvP battle, and those who lost would end up with the clue after a delayed period of time.