Abba Caving is back again!
Time to grab those silk touch pickaxes once again, as Abba Caving has returned for 1.9!



How The Game Works
Abba Caving is a winner-takes-all caving game within Minecraft which requires a silk touch pickaxe to play. Players use their silk touch pickaxes to collect ores which correspond to the following point values:



20-30 minutes is typically a good game length for up to 6 players, provided a large enough cave system. All players must stop mining ores/collecting loot when the time is up. Everyone meets back at a location to tally up points, and the player with the most points at the end wins! All other participants must forfeit all of the ores/treasures they have found during the match to the winner.

PvP is strictly prohibited. In the interest of maintaining a healthy game and for all future games, PvP is not allowed, and is highly discouraged.

Unenchanted iron armor only. Unbreaking/Mending enchantments are acceptable on armor.

No potions or enderpearls. Any other weapons or tools of choice with enchantments of any kind (that are normally obtainable in survival), are allowed. This can include diamond tools/weapons with enchantments.

Strip/branch mining is allowed. Albeit, it is discouraged unless you are trying to find another cave or cave system.

Above all, have fun! Be sure to share your experiences and thoughts here throughout the lifetime of the current server map (: Here are some screenshots of Embarkation Rooms (the starting/ending locations we decorate as a tradition) from past Abba Caving events on the Cemetech 1.8 map:





Fun Facts!

► A total of 14 games were played over the course of the 1.8 map from February 2015 through December 2015.

► The average winner of a 20-minute game (normally having 4 people) walked away with roughly 30 diamond ores, 40 lapis ores, 90 gold ores, 210 redstone ores, 390 iron ore, and as much as 30 emerald ores.

► More stats on the older Abba Caving topic here!

BIG PLAYER TURNOUT!!!
Abba Caving - 03 April 2016


Screenshot courtesy of ComicIDIOT

Today, we had a massive turnout with a record-shattering 11 players, beating the 5 player count on the biggest match from our 1.8 map -- thank you everyone for participating! This was even more players than expected (we could have even had 13 players if a couple more people were available to play), and the reward to the winner needed a whole double chest! In the future, we will look into splitting the total ore count to the 2nd and 3rd place winners, and giving out participation awards... thoughts?

Event Statistics:

1st Place - 756 Points - LennartVH01
2nd Place - 718 Points - Pizzabboy
3rd Place - 717 Points - KermM
4th Place - 593 Points - tifreak8x
5th Place - 575 Points - HactarCE
6th Place - 484 Points - Rivereye
7th Place - 382 Points - ElementalVis - 1 death
8th Place - 360 Points - Racerdude24
9th Place - 332 Points - DrDnar
10th Place - 293 Points - ThreeHunna (Unicorn)
11th Place - 128 Points - ACagliano

Average Score - 485 Points
Median Score - 484 Points



Ores Collected
0000 Ores - Emerald
0053 Ores - Diamond
0130 Ores - Lapis Lazuli
0309 Ores - Gold
0583 Ores - Redstone
1366 Ores - Iron

Wild Cards
0 Items - Diamond Horse Armor
0 Items - Notch Apples

Thank you everyone again, and if you have any suggestions, want to share experiences, comments, etc, feel free to post them here! Videos from KermM, tifreak8x and myself will be up in the near future.

I really can't believe the turn out, it was awesome! But it does mean that for future events, we need a new world with a lot better ore generation, and possibly bigger/better cave generation.

GG guys, and congrats to Lennart for winning all that loot!

That was all in a 500x500 square world. Pretty impressive.



I'd be all for that. It'd encourage participation and keep people around. I'd promise every player something. Maybe 3 Lapis ores. If not from the contest then from an admin. If we can keep this level of players for a few rounds maybe we can create a tournament. Kinda like how there's March Madness for College Basketball, we could have June Madness for Abba Caving. Pit 1v1 or 2v2 until the top two sides against against each other.

I remember discussing some part of this back in a 1.8 topic. For the first round the winner get's 50% - whatever - of the loot mined. The second round, 55%. So on and on until we get to the last two. There the winner will take 80% of the final pool and the loser getting 10%. The rest gets distributed to the participants. Not sure how we could make the final distribution fair though.

That would make things super interesting, for sure!

I missed putting a 'congrats', so congrats to Lennart for winning, and good game!

I honestly am blown away from the turnout; totally did not expect this many people to show up, and I think if anything, this really urges us to keep things much more fresh and more of a good experience for everyone, especially the lower scoring participants who may have had a harder time fighting over ores. Which also is related to what Comic is saying to further build on this discussion:



So, I would like to look at a couple of things with all of this in mind regarding creating a positive feedback loop for keeping out current level of interest in participating in Abba Caving.

Better Caves
I'm not sure what everyone's experience is like, but from what I can tell from at least myself, Kerm, tifreak and rivereye who were all in a Skype call during the match, there wasn't the most impressive caves (despite that the location was supposedly relatively good on caves), and with 11 people participating, that is definitely not preferred in the future. I think the first step we can take is by changing the world, and more specifically, cave generation. We could in theory keep the vanilla ore distribution the same, and what I could highly suggest is using the Terrain Control plugin that I have discussed and showcased with some screenshots here that would make it so that it would be more of a rare thing to actually run out of caves. I explored these caves in a singleplayer world, and it was nothing short of amazing with what one would truly consider to be a mix of spaghetti caves. I did not find myself mining around to go to a new cave, because all caves in a very vast area were connected to each other one way or another. This would not only be perfect for facilitating excellent, healthy Abba Caving matches for a group of as large of a size as we had, but because this is such a unique thing for most people, it would give even more incentive to play Abba Caving with us, and to mine resources from the Abba map. Of course, this could work for groups of larger size, but it'd still be good regardless for things like tournaments. For a tad more insight on cave generation and how Terrain Control would affect vanilla cave generation, see this.

Tournaments
I think this would in the very least make for what feels like a more "fair" match. When I played today in the 11-person game, there was a bit of struggle in the beginning to fight for ores which did stop within the first couple minutes, but it is something that ideally wouldn't have to happen. Part of it is to blame on the lack of cave branches in the beginning when you had like 5 or 6 people going down the same cave, but the other is in part due to the larger group. Larger groups are absolutely fine given bigger cave system (again, nudging using Terrain Control to make much more expansive caves), but it'd also be good to have tournaments to be able to create more controlled and organized matches and allow everyone to feel they had a better chance of winning, rather than having to deal with a crowd of people.

While we would need to fine-tune the numbers, I completely agree with the ideas presented about how loot could be distributed for people who progress further into the tournament. We could also do something like make each "match", a best of 3 if we do stretch the tournament out over the course of a month so that each matchup would be more decisive who should definitely move forward. You know, perhaps someone had a bad run and a bit of bad luck, so they lose a match, but maybe they end up winning the next 2 because they are legitimately a bit more experienced. Regardless, I feel a tournament is definitely called for with some rewards which reward everyone for playing in the least, with bigger rewards of course being for those toward and especially at the top. Tournaments would also further incentivize everyone by the bigger rewards being involved. I mean, given that we had as many people participate in the tournament as there were participating in today's match, you could have a stash of goods as a jackpot which is at least twice as large as what we saw today.

I'm just gunna touch on the tournament thing for right now:



That's not at all how tournaments work. It should be as much luck as it is skill. FIRST Robotics and March Madness are two things that come to mind where there are no best of X. Maybe when we get to the final guys we can play it more like the World Series or World Cup where it's best out of 7 for the ultimate winner. But I truly think this is something we should try and make do in a weekend. Get a couple worlds generated and ready with multiple embarkation rooms each. So we can quickly jump from one tournament to the next. It could be an exciting event. Or, we can drag it out for a few months and say "Okay, it's Lennart vs TheeHunna" and whenever they are both online and ready we do it. It'd be a bit less eventful but we could get a larger overall participation out of the players.

Or, if we wish to drag this on for a while. Have regular competitions. Make it like American Football (and even like Rocket League!) where each person has a W-L record and those with the best record start to move on to the higher rounds. Those first few games could all be winner takes 90%. Loser get's 5% and then 5% goes towards the final pool. Then the "best players" go at it, taking 70% for the winner, 20% for the loser and 10% for the final pool. Then finally the last game where winner takes all or however we do it.

The big issue with the cave was the fact that 11 people trying to start at the same spot got crowded fast and if you were a half second back, you lost out. It kind of forced a few people to start to tunnel just to find a new cave, wasting time. I think the tournament style would be a neat way to do it, but I like the idea of having a kind of regular season where we match people up with each other and let them at it.

The other thought might be to do something NASCAR style, where people are able to enter in and we assign points to each place and keep a running total of the points. After a point, we enter the race for the championship where the top players are in contention, but everyone still participates. The top 3 players (for example) are the only ones eligible for the large prize at the end of the season, but each match is open to everyone. So, something could be done where we do a 60, 20, 10 split for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. Of the remaining 10%, half of that is placed off to the side for the grand prize for winning the season, and the other half as participation. Of course, we would need enough matches to make the grand prize worth it. The grand prize would be winner take all, but you don't have to win the last match to get it, just beat the other two people in the chase.

My perspective from the Abba Caving event!
A bit of neck and neck fighting over ores, and being cornered by a horde of zombies ensues!

This was my chest at the end of the Abba Event with 756 points:




I'm in favor of hosting multiple smaller competitions of 2-4 players so that the caves won't get flooded with people at the start. People could ask to join the pool of people picked from and every game, a few people currently online could be chosen to play a match. Maybe we could even use the elo system used in other sports like chess to determine who competes.



I'm in favor of splitting the pot, since winning this one game has literally just made me the richest person on the server now.

A few people have also talked about putting bets on who will win a tournament. So say 70% of the total bets go to the winners of the bets, 20% goes to the winner and 10% is added to the pot.

I would like to create a plugin that would do these things, such as counting the chests, timing a match, betting and keeping the pot. I've got a Github Repo for those who want to contribute or check our progress.

That's actually a really good idea that never occurred to me; F1 does the same thing. I thought about using the scores from each event but that can get unfair really fast. I think 6 points for first, 5 points for second, etc.

Yeah, it would have to be a point value for each place predefined, not using the scores. I was thinking a little higher though. Start at 15 for first and work down (so this way, everyone gets a point), or a something similar to how the Walleye Club I am in does it, you get 10 points for showing up, and then additional points for placing in the top 30. 1st place is 30 points on their scale.

Lets of course decide on a format first, and then worry about semantics from there (like how many points and the distributions).

My PoV from our recording this first amazing abba caving event

Slightly belated video from my own perspective during Abba Caving.

Rivereye Completely Owns Match
Abba Caving - 10 April 2016



A very intense round of Abba Caving with 7 players took place Sunday afternoon in a great cave system! Scores were higher than anticipated, seeing some improvement among the newer players. Rivereye was the winner of this match with a crushing 938 points! This comes a tad bit behind the all-time record for a 20 minute game held by tifreak8x at 956 points (based on the current scoring system) which was set back in November 2015.

Event Statistics:

1st Place - 938 Points - Rivereye
2nd Place - 779 Points - ElementalVis
3rd Place - 758 Points - Unicorn
4th Place - 736 Points - tifreak8x
5th Place - 664 Points - HactarCE
6th Place - 501 Points - ACagliano
7th Place - 399 Points - DrDnar

Average Score - 682 Points
Median Score - 736 Points



Ores Collected
0026 Ores - Emerald
0100 Ores - Diamond
0101 Ores - Lapis Lazuli
0212 Ores - Gold
0496 Ores - Redstone
0867 Ores - Iron

Wild Cards
0 Items - Diamond Horse Armor
0 Items - Notch Apples

Note: The jackpot was split 80-20 this time to encourage all non-winners to continue to play with us (even though there is the irony of it not being winner takes all in reference to this). This means, the winner took 80% of the ores, while the remaining 20% was distributed evenly among the others. If you have any opinions about how reasonable this seems relative to this specific match, or in general related to this, please do voice them! We do want everyone to feel like they first and foremost had a fun time, and also feel there was reasonable reward for participating (which also outweighs the risks involved with caving).

Thank you everyone for playing - good game! Congrats to Rivereye for winning this one! A video for this event from tifreak8x and/or myself may go up - we'll see.

In other news, a little spoiler for a likely event to happen next weekend - we plan on doing more Abba Caving this coming weekend, likely Saturday, April 16th, but with a twist! We have been playing around with cave generation options in an effort to boost the amount of caves, so expect a post sometime in the middle of this week about it!

I spectated this match and it's really hard to not say anything has Abba players walk past ores or just might kill themselves.

Here we have DrDnar mining past some Emeralds in the distance.


Elemental passing up some emeralds above him; too focused turning lava into obsidian it seems! But he did spot those on the way back!


This one was painful! Rivereye had just mined some iron and underneath it was this emerald.


Acagliano came through behind him and picked up that emerald though!


DrDnar passing up on some points! (Redstone = 2 points each ore)


DrDnar just barely avoided a wall of lava coming at him; he did mine through it but quickly put the block back.

Might have been painful to watch, but it worked out in the end. :p

THIS WEEKEND: SUPER ABBA CAVING
Saturday, April 16th, 2016: 2pm EST

Sharpen up those silk touch pickaxes, and polish that iron armor,
because this weekend will hold caves unlike anything you've seen before!
Caves, caves, caves galore!
Ravines stretching down from the surface to lava level!

I still need to watch Inception. Thanks for the reminder.

This topic is the biggest troll!



But in all seriousness, I love participating and the new policy of giving everyone something might inspire more participation. A few other things I could suggest is maybe letting players bet on the outcome of the outcome of the match with ores and stuff and the bet winners split the betted ore. Not sure how that would work. Another idea is for, in addition to ores, comic to hide chests with "tickets" for valuable stuff, like potions or the flying player item or dragons breath (since the End is off for now) or free denarii.

Ps: I saw in the rules about strip and branch mining. What about blast mining (using TNT)?