After much endeavoring and much tricky conniving with command blocks and redstone circuits, the likes of which would make your favorite Youtube Minecraft redstoner shutter with disgust, I am unveiling Mob Mayhem, an aptly named minigame where you get to battle against progressively intensifying waves of mobs to win points/tokens and earn cool prizes.

Technical

This game is vastly automated. Everything from who you are playing with to friendly fire, wave progression, gear/armor upgrades, and end-of-game conditions is all automated. There is no need to worry about anything besides reading the directions and following them. I hereby disclaim any and all responsibility for loss of gear that results from people's failure to read the users manual.

Warnings and Guidelines
1) There are three control signs barring access to the arena. The one on the left teleports you inside. The two next to it enable or disable a flag preventing the system from modifying your armor. If you are going in with your own armor, make sure you click the sign saying "Want to play for fun?" If you do not, the system will overwrite your existing armor.

2) If you are playing competitive mode, be sure to click on the sign that says "Play Competitively?". If you do not do this, the system will not replace your armor, and thus you will have to fight out the match with leather armor.

3) If the gate to enter the prep zone is closed, the arena is in use. Please exit the world and return later. If you remain too close to the arena when players are on their final wave, your inventory may be cleared if it detects you as part of the playing team.

4) Please be considerate of other players online. If you see someone waiting to try the event, please don't continue to do multiple rounds. Let someone else in. Also, if there are other players online doing other things and the server performance goes down, give the event a rest and let other people enjoy their time online. I took a number of steps to minimize any lag impact from running my event to the server, but bear in mind that in a low TPS environment, every little bit counts.

5) The event's underlying programming consists of multiple things designed to minimize the lag impact of running it.
[] to minimize lag spikes that occur when the mobs are teleported at once into the arena, the teleportation is done in groups no larger than 10 every tick. Say the pulse runs for 4 redstone ticks with 5 players (4 RS ticks = 8 game ticks). The system would spawn 1 mob per player per tick, resulting in 50 mobs... 5 per tick. Rather than teleporting 40 at once, each tick 4 are teleported. The benefit of this change is yet to be tested.
[] should something within the event bug out and lock up the system, a condition that would cause runaway mob spawning, the event is programmed to activate a failsafe, shut itself down, kill off the mobs, and /tellraw the error to everyone playing.


There are two possible modes of play:
1) Competitive mode, which requires that you begin with the provided leather armor and stone weapons. Upgrades to your armor and weapons are given to you as you progress, as are other forms of helpful items. You only earn points for this mode.

2) Casual mode. Take whatever gear you want in with you. Wreak havoc. Feel like a champion. Get no points.


In each mode of play, there are 3 game formats:
1) Team ACag-Hosted Matches: These are matches that are announced by me (NefariousArcher/ACagliano), and hosted by me, in coordination with whoever else joins. I am running these 2-3 times per week at pre-scheduled times, with addition randomly announced matches.

2) Solo, Self-Hosted Matches: These are matches that you run by yourself. You are the only competitor in this format. You are trying to survive on your own against the waves.
[] to have these rounds scored for the tournament, you must submit to me via discord a screenshot of the kills and deaths scoreboard for your round. You telling me does not count. You must submit at least 7 solo round to qualify for the tournament that month. If you send me more than 7 (max 20 per month), I will only use your top 7.

3) Team, Self-Hosted Matches: These are like ACag-Hosted matches, except you are running them on your own with your own team. These formats are not scored at all.


[Scoring Brackets]
If your KD ratio is: between 0 and 25, you receive 2 tokens
If your KD ratio is: between 26 and 50, you receive 4 tokens
If your KD ratio is: between 51 and 100, you receive 6 tokens
If your KD ratio is: 100 or above, you receive 8 tokens
If you score the highest out of the group you played with (team) or the highest for the month (solo), you win an additional 2 points.
* this is subject to change
* prize costs may drop depending on how long players take to win mobs.
I'm shocked that there are no other posts here; I think that our Minecraft userbase is increasingly unaware of the forum and the fact that it's good for discussion you want to continue to be able to read in the future, after your Discord scrollback is lost to the ages. Razz

I was quite fond of the original Mob Mayhem design unveiled about a month ago and iterated over the following weeks. The very first version was a bit frenetic, difficult, and laggy, but it was gradually improved to have a clear difficulty curve, a nice mechanism for providing supplies, a nice big area for building a small or large protective structure, and a good length. I was very pleased with it both as a solo and multiplayer feature on the server when our members need a break from intelligent survival building and mining for a while, especially with the opportunity to earn rare/valuable/uncraftable gear or tools.

I played the brand-new version yesterday, and an unfortunate tl;dr: I found it to be almost strictly worse than the original version. I'll try to present a compliment sandwich, since that often makes negative feedback more palatable:
  • The good: I love the staff member bosses. Using the staff as mobs, giving them personality-related gear and attributes, and having them drop player heads is awesome, and makes the game feel Cemetech-specific and decidedly more fun. And the fact that you only get a subset of all possible member bosses each run gives the game excellent replayability.
  • The not-so-good: It's way too long now. Less than halfway through, I was wondering if it was going to be over soon, and found myself not enjoying the length of it at all. In fact...
  • The bad: I personally found it not to be fun any more. The waves no longer feel like they're in any sort of cohesive order at all, more thrown together in a random order. I also felt it had progressed from originally too difficult to just-right (if you play carefully, you can minimize your deaths and maximize your kills) to just pure chaotic nonsense (you can't avoid dying, and whether you or someone else gets kills is totally random - especially the darkness waves). Some waves felt more like a celebration of admittedly cool mobs than anything designed to actually be integral to the match from a player's perspective. Many waves seemed to have random creepers thrown in to increase the probability of player death and not add anything particular to the fun of the gameplay.
  • The good: creativity of mobs. There were some excellent new mobs added; I particularly liked the shulker-headed mobs. I enjoyed discovering each of the interesting combinations of attributes and mobs, and hope to see more of that.


I know it's a work-in-progress, and I know that a massive amount of ACagliano's effort has gone into creating something unique and special to the Cemetech Minecraft server. I greatly appreciate the work, and I hope the above can be some constructive criticism to continue to make it even better.
I do agree that we probably should be using the forum more. It would be neat if posts on this subforum got forwarded to #cemetech-mc or to a special channel in the Minecraft discord, if that's possible.

The reason that the rounds seem random is probably that they are now randomly generated. I agree that the planned-out difficulty curve was more fun. I think that one of the reasons for that is that your armor steadily improves over time so that the same mob is much more difficult in round 1 than in round 10. In my opinion, the player's equipment should stay the same, that way only one variable needs to be considered when setting the difficulty curve. I suggest a system where each game would be ten rounds long, and each round should be randomly selected from 4-5 different options specific to that round number. That way, it's not possible to get the same round 2 as round 3, and the game still has high replay value since you never get the same rounds each time. It also allows you to fine-tune the difficulty of each round, so that the game doesn't bounce back and forth between easy and hard rounds.

Kerm, I'm glad you enjoyed the Blockhead Zombies; I helped make those. I also agree that the staff member bosses were really fun, along with the rest of the new mobs.
KermMartian wrote:
  • The good: I love the staff member bosses. Using the staff as mobs, giving them personality-related gear and attributes, and having them drop player heads is awesome, and makes the game feel Cemetech-specific and decidedly more fun. And the fact that you only get a subset of all possible member bosses each run gives the game excellent replayability.
  • The not-so-good: It's way too long now. Less than halfway through, I was wondering if it was going to be over soon, and found myself not enjoying the length of it at all. In fact...
  • The bad: I personally found it not to be fun any more. The waves no longer feel like they're in any sort of cohesive order at all, more thrown together in a random order. I also felt it had progressed from originally too difficult to just-right (if you play carefully, you can minimize your deaths and maximize your kills) to just pure chaotic nonsense (you can't avoid dying, and whether you or someone else gets kills is totally random - especially the darkness waves). Some waves felt more like a celebration of admittedly cool mobs than anything designed to actually be integral to the match from a player's perspective. Many waves seemed to have random creepers thrown in to increase the probability of player death and not add anything particular to the fun of the gameplay.
  • The good: creativity of mobs. There were some excellent new mobs added; I particularly liked the shulker-headed mobs. I enjoyed discovering each of the interesting combinations of attributes and mobs, and hope to see more of that.


1) The staff member bosses -- those were set up as a troll, mostly, and a homage to the server staff, and kind of as a tongue in cheek joke.. the players fighting the staff.
2) The length: And to think i wanted to do more waves :p But seriously, it is a bit on the long side now; However cutting back on length is fairly trivial. Overall, the new setup is only 18 waves, versus 15 for the older. I could reduce the total combination to 15 this time as well.
3) Yesterday was the first time testing the difficulty curve for such a large amount of players. It's not half as bad when flying solo, but when in a large group, the mobs can be quite hard hitting. To combat that, I've taken two steps. Firstly, the starting gear has been upgraded to iron. Secondly, much of the chaos was due to this: the trolly waves were meant to be mostly interjected rarely, but since one randomizer was essentially a clone of the other, that's double the probability of getting a mob type. The second randomizer string consists of more modest mobs, and while creepers and things like that are still in there, they're more leveled out with other mobs. Should I need, I can further reduce the difficulty by applying Weakness to earlier ones, or by removing some of the more insta-kill types. As you say later, it is indeed a work in progress and difficulty scaling is kind of an on-the-fly thing.
4) Some of those mobs were the most annoying to pull off. Especially shulkers and other things that like to teleport. In fact, they were affixed to zombies for the sole intent of preventing them from teleporting out of the arena :p

KermMartian wrote:

I know it's a work-in-progress, and I know that a massive amount of ACagliano's effort has gone into creating something unique and special to the Cemetech Minecraft server. I greatly appreciate the work, and I hope the above can be some constructive criticism to continue to make it even better.

Indeed, it's a continuing-development type thing, and I'll keep trying to optimize and improve, and even rotate mobs from time to time to keep people on their toes.
Also I'm compiling a full documentation of the circuits and commands used, that ill toss into the staff forum, for reference.
  
Register to Join the Conversation
Have your own thoughts to add to this or any other topic? Want to ask a question, offer a suggestion, share your own programs and projects, upload a file to the file archives, get help with calculator and computer programming, or simply chat with like-minded coders and tech and calculator enthusiasts via the site-wide AJAX SAX widget? Registration for a free Cemetech account only takes a minute.

» Go to Registration page
Page 1 of 1
» All times are UTC - 5 Hours
 
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum

 

Advertisement