Creative Chaos Mode

[ROCKONN]

At the end of every revision on creative, as most of us know, we host a Chaos mode, in which we first go for a few days in survival mode, scavenging materials from buildings, triggering traps, destroying things by hand, and afterwards destroy the map again in creative mode with the aid of unlimited tnt. During the Chaos mode, all player's data is reset, inventories wiped, all teleport aspects removed (homes, warps, etc), and the player position reset to the spawnpoint.

However, there are many people who ignore the spirit of starting from scratch to tear down an empire. These people make stashes of armor, food, tnt, etc, all over the map, usually in bedrock bunkers to survive the onslaught of tnt waves. They hide these stashes in the hopes of using them to gain an advantage over all other players during the survival mode of Chaos. Personally, I'm of the belief that such actions defeat the purpose of the survival mode of Chaos, that inventories are deliberately wiped for a fresh start. It's one thing for controlled stashes to be put into place- the odd 3 blocks of tnt, a piece of diamond armor, simple stuff like that. However, time & again I've seen people with inventories full of tnt, glitched pieces of enchanted armor, and other things that players who wanted to survive with what they've spent months working on simply cannot compete against. These people & the actions they take quite simply ruin the fun of Chaos mode. The arguement could be made that such wild cards keep it interesting, but I find that hard to support when 2-3 such players seal off the spawn & chase down whoever exits it.

As a solution to this issue I've seen, I propose the following:

In addition to player data resets, the Chaos map should have all chests removed that'd been previously placed, as well as large groups of other storage-related items. This can be done very easily with a worldedit filter.

 

Players can have their massive amounts of tnt & over-powered armor during the creative Chaos mode. Leave the survival mode timeframe for surviving.

[Denevien]

What about just adding a world guard flag to deny chest access during the survival part.

[ROCKONN]

What about just adding a world guard flag to deny chest access during the survival part.

That'd work too, but should extend to dropper/hopper etc as well, as people'll get crafty with giving themselves items.

[WayneByNumbers]

I think that, rather than trying to engineer the gameplay, truer chaos might be better achieved by keeping the conditions themselves more chaotic.  Last rev, the survival chaos period was publicly announced well in advance.  Within a day, it was clear that was a mistake--bedrock and god-gear stashes everywhere (I cannot claim complete innocence there, you do not want to know what I tried to put in my ender chest).  People were too excited to cancel the event, so it went ahead and was fun, but the effect on the map was awful.  Fortunately, the admins realized this and took it upon themselves to clean up the map as best they could before backing it up.

 

So instead of trying to remove any attempts to leave stashes, don't give people the opportunity to use them.  Have creative chaos first.  Bedrock will be destructible, so people won't bother.  Most chests and other storage blocks will probably be destroyed, or even hunted down by people anticipating the survival chaos to come after, so making caches won't be worth much.  Perhaps during creative chaos, placing any inventory blocks can be deactivated to prevent any last-minute hoarding.  Only then, in a tortured, blasted landscape peppered with the remnants of the valuable builds missed by the bombs, have survival chaos.  Hopefully, people wouldn't be so motivated to ruin the map by having conditions be competitive right out of the gate.  Rather, the incentive will simply be to destroy as much as possible during the TNT period to level the playing field.

 

Another, less desirable but perhaps safer, method, would be to simply not have survival chaos at the end of the rev, at least not with the most recent map.  Knowing people wouldn't have access to their hidden goodies anyway would make caches utterly useless.  Even the knowledge that the current map might be used someday in chaos wouldn't make stashes very appealing.