I think it's time to start doing the Vizzed.co Minecraft Server competitions that we've been talking about for months. These will be "1 day long competitions" rather than "month long contests".

The competitions would allow any number of players to join and I'm hoping to offer up cash prizes (probably like US $25) to the winners. I'd love to host at least 1 competition a month and each competition would last around 1 hour. They'd all be live streamed and also edited and uploaded to my YouTube Channel.

Each competition could be broken up into rounds with eliminations taking place for each round. They could be a full hour long competition that goes on until there's only 1 man left standing. Or they could be a creative competition where users compete to make something within the limited time and the best "structure" wins based on viewer votes. Any ideas are possible, we can take this in any direction just as long as each competition is just a day long (heck, I'm even open up to the idea of a competition lasting hours).


Here's a few of my ideas:


2D Race
This is my favorite idea. The idea behind this would be to try and put together a 2D Platformer obstacle course that users would have to race through. Every user would have the same course that they'd race through and each course would be based on a different retro game.

This idea would involve putting together a texture pack using 8-bit graphics from NES games (and/or maybe 16-bit graphics from the 16-bit era). So it'd be a little more time consuming to prepare but if I was able to get a few users to help out, that'd speed up the process. Or I could just find a good retro themed texture pack online.

So I already put together a mockup for how this would work and look.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUguMo8_oMo

So in the video, the screen is split in half. The bottom is what the contestants would be seeing (or maybe we could use commands to change their camera view so that it's a more authentic experience) and the top is what the camera guy (probably me) and the viewers would be seeing. See the layers in the background and foreground in that video? Lets just imagine each of those being the same exact course so that the player can see in their peripherals where everyone is at and also so that the audience can clearly see how far along everyone is.

This competition could be a series of courses, each with a different theme and game. Or it could be a single long "endurance" course.


PVP in User Creations
We could have various PVP challenges based in player creations. What we would do is simply copy the creation to a separate world so that the creation can be altered or destroyed. Challenges could be death matches, hide and go seek tag, etc.

Here are some examples of creations that could be used:







Super Mario Kart
Years ago I started recreating the Super Mario Kart courses 1:1 on the Vizzed server. We could find a kart mod and actually set up a race event.



Survive the Disaster
The idea would be to put together a miniature world or a small course with 1 objective: survive the disaster. The last man standing wins. No rules, just stay alive! Here's a few examples of potential disasters:

Titanic PVP: There's plenty of Titanic recreations, we'd just find the best one out there and use that as our starting point. This object would involve having water slowly rising and users trying to stay alive inside the titanic, which would be sinking. Users could use various weapons to speed up the sinking process by making holes in the side of the ship. We'd also find a way to make it so that the water kills you if you're in contact with it for more than a few seconds (as if it was so cold that you died from hypothermia).

Meteorites: Basically stuff is falling out of the sky that can kill you if it hits you. These objects are also slowly destroying the world. The world is probably a single layer world so these craters would make holes in the world that you'd fall through and die.

Rising Lava: we'd have a vertical world where the lava slowly rises and your objective is to get to the top before the lava kills you and then just stay alive. This idea was somewhat inspired by this video.

Summoning the Minecraft Staff for feedback:
SonicOlmstead :
merf :
Fyredove :
Boured :
Barathemos :
deggle :

Davideo7 : I love all of these ideas my only concern is activity is really low right now so we need to get that back on track I don't know if we need meetings to do that or what would help it or maybe these ideas themselves could be the key to getting activity back up we could try to do one of the easier ones first and seeing how many players we get.

SonicOlmstead : The competitions, especially fun ones and ones with cash prizes, will help draw interest to the server. If it looks fun and exciting and users see that on the YouTube video or in the stream, they might want to join and so we draw in new traffic along with returning traffic.

Also, we need to start the weekly meetings back up again. I'm down for starting next Monday. My focus for 2020 is to be more involved with the community. Less time working on development and more time doing things where I'm interacting with the users and doing things that are beneficial for the community of this site. I want to do more streams and YouTube videos and I think these competitions definitely could help with that.

Davideo7 : I also am down starting again next Monday, I get what you mean I also think if Furret can start using the competitions we do with his advertising role I gave him for the server it could help bring new people to the server as well as the site.

I'm not sure what it's called, but I saw my brother playing a game with one of his friends there they built several floors of snow over a lava pit, each had a shovel, and started top floor with the objective of digging the floor out from under the other player and dropping them into the lava. It looked really, really fun and would be a cool PvP elimination game, I think.


I also think there's a ton that could be done with the new target block. Setting up horseback shooting galleries, long range archery competitions, etc. etc.

Any way we could set up jousting?

m0ssb3rg935 : I believe the game you are referring to would be spleef which I would love to set up as one of these events sometime.

I feel like I heard about the target block and then simply forgot about it if I may ask what does it do again?

I'm not really sure about jousting but I had an idea to have a variant of ultimate that if these events do well enough with I would look into setting up eventually if anyone was interested.

SonicOlmstead : The target block's new. Came with the bees update. It's got a big bull's-eye on it and, depending on how close to the center you hit it with an arrow, it sends redstone signals of varying strength. I haven't played around with it really, just been reading up on the updates. I'm kind of redstone inept.

I'd love for more fun original competitions. Maybe alternating between a more Player vs. Player based one and a fun casual one is the healthiest approach here.

Last building competition didn't do as well when it came to participation and I feel like that might be because plenty of people just get scared of by the concept of building something big. I think if we had a fun Minecraft night with one or two competitions, while also being live streamed, it would be more fun and more people might come and check it out.

Wait um....when was I ever Minecraft Staff? Was this a thing I was unaware of?


Either way these ideas seem pretty neat!

Boured : I think david summoned you instead of Furret by mistake lol.

I have 1 idea for a future competition that I would love to either participate in or just watch. The Hidden Base challenge.

You get a small area to work in and in creative mode you have to put down a bed somewhere. Everyone else looks for it in survival mode and the 1st person who finds it wins.

I like it becauss the hider can set up traps or mazes, or do whatever to hide their bed as secretly as they can.