Inspired by Drew's thread about
watching the Mindcrack Ultra Hardcore series, I figured I should start a new thread to gauge interest in having our own AppleNova Ultra Hardcore game of Minecraft.
What's UHC? It's a tournament style of playing Minecraft SMP with a group of people. You spin up a new world with a set of custom rules, and you have just a couple of hours to complete the objective. The Mindcrack guys play as a deathmatch, and the last team standing wins. "Ultra hardcore" in name means you get only *one* life (hardcore mode) and your health does not regenerate with food (
ultra hardcore mode). Basically, you'd need potions or golden apples to recover health if you get hurt. Also, depleting your food bar still makes you take instant damage. So, you'd still have to keep yourself well fed!
I'd spin up a whole new temporary world for the game. Some of the features that the Mindcrack guys use that I'd also set up include:
- eternal daytime to concentrate hostiles underground, making mining more perilous
- automatically spread out the players/teams some initial distance from spawn
- use the new worldborder feature to restrict the explorable area
- automatically shrink the worldborder over time to force people to keep moving and eventually start to encounter others
I think the shrinking worldborder bit is super clever. We could start it at 2000x2000 and have it shrink to 100x100 over the span of a couple hours. At least in deathmatch mode, that forces a true end-game situation where the remaining players are forced to face off.
There are also some self-enforced rules like "no branch mining". The Mindcrack guys are able to keep each other honest because everybody posts their videos on YouTube, and then anyone could get called out for breaking the rules. Since I doubt we'll all be running screen recorders, we'd just have to make a gentleman's agreement to just play fair.
So far, Drew, Spec, Rowdy, and I have expressed interest in having our own UHC tourney. Of the other regulars on the server, maybe we could talk Turtle, 709, Elysium, Whammer, and Dellphi to join? Then we have a bunch of others like Bryson and InvaderJak who only rarely pop onto the server but might be interested in a quick fling. I *might* even be able to talk one of my two friends, gerlocian and Nik_Everett, to join the party too.
Thoughts from you guys?
At 9+ players, we could do teams of three. If we have fewer than that, I think we should just split up 50/50 because having teams of two doesn't sound as fun. We'd probably all need to set up some voice chat system for each team to talk to themselves. That could be skype or teamspeak or whatever works best; someone else needs to lead that effort because I don't know what service works best.