Survival Games, SkyWars, EggWars, UHC, Lucky Islands... These are the vanilla combat games on Cubecraft. Each game has a different method of resource gathering. Some games place you on floating isles and others in a survival setting. EggWars lets you respawn and UHC doesn't have natural regen. But at the end of the day, all of them have the same goal: Be the last man/team standing.
This is where BlockWars comes in. It is the only vanilla combat game on the server where lives are unlimited; where player elimination is not the only end goal; where one does not need to waste time suiting up and can just go fight the good fight. It's a wonderful breath of stale air.
BlockWars has great potential to be a unique and exciting game on the server to rival the likes of EggWars, but the game is plagued with seriously troubled design and uninteresting combat. The following suggestion is how to fix the biggest of these issues: the block-placing system.
The Problem:
BlockWars is divided into three phases: Building, Fighting, Overtime. The first phase is the only one in which blocks can be placed, and they can only be placed on the team's own side. Each player has 72 blocks + a trap that they can place, and there is nothing more than a 2-block radius around the flag to prevent people from placing blocks anywhere. The central issue with this building phase is that there is absolutely no reason not to just dump all of one's blocks in front of the 1-2 entrances to the flag/core and call it a day. There's no incentive for anyone to make interesting fortresses, pathways, walls, or anything else, because all of them are either barely useful or would be better spent making a larger glob of clay around the thing you're supposed to be defending.
This is made even worse by the awful equipment the different kits have - everyone's running around with bare-bones armor and weaponry, and nothing better than wooden or stone picks to chug through at least 8 layers of blocks in the enemy base. And then of course everyone has Mining Fatigue just to slow everything down even more; swords swing slower and picks take ages to mine a single block. The only saving grace is that one kit that can use tnt every 40 seconds, which nobody on the other team can do anything to stop.
Every game ends up being a stalemate; I have yet to see a single game end before the Fighting phase timer ran out that wasn't a 3/0 wipeout.
The Solution:
This is where BlockWars comes in. It is the only vanilla combat game on the server where lives are unlimited; where player elimination is not the only end goal; where one does not need to waste time suiting up and can just go fight the good fight. It's a wonderful breath of stale air.
BlockWars has great potential to be a unique and exciting game on the server to rival the likes of EggWars, but the game is plagued with seriously troubled design and uninteresting combat. The following suggestion is how to fix the biggest of these issues: the block-placing system.
The Problem:
BlockWars is divided into three phases: Building, Fighting, Overtime. The first phase is the only one in which blocks can be placed, and they can only be placed on the team's own side. Each player has 72 blocks + a trap that they can place, and there is nothing more than a 2-block radius around the flag to prevent people from placing blocks anywhere. The central issue with this building phase is that there is absolutely no reason not to just dump all of one's blocks in front of the 1-2 entrances to the flag/core and call it a day. There's no incentive for anyone to make interesting fortresses, pathways, walls, or anything else, because all of them are either barely useful or would be better spent making a larger glob of clay around the thing you're supposed to be defending.
This is made even worse by the awful equipment the different kits have - everyone's running around with bare-bones armor and weaponry, and nothing better than wooden or stone picks to chug through at least 8 layers of blocks in the enemy base. And then of course everyone has Mining Fatigue just to slow everything down even more; swords swing slower and picks take ages to mine a single block. The only saving grace is that one kit that can use tnt every 40 seconds, which nobody on the other team can do anything to stop.
Every game ends up being a stalemate; I have yet to see a single game end before the Fighting phase timer ran out that wasn't a 3/0 wipeout.
The Solution:
- Remove Mining Fatigue - This will speed up the combat and the base-invading process
- All broken blocks drop themselves, not just when Miners mine them - Instead of the game being about a pre-made cocoon around the flag/core being slowly taken apart, this will allow for constant dynamic changes to each team's base, and allows for interesting combat where mid-battle block placement skill is now a factor.
- Miner gets Gold pickaxe as compensation
- Remove Building phase - players get 64 blocks and a trap that do not restock and are preserved between lives (you always respawn with the same number of blocks you died with) - This one is huge. In order to keep people from just building giant clumps of clay around their flag/core, simply don't give them the time to do so. Now if a player spends the first moments of the game building around the base, they have to consider the cost of losing those blocks for later, and must be prepared at any moment to defend their structure from the enemy.
- Buff players' gear by one level (Wood is now Stone, Leather now Chain, etc.)
- Give players more trap blocks