Ideas for a Contest Arena

[Perez]

Every year around Xmas I buy a bunch of games off Steam. I then make my friends (around 9 of them) jump through a bunch of hoops participate is a series of contests across several games to win said games. Three of my contests are on my Tekkit server. One is a complicated obstacle course. Another is a treasure hunt. But the last one I want to do is some sort of arena. However I can't figure out a balanced way to set it up since some of them play MC a lot so they know how to fight well whereas some others are really new and would probably end up losing out. Throwing them into a giant room with weapons would just be bland (and one I did last year) so I'm trying to figure out how to spice things up. Currently the arena I was thinking of was going to have a slowly opening roof (using frames) from the outside to the middle, slowly spilling lava into the outer sections of the arena. Or dynamite. I haven't decided yet. Before that I was thinking of having a series of dispensers connected to some wireless redstone that I would control. Whenever I saw people were getting stagnant in fighting I would fire a volley of zombie/creeper eggs into the arena to force some mistakes. I even considered it being last man standing but a rule about no attacking each other. That would need more complicated and justifiably random ways of causing danger in the arena.

Anyone like to help me think of horrible (and complicated!) things to do to them? I'll end up throwing up screenshots of the events I pull off the server when I do them. They start on the 19th after we all got exams out of the way. We're currently in the process of setting up nether-highways to spread out the contest locations across the world.

[vitorsly]

An arena eh?

How you put them in a floating ice platform hovering above a lava lake, and 20 billion snowballs to everyone.

People will try to push each other into the lava ( or punch them to death) and the last person still on the ice platform wins.

[Perez]

I like this. I think I could make that the "Final Stage" of the arena so to speak. This makes me want to put the arena way up in the sky and have the walls be solid (no glass) so my friends won't realize what's going on. The walls and floor will be frames that I can retract and towards the end whoever is still standing will be exposed to the ice/falling off. A series of chests on the ice with snowballs and bam. A great finisher.

[Perez]

Decided to give a progress update on the arena.

We begin by leaving the nether.

To find...nothing?

Participants to the arena (armed with iron armor and a stone sword) read this!

They fall and see...

The arena. This is where it happens. The rules are simple for the arena. Be the last man standing. However the other condition is that you cannot damage another player. They are confused. What happens next?

Well I'd go ahead and show you but I really don't want to reset all the doors, lights, and such. Here is a look from the outside.

Those are the doors that raise on the walls that release the 1x1 rooms that have deployers spawning zombies, skeletons, and zombie pigs. The fighting for their lives begins. After a few of the 9 participants falls, I'm going to hit a switch that enables this.

That's what's gonna push the wall in, more than halving the space in the arena. Once a few more die, another switch and another wall closes in.

Now they're fighting at around 1/5 the space they had before. Once I'm down to two or three people I hit the final switches to shut off the mob deployers and retract the entire floor.

And as vitorsly suggested, an ice platform over a lava pond with chests loaded with snowballs.

A few holes in the ice, plenty of snowballs. Should be easy to have a final victor. As an aside the prize I'm giving the winner is The Walking Dead game on Steam and we're gonna do the fight on the 19th.

Anyone have any suggestions to things I could possibly add to this? I'm pretty much done but if someone comes up with something good/easy to implement I may consider tossing it in. I'll be sure to put on more screenshots of the event itself when it's live.