EpicDuels

v2.0.0 — Party System, Lobby Hardening & Stability

Date: May 2026 Minecraft: Paper 1.21.1+ Java: 21

Major Feature — Party System

EpicDuels now supports group play through a full party system. Create a party with /party create, invite friends with /party invite <player>, and launch a game with /party start. The party owner selects a kit once at the start; the arena is picked randomly per match. Supports 2–8 players.

Mode 1 — Team Duel (2v2 / 3v3 / 4v4)

• Teams are shuffled randomly at match start.
• All teammates spawn at the same arena spawn point with small circular offsets so nobody overlaps.
• Friendly fire is disabled — team members cannot damage each other.
• Eliminated players automatically spectate the ongoing battle until their team is wiped.
• The last team with a surviving member wins.

Mode 2 — Single-Elimination Tournament

• All party members compete in 1v1 bracket matches using the existing duel system.
• Byes are inserted automatically for party sizes that are not a power of 2.
• Eliminated players are auto-routed to spectate a random live tournament match so nobody is left waiting in the lobby. When their spectated match ends they are re-routed to another live match if one is still running.
• The final winner is announced only to party members — no server-wide broadcast.

Party Commands

Command	Alias	Description	Permission
/party create	/p create	Create a party	epicduels.party
/party invite <player>	/p invite <player>	Invite a player	epicduels.party
/party accept [player]	/p accept	Accept an invite	epicduels.party
/party deny [player]	/p deny	Deny an invite	epicduels.party
/party leave	/p leave	Leave your party	epicduels.party
/party disband	/p disband	Disband (owner only)	epicduels.party
/party list	/p list	Show members	epicduels.party
/party start	/p start	Open mode-select GUI (owner only)	epicduels.party

New Permission

Permission	Description	Default
epicduels.party	Use all party commands	Everyone

New Files

File	Purpose
Party.java / PartyInvite.java / PartyMode.java / TeamSize.java	Party model layer
TeamDuelInstance.java / Tournament.java / BattleInstance.java	Match model layer
PartyManager.java	Invite, party lifecycle, member management
TeamDuelManager.java	Team composition, arena spawn offsets, friendly fire, winner detection
TournamentManager.java	Bracket generation, match scheduling, spectator routing
FriendlyFireListener.java	Cancels damage between teammates during team duels
PartyCommand.java / PartyTabCompleter.java	Command handling

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Major Change — Adventure Mode in Lobby

All players now join and stay in Adventure mode inside the lobby world. This prevents them from breaking or placing blocks — which is especially important for servers running external plugins like ImageFrame whose maps/images would otherwise be destroyed by any player in Survival/Creative.

• Players are set to ADVENTURE on join and on return from a duel.
• Spectators are also returned to ADVENTURE when they stop spectating.
• Admins with epicduels.admin are unaffected — see "Per-Admin Bypass" below.

Major Feature — Item Frame & Armor Stand Protection

A new PlayerInteractEntityEvent handler prevents non-admin players from interacting with item frames and armor stands in the lobby, closing the last bypass that Adventure mode alone did not cover (right-clicking an item frame still works in Adventure mode without a tool).

Major Feature — Per-Admin Lobby Bypass

Admins can now switch their own lobby protections off temporarily for building without touching the global config or affecting other players.

Command	Description
/duel lobby off	Puts you in Creative mode and suspends all lobby protections for your session
/duel lobby on	Restores your Adventure mode and re-enables all lobby protections for you

The bypass is per-player — every other player keeps full protections while an admin is in build mode.

Bug Fixes

Memory Leaks

• BukkitTask references — DuelManager's request-expiration repeating task and QueueManager's matchmaking loop both lacked stored BukkitTask references. On plugin reload, these tasks kept running in the background, slowly eating RAM. Both now store their BukkitTask and cancel it on cleanupAll() / cleanup().

• Leftover instance worlds — Arena instance worlds (arena_instance_*) left behind by a previous crash or hard shutdown were never cleaned up. The plugin now scans for and deletes them on the first server tick after startup.

• Ghost queue entries — Players who disconnected while in the matchmaking queue were previously skipped on the action-bar update but kept in the queue maps indefinitely. They are now removed immediately when the next tick detects they are offline.

Supabase Sync

• The plugin now runs a connection test on startup so misconfiguration (wrong URL or key) is caught immediately rather than silently failing on the first win.
• PostgREST returns HTTP 204 No Content on a successful upsert; this was previously treated as an error and the push was silently dropped. Now accepted.
• HTTP 401 / 403 responses print an actionable hint: "Check your Row-Level Security policy in the Supabase dashboard".
• StatsManager.pushAllToRemote() during onDisable now properly awaits all async futures (up to 15 s) so no stats are lost on shutdown.

Performance Improvements — Hologram Efficiency Rewrite

The HologramManager was re-written to eliminate the biggest source of entity churn on leaderboard servers:

Metric	Before	After
Update strategy	Delete all ArmorStands, re-spawn	Update text in-place
Refresh interval	200 ticks (10 s)	1 200 ticks (60 s)
Orphan scan scope	All loaded worlds	Hologram worlds only
Player name lookups	Bukkit.getOfflinePlayer() per line every tick	Cached per refresh cycle
Line spacing	0.28 blocks (causes overlap at small fonts)	0.30 blocks

The old approach spawned and killed 20 ArmorStand entities every 10 seconds per hologram. On a server with two holograms this meant 240 entity-create/destroy operations per minute — causing noticeable lag spikes. The new approach touches only existing entities' metadata.

Upgrade Notes

• Replace EpicDuels-1.0.0.jar with EpicDuels-2.0.0.jar. All existing config, arenas, kits, stats, and .yml files remain fully compatible.
• No config changes are required — new features work out of the box.
• The new epicduels.party permission defaults to true (all players). If you want to restrict party creation, add it to your permissions plugin.
• Admins who had custom lobby protections toggled off in config.yml should review whether the per-player bypass (/duel lobby off) is a better fit.