  We provide a comprehensive view on the role of Abelian symmetry and
stochasticity in the universality class of directed sandpile models, in context
of the underlying spatial correlations of metastable patterns and scars. It is
argued that the relevance of Abelian symmetry may depend on whether the dynamic
rule is stochastic or deterministic, by means of the interaction of metastable
patterns and avalanche flow. Based on the new scaling relations, we conjecture
critical exponents for avalanche, which is confirmed reasonably well in
large-scale numerical simulations.
