Card Hunter Single-Elimination Tournament (rules discussion)

#01

This is the topic where we can discuss about the upcoming Card Hunter Single-Elimination Tournament.

The tournament will happen during a weekend, maybe Saturday, during a time when Card Hunter players are most active. This will probably mean something like 7:00 pm GMT (late in Europe, evening in the US), but we will decide that a bit later after getting some feedback. The tournament will last about 2 hours 30 minutes.

Basic philosophy of the event: everything should be made as easy as possible for both the organizer and the participants. This is important because we want an event that is sustainable and not just a one time deal. If everything goes well, we might even be able to have this tournament every week.

Nothing is yet written in stone, so please give your input and make the event better.

Here is the first version of the rules.



Tournament Rules (under construction)

1. Signing Up
Sign up for the tournament by posting on the tournament topic. Each tournament will have their own own topic which contains everything from rules to final results.

Minimum requirement for signing up is a forum post count of 10 or more at the time of signing up.

There are 32 spots available in the tournament. If more then 32 people sign-up during a 24-hour period, participants will be chosen randomly. Those who didn't get a spot, still have a change to make it to the tournament as substitute players (read part 4).

People who have signed up

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Subtitutes

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2. Maps
Each tournament uses 5 unique maps built by community members. Each round has a different map. Participants will be given all the maps beforehand. It is a good idea to study the maps and try to come up with different decks that would perform well on those maps.

3. Deckbuilding
Each tournament will have some kind of deckbuilding restrictions to keep things interesting and to further differentiate tournaments from regular multiplayer.

But to simplify things a bit, this first tournament will have no deckbuilding restrictions. You may use any builds you like. This includes classes, races and items. You may either keep the same build between rounds, make minor modifications to it, or even change it completely. In other words, you may use the same build for each round, use a different build for each round, or something in between.

Keep in mind that you only have a few minutes between rounds to change your deck. It is a good idea to store the decks you want to use beforehand, because you might not have time to do it manually.

4. Showing Up
Enter the Card Hunter chat room no later than 10 minutes before the tournament is supposed to start. This is because the organizer needs time to confirm that we have full roster. If you arrive late, we cannot guarantee your spot in the tournament, so it is a good idea to show up as early as you can.

If and when one or more of the participants fail to show up on time, substitutes will be used in order to get a full roster of 32 players. Substitutes will be taken directly from the chat room on the basis of first come, first served.

If you have signed up for the tournament but fail to show up for any reason, even a good one, you will be denied access to the next tournament. This minor penalty is to help ensure that people sign up only when they know they can actually participate.

5. Brackets
Organizer will post tournament brackets on the forum topic. From there you will see who you are fighting during each round. If your name is above the name of your opponent, it is your job to set up a custom game using the tournament map of that round, and invite your opponent. If your name is below the name of your opponent, just wait for the invitation. If you do not know how to set up a custom game, ask help from the organizer.

We will be using Challonge as tournament brackets tool. Below is an example of what it will look like. Cool thing about it is that the image will automatically update as the organizer updates the brackets.


6. Rounds
Tournament has 5 rounds, each lasting 30 minutes. Matches last roughly 20 minutes, after which there will be 10 minutes of downtime during which the organizer updates the brackets and the participants can change their decks or go to the toilet.

6. The Match
Tournament matches are best-of-one. This means that whoever wins the match, will go forward to the next round, and whoever loses, is instantly out of the tournament.

Each player will have a timer of 10 minutes. This is only half the time you usually have, so it is a good idea to practice making faster moves. You do not want to lose because you ran out of time.

7. Disconnects
Because disconnects are so easy to fake, and it is virtually impossible to get caught doing so, the person who gets disconnected will suffer some kind of a penalty or even lose. This might not always seem fair, but it is the only way to discourage cheating.

If a player disconnects during round 1, there will always be a rematch. As a penalty, the player who disconnected must not play any cards during round 1 of the rematch. At the start of round 2, the match continues normally.

If a player disconnects after round 1, we will look at what the score was.

A) If both players had equal score, or the player who disconnected had a higher score: there will be a quick rematch using 5 minute timers. As a penalty, the player who disconnected must not play any cards during round 1 of the rematch. At the start of round 2, the match continues normally.​

B) If the player who disconnected had a lower score: the player who disconnected,loses the game and is out of the tournament.​

8. Posting Match Results
After the match is over, winner of the match must post on the tournament topic so that the organizer can update the brackets. Winner can choose his or her words, like "I won!" or "I was victorious!", as long as it is easy to understand.

To everyone else, please refrain from posting on the tournament topic when the tournament is in progress. Otherwise it will be difficult for the organizer.

9. Tournament Winner
The winner is the person who wins all 5 matches. We will also have a bronze match that runs parallel to finals in order to determine 3rd and 4th place.

10. Prizes
Blue Manchu has kindly agreed to give us some gold and/or pizza as prizes for this tournament. It is still unclear what the actual prizes are and who will get them. For example we could give prizes to top-3 or maybe top-4. I will add details here later when I know more.

1st place: 400 pizza

2nd place: 240 pizza

3rd place: 160 pizza


4th place: 80 pizza



That is what I've got so far. It's still missing a couple of things but I think it's a good start.

Please post comments, ideas or suggestions. Thanks!

 

Swiss would be better, in elimination tournaments if you are unlucky in 1 round you get eliminated, in swiss you can still do top 4

 

Like I said in chat, one person organizing a 32-player swiss tournament in 2 hours 30 minutes is not a realistic goal imo. The fact that half the players are kicked out after round 1, relives a lot of pressure from the organizer, which I think is very important the first time we run this. I think we need to start small and see how it goes. I personally would like to see a double elimination tournament because there you have two chances before you are out, but you don't get the complete chaos of a 32-player swiss.

As for getting eliminated after a one loss.. is it that big of a deal really? I mean it's not like getting instantly eliminated is the end of the world because there will be other tournament. And besides, it gives new players a better shot at getting to the end.

 

Why 10 minute timer? You were so vehemently against it in the previous tournament, and the main reason for its presence in that tournament is absent here (best of 3 matches). Either way, I'll participate once sign ups open, just to see what it's like. Good luck running it SLG, you've definitely proposed a system that seems convenient for the organizer. You know my feelings on what makes a tournament interesting, but they might change and in any event the more events the better.

 

I chose the 10 minute timers for the obvious reason of time constraint. If we had the default 20 minutes, and one or more players per round used all that time, the tournament would last about 4-5 hours. Nobody wants to participate in a slow grinder like that. If we want to run any kind of tournament that has 5 rounds, and that happens at a specific time, we have to make some compromises. It would be nice to have more time, just like it would be nice to have best-of-three, but it's just not possible in a fixed time tournament like this one.

With the Peasant tournament it was different because matches didn't all happen all at once. From a players' perspective the default 20 minutes (or at least something like 15) would probably have been better, but we used 10 minute timers because you acted as a referee in all matches, and if one matchup had lasted for 1.5-2 hours, it would have been a nightmare to organize.

I think that simplicity can be fun too because it requires less work from the players. They can just show up and start playing without the need to first communicate with their opponents or the organizer, posting decks and sideboards, etc. That can of course be fun too, but I think it would be good to have something that would interest casual players and forum users as well. I also don't think that an event needs tons of elaborate rules to be fun. I think all it needs is new maps and some kind of simple deckbuilding restrictions. We don't have the latter this time around because this is just a test, but we'll have it the next time around, assuming next time happens.

 

I want to play in this tournament pretty much as you described it. Make it so!

 

Here's a quick update.

I've been trying to find ways to remove the first-round-out-of-the-event-sudden-death aspect that would not increase the total time to more than 3 hours.

Swiss tournament would probably lead to tons of issues because there would be so many matches in so little time. But even if it was manageable, there would be the potential problem of people quitting the tournament half-way when it becomes clear that they cannot get any prizes. Some might stick around just because they promised to finish the tournament no matter what, but I wouldn't be surprised if many of those who lost their first two matches, suddenly had some real life things they need to do. This is why I think it would be important if everyone who was still in the tournament, also had a chance of winning a prize. And as soon as it becomes impossible to get a prize, that person would be out.

I was contemplating a slightly altered version of something that Farbs suggested earlier. We could maybe have a combination of swiss and single-elimination. Like this:

SWISS
Start of Round 1
32 players 0-0

End of Round 1
16 players 1-0 (these players advance directly to single-elimination)
16 players 0-1 (these players go to round 2)

Start of Round 2
16 players 0-1

End of Round 2
8 players 1-1 (these players advance to single-elimination)
8 players 0-2 (these players are eliminated from the tournament)


The idea is that everyone fights 1-2 matches, and a single win will advance you to the final single-elimination part. The problem here is that it will give us 24 participants, which doesn't work because we need 16, 32, 64 etc. I've been trying to figure it out and I don't think it is possible to use this kind of system that would lead to having 16 players in the final part. If we start with 24, we'll end up with 18. If we start with 20, we'll end up with 15.

Anyone has any ideas on how to make something like this work without any byes etc.?

There's of course the double-elimination, but that requires a lot more rounds, and we would probably have to go with timers that are less than 10 minutes.

P.s. I'm considering running this tournament this week on Saturday 1st of February, around 7:00 PM GMT (UTC). Feel free to comment on that as well.

 

Count me in slg, time should be fine for me if i read it right ;-)

 

Ok, cool. It happens 20:00 swedish time btw.

 

I want to participate too

 

I'd be up for something like this too. Not sure how well it would work exactly, but why not give it a shot.

 

I'm in! Also, I would suggest starting with 20 so that you end up with 15, and then bring in a 16th from the eliminated group either by random lottery or by points scored / time spent / some other metric.

 

As brutal and unforgiving as single elims are, I still think that's probably the best way to do it and keep it simple. Yes, it sucks getting eliminated in the first round, but it solves all the other problems with organizing the tourney.

I'm very interested in competing, but it depends on the date. My Saturdays are pretty booked lately.

 

what about a mini league? 4 groups of 6 and the best 2 of each group procede to single elimination?
Day x group A would do all their games with every victory scoring 3 points. day y group b and so for

So lets suppose, in day 1 of next month the matchs of group A would occur during all day, the members of the group would face each other, and then post screenshots/scores on the tournament thread and so for. The maps would be pre determinated randomly by tthe responsable for the tournament and in that day the players would have to find each other and do the games

 

Count me in. When you post times and deckbuilding restrictions I'll pay a little more attention, but this sounds great.

 

Signing up.

 

7 GMT... Any chance it could be an hour later? Or earlier but on Sunday? I'm free around noon my time on Saturday, so 8 pm GMT. If the time can't bend that is okay, I'm sure you will have enough participants.

 

Yeah, for me early Sunday would also be better, generally speaking. I'm usually less busy on Sundays.

 

Is there any particular aspect that you think won't work? There's still time to make changes.

Not a bad idea. I was thinking that instead of winners posting "I won" or whatever, they could post match score, for example 6-2, 6-0, 6-5, etc. Organizer could then use this data to determine who from the 16 is "the Winner of the Losers", in other words who lost both matches but scored the most points. That person would then join the other 15 and we could have a 16-man tournament.

Hmm.. maybe we should first see how many people sign up for the event. If we get around 20, then what you suggest makes sense. But if we get 32+, then maybe the original idea is better, because I'd rather take as many participants as possible.

Yep, there is no good solution for that problem if we want to keep total tournament duration at a minimum. It's basically a choice between less matches or faster matches. I even considered best-of-3 with 5 minute timers, which would certainly be interesting and something I would like to do at one point, but I think that if we did it right now, we would see tons of timeouts.

This tournament happening at a fixed time, and lasting about 2-3 hours, is the core point of the whole event. Anything that would require longer duration and/or multiple days, is a definite deal-breaker. What you describe there could work, but just not for this particular event.

Thank you everyone who already signed up, but the official sign-up topic will be posted on Thursday, so please use that when it appears. It will be open for at least 24 hours, and if we do not get the full 32 players (+ subs) it will be open for even longer than that.

8 pm GMT works for me. It was actually my second choice. But if we went past that, like 9 pm or 10 pm, and the tournament lasted more than 2 hours, it could be too late for many European players. Yep, time-zones are pretty annoying.

Unfortunately for this first tournament Sunday doesn't work because I have something I need to do on Sunday. We're pretty much stuck with Saturday, but the time is still flexible. And if Sunday is universally more liked than Saturday, and if these tournaments happen ever again, then maybe we can permanently switch to Sundays after this first test run.

 

Hey, thanks for being flexible.