Tournament Discussion (Swiss Tournament #1)

I'll say one thing about the time limit. Some people have slower computers, and even with speedy animation settings and low visual quality will experience some lag. Obviously that discrepancy will exist no matter what time limit you offer, but 10 minutes is extremely punishing for players on slow machines. 12 min, or even 11 min, anything you can throw those players would be nice.

 

I am curious what animation level people play at. I play at 8 with auto targeting off and show enemy cards on. Sometimes I can get away with 7 animation speed, but anything less and the game feels super sluggish (I guess I'm used to the 10 speed when I farm SP?).

11 minutes would work, 12 might as well... but I think that might be pushing it a bit. When you start getting to 13 minutes you could have just run an entire other match at 10 minutes... I'd rather have more matches with lower time than fewer matches with more time, especially in Swiss. Maybe not in elimination though.

 

Actually, I was wondering if the person running it could enter too. To make it fair I'd most likely have everyone submit their build to a neutral third party, or simply have them posted publicly.

Remember, I'm treating these tournaments more as an experiment to see what is possible within the given framework. Can an organizer also participate and still manage it? From how SLG's tournament ran it seems highly possible.

 

Posting your build in the forum thread before anyone else sends his build would solve the problem of the possibility of adjusting your build after all others send them to you.

But the main problem would be of course the delay for the tournament. You would be only able to keep score and answer questions after your own matches and depending on the amout of players that is quite the time investment and since it seems that every minute counts for you it would not be fair to the other players to delay the tournament just because you also want to eat the cake.

 

Yeah, I could post my build first, that'd not be a problem.

I don't see it as much of a delay. SLG had almost no questions and the tournament ran very smoothly. There were almost no hiccups that occurred *during* matches (only one I can think of was the faulty map that had no time limit), as most questions were in between games. I'll be monitoring the chat during the game in case things arise -- I'm really good at multitasking and have never really had a problem with a 10 minute time limit while using 3DC and while chatting...

If problems do crop up I can bow out if needed, I just want to experiment to see how it goes. Updating the brackets literally takes a few seconds with Challonge -- it is almost entirely automated. The only thing that would take any time would be to determine finalists due to ties. But if I push the finals to another time then I wouldn't have to resolve ties immediately.

Again, I view these things as experiments. For me each tournament should try new things and push the boundaries to see what works and what doesn't.

 

I'm curious to know if anyone has any thoughts on the "limit 1 of a specific item per team" rule. Would it make the teams be primarily Adventuring parties and builds more bland or would it be more interesting?

I'm pretty sure I'm going to go with Swiss tournament with the 4 finalists having a round robin tournament at a later date, limiting it to Epic and lower, and banning WW/WWE.

The maps will be most likely randomized (from a small set of well balanced maps) so you can't build a team for a specific map -- but have to make something to work for all of them.

Any other thoughts on the rules?

EDIT/UPDATE: Would people prefer Epic limit with only 1 item of each type, or Rare limit with no limit on number of items?

 

Anyone else want to weigh in on the timer issue? Perhaps we should take a vote of players from the last tournament as to whether 10 minutes was enough or whether they'd rather play a longer tournament with a 12 minute clock.

 

I thought that 10 minutes was plenty, but then I would also be okay with 5-minute blitz... (I also don't play builds which require me to agonize over each move.)

 

I tried a 5-minute blitz with 3DC when SLG accidentally set the final map for that. It was pretty intense, especially considering I wasted a minute laughing at it. I did win, but barely -- made a ton of silly mistakes due to time.

I'll go with 11-minutes. The one extra minute is just a buffer for loading / trait cycling / chatting. Maybe in the next tournament we can experiment with higher (or lower?) time limits.

 

12 minutes would probably win because people like to have more time. But the thing is that people will vote based on their own view as a participant, not based on what is good for the event itself. There is a downside to everything, and while getting extra minutes is nice, it could be detrimental to the event as a whole if the total duration is too long.

That being said, I think 12 minutes is the way to go here, and it's what I will be using the next time I run a tournament. I'd like to have 30 minute rounds so that it's easy to keep track when the next one begins, and 12 minutes fits pretty well to that. Matches take 1 minute to set up, fights take a maximum of 24 minutes, and we'll then have a 5 minute downtime.

1+12+12+5= 30 min

Of course it won't always go that smoothly but it's a good goal to have imo. And that extra 2 minutes should help a lot against timeouts.

Yea, blitz matches are pretty fun. Having best-of-3 with 5 minute timers is also something I've considered because if you also mean roughly 30 minute rounds, assuming there was very little downtime between matches and rounds. It's also good for spectators because lots of things are happening all the time.

Actually the old broken version of the final map had no timer at all. And if you are talking about a casual PvP match you and I had (which may or may not have happened, I don't remember), then that 5 minutes was my blitz testing, not an accident.

11 is such a weird number. It's so close to 12 that I don't see any reason why not to just go with 12, which makes much more sense and looks better.

 

You better start off with like 10 or 12 ppl, With all the 1 item per team and pre loading builds stuff i don;t expect anywhere near 32 ppl to join the tournament even with some hype!

 

Oh, you said "oops" when we started, so I thought it was a mistake or something. :-P

And 11 isn't really a "weird number" any more than 12...

Yeah, the beauty of a Swiss format is that any number of players works (although even is best to avoid byes). If needed to maintain an even number I'll drop out.

The only real problem with Swiss is that once someone loses a few rounds and has no hopes of a prize, they might just quit the tournament entirely -- which can be problematic. Besides that Swiss just seems like a much better format for its flexibility in both number of players and ability to mitigate luck.

 

I was interested in doing a rapid fire of 5 minute matches (5 minutes * 2 players + 5 minutes break to recalculate). With a Swiss format you could have a ton of matches with lots of players and really get a good idea about who the best players are. However, I think I'll save that for the next one. Right now I'm trying to determine the limits on items. Either:

1.) Epic (or lower rarity) items. Each party may only have 1 of a specific item (e.g. a 3DC team could not have more than a single Runestone equipped on all characters combined)
2.) Rare (or lower rarity) items. No limit on specific items.

I'll probably put a poll up tomorrow to see what people are interested in and go with that.

 

I totally disagree.

If numbers like 10 or 20 cannot be used, 12 is a very common next choice. 12 is a composite number with 6 divisors. This is why it is used in many different things like clocks, the calendar, bible, and of course in a million online and offline games. 11 on the other hand is an uneven, non-composite number that you see almost never in anything really. What makes it a "weird" number is that it's too close to both 10 (usually best choice) and 12 (usually 2nd best choice). It's seen as either having an extra "1", or missing it.

Whatever timer you use for this particular event is of course not that important, but if we wanted to come up with a default timer that was used in all future community tournaments, which I think we should do, then I think 12 minutes is clearly a better choice.

 

But 11 is a beautiful prime number!

 

All that is meaningless to an arbitrary number used to determine time. It is an even number so it is more "appeasing" to the eye or whatever, but that's a social construct and doesn't really have any basis for this.

The only reason I'm considering 11 minutes is because I think the game should technically be 10 minutes, but not start counting for a few seconds after the first turn or the second player shouldn't be able to see his cards until the start of his turn (the first player has a slight disadvantage because he has to analysis his initial hand under the clock while his opponent does not have to). If those measures were in place, and the clock wasn't running on the first turn of card cycling, I'd leave it at 10.

 

I've posted the poll on the item restrictions. Let me know what you are interested in: https://forums.cardhunter.com/threads/poll-on-upcoming-swiss-tournament-item-restrictions.5216/

 

I like 10 minute timers.

 

Yeah, I'm going with 11 minute timers (22 minutes matches) with 8 minutes for updating the scores, getting water (you know me and water), and preparing the next match. That means each match will be in 30 minutes like SLG's last tournament. However, there is no elimination, so everyone will be playing the whole time. I'm unsure on how many rounds we will have yet, but I'm going to see what participation is like.

If this goes smoothly I'm going to try a 5 minute timer for the next tournament (probably a month or so after this one ends). Right now I'm just trying to determine what item restrictions, and it is overwhelming in one category so far so I'm pretty sure I know what it is going to be.

 

No, it's not. Do you think BM chose 20 minutes by accident? Of course not. They chose 20 minutes because it's a nice even number that also looks "right". They didn't choose for example 17 minutes and 39 seconds because that would have been weird. Same thing applies with 11 minutes, but of course on a smaller scale. You never see the number "11" in any timers or other game things, and there's a reason for that.

Instead of forming subjective opinions on what the timer "should be", or listen the opinions of individual people on the forums, I think we should look at what happened during the matches when the timer was 10 minutes. In my tournament we had multiple timeouts and multiple close calls, for example the winner winning with only 1 second left on the clock. This is a pretty clear indicator that 10 minutes was not enough, because we don't really want the timer to decide the outcome, only to speed things up a bit. If we want 30 minute rounds, only other choices are 11, 12 and maybe 13 minutes, although the latter is pushing it. Like I said earlier, instead of having different timers for each tournament, I think we should come up with a default timer for all future tournaments that everyone would learn to use. And I think this should be 12 minutes because it's a logical choice as a number, and with 12 minuter timer and 5 minute downtime, you can fit one round nicely in 30 minutes.

But it will be interesting to see what the situation will be with 11 minute timers.