League Test

I've advertised the test build, and the leagues test, on the Loot Fairy Tracker page. Hopefully this will increase participation.

 

Is a dev needed for starting the league ? Any chance of weekend tests or a league auto-scheduler engine ? Like have it running every x hrs on test server ?

 

This all looks incredibly cool. I can definitely see trying this out.

Also, on the chest prizes page "Attack of the Artifacts"...

 

And lo did the League feature convince me to sign up for a test account.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'll just be killing Greenfang.

Edited P.S.: Will this test League require fake gold or fake pizza?

 

Doesn't seem so, it says "Free" on the league Enter button.

 

Hmm. Immediately after defeating Greenfang, and with no multiplayer party yet, I went over there to click on the new icon. Gary popped up to tell me to create a party (no message about "Free" entry, or indeed any League information). Jon says that it's a fixed party League: will my situation resolve when the League actually begins, or will I be forced to get a multiplayer party first even though I won't use it?

 

I noticed this too, I'm guessing you need to have a mp party (not necessarily a starter pack). Not sure if Jon intends to change this.

 

Attended tonight's test, some general feedback.

1) It was fun, generally liked the format ideas and the way it worked. Most of the issues were relatively minor.

2) Ok, so when the pod starts everyone is there and ready to play. So it seems like games were quick to startup, and the league finished in about 40 minutes.
- Personally, I'd like to see the league end when all the mandatory games are complete, rather than using an arbitrary clock count-down. We'd all finished and were sitting around.
- I'm on the fence about allowing games beyond the required games. (the functionality wasn't working in the test but we discussed that it would only add to your tiebreaker value). Seems to me like this would simply reward faster players (of which I am one), they will be able to get more games in and build up their tiebreaks values while slower players finish their regular games. i don't know this is needed...


3) You already know that for this to be a success you need relatively consistent leagues kicking off
- Keep the pods small and the leagues short, this should make it easier to find players.
- At times when you know you have large amounts of MP players, you could consider running larger/longer leagues
- Leagues that cost gold will naturally have higher interest levels, though I really hope you give pizza leagues a good try to see if they can find a following.

In general the format was a little odd. 1 hour to signup, but as pods filled they fired off immediately. The signup period ran for an hour, than another 3 hours for the league?
- This was confusing, the pod I joined started immediately, and completed in 40 minutes. At that point we couldn't start another pod or do much of anything.
- When a league ends, I assume it'll return you to the pool to rejoin later leagues?

 

I think generally speaking the idea is to have leagues in the future that have more rounds, or longer rounds, so that the signup period not filling the gameplay time makes sense. The exact ratios will of course need to vary depending on players & event specifics.

I think it'd be sweet if there could be multiple leagues going at a time. I don't know if this functionality is planned, but even if the playerbase can't support it now, it'd be great if at some point in the future I could click on the Leagues icon and have a choice of events to join.

 

Based on when I play there's at least 30-40 people in MP. (I'm sure this varies substantially at other times)

If leagues were kept small, say 5-6 players, I'd hope they could run a couple a night. Based on what I saw testing tonight a league like that would probably only take 45 minutes - 1.5 hours. if you could get 20-25% of those in the queues, you should have enough people.

That was always the beauty of the drafts on MtGO, they were firing up all the time because they only require a small amount of people.

I'm not sure if that's the plan, or if they plan scheduled events like tonight? Everyone who wants in to a league shows up at a set time and joins up for a longer running event.

 

I agree with you about what would be awesome. I was making recommendations to Jon in lobby chat based on my experience with MtGO.

 

Yeah, longer leagues sound cool—provided that we could have multiple leagues going on at once. A long league probably wouldn't be worth it if it prevented players from participating in short events. Of course, we should try many configurations.

 

I was under the impression that every League would be able to be joined by both the means of pizza or gold, not that there would be separate leagues. Or at least that's how I took this line from the Wiki: "Leagues will cost gold or pizza to join, which will be deducted from your account as soon as you join." Though I guess that line could be taken either way. Is there anyone more in the know that can clarify?

 

Basically, there is no set-in-stone answer right now. The current idea is that there will be some gold leagues and some pizza leagues but nothing has been finalized.

 

One league at a time doesn't seem to be that big of an issue. Longer signup periods are a great idea, in many ways the league only needs to extend for an hour or two after the signup period ends to allow time for the final pods to end.

So currently, had the additional games worked last night, we would have had an additional 3+ hours to keep playing within our pod to improve our tiebreakers. That seems extremely excessive when it only took 45 minutes to complete the (admittedly small) pod games. League games were quick for the same social reasons that drafts work on MtGO, the players are active and there to play for that hour or two, so you tend to get through all your games pretty fast. This is the virtue of small pods, it only takes 5-6 players to create a pod, and since they are all active at the same time the pod runs very quickly.

Given your existing design, I imagine you could run a few short/small pod tournaments each day. For example; night time hours in North America seem to have a decent amount of players, so you could run a signup for an hour, plus 1 more hour of league play time, and probably fit multiple of those into an evening. You could probably run 12 of these throughout a day and simply track interest levels at each time.

Alternatively if you "released" players once their pod games were complete, than you could run longer leagues that allowed players to compete in multiple pods. This way you could keep a league signup running for long period, and just allow pods to fill, run to completion, end and deliver rewards many times within that period. Players could use the MP forums to try to drum up support for a pod.

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By all means please try longer leagues and larger pods. I just think you'll have a much harder time filling leagues that require more than an hour or two of time commitment, that's the magic number for most online games. And it's no different than getting adult friends over, a couple of short games is a relatively easy task, where as getting a group to commit to a 6-8 hour game is nearly impossible. Even when everyone loves the game it's simply a scheduling nightmare.

 

The info page for Artifact Anachy says third place is worth 1 artifact chest and 2 magnificent artifact chests, but when I logged in today it says I won 9 chests, and the chest shop shows 8 artifact chests and 1 magnificent artifact chest waiting for me. I only played one league (the one that started right after last night's reset), but I had my free daily chest still open when I entered the shop.