Automated Tournaments work very well for The Banner Saga: Factions. Here is a brief explanation: http://bannersaga.gamepedia.com/Tournament For Cardhunter, I would charge 5 Pizza to enter the tourney, and you get 8 Pizza if you complete X amount of games within a 7 day window of the tourney. Buy charging 5 Pizza to join, people will want to get that 8 back and be more apt to play the required amount of tourney games to do so. If you complete the required amount of games and you finish over .500 you get more pizza, and so forth for a higher finish and even more for 4th, 3rd, runner up and winner of course. All you do is click a button just like you can click for yay or nay to computer opponents. If you click yay, then it will search for other tourney opponents before it searches for regular ranking games. A tourney leaderboard will show where everyone is doing with a separate ELO for the tourney. This will fire up the multiplayer boards by bringing finality and cohesiveness to the rankings, which is lacking now. Who really is the best? Who will dominate the tournaments. These are fun questions for competitive multiplayer. I would rotate two types of tourneys. One would be straight up cardhunter. You put your deck together click tourney play and the engine finds you an opponent also in the tourney. The other type would be always changing. Maps of course would be changing every week, but for these alternative weeks you could say no dwarves, or an all priest tournament, basically limiting class / race or card types here and there and see who has the versatility to remain viable in competition. I have no idea if this is a coding nightmare but it seems to work quite well in The Banner Saga: Factions. Nobody would have to worry about appointments and commitments or flaking. You sit down like you always do, click play and go. The fun part is the game could say "tournament" by it which will increase spectators possibly, and also we can all check out the Tournament rankings and see who is dominating that week. I think this will increase the fun of multiplayer because every week there is a #1, a #2, #3 etc which is sorely lacking. The ratings system has no finality to it, no "playoffs" just an endless fluctuating number. Every six weeks for so you could do a super tournament that costs 25 Pizza with no Pizza returned for completing any games. Instead you give much higher levels of Pizza for the top 25 finishers. Just some thoughts the main thing is an automated tourney, if its not a coding nightmare, I think would go a long way in capturing the imagination of the players.
Definitely, if tournaments were coded into the game it would also reduce the headaches we community organizers have to endure in order to create the experience
I appreciate your suggestion and overall thought put into this. Like you, I think that automated tournaments are a great idea and you made some great points. It's not the first thread to suggest something like this and I have one gripe with it: Why is everyone so quick to offer the entry fee for these things to be pizza slices? What's wrong with gold buy-ins? It works for Hearthstone and Blizzard isn't exactly known for it's philanthropy... BM will make their own decision for sure, and they don't strike me as naive but I feel any suggestion we make should be as friendly to us, the people who play the game, as possible and having to constantly pay to participate in tournaments seems greedy to me, even at the low, low cost of 5 slices.
Note that the OP's suggestion would actually net 3 pizza for all participants, assuming they complete the required number of matches for the tournament:
Fair enough, still I object to the very notion of pizza entry fee. Wouldn't mind it being either gold or pizza but just pizza is not cool imo.
How much gold, 100, 200, 300? What would happen if there was only one other person on to play? Winner determined solely by a numebr of games won? These are all fairly large issues. I really do want to see more events, even a small semi-automated one like this could work every week. Get people playing more, and returning to play more if they haven't in a while. Addictive gameplay that offers useful in-game rewards is a good idea.
Gold wouldn't work as well as Pizza. You want them to feel a slight obligation to complete the required number of games within the time frame. Earning a few pizza vs losing a few would serve that purpose better than gold, unless it was a substantial amount, however a substantial amount of gold would deter others. If there was only one other person on to play you would play them, if you hadn't already, it would probably be a cap where you can only play each person x amount of tourney games per tourney, if nobody eligible on, you would play non tourney multi like now. Winner is determined by best ELO ranking within tourney games. So basically its who performs the best vs the other higher ranked players. One guy may play fifty games and have the most victories, but since he loses to the better players, doesn't win the tourney, because the other guy played thirty games and never lost. So what makes this so special? Well its like a snapshot of multi player dominance every week. It gives us something to shoot for, something to point at, aim for. Limiting the tourney games per each opponent gives the games a more ominous feel, "this is it!" Also, consistent high finishers and tourney winners and runners up will in my opinion being to eclipse the Leaderboards or live rankings in terms of perception of skill level which really doesn't mean anything unless it does, to you. Its fun. What I think would be super cool is to have special costumes for the top three finishers each week. Making 27 costumes (three classes times three races times three finishers) is asking a lot, so maybe it could be something where you can code in Gold, Silver and Bronze to existing costumes, but it only lasts for that week. The real point is, is to add meaning to your multi player experience which increases the fun, the drama. Maybe it would even be possible to do multiple entries and have different types of awards. For example, you have your ideal team that you simply dominate with, then you have your all elf wizard team you enjoy experimenting with. If you are a total cardhunter enthusiast and can handle playing that many games within a week, then maybe you could enter both teams. Different types of awards could be "Best all elf team, best peasant (nothing above uncommon) team, best all drawback card team" etc I suppose though, multiple entries per person per week would inevitably cause people to have one real team and ten other entires that they tank to their buddy, and buddy returns the favor. Anything that can go wrong, will. I would also keep the online chest system going within the tourney. You could simply add tourney wins to the regular pursuit of mult player chests so they would count the same way. I believe the devs want to add online tourney but have so much they are working on now that it is not a priority. An assumption on my part.
Tournaments are something we're definitely thinking of, but (and this is me reading into the mind of Farbs, Jon, and company) I don't believe *automated* tournies are part of it at the moment. I think they're working on ways to make it easier to run and to keep track of.
