ToA Feedback (2014)
The tournament was pretty heavily changed from the format of previous years, so here's my thoughts on most of the changes:
Things that I liked:
- No A & B Events: I loved this change. In previous years, I think that the A&B events led themselves to too much gaming of the system. It wasn't a case of "This is an event for the Americans, and this is the event for the overseas players." It was more like "Log on and look at the A-event. Notice that Eldreth, Iluv, Risca, Ahkan all joined FFA-A. Pass on this event, set alarm for 4am, crush the FFA-B."
- No tiered events: Tiered events didn't help real newbies and lowbies gain credits and participate, it just made it a cheap way for experienced veterans to boost up an alt while simultaneously giving the admin three times the body events to run.
- Removal of the 1v1: Typically, I felt that the 1v1 was far too heavily weighted in terms of points, as well as being far too favorable to certain classes(Defiler, Monk). It was also a particularly contentious event, with things like forcing poisoned food and tons and tons of scheduling problems. Glad to see it go.
- Addition of the Circle events: Loved these. They provided a great reason for everybody to get involved in the Tournament, even if they weren't bothering with solo events, and they're very inclusive. Doesn't matter how good or bad you are, you can pitch in and help.
My complaints:
- The rules were not enforced: "You must be in a city or council to join the circle events." Garryn lets Menoch join the circle FFAs. "You can't hide inside cities for PK gemhunts." Garden ignores people hiding inside cities because they've only been in there a few minutes. Also, don't say "You can't hide inside cities in this PK event" and then let people hide directly outside the gates in the siegeline for ten minutes at a time, because that's still hiding in city defenses you rules-lawyering-SOB.
- Quizzes were slooooooooow: A 20-something question quiz should not take an hour to complete. That's an hour of sitting there waiting for a question, unable to do anything but also unable to tab out or get up since you might miss a question.
- Quizzes are CTRL-F fests: Here's how you take first in a quiz. Save every events post to a text file. Add every helpfile to the end of it. Read the question, CTRL-F, type in a keyword. Yawn. If you have a friend in the quiz, get them on Skype or something so you can both scan the text file, because more eyes on the file increases the odds you'll find the answer
- Too much poopsocking: So, wait, the last bashing event with all the mini-events was a thing that people really enjoyed? Let's throw that out and have a solid week of bashing, one straight event! 28 people bashed enough to just get all the participation credits. Only 52 people bashed up the second set. The event was too damn long and the benchmarks were too damn high.
- -PK +Share Gemhunts: Make Gemhunts +share +PK or -share -PK, but please do not make them +share -PK, because then you have people 'accidentally' dying to guards and swinging the scoreboard 2k+ points at a time. Really, the entire point of sharing is so that your circle can pick one person to win it. Since the circle as a whole would be the winner already in a circle event, sharing is entirely unnecessary.
Things I would like to see:
- Quizzes: I'd like to maybe try a few quizzes with more questions and much shorter answer times. I'd rather the winner be the person who knew 10 of 30 answers than the person whose team could CTRL-F 18 of 20.
- 4v4: This probably does not need to last 3 days. I'd like to find some way to cut a day off of this. Preferably, I'd like to use Round Robin to cut some teams out of the contest, because I like Round Robin as a way to feel out my enemies before the real tournament begins, and because it's a good way to determine the "participation points" teams that are basically just time-wasters with no real shot at victory.
- Arts: Open the arts contests up a few weeks beforehand, so you don't have to post begging for approvers to approve.
And lastly, getting a paragraph of its own... Scheduling. I know that you have players all over the world and that you are therefore obliged to schedule events with that in mind. With that said, can you PLEASE stop scheduling goddamned Circle events at 2am CST(3am EST)? These are circle events, with potential consequences for everybody on our side, and so some of us feel compelled to wake up/stay up and make an appearance rather than let our buddies down and lose the event. This isn't a case of "The Aussies play that game for their circle", it's a case of "The Americans stay up and play for their circle", and it kind of sucks. Yes, having them all at US primetime sucks for overseas players, but honestly? Everything else in these games is already based around US times so it always sucks for them and they're used to it. 
Yes, yes, I know you say you 'probably aren't running it like this next year and it'll be some big RP event", but the key word there is "probably". Also, I will be very sad if you remove the 4v4 and the circle games.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
Comments
There used to be a joke contest in the past, but they stopped doing it because the jokes were awful and because so many of the jokes ended up being insulting. Everybody wanted to get rid of the contest.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
The round-robin portion of the 4v4 was particularly useful when we had more than 10 teams show up. Now that we have fewer teams, it makes constructing the brackets much easier. What I really hate about the bracket is how difficult it becomes to rank more than the top 2 teams.
What if we got rid of the bracket and did an extended round-robin. Each team fights every other team multiple times (like a baseball or basketball season). Your final ranking is determined by your win-loss record. What do you think?
I'm not sure what to do about timing. Each team fought in at least 11 matches this year. At 10 minutes per match, you're looking at at least 2 hours of play without counting on downtime while you wait for your next opponent to become available. Would it be better if we scheduled it for one big 3-hour session on one night? 2 2-hour sessions? I liked spreading it across different nights because it gave me time to wrap my head around any improvements that could be made or any code that needed to be adjusted, and also because it gave teams time to discuss strategies and break down their previous matches. However, I'm aware that this can create scheduling problems.
In a perfect world, how would you guys run the 4v4 from start to finish?
This is one of the events that just has to take a certain amount of time and there's no getting around it.
One problem is that scheduling around a contest that's spread out over three days is problematic, what with varying work schedules, school schedules, and social events. The contest might take an hour, but I can't get somebody to swap one hour of a shift with me, so if I need to manipulate my schedule around this, it's a fairly large amount of work. Hell, on day 3, I'd have rearranged my schedule for about 20 minutes of playtime. With this in mind, One long block is a lot easier to account for since I'm dealing with time in evening sized blocks and not hour sized blocks, but that runs pretty late on the east coast in addition to being a lot of time sucked up in one event. I think that this year, I'd have liked to split the difference at 2 days at ~1.5 hours each. It doesn't run as late as a one-day, doesn't require me to schedule as many days as a three-day, and it leaves us with a break so we can reevaluate strategies and brainstorm between phases.
A lot of this depends on team size, though; if we got more teams, we couldn't fit it into two days; the more teams we get, the more unwieldy this gets and the more games we have to play and the harder this event gets to run. Oddly, increasing the amount of teams increases the scheduling hassles, and increasing scheduling hassles decreases the amount of teams playing. Juran and I almost called Participation Credits off this year due to scheduling difficulties. If you guys hadn't rescheduled the 4v4 days we'd have dropped, and we love the 4v4.
That aside, the biggest improvement to the 4v4 would honestly be working out some way to narrow the teams down earlier than we do. While "Participation Credits" is a serious team, there's a lot of participation credits teams who just want the default "thanks for entering" points.
I don't mean to sound like an ass when I say this, but the truth is that a lot of the teams that make it through to the brackets are basically punching bags. They're participation point teams who don't have a shot at winning. Getting matched up against Culture Club in the first round of the bracket was basically like getting a bye, except we had to show up for it. We could have cut an entire day off of the 4v4 this year if we'd just culled the bottom 4 teams after the round robin and the results wouldn't have changed that much, if at all.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
As far the rest of my ToA complaints, I agree with
@Iniar
Combat knowledge would be worse than any other quiz because there's maybe 6 people who know the answers to most of those questions. Don't you read these forums?
I always figured scavenger hunts were more 'area knowledge' quiz mechanic. It's hard to ask historical questions that are relevant without giving someone a ctrl-f advantage. Best question of the entire tournament were throwbacks to the old justice league, WHICH YOU GOT WRONG. It was not a ctrl-f question. It also doesn't help that there are like 0 people who are ents that were around back in the old days and have no context with which to asks questions. Also, considering we tried to ctrl-F the tournament, it's hard to do without context if you ask the right sword of questions. I had to laugh when people answered off an early events post because it was the first ctrl-f example of the name in the question, but contextually the event in question happened 100 years later.
I am sure that the AFK tracking and tests were done in good faith, but it's not really believable when top ranked event goers are staring at a shard wall for an hour straight because they totally weren't AFK, just really admiring the wall. And it's hard to fully fault them either, because it's entirely what this kind of event encourages. There will never really be an alternative so long as 168+ hour bashing marathons can net you over $450USD in credits.
Smaller, focused bashing competitions, perhaps with modifiers and extra challenges, would be my only real suggestion. Otherwise, just nix it, because it's not fooling anyone.
‘Every sword’s a weight to carry. Men don’t see that when they pick ’em up. But they get heavier with time.”
I think it might also help the judging process if you trimmed it down to just one flat design per character, per section. That leaves crafters with two designs to come up with (Wearable/Utility), and cuts out an excess 4 designs per person for judges to consider.
Edit: Not seeding, but ranking all of the teams to determine tournament point awards.
I like the idea of a theme both because I dislike the idea of people getting all year to polish pieces and because I like the idea of having to design within constraints.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
I do like the entries this past ToA. They were well done.
I don't want to bar anyone from competing for top ranks, that's Ahkan's dumb idea.
Here's how I want it to work:
Under this system you play every other team at least once and every team has a chance to go as far as their performance can take them, but you cut a lot of teams from the final bracket. That saves a lot of time, since a 4v4 single elimination is 2 extra rounds of fights, at most.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
Tbh, I don't see the point in describing sets. Dark bracers/boots/underpants/kilt/shirt. Done. I think sets are a waste of everyone's time in so far as to say workload x 7. I also don't see why you get to double-dip in one trade skill. I thought the old system of "One trade skill, on submission" was pretty badass. I'd also like to see a lightning round where you have like 1-3 hours. Jesse shows up says "The theme is rainbows and demons, you have three hours. Go." That would be badass to see what you guys improv as well as when you have two weeks of preparation and 8 years of hoarding.
My only real complaint regarding this year's Tournament was the unrewarding nature of the circle-based events. While I wouldn't want to see any kind of system where everyone who played wins (looking at you, CTF rewards), the lack of any existing reward for participation or rankings below first was rather discouraging to many players. While I know I risk sounding like a conspiracy theorist, I'm sure we all know which circle was slated to win the inter-circle competition. Definitely a hard-earned victory, but not exactly a surprising one, and the lack of incentive for anyone but the winners extinguished the desire to participate for several players. If the chance to participate in the games is supposed to be the incentive for people to get involved, it'd be nice to have a different set of games/events rather than fielding the exact same thing as every other in-game celebration.
In short, not really sure how to reward non-winners without making it seem like cuddly "everyone is a winner" bs, but the infrequency of the event makes "at least we gave it our best!" a poor consolation to losing teams.