Tournaments

That's a conversation to be had when people actually start hacking the game up.

Ideally, since multiplayer is probably really cloud dependent and games taking place on their servers, PA multiplayer would be difficult to hack.

Not everyone lives in the western hemisphere, you know.

Wrong.

Well, it is kind of true that the majority of the backers of PA reside in the western hemisphere.
Then again, majority does not equal entirety. I want to play too!

Was just kidding.

Split into as many timezones as needed...

I'd need to find someone to run Australian timezone tournaments who doesn't get dragged down in forum politics.

I have no idea of what kind of demand there will be when I can finalize details like support from Uber.

Wasn't believing you, just making a point.

I would be happy to organize it, or at least try to.
Should be easier to manage than the western tournaments due to a much lower player count.

Mplayer (late 90s) and then GameSpy Arcade had a dedicated team for hosting tournaments in all games (including Total Annihilation).

It was just a small group of people that were granted special admin status that would organize tournaments on a fairly small scale and offer a special client trophy icon (showed up in chat) and free upgraded subscription as a prize. This could be expanded to in-game content that costs money (such as commander skins etc.)

They were called Wizards. I joined their team and had a lot of fun with it. We basically had one guy who was dedicated to updating a website with the tournament results real-time. People entered the tournament by just joining a chat room and saying they wanted in. The tournament dates were all posted on a website. The room was hosted a few hours before the start time and that's when we started taking entries. You could also pre-register on a web form. We had a tool that would randomly match-up all the contestants that showed up. We posted the match-ups in the chat.

You could do 1v1 or 2v2 tournaments. People would go off and play their game and come back with the results. It was primarily based on the honesty system, but people had replays if there was an issue. We rarely ran into liars/people bickering. But if we did, we could join the game as a watcher, or watch a replay. By the time I went off to college, I think GameSpy killed the program. But I think it was a great program. Everyone had a lot of fun.

All this has to be part of the PA lobby system.

And by lobby, I mean external software with chat, replay vault, and tournament hosting features, not the "waiting for player" ingame lobby.

About the cheating stuff

I think it's wrong to discuss if players should be able to "cheat" in tournaments. cheatiung is always breaking the rules. So we should talk about, of and which modifications can be used.

If someones breaks the rules of the tournament he/she should be immediately disqualified.

That would be hell of a strechgoal if you ask me. We just want (for starters) organize small tournaments here. Although I like the idea of having these tools for organization. But for our small tournaments "Waiting for opponent..." is just enough.

We come back to this demand if we have hundreds of players, demanding to participate in the tournaments.

A hell of a stretch goal ? That should be the minimal stuff to have next to a ladder if you want the game to be remotely played competitively.

FAF has a tournament system (based on challonge). You log in the lobby, double click the tourney you want to play, and when it starts, you are warn and you auto-join a tournament lobby.
A new tab is available for you with the current result of the brackets.

That's trivial to do because I rely on an existing backend, but Uber has more resources than me to make their own tournament tools.

Dunno how long did they needed to develop FAF.

Well maybe I exaggerated a bit. But we already have a spectater mode. Chat lobby was not confirmed, but for an 8 man tournament the forum is enough.

Thinking in a bigger scale (competition, e-sport?), we might need them.

The tournament system took me 2 evening.

I really hope that we will have an external lobby system (that doesn't require to launch the game) with chat,...
That's what is making good communities.

ie. battle.net 2.0 doesn't have that, and even they have thousand of players online, I always feel alone on it.

I would be interested what Uber thinks about this in general (e-sports, competetive play and so on) and their plans (besides finishing the game).

Hug?

i dont want to get to much into this. But as kind of a self chosen outsider. I just wat to mention that i kind of dislike how tournaments are handled at the moment. There are so many you cant follow them all, hence getting the overview of them, sometimes they are directly interfering each others timetables.

If you look at real sports. All have kinda umbrella association. Which makes the global rules.
There are some major tournaments, some have world and or continental championship.
The higher the level of sport the stricter are the rules, what is allowed and what not. So think of horizontal and vertical division.

Also maybe tournaments per land are not needed but they may be easier for casuals to watch (language not all speak english)
Dividing into timezones maybe usefull (north/south american; europe/africa; asia + australia )

Just my 2 cents.

Will happily now watch what you are doing. :ugeek:

I was able to meet and make friend with dozen or people on GPGNET and FAF, while after 6 months, I was unable to tell another nickname than the ones of my real friends.

Shouldnt be a problem due to the webui interface of the game. probably if you can da a website for it you also can get it direct into the game.

I would prefer an external client. I don't really want to launch a big program just to chat with people.
FAF uses a standard IRC server, and dozen of people are chatting everyday on it from work or ipad.

That's the kind of thing that make great communities.

The problem is, that we don't know how many people would join tournaments, how big the possible fanbase is, who thinks about hosting and organizing tournaments. Often the big fanpages and portals are doing this kind of stuff (and more). But PA is new. The forum is the fanbase.

I don't know if there are some fanpages which host tournaments for several RTS games and are planning to do so.

But until I know otherwhise I assume we have to get this rollin' .

@thepilot Do you know what the SupCom community is thinking about that (since you are involved in FAF)?

It's easy to estimate that by looking back how GPGNET tournament system was.

There was a tournament at least every week (every 3 days when the game was released), and at least 10 players each time.

Currently on FAF, we have a Championship kind of tourney going on every week, and a big tournament a least once a week.
There was also some money tournaments last year.