How to improve to PACE tournaments

It was ok, I knew he was quite sad about he didn't make it to the invitational. After all, having a **** final round is a mess and it should have been handled better.

Download, install, connect to server and then just switch channel. It is super easy, to just connect and listen. If you wanna talk, you need to set up a push to talk or voice activation, guides are online at google.com

2:40 AM now!

I must resist ... I must go sleep. GN

I was expecting there to be irc channel that would have consisted of official signals only. Now you had to really pay attention amidst the chatter. That would ofcourse require people managing multiple channels.

Also atleast 8 times it was asked and it was confirmed that the brackets are final and then changed. You need to either look up what final means or ask about the issue in a different way.

I have larger unit selection box delays than on ground planets. It's not during the entire game but quite long spikes in mid and late game. I was able to take my hands off the mouse and keyboard while waiting.

From a guy that has played EVE Online for some time, trust me, even more than 200 people on TS at the same time works just fine.
Some corps have done even more than that.

Yeah sorry about that , won't happen again.
We were a bit too nice with the latecomers they messed everything up.
Next time we will be Firm but Fair ...

Teamspeak only, will fix some off the big problems we had this tourney I'm sure.

Will definitely solve the case where a random joined a tourney match ! And messed up some things ...

The concept of two methods of communication (IRC and VoIP) is kinda faulty.
Teamspeak obviously is better to bark out clusters of orders, but it can be quite hectic at times with loads of people speaking at the same time and participants not recognizing the leadership just by voice or accent. Besides, there were issues of accidentally leaking information by players done to players still playing.

Setting a global mute and allowing only admins/power users to write on IRC could dedicate it to official statements and announcements. Every official post would therefor be noticed and of greater weight since no "yoyo how dat game like bruh i tapped 3 pussies tonite" would be amidst them.

While it would be ideal to avoid any confusion in the first play when the situation is in flux acknowledging that instead of pretending that they are in better order than they are is vital. Thus if you say the brackets are "current" or "updated" instead of "final" that mentally prepares better for the situation than being in a constant state fo surprise.

I had 2 random people join my games but it didn't cause any more harm than them being disappointed because I was able to recognise they were not my intended opponent (this was made easy by there being a clear correlation with PA name and irc name perhaps make that a requirement?). I passworded some games and some games the joining was quick enough that it was not needed. Players came up with passwords on the fly but I guess it could make things trivially easier if there was one tournament-wide password (enforcing at the same time that games ought to be passworded).

I like most of what is suggested here.

I'm not sure about this though. Would we have to be on teamspeak all the time we're not in game?

The reason I like IRC is that you can still read previous announcements. People can -for whatever reason- not be listening to teamspeak at some point and they might miss important announcements. When they check back a bit later they are missing information and can't read up or find it anywhere either. This might have casters/TO's repeating stuff over and over.

Could some basic info still be posted to IRC or TeamSpeak chat? These things were vital for me to know as a player and were a lot of the time were very unclear when I was done playing a game.

• When does the next round start? (delays make the schedule useless)
• Are the current brackets final?
• Will I get casted?
• And finally: Are we allowed to start?

Maybe TeamSpeak should be mandatory 5-10 minutes before the next round starts? It should clear before hand though when the round will start.


Edit: Just read this and I agree with this.

This is why the rules should be clear on how the tournament is organised, when important announcements will be made, therefore when you need to be at your machine, etc. You make it clear when you're expected to be listening to TS, you make it so round finish times are announced when you start a round, etc.

I agree with this but this doesn't address my main concern: You need to be listening at that exact moment for the information to get through. What happens when someone is not listening to TS at the exact given time of the announcement? They should be able to find it somewhere where it persists like IRC. Maybe TS chat is viable for this aswell?

This is a tournament, if you can't get yourself organised to sit in your chair with some headphones at a particular time then how did you make it to the tournament at all?

Alright, but seriously: Assuming everyone has the right intentions and are doing there best to be there at all the right times, a scenario that seems possible. Mistakes will happen, I guarantee some people will miss, misunderstand, misinterpret and forget announcements or be listening at the wrong time. Also don't forget not everyone is a native English speaker, some people might have trouble understanding oral English. How would the TO/casters deal with this?

My suggestion still is textual announcements that people can check back to and reread at any time.

Also, one thing that we need to handle is that the top players right now will most likely be the top players in two weeks. If a top player has already won the invitational and wins the tourny again next week, then the invitation should be passed down to someone else. Otherwise it'll just be the same people winning and getting the invitational.

Here are my problems with naval

1. Slow turning radius and slow movement makes it impossible to take your forces to react to a threat.
2. Generic complaint about wreckages and bad pathing.
3. The hit boxes for the ships are so large that if it makes it difficult impossible to select the factories when ships are leaving the port.

I'm not sure this is true but I feel like naval factories are a lot cheaper than their land counterparts and makes it really easy to spam T1 naval. Coupled with the fact that the T1 AA ships also target land units makes it a lot better than the AA abilities of land units. I know that my opponent in the naval battle could not use his T2 air to win against my T1 ship spam and had to find another way to break my forces.

Yes, it is terrible how the most skilled individuals keep winning at tests of skill. How about other people try and get better and so take their slot that way?

midspark might have a point though:
How is that invite stuff actually handled? I've accumulated multiple invite by now I think.
Is everyone who just got one invite in one tourny invited? In that case my extra invite basically took away an invite from somebody else.

Best as I can tell, PACE doesn't know either I suspect they'll simply be arranging everyone by score and then working their way down the list until they're out of slots.

I'll be happy to take it off your hands.

This might be a solution in search of a problem, but I wonder how many colour blind people we have, and how many have difficulty making out the symbols on certain colours. Some of the lighter colours like white are a pain in the ***. I wonder if PACE shouldn't mandate that players choose from a specific selection of the colours.

Putting this out there for discussion.

Re the argument over Teamspeak and not hearing announcements - it should be noted that Teamspeak also has a text chat functionality

It has always been my belief not to restrict people because of someone else.

Unless we have a VERY high rate(20-25% at least) of color blindness(which may be towards different colors) I wouldn't even begin to think about restrictions.

Players get to choose the colors they like, it's their choice. We shouldn't have to spend hours trying to figure out what exact colors CB people may or may not be able to see(which may have a lot of conflicts).

If you're color blind, I'm sorry, it sucks. But I will no more cater to you than, blind people, deaf people, etc.

So mandates on colors? Nope from me.