Tournaments

Knickles said it wasn't the amount of people, but scheduling. And scheduling increases in complexity the more people you involve which SMNC required.

SMNC community is also entirely different. Early days were hallmarked by elitist cliques born out of the alpha testing group. Probably did more damage than good in terms of community. It unfortunately set the tone for the entire time they played, which only ended as the game died down a bit.

Now is a good time to start talking about this because a playable build will come sometime during the summer and it will probably be the best time to organize events, as the enthusiasm will probably be at its highest. People will also be scrambling to find the OP build/strategy of the week and organized competitive events would help mature the metagame.

I think alpha/beta 8 mans with some forum recognition could be popular and help improve the process before the game gets released.

To make big tournaments happen, the game must be very competitive, wich means the balance must be good, many strategies must be viable, the game shouldnt be luck dependent, and imo the most important, everyone should have the same conditions!
Everyuser has to upload scripts they use so others can use them to OR the tournament gives you scripts you are allowed to use and no others are.

My idea is to start the scope very small and work up from there. We'd be building something that does not exist.

What do you mean by scripts?

Same conditions would be the same game. You can't really check or enforce scripts, so that's not possible.

While keeping the game balanced and competitive is ideal, it doesn't determine how successful the tournament scene is.

They're talking about Macro Scripts Polynomial. Somewhere Neutrino had said that he'd be fine with letting players create Scripts to aid them in the game, like unit orders, build orders and so on.

Definitely sure that it would be "Bad Form" to use them in a competitive game where money is on the line... but unless some one is checking...

I was also thinking about scripts wich would "improve" the unit AI by giving them more complex orders. Zero-K got alot of community made scripts
What i am saying is just... they should either be not allowed or given to everybody.
If money is involved there should be an extra client to check. Some sort of Anti cheat.(Used by some external ladders).

What i also think would be some nice Idea is getting the game on ESL.

If I run events, considering how close Uber is the community, vanilla or bust would be non negotiable. (mods and stuff)

But yeah, can't enforce scripts.

We have to prevent that. I guess a much said word was "noob". And the "elites" commanded the newbies around, only showing them their mistakes, but not realy helping them to fix that? (Sure not all of the alpha/beta players)

I enjoy RTS communities, because they are more mature. I recognize in the last year, that games with a young community have a very harsh tone. But that's another topic and I don't think that this will be a big problem here.

Although I agree with you, we should also plan ahead to the "normal" release. When everyone can play the game. We as early backers and preorders (galactic) are hyped and encouraged enough to play the game a long time. Most will be pretty loyal (if Uber doesn't make second ME3 Ending or SimCity/Diablo3 start) and play the game a long time.

The release and the "normal" costumers are important. If we can make some funny and entertaining tournaments at release, we may become a bigger fanbase, resulting in more players available for tournaments, a bigger variety in the opponents strength and so on.

I hope someone understands what I'm writing here. It's thinking a bit ahead (perhaps too far?).

My basic plan would be Alpha/Beta: Small community-tournaments. Most people who are of Alpha/Beta are at the forum anyway.

Release: Several (fun) tournaments for the new players (including alpha/beta players or ot is discussible). Would be nice to have a small support from Uber here (Tweet or Facebook news, showing that we are doing this is enough).

After release: See what the future brings.

Here I get the idea of making a youtube channel, showing tactics, giving beginner tipps of some experienced players. But that goes maybe too far atm.

That sounds great.

Although I agree with you, we should also plan ahead to the "normal" release. When everyone can play the game. We as early backers and preorders (galactic) are hyped and encouraged enough to play the game a long time. Most will be pretty loyal (if Uber doesn't make second ME3 Ending or SimCity/Diablo3 start) and play the game a long time.

The release and the "normal" costumers are important. If we can make some funny and entertaining tournaments at release, we may become a bigger fanbase, resulting in more players available for tournaments, a bigger variety in the opponents strength and so on.

I hope someone understands what I'm writing here. It's thinking a bit ahead (perhaps too far?).

My basic plan would be Alpha/Beta: Small community-tournaments. Most people who are of Alpha/Beta are at the forum anyway.

Release: Several (fun) tournaments for the new players (including alpha/beta players or ot is discussible). Would be nice to have a small support from Uber here (Tweet or Facebook news, showing that we are doing this is enough).

After release: See what the future brings.

Here I get the idea of making a youtube channel, showing tactics, giving beginner tipps of some experienced players. But that goes maybe too far atm.

That sounds great.

Best would be vanilla. Good would be a checksum like SupCom had, to veryfy uses the same gamefiles.

I didn't thought much about that, because I don't know how the game works in that way at the moment.


That's some wall of text of me. And I don't know if someone understands (I hope so ).

What are your opinions? Did i went too far with my thoughts? Did you understand everything? Nothing?

Tell me!

tl;dr I'm too lazy to do this.

Errr... can someone explain to my what vanilla is ?

The base software, without modification. You can read more about that at

Wikipedia.

But this also excludes developer updates. So maybe vanilla was the wrong term, but I think you know now what I wanted to say .

Very fancy haha,

Yeah I like the idea of tournaments, I mean, MLG Planetary Annihilation is a long shot, but friendly matches organised here on the forums? Sounds fun!

Ahhh thanks xD would have never imagined that vanilla means this^^

Well about 'cheating' there probably shouldn't be any limits during the alpha/beta tournaments. We want as many bugs and exploits to be flushed out as possible before release.

As to scripts... well I am pro automation player so I would like scripts to be as freely used as possible. We will have to see what kind of scripting PA will allow and where the precedence will be set for ladder and tourny games whether they are set by UberEnt or the community. Uber might not be inclined to develop powerful anti-script systems since they've said that the server-client architecture should be a pretty good anti-cheat system in itself.

I think once we get a playable build we could devise some more specifics. I do like the idea of having a qualifying season for a big a$$ tournament. I'm pretty sure I could communicate with Uber some sort of ideas, in game and out of game. Forum badges, for example?

Alpha/Beta could be Season 0 since we'd be figuring out what the heck we are doing.

All of us who are interested and have some knowledge of how tournaments/organization works should get together and discuss it as soon as the game reaches a playable level on a competitive scale.

The sooner we are able to get tests going, the better the quality of the tournaments will be from the beginning of the full release.

As for cheating perhaps Uber could add an option for cheating? I don't know how that works but if it would be possible, adding a 'cheating=off' setting for a tournament hosting would be a good idea.

I really like the idea of a Season 0 during alpha/beta (there probably won't be a distinction once we get a playable) for casual competition and to work out the bugs.

Err... what? Cheating should not be possible. That should be the goal. Unless you mean inbuilt cheating like giving yourself units or messing with gravity and planetary bodies and so on which you should be able to do in sandbox.

Yes I didn't word myself properly, I meant that, having lots of tests before the actual full game is out and then once it is out, we already know how to set everything up and get proper tournaments going for all fans :mrgreen:

Well that is exactly what I mean, people should not be able to have any way of cheating, I'm not a modder or a developer so I have no idea how those things work but I'm sure people will have a way of cheating and avoiding the system, especially since the game will have lots of build patterns and methods(scripts that were mentioned already). That should be prevented, I thought maybe it could be blocked by Uber, if that is possible.
But then again it would be interesting to have a cheaters tournament(not spawn units and that stuff) rather than have people play using their building methods and speeding up their initial growth with scripts, I think it would be interesting to see that. Of course that would count as recreational, for fun tournament, similar to how FAF has the engyredesign mod where everything is cheaper and all battles have experimental battles and chaos.

I'll start listing out requirements and scope in the first post and we can revise as time goes on and good ideas formulate.

What do you mean with build patterns? How can that be cheating? If there is an exploit it should preferably be fixed with a patch.
Scripts that enhances your control of your units is an open debate whether or not it should be allowed in ladder and tourney games. We will have to see where the consensus arrives.

This sounds more like a mod. Rather than holding an 'exploit/cheat' tournament you might wanna try and patch it instead.
You could of course have an AI tournament if enough people are into to that.