Right now, real-time tournaments get deleted an hour after they were created if they don't start.

Before that rule existed, what usually happened with real-time tournaments is someone would create one, it would take weeks/months to fill, and by the time it started 99% of the players weren't around at that moment and got booted.

That was obviously broken, so the one-hour-delete rule was added to ensure that a tournament either starts or doesn't in a timely fashion.

However, this makes it difficult to start a real-time tournament, and they happen rarely. I think there is an opportunity for more real-time tournaments, as there are a lot of players who mostly play real-time games.

Right now, the way that successful RT tournaments works is the creator schedules it in advance. For example, someone posts on the forum "RT tournament this Saturday at 3pm!" and everyone who is interested shows up.

WarLight could formalize this process. Say, for example, when creating a RT tournament, it asks you the day/time it will start. The tournament creator specifies the date, and the start date and a countdown gets announced on the tournament page. Then people can be invited and join as normal. If it's full when that time comes, it starts and plays out as normal.

Of course, people could join it and forget to show up, but they'd just be booted and the tournament would continue. At least they knew exactly when it was scheduled to start (and they can always decline if they change their mind).

The nice thing about letting people join in advance is that you know your spot is reserved. There have been occurrences where too many people show up for a RT tournament, and some of them get left out. This would eliminate that.

This may lead to a problem with people not turning up as a lot of people will join in advance and then forget about it or plan something else and not go back and withdraw from the tournament. I believe if you make a tournament of 32 players or something like that and have it open to anyone who wants to join, in the first round you may have a boot rate as high as 50% from people forgetting about it or having planned to do something else and not going back and declining from the tournament and you don't exactly want an RT tournament with half the people in the first round failing to turn up.

I think a good way to promote RT tournaments would be to make them more accessible for people to see and join them. You could do a similar thing to the RT ladder and have a message on people dashboards saying 'there is currently 1 RT tournament running- join now'. this would lead to people joining who are playing at that moment and reduce the first round boot rate and speed up how long it takes to fill up. The only problem with this is that people wont know in advance that the tournament is being created so guess people would still have to post in the forum wen there creating RT tourneys to see if people are interested.

As I've already mentioned, challonge has a very useful feature of checking in. People register for the tournament, but they have to check in 30 minutes before the tournament starts. That way a tournament serves as an automati lobby. Of course that is useful if we have an absolute date/time when the tournament starts, challonge solves this by making automatic adjustments to the number of players and randomly setting byes. So for example if 24 people register for a single-elimination tournament, initially we could have 32 players brackets with 8 byes, but then after check-in phase (which can be longer than 30 minutes, but it's unlikely it's necessary) suppose only 15 people checked in. That way the tournament will set up a 16-player tournament with automatic byes. I believe that is very decent system for rt tournaments. Again other features like setting best of x series as rounds would be greatly appreciated.

yes, byes would be a cool feature for host. When we were used to do WGL, happened lot of time that we have to nter manually some alts for start the toruney and surrender in the next match.

talking about what fizzer was suggesting it would be nice if there were some _reserve_ spots. Even if all spots on the tournament are filled you could still join in reserve. So if on the actual tournament start the person is a no show, the active reserve would get pushed forward in their place. I'm thinking 5 minutes before the RT tournament starts the user would get a popup box or warning message saying "RT tournament you signed in for is about to start, are you still with us?"

automatic tournament sizing and added bye accounts would also be very welcome.

also i would like to see a RT tournament summary list with a timer countdown for each of them on the multiplayer dashboard. so people know what RT tournaments are coming up and exactly when they are actually starting.

How about putting open real time tournaments on the dashboard?

For coin tournaments, we have additional restrictions that other sites don't have because coins are worth real money. For legal reasons, we can't change the size of the tournament or do byes in coin tournaments.

However, when people are investing real money in a tournament, I don't think you'll see a big boot rate like you would on another game where they have no commitment.

Having a reserve list and "checking in" could work.

Yes, some tournaments will be advertised on the MP Dashboard, but if there are a lot you'll still have to go to Tournaments to see the full list.

To me this is fine.... as long as we can still make real time tournaments the old way.

Last night, on a spur of the moment, I made a real time tournament. It started with a lobby and then I made the real thing...... I dont want all tournaments to have to be scheduled.


This brings up a suggestion for real time tournaments. Most real time tournaments are made as a "LOBBY". If we could have a built in timer for real time tournaments, such that, when the timer ends, Warlight automatically creates a Tournamnet and invites the players who accepted the lobby.....

have some options that allows to choose between:
- a fixed number of players that must be filled, or tournament is cancelled
- resize number of players to fit most possible number of active players
- maximum ammount of byes allowed

this way you can force your law settings for the coin tournaments, but have the rest available for people who just want to play a no-coin tournament asap

looks great fizzer.

will seeded be implement?
i think for no coin RT tourney, it is pretty cool can change the size of tourney.

agree with PS.

I think seeding can be interesting but if it is automatic seeding then it would be very flawed. If it is manual seeding then it will take forever to agree upon seedings unless it is a small group of well known players. Even then I would imagine it would be tough.

RT tournaments need flexibility, you want to be able to make a tournament with any number of players- preferably without byes (that's no fun experience, not to mention coin games legal issue). You also predictability in terms of when a tournament starts (and ends!).

I think that's very hard- if not impossible in the current system. One way might be to add a new kind of tournaments, I think a swiss-system tournament might work for this.
For those who don't know what swiss system is; here's a description of it:

" Swiss system may be used when it is not feasible to play as many rounds as required in a round-robin, but it is not desired to eliminate any competitors before the end of the tournament. There are a predetermined number of rounds and a predetermined scoring system. All competitors play in each round unless there is an odd number of competitors.

Competitors are paired based on approximately how well (or poorly) they have performed so far. In the first round, competitors are paired either according to some pattern [Seeding possible, for those that want that] or randomly (according to common practice in that type of game or sport). In subsequent rounds, competitors are sorted according to their cumulative scores and are assigned opponents with the same or similar score up to that point. Some adjustments may be made to assure that no two players ever oppose each other twice or to even out advantages a player may have due to chance."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss-system_tournament


Additionally I agree with a few points already mentioned;
Reserve spots
Pre-registration, check-in before tourney begins
Show it on the dashboard

Edited 3/19/2015 20:53:46

Swiss tournaments would be an awesome solution, and I've been encouraging Warlight to make them for over a year now

Not only automatically seeded, host can decide seeded by himself

^^ That would be a nice luxury.

The start time feature sounds like a great option for RT tournaments. Like others, I'd like to also keep the current format.

With the right settings, I would be interested in joining a swiss tournament. They may wind up being a bit slower because round 1 has to finish before round 2 can start, (and round 2 before round 3, etc), but they could work.

swiss system sounds interesting but also sounds like a lot more work to implement.

@Fizzer,

Mind sharing your current thoughts?

Thanks everyone for all your feedback.

Swiss tournaments sound cool. It sounds like they're basically a way of making larger round-robin tournaments, since you don't have to play everyone and can still be mathematically confident the winner is determined accurately.

However, they suffer from the same flaw as round-robin tournaments: once a player/team starts losing a bunch, they have no motivation to continue playing. They know they can't win, yet they could still have a whole bunch of meaningless games in front of them. This is fine when playing with pre-arranged people (either your friends, or a group of top players that are trying to determine who is best.) But doesn't make as much sense for coin tournaments, as the goal with those is to try to get 1st/2nd to get the coin prize, and once that goal is no longer attainable you don't care about the tournament anymore.

SE/DE are better in that regard as people are quickly eliminated after losses. For the initial launch, coin tournaments will be restricted to SE/DE.

Allowing host to set seeds is easily abusable. I guarantee you that we'd see a ton of tournaments where all of the good players are on one side, and all of the poorer players and the tournament host are on the other. That way the host can get a "free ride" to the championship. Even more, it's hard to police this kind of thing, since I don't know of a way to clearly define a rule that outlaws it. Frequent players can spot this and avoid that tournament, but then it just becomes a newbie trap since new players won't know enough to spot it.

Having a reserve list and "checking in" is a nice feature but that will probably not be in the initial launch, just because this updating is already taking too long and we have to draw the line somewhere. It can be considered for a future update. For now, we'll just cancel any RT tournament that doesn't fill up.

However, we'd also need some buffer. Otherwise if the tournament filled up, but then someone declined the tournament 2 seconds before it's scheduled start time, the tournament would be cancelled. To avoid that, tournaments shouldn't be cancelled until 30 minutes after their scheduled start time if they're still not full. If they fill up during those 30 minutes they'll start immediately.

This also handles people who still want to do RT tournaments the current way, since they can just set a start time of 5 minutes from when they create it and it will effectively act the same way RT tournaments currently do.