Holiday Invitational Tournament

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Smitty
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Holiday Invitational Tournament

Post by Smitty »

Raishiwi and myself are considering hosting a tournament around the holidays, and we’d like some feedback to determine how feasible this endeavor is. Matches will be hosted on twitch.tv/raishiwi. We’re putting some money on the line too, and we’ll be fundraising for the prize pool on Raishiwi’s stream.

This will be a sixteen man invitational tournament; the goal of which is to feature 16 of the top Red Alert players. Time and player permitting, I would really love to do best of three group play for the first round, then best of five series for the round of eight and on.

We’re currently targeting the weekends before Christmas and New Year’s, December 23rd, 24th, 26th, 30th and 31st. The holidays work best for us because I work in higher education (Christmas break as an adult FTW) and Raisiwi is a business owner with the ability to close the office for the holiday. We can try to move this around or extend the tournament to three weeks depending on feedback.

We will try to divide the tournament into time-slots, targeting early afternoon and evening for Europe. Each group will play anywhere from 8-12 games, which I believe can be completed around a five hour block. (Assuming we don’t get too many hour-long games).
Playing some matches concurrently and only streaming one to save time is an option, though we’d like to stream everything we can.

Assigning time slots to groups allows us to move around players if they can only fit one slot. Hopefully there won’t be too much of this as I’d like to keep the draw as random as possible.

We will be using Discord to run this tournament. Discord makes organizing events like this much easier, and all players will need to be in the designated channel.

In the feedback I’d like to hear a few things:
1. I would like form a selection committee to determine invites for top-tier players. I want committee members from both NA and EU who play frequently enough to have a feel for the 1v1 scene. It may be tough to have to choose the final couple of invites, but I also want to have a list of alternates in case of no-shows. If you are interested in this committee let me know.

2. We also need a rules committee, mostly to pick a good map pool but also to set rules for no-shows, etc. etc. Tell us if your are interested in this committee.

3. And the most important one, is this tournament doable? If you are a top tier player (you know who you are) let us know if you are able to compete around these times, or if you could if other dates were opened up.

Raishiwi and I have run events like this before, so we’re confident in our ability to run a show. (At the very least it shouldn’t be cringeworthy). Let us know in the comments how interested you are in an event like this and if you are interested in participating.

noobmapmaker
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Post by noobmapmaker »

My 2 cents: it seems like a good timing - in between RAGL seasons, no other tournaments planned. People might like to watch/play a cozy Christmas tournament. Hopefully the players got time on their hands as well! If not, why not open it up for any player? Just an idea: first week of signups the RAGL players get early acces (with Master > Minion > Recruit in case of tons of signups).

And for what its worth, I'll donate $15 for the prizepool if you guys manage to get 16 players playing.

I suggest you also contact SoScared/FiveAces - or ask in the IRC . There's a special place where we talk about tournaments and I think they can grant you acces to it. But mainly it would be good to talk to them about previous tournaments and what worked well and what didn't work well.
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klaas
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Post by klaas »

Sounds like fun.

1) I can suggest names no problem
2) Not sure if I can be there during the tourney, but I won't mind to help
3) Not sure. I have a young kid, need to work a bit during those days, and also travel to grandparents etc, so dont count on me.

I would like to see a 2vs2 format, where a team consist of 1 allies and 1 soviet player. I havent seen too many good 2vs2 matchups, specially making use of nice super weapon combos. And forcing players to pick both soviets and allies will increase the diversity in the matches.

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Smitty
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Post by Smitty »

Threw some names around with some invitees (MT, Barf, Omnom and Lorrydriver) and I’m confident we can get a good field of 16.

I’ll get more specific on the time windows we’re looking at (Times UTC).
Group Play
December 23: 7 p.m. to Midnight
December 24: 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. to Midnight
Monday December 26: 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. to Midnight

Round of 8, Semis and Finals (all best of five)
December 30: 7 p.m. to Midnight
December 31: 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. and 7 p.m.

Like I said above times and dates are pretty mailable, but if players can fit one or two of these timeslots it will go a long way in making this tourney happen. January 1st and 2nd are possible depending on players and Oklahoma State’s bowl situation.
We’ll keep contacting players and should have some graphics soon. Keep posted and spread the word!

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JOo
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Post by JOo »

i did track pretty much all the tournys and leagues so far ... you can take a look on previous events and get some information about formats, players, games played, prizes, winners and so on ... also they are all linked to their sleipnirstuff-thread with rules, brackets, sign ups

https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/wiki/G ... ompetition

if theres more then just asking for money and then burping into microphones while waiting endlessly for any games to get started ... im willing to tune in
Last edited by JOo on Sun Dec 04, 2016 9:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.

noobmapmaker
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Post by noobmapmaker »

Finals on new years eve? Doesnt that enlarge the chance of people not showing up/not many people spectating?

Also, agree with JOo: I think a tournament like this (and the players and viewers) deserves quality commentary. A tournament can quickly decline into chaos when the hosts dont act swiftly on technical/organisational issues. Would be ashame when that happens!
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Raishiwi
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Post by Raishiwi »

JOo wrote:

if theres more then just asking for money and then burping into microphones while waiting endlessly for any games to get started ... im willing to tune in
I guess this is pointed at me, I wish we had the vod still of the last tournament we ran, it was incredibly smooth and our small staff made it have very little downtime. We take tournaments a little more serious than fermented friday....Also we have tried contacting SoScared and planned to see if we could bleed the tournament into his stream so he could get a piece of it, since he already contributes so much to the community.

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JOo
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Post by JOo »

Raishiwi wrote: I guess this is pointed at me

no , im talking more generally ... we had quite a lot of tournys and only recently started to have money involved ... someone can imagine that this move in our community could potentially attract bad (and not interested in openra and their community at all) people

the last tournys imo were super-boring ... the viewers were waiting "hours" for any players to show up ...

well anyway ... it's probably just "me" who speaks these things out :D
Last edited by JOo on Sun Dec 04, 2016 9:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.

OMnom
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Post by OMnom »

How about instead of a tourney, we just do a king of the hill competition? Person with the longest win streak takes home the prize, second longest gets 2nd place, etc.

+No limit on people who can attend
+No-shows won't screw the order up
+Playing order can be planned spontaneously
+More games, less waiting
+Can be done in 1 day

-Less hype
-People might get bored of the same person

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SoScared
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Post by SoScared »

Hi!

Sorry for the slow response. For the holidays I'm gone but I'm happy to support in whatever fashion is possible. I'll be streaming the Mondays up until December 19th after which I'm gone until the 30th. If you need me to cover some European time slots or whatever just let me know! I'll probably be able to cover other days outside Mondays if neccessary.

As NoobMapMaker mentioned there's a private forum used to establish various competitions in the past. I'll add you two to the forum group (check your Sleipnir PM's later). There's possibly too little time to organzie properly through there but it may serve to provide some useful information regardless.

2: I'd love help.

3: I think so! Although 16 players is quite a challenge. If mathces are announced properly and early and the format/time is clear, you can expect minimal no-shows. But make no mistakes, there will be no-shows :)

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Smitty
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Post by Smitty »

The main goal of this thread was to determine viability and after reading feedback and talking to players in game I’ve decided to call it off.

I still think a sixteen-man tournament is very doable, but there is a major communication issue that needs to be addressed first:

The OpenRA community needs Discord.

Currently community members are scattered over sleipner, irc, mumble, etc. Discord offers voice chat, private calls, private messaging and lobby chat. Channels can be created for official announcements as well as announcements for who’s streaming and who just put up a video. Files (i.e. replays) can be shared as well. In short, Discord is built for this kind of thing.

We’re still very interested in throwing a tournament or another event in the future, and we’ll still be around for a bit of holiday streaming. If there’s interest in a smaller event like OMnom suggested let us know.

Final thought: There probably shouldn’t be a meaningful competition until Pillboxes are nerfed anyway :|

lucassss
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Post by lucassss »

Forums are google searchable and long livng, the same is true for irc (irc logs). Is it also true for discord?

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anjew
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Post by anjew »

Dont forget Australia. You have to be careful with how you do times because if you did it on the Christmas eve chances are it would be Christmas day in Australia.
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AMHOL
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Post by AMHOL »

I don't see much point in making it a 16 person tournament, why not just make it the people with an actual chance of winning, and make it winner stays on, granted you won't get as much content for streaming but you'd get a good day of quality content.

You, OMnom, Barf, Medium Tank, Kazu, Lorrydriver, Frame Limiter, FiveAces

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