ESL Go4COH2 cups

Jump back to quoted post30 Dec 2015, 16:09 PMRedDevilCG

What's the point of having a tournament if you want to predetermine the final match? I hope we don't let personal bias affect how we arrange tournaments.

Jump back to quoted post30 Dec 2015, 13:13 PMChexx

Starting positions should be fixed for the NA Cup, too. I already messaged the guy responsible for the NA cups.

Jump back to quoted post28 Dec 2015, 17:44 PMtofu

There were many good games in the tourney and fortunately,I won 1st prize in NA division.




And as RedxWings says,there are sooooo loooooong waiting.I bet Vindicare didn't come last match because he took a nap or just bored of waiting.

Jump back to quoted post30 Dec 2015, 16:43 PMAmiPolizeiFunk

The points that I am making will become painfully clear this Sunday if we have a randomly seeded single-elim tourney. Some brackets will be much harder than others. Those brackets will have long and difficult games that will fatigue the winners, while other brackets will give an isolated top player an easy route through. The players in easy brackets will have a strong advantage in the later rounds playing against players that have struggled through the difficult brackets. You don't need to do a bunch of math to figure out the chance of this happening. It simply will happen, and you'll see what I mean this Sunday.

I'll immediately be able to tell you the tough brackets compared to the easy ones and show you how that is not fair to the players that got stuck in the tough brackets. If there are only 4 tourneys per month before the reset, then the effect will happen over and over again. Arguing in favor of a randomly seeded single-elim just boggles my mind.

If you want fairness and no seeding, then run Swiss or at least double-elim, where the tournament format itself accounts for the lack of seeds, and ensures that the best players fight one another at the end of the day.

Jump back to quoted post28 Dec 2015, 18:29 PMCieZ

Congrats to Hans and Tofu for winning EU/NA.

Some really fun games to watch, some great play.

My biggest concern, probably to no surprise, is the timing issues. Spectators don't want to have to sit around for significant periods of time between matches and participants get bored as well. Having to devote upwards of 10 hours every Sunday for months on end to win $100 a week isn't worth it. Tons of players won't be able to commit to this sort of schedule and many more will get burned out after the first month.

My other concern is that this is just too many small tournaments back to back to back for our small community. I think we would be better off having a big event every few months and then a few smaller events in-between to keep things rolling. Weekly cups might work for a community like Hearthstone where the top players are going to be traveling to big events, giving other players a chance to make a name for themselves during the weekly events... but for us... I just see people getting burnt out and wanting something new - or even a break from the tournament grind - because 10+ hours per Sunday of waiting/playing week in and week out is a grind, not a competition.

Jump back to quoted post30 Dec 2015, 14:09 PMAmiPolizeiFunk

So you'd rather the top players knock each other out in early round Best-of-1's instead of in the late rounds? You'd rather see top players crush new players in the late round Best-of-3s? I can't stress enough how important seeding is for single-elimination events. I guess if you think "random seeding is ok," then we will see the results of this approach first hand.

There's even more to it than that. It's about fairness. Say the randomizer puts DevM in the top half of the bracket, and puts Aimstrong, Jove, Luvnest, Jesulin, PauL & HelpingHans in the bottom half of the bracket. The latter bunch tire each other out struggling through insanely difficult early rounds, while DevM cruises through his entire bracket without even breaking a sweat. Then DevM meets say an extremely tired and exhausted Luvnest in the finals and utterly destroys him. Do you wanna see that? I don't.

Properly seeding single-elim tourneys is of utmost importance.

Mathematical stuff from Yukiko

Jump back to quoted post30 Dec 2015, 19:37 PMVindicareX

Oh please, Ami. If you cared about players "fatigue" or their "easy route," you wouldn't do things like invite players to skip an entire qualifier weekend and go straight to main event in OCF (where they have to just win just a few games to earn some money). This style hardly seems fair to me. And as we saw with Jesulin (whose performance isn't what it once was), these invited players are not guaranteed to make it to the finals.

Jump back to quoted post30 Dec 2015, 18:32 PMluvnest

Thanks for the reply.

But you still haven't declared the starting postions of either faction (Axis or Allies).

Jump back to quoted post2 Jan 2016, 15:10 PMShadowDraft

Hello I'm ESL ShadowDraft currently working on CoH2.

I've looked into this and talked to HHans and something like faction spawns is not fixed. Or at least I might've not understood what you mean by this.

I guess if players feel strongly about the fixed starting positions we could include that choice in the rules.

Jump back to quoted post2 Jan 2016, 15:34 PMTittendachs

In 1v1 there are two starting positions obviously... Because of the not-mirrored map design one position is often more exposed to cut off attempts. Thus players agreed on fixed starting positions for allies/axis because in every tournament so far matches were mostly best of 3 and everybody had to play both factions.

People are used to it. I guess players could also make a gentlemens agreement before every match if the rules are still unclear when the tourny starts?!

Jump back to quoted post2 Jan 2016, 16:42 PMWaffleticket

I thought maps were designed with the intention of fixed positions?

Jump back to quoted post28 Dec 2015, 16:00 PMRedxWings

I'll provide some perspective for the NA side.

All in all, this tournament took about 11 - 12 hours. I had 4 games, 2 no shows, and a final game I threw because it was 3 AM in the morning and didn't really care at that point. I spent about 4-5 hours playing and 6-7 hours waiting. (the no shows should account for half of this)

Unlike the EU tournament, round 4 and up were best of 3s. Not only did it make the wait times extremely long, it just wore on all the players, most of who were either playing well into the night or even through the night. Combined with the double elim, most NA players dropped at the end, like paul and vindicare did.

I really, really, REALLY hope they don't repeat this style of tournament because frankly, it is a little insane to ask players to dedicate half a day on a sunday night. If they do, I can't see myself playing another tournament.

Jump back to quoted post2 Jan 2016, 15:34 PMTittendachs

In 1v1 there are two starting positions obviously... Because of the not-mirrored map design one position is often more exposed to cut off attempts. Thus players agreed on fixed starting positions for allies/axis because in every tournament so far matches were mostly best of 3 and everybody had to play both factions.

People are used to it. I guess players could also make a gentlemens agreement before every match if the rules are still unclear when the tourny starts?!