Tourney 4: new ideas

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New T4?!

Well, first of all I have to tell you that I haven't a lot of time, so maybe I have lost some part of MARP's life: for instance I haven't understood why Phil Lamat e Mdvd dropped T2 e Quazar T3... but I want to propose some change to solve some little problems: I think that Tournament are too "big" and too long: maybe this is the reason because there are only 20-30 players in all the world. This is a known problem for me: years ago I founded a team of the best players of the coin-op. We were only about 20 in Italy... So if we want to involve more people we could reduce the difficulty, so I propose for vote:

1) Monthly tournament 2) 4-6 games each tournament 3) 1 game for each kind (platform, maze, shoot'em up,...) 4) votation for games: 1-15 of the previous month (or 25-10) 5) two leaderboard. The first as T3: players who played all games have points... The second only in percentage for ALL players, so they have not to play stupid game that they don't love: for example I think it should be right that Tommi (3 first place in T3) could win something...

Regards to all, and good debate!

-- IUR DHURIN (iurdhu@hotmail.com), March 26, 2000

Answers

I agree that the tourney requires a large investment of time to do well. But I think changing to a monthly tournament might result in less players, not more. Maybe the number of games could be reduced from 10 to 8 if time is a big factor.

Another thing I thought of was allowing players to drop their worst score. If someone detests a particular game they can upload a terrible score and it won't count against them.

So I vote:

1) No 2) No 3) No 4) Fine with me. I wonder what the standings would be for T3 if these scoring rules were followed (although I wouldn't advocate changing them now of course, particularly as I am Numero Uno :)

-- Ian Sutton (suttoni@hotmail.com), March 26, 2000.


Well, I would certainly prefer a shorter tournameent with less games. I also have little time to learn the games better (what with work, emu coding, doing other things I like). About 5 games seems right, one each of platform, maze, shooter, fighter, and puzzle (open to other suggestions here). Maybe add another for a 'miscellaneous' category for those games that don't fit anywhere else.

Rather than that second leaderboard, maybe some sort of 'awards' could be set up. Things like most 1st's, or some things that are not quite so serious...

-- Barry Rodewald (bsr@hn.pl.net), March 26, 2000.


Making the tournaments easier i don't think would be a positive change. The tournaments are too big perhaps (too many games), but they are defininetly not too long. There are good benefits to having long tournaments. For one, people who can't spend 24 hours a day playing can schedule bits and pieces of the week to play, the more weeks they have the more play they can get in (i.e. more weekends...) One month would make 6+ tournaments a year, that's just too many games being used up never to be played again untill the next time they can be voted on.

my cents.

-- Chad (churritz@cts.com), March 26, 2000.


Here's my opinions about:
1 - NO way. I even think that we're having Tournaments too often: I guess having 2 months rest between a Tourny and another (3 Tournies a year) will be better for a number of reasons: maybe I'll open a new thread about this issue later on.
2 - YES: actually I agree 10 games are too many, but I won't reduce the lenght, because time is needed to learn unknown games.
3- YES: a similar way has been taken in choosing games for T3, and I think Barry proposal (6 games: platform, maze, shooter, fighter, puzzle, miscellaneous) is ok.
4- YES: already in use.
5 - NO: players have to play all games in order to qualify. (I'll add a section to the stats for non-qualified players, anyway....)

Cicca

PS: could you please mail me and tell me more about that italian coin-op players team...?!?

-- Cicca (cicca@writeme.com), March 27, 2000.

1) NO. Two months is the proper length. Perhaps introducing a 2 month break will give people a chance to "take a breather" recover, realx and do other things...

2) YES. Fewer games would drive up the scoring and make the competition even more intense!

3) YES. That way we ensure game variety and avoid ballot stuffing.

4) NO. Winner of T3 should pick one game. Everyone else get 3 votes or one vote per game type regardless. Ties are broken by randomizer.

5) NO. Current Tourney LB works great!

Pat

-- Pat (laffaye@ibm.net), March 27, 2000.



I think the point may be being missed here. As Iur states, there are very few players on the current tourneys, and instead of justifying why things are great the way they are, maybe more time should be spent asking new people for suggestions or wondering why they don't play along.

Just my 1/2 a cent :)

-- bubble (bubble@mail.pt), March 27, 2000.


1 ) NO. I even suggest two months between each tournament ( 3 tournaments instead of 4 per year ), to have time to explore other games and think to the regular leaderboard. But the two months length for a tournament is OK. 2 ) NO. I think that 10 games is the good number. 3 ) YES. And there are almost 10 kinds of games, I suppose... 4 ) ... 5 ) NO. One leaderbard is enough. But I will suggest another way of counting points. For example, Tommi has 3 first places which are very impressive, leaving the second of the game very far behind him. It's not fair that points are not awarded for that. So, maybe first place should give more points.

My three cents...

-- lagavulin (darre@club-internet.fr), March 27, 2000.


I have a new idea for you to ponder, but first I'll vote.

1. NO - two months seem short enough, although I admit I don't play the entire two months... not really. As for the two month break, I'm neutral on that...

2. I'm neutral on this one - I'm game to keep it at ten or go ahead and reduce it a bit - I don't mind either way.

3. If we stay at 10 games, keep it at two, but if we go to the 5, 6, or 8 range, then we should go to one.

4. I think Pat's right - we're already doing that.

5. Keep it at one leaderboard - whatever that is doesn't matter :)

Now the new idea - I've been thinking of doing a "non-elimination" tournament - where two people go against each other one week at a time, playing one game each person wants to play, and perhaps another game picked out of random that the players vote for. Scoring would use percentage, and if the person wins, you move on - if not, you go to the consolation bracket - so you get to keep on playing. Mark Longridge did something similar to this quite a number of months ago... but not in a tournament bracket way...

This is just a preliminary idea - but I'm wondering of your opinions of it. Thanks for reading - GB9

-- Gameboy9 (goldengameboy@yahoo.com), March 27, 2000.


While it seems that we'll have a two months rest before T4 (and that's a great piece of news !), I wish to focus on a few other isseues.
I can't figure how to find out more than 10 categories, as Lagavulin says; MAMEnu has a number of predefined categories (11: misc., action, drive, exploration, fighting, maze, platform, puzzle, shooter, sport, vector), but most of them are redundant (exploration games could be considered mazesor platforms, most of vectors are shooters, and action games are fighting). So far, platform, maze, shooter, fighter, puzzle, sport, drive and miscellaneous are the 8 reasonable categories to divide games into.

On the other end, I don't agree with gb9 to shorten the tournament if playing less than 10 games: doing so, it will happen that every player will go for the games he's already good at, and will not have the time to learn and improve in the others: the more you shorten a tournament, the closer you go to the regular LB, which could be considered as an infinite number of individual tournaments one a single game. Giving players the time to learn new games will make the competition more intense, and scores will reach higher.

I'll give you a few examples:
In my opinion, T1 was the best from this point of view: I personally had the chance to reach the first positions in 5 games I had never seen before, while in T2 and T3 I'm in the first places in the 2 or 3 games I already knew, and in all the others I only had the chance the make decent (sometimes even less !!!) scores...
As far as I know, the only other great site hosting Tournaments is Ron's Snipercade; there are 2 kinds of competitions there: one is called "Challenge", a different game each month, where points have to be scored with the 1st life only; the second one is the famous "Deca", it lasts 1 year (!!!) with 10 games to be played.
Well, challenge is played by an average of 10 players, while Deca2000 has more than 160 partecipants, with +/- 45 players already qualified.

To end this flood, let me disagree once more with gb9 (nothing personal, my friend :-))) on his new proposal for a new tournament: first of all because with so many tournaments, the reagular LB will be more and more ignored, second because such a kind of tournament (close to the so called "Leagues", or "Mobile Standings" in sports like tennis or squash) technically is nothing different from our LB: I mean, do you want to challenge, or "attack", the player above you ?!? ok, start playing the games that worth points to him....that's it !!!

So far, let's have our tournies (3 a year) with max 8 games, keep one LB (you'll have 4 more different LB in my stats:-), don't change the scoring system (it will make more difficult, and even senseless, to make a "championship LB" which would consider scores for all the tournamnts (as I'm planning to do in the stats), and pls, don't forget, as many of us are doing (me included) the old dear Marp LB.


Thanks for reading

Just my 2 (thousands!) cents
Cicca

-- Cicca (cicca@writeme.com), March 28, 2000.

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