ToA Feedback (2014)

Khizan

The ToA is all but over now, and so it's time for the annual feedback thread! Hooray!

The tournament was pretty heavily changed from the format of previous years, so here's my thoughts on most of the changes:

Things that I liked:

• No A & B Events: I loved this change. In previous years, I think that the A&B events led themselves to too much gaming of the system. It wasn't a case of "This is an event for the Americans, and this is the event for the overseas players." It was more like "Log on and look at the A-event. Notice that Eldreth, Iluv, Risca, Ahkan all joined FFA-A. Pass on this event, set alarm for 4am, crush the FFA-B."
• No tiered events: Tiered events didn't help real newbies and lowbies gain credits and participate, it just made it a cheap way for experienced veterans to boost up an alt while simultaneously giving the admin three times the body events to run. 
  
• Removal of the 1v1: Typically, I felt that the 1v1 was far too heavily weighted in terms of points, as well as being far too favorable to certain classes(Defiler, Monk). It was also a particularly contentious event, with things like forcing poisoned food and tons and tons of scheduling problems. Glad to see it go.
• Addition of the Circle events: Loved these. They provided a great reason for everybody to get involved in the Tournament, even if they weren't bothering with solo events, and they're very inclusive. Doesn't matter how good or bad you are, you can pitch in and help.

My complaints:

• The rules were not enforced: "You must be in a city or council to join the circle events." Garryn lets Menoch join the circle FFAs. "You can't hide inside cities for PK gemhunts." Garden ignores people hiding inside cities because they've only been in there a few minutes. Also, don't say "You can't hide inside cities in this PK event" and then let people hide directly outside the gates in the siegeline for ten minutes at a time, because that's still hiding in city defenses you rules-lawyering-SOB. 
• Quizzes were slooooooooow: A 20-something question quiz should not take an hour to complete. That's an hour of sitting there waiting for a question, unable to do anything but also unable to tab out or get up since you might miss a question.
• Quizzes are CTRL-F fests: Here's how you take first in a quiz. Save every events post to a text file. Add every helpfile to the end of it. Read the question, CTRL-F, type in a keyword. Yawn. If you have a friend in the quiz, get them on Skype or something so you can both scan the text file, because more eyes on the file increases the odds you'll find the answer
• Too much poopsocking: So, wait, the last bashing event with all the mini-events was a thing that people really enjoyed? Let's throw that out and have a solid week of bashing, one straight event! 28 people bashed enough to just get all the participation credits. Only 52 people bashed up the  second set. The event was too damn long and the benchmarks were too damn high.
• -PK +Share Gemhunts: Make Gemhunts +share +PK or -share -PK, but please do not make them +share -PK, because then you have people 'accidentally' dying to guards and swinging the scoreboard 2k+ points at a time. Really, the entire point of sharing is so that your circle can pick one person to win it. Since the circle as a whole would be the winner already in a circle event, sharing is entirely unnecessary. 

Things I would like to see:

• Quizzes: I'd like to maybe try a few quizzes with more questions and much shorter answer times. I'd rather the winner be the person who knew 10 of 30 answers than the person whose team could CTRL-F 18 of 20.
• 4v4: This probably does not need to last 3 days. I'd like to find some way to cut a day off of this. Preferably, I'd like to use Round Robin to cut some teams out of the contest, because I like Round Robin as a way to feel out my enemies before the real tournament begins, and because it's a good way to determine the "participation points" teams that are basically just time-wasters with no real shot at victory. 
• Arts: Open the arts contests up a few weeks beforehand, so you don't have to post begging for approvers to approve. 

And lastly, getting a paragraph of its own... Scheduling. I know that you have players all over the world and that you are therefore obliged to schedule events with that in mind. With that said, can you PLEASE stop scheduling goddamned Circle events at 2am CST(3am EST)? These are circle events, with potential consequences for everybody on our side, and so some of us feel compelled to wake up/stay up and make an appearance rather than let our buddies down and lose the event. This isn't a case of "The Aussies play that game for their circle", it's a case of "The Americans stay up and play for their circle", and it kind of sucks. Yes, having them all at US primetime sucks for overseas players, but honestly? Everything else in these games is already based around US times so it always sucks for them and they're used to it.

Yes, yes, I know you say you 'probably aren't running it like this next year and it'll be some big RP event", but the key word there is "probably". Also, I will be very sad if you remove the 4v4 and the circle games.

Sarrius

I liked:

The circle events.

The themes being announced and firmly decided for the quizzes and scavenger hunts, etc.

The lack of A&B.

Why? The circle events were a very cool way to add more team-oriented events that don't depend on individual scores, but a circle-wide score. It was also a great way to reward the people who tried to help out - @Airamaya ran her own mini-ToA inside Ithaqua, and rewarded people. I'm going to be rewarding top placers and hard works in the next few days. The lack of A&B made it so I knew what event was when and that was it. There was no second event I could potentially wait up for, which meant I could go to bed instead of waiting it out for a few extra points. I liked that you guys gave definitive themes for quizzes and scavenger hunts (though I'll admit I did not participate in any of them) - it was a nice way to provide a guided, structured event that differed from one using the exact same mechanics somehow (your quizzes this year will be in 3 flavors: chocolate, vanilla, and pistachio!)

What I disliked:

The removal of the 1v1 tournament.

The poopsocking bashing event not being broken in to much more reasonable time periods.

The 4v4 being three days when we could have just kept going and finished on night two.

While I agree with Khizan that the 1v1 was heavily weighted (and shouldn't be), I still looked forward to it because it was an event that 'made up' for the fact that everything else year round is shardfalls, team combat, et cetera. Yes, we can arrange our own leagues and find our own duels and all that (and we really should), but it was nice to have that event every year. It was, yes, very prone to cheese, but the way you counteract that is lowering the weight of the event's scoring. The poopsocking bash events was way too long and should have been separated in to much smaller portions, like the last Great Hunt. The team 4v4 event could have been done in two nights, but we cut it short on night two for basically no reason.

Like Khizan, I will say that scheduling is its own issue. While the A&B event removal is nice, the flip-side of it is that if I couldn't make every event, chances are I was out of the running for the category in question. I hate that a lot. I don't particularly have my sights set on winning the Gauntlet because I am a horrible scrub, but it would be nice for the illusion of the possibility to not be shattered so simply as by looking at the way you guys set up the schedule this year.

All in all, an awesome Tournament and I look forward to it again next year.

Iniar

I want combat quizzes. How many seconds of balance does a Mage's Pyroglacia spell take? NONE. (Cause tricksy)

Sarrius

I feel like the only way to stop CTRL+F fest quizzes is to use categories or topics/themes that are basically not in help files. Pop culture, area knowledge, etc.

Iniar

Or things Ctrl-F'ers don't normally participate in. Like combat. #ohsnap

E: We should also have a stand up comedy section. 

Caelya takes a deep bow, and claps her hands imperiously.

"How many druids does it take to plant a seed? Two, both fertile!"

Khizan

There used to be a joke contest in the past, but they stopped doing it because the jokes were awful and because so many of the jokes ended up being insulting. Everybody wanted to get rid of the contest.

Sarrius

Khizan said:

There used to be a joke contest in the past, but they stopped doing it because the jokes were awful and because so many of the jokes ended up being insulting. Everybody wanted to get rid of the contest.

4 of the top 5 of the first year's joke contest were Arlith Jokes.

I approved. I was even one of the four.

Jesse

I'd love to discuss the 4v4, as that was the contest from this year's tournament that I was exclusively involved in.

The round-robin portion of the 4v4 was particularly useful when we had more than 10 teams show up. Now that we have fewer teams, it makes constructing the brackets much easier. What I really hate about the bracket is how difficult it becomes to rank more than the top 2 teams.

What if we got rid of the bracket and did an extended round-robin. Each team fights every other team multiple times (like a baseball or basketball season). Your final ranking is determined by your win-loss record. What do you think?

I'm not sure what to do about timing. Each team fought in at least 11 matches this year. At 10 minutes per match, you're looking at at least 2 hours of play without counting on downtime while you wait for your next opponent to become available. Would it be better if we scheduled it for one big 3-hour session on one night? 2 2-hour sessions? I liked spreading it across different nights because it gave me time to wrap my head around any improvements that could be made or any code that needed to be adjusted, and also because it gave teams time to discuss strategies and break down their previous matches. However, I'm aware that this can create scheduling problems.

In a perfect world, how would you guys run the 4v4 from start to finish?

Khizan

This is one of the events that just has to take a certain amount of time and there's no getting around it.

One problem is that scheduling around a contest that's spread out over three days is problematic, what with varying work schedules, school schedules, and social events. The contest might take an hour, but I can't get somebody to swap one hour of a shift with me, so if I need to manipulate my schedule around this, it's a fairly large amount of work. Hell, on day 3, I'd have rearranged my schedule for about 20 minutes of playtime. With this in mind, One long block is a lot easier to account for since I'm dealing with time in evening sized blocks and not hour sized blocks, but that runs pretty late on the east coast in addition to being a lot of time sucked up in one event. I think that this year, I'd have liked to split the difference at 2 days at ~1.5 hours each. It doesn't run as late as a one-day, doesn't require me to schedule as many days as a three-day, and it leaves us with a break so we can reevaluate strategies and brainstorm between phases.

A lot of this depends on team size, though; if we got more teams, we couldn't fit it into two days; the more teams we get, the more unwieldy this gets and the more games we have to play and the harder this event gets to run. Oddly, increasing the amount of teams increases the scheduling hassles, and increasing scheduling hassles decreases the amount of teams playing. Juran and I almost called Participation Credits off this year due to scheduling difficulties. If you guys hadn't rescheduled the 4v4 days we'd have dropped, and we love the 4v4.

That aside, the biggest improvement to the 4v4 would honestly be working out some way to narrow the teams down earlier than we do. While "Participation Credits" is a serious team, there's a lot of participation credits teams who just want the default "thanks for entering" points. 

I don't mean to sound like an **** when I say this, but the truth is that a lot of the teams that make it through to the brackets are basically punching bags. They're participation point teams who don't have a shot at winning. Getting matched up against Culture Club in the first round of the bracket was basically like getting a bye, except we had to show up for it. We could have cut an entire day off of the 4v4 this year if we'd just culled the bottom 4 teams after the round robin and the results wouldn't have changed that much, if at all.

Iniar

What if you ran the ranking matches for the 4v4 in a league format/RR throughout a 3 month lead up, then just a top-4 team semifinal in the ToA?

Ahkan

Concerning 4v4.

Gonna have to go with Khizan on this one. I felt would could have blitzed through the 4v4 in a day or two at most. I think you should be able to flag your team as 'participation' and 'main event'. The participation dudes can go fight, and they should have to fight, but we don't keep score of their games. That let's us get straight to the chase and lets the 3-4 serious teams beat the **** out of each other and move on to the next round. A good example of this is my team had to curb stomp Kliko's team 3 times in a row. It really thins the herd and lets you optimize the whole 4v4. To be honest, when I looked at the team spread and composition from day 1, I was 4/4 of the top 4 places. My only risky bet was putting my derp squad ahead of Truename Shotgun for 3rd.

I'm not sure if this is viable, but I think that we need to let people get involved in the 4v4, because it's the best event. On the other hand, lots of participation credit teams bog down the progress to the main event. When you enter as a participation credit team, you know what you are. 

As far the rest of my ToA complaints, I agree with

-Rules were inconsistently enforced

-Event runners were never on the same page.

-Quizzes were too long

-Freezetag is dumb

-Schedule was awful

-Bashing event was too long and auto-bashing wasn't enforced until it was too late

-No small potatoes bashing events

-Quiz/Scavenger hunt wording was vague, misleading, dubious at best

-Invisible items on scavenger hunts, really?

-Scavenger hunt clues were not active 

-Quiz answers were oblivious to spelling and AD/AM. When you have year overlap, the AD/AM is important.

Azaoz != Azooc

Thanatos != Potatotos.

-Quiz answers gave out effort grades.

-Too many issues were filed in the making of this ToA.

@Iniar
Combat knowledge would be worse than any other quiz because there's maybe 6 people who know the answers to most of those questions. Don't you read these forums?

@Khizan
I always figured scavenger hunts were more 'area knowledge' quiz mechanic. It's hard to ask historical questions that are relevant without giving someone a ctrl-f advantage. Best question of the entire tournament were throwbacks to the old justice league, WHICH YOU GOT WRONG. It was not a ctrl-f question. It also doesn't help that there are like 0 people who are ents that were around back in the old days and have no context with which to asks questions. Also, considering we tried to ctrl-F the tournament, it's hard to do without context if you ask the right sword of questions. I had to laugh when people answered off an early events post because it was the first ctrl-f example of the name in the question, but contextually the event in question happened 100 years later.

Wysrias

The only big bit of feedback I can give is that I think, in the future, these marathon bashing events shouldn't happen. The reason being is that, poopsocking aside, it really is a competition of "who can appear not AFK the best when in actuality 99% of it is completely automated". This isn't really pointing fingers at the participants, because when you have, what, nine straight days where you have to stay on top? You'd best be automating the vast majority of it, because anyone with any responsibilities or commitments would find taking an entire week off of their life to hunt down text exp to be ludicrously difficult.

I am sure that the AFK tracking and tests were done in good faith, but it's not really believable when top ranked event goers are staring at a shard wall for an hour straight because they totally weren't AFK, just really admiring the wall. And it's hard to fully fault them either, because it's entirely what this kind of event encourages. There will never really be an alternative so long as 168+ hour  bashing marathons can net you over $450USD in credits.

Smaller, focused bashing competitions, perhaps with modifiers and extra challenges, would be my only real suggestion. Otherwise, just nix it, because it's not fooling anyone.

Bathan

I don't remember if it was for a ToA or not, but there was a one hour bashing contest a couple of years back, and it was actually a lot of fun. I was up against Juran, Risca and some others, and it was an intense hour of trying to audible when my bashing zones were taken. I also did a three hour one which was, while less fun, still a good time. Anything more than three hours is just not worth it, and it will just be autobashing.

I also wish events like this could just be scattered around. Maybe have a different, small set of events on the weekends? Small credit prizes? Unique items? @Savorai mentioned that we're heading towards some cool narrative thing, but until that happens, small events with prizes encourages people to log in and, cherry on top, not be AFK. Sorry for derailing.

Aleutia

In regards to the Arts section, 10 days is a very short time to bang out six designs, a bardic entry, and a drawing that's worth a damn. In the future, I'd like to see, as Khizan said, the Theme announced at the beginning of the month, or just get rid of themes all together. I would personally much rather submit my best designs that I can have worked on all year with the ToA in mind.

I think it might also help the judging process if you trimmed it down to just one flat design per character, per section. That leaves crafters with two designs to come up with (Wearable/Utility), and cuts out an excess 4 designs per person for judges to consider.

Juran

Jesse said:

In a perfect world, how would you guys run the 4v4 from start to finish?

I would remove the dual elimination portion of the 4v4 and do a four team single elimination playoff instead. Seeding the top four teams based on overall record and head-to-head is not overly difficult, and would get a fair winner after the playoff in only two additional 'rounds'.

Edit: You don't want to remove the grand finals, because there should be some buildup and an element of risk. But a full round robin followed by a full double elimination bracket is excessive and borders on tedious.

Jesse

What about seeding ranking the rest of the teams? Just base those on overall record?

Edit: Not seeding, but ranking all of the teams to determine tournament point awards.

Juran

I don't know if you have the ability to time matches, or could add that in before next year.

In most other competitive e-sports events, the tie breakers in matches like this generally go as follows:

• Overall Record
  
• Head-to-Head
  
• Match Time
  

The third only ever comes into play in the event of a three way tie with a win/loss against head-to-head opponents. In such an event, you would look to see which of the three won their respective game the fastest.

Khizan

@Jesse: I'd just base them on their record in the round robin, yeah. 

Aleutia said:

In regards to the Arts section, 10 days is a very short time to bang out six designs, a bardic entry, and a drawing that's worth a damn. In the future, I'd like to see, as Khizan said, the Theme announced at the beginning of the month, or just get rid of themes all together. I would personally much rather submit my best designs that I can have worked on all year with the ToA in mind. 

I like the idea of a theme both because I dislike the idea of people getting all year to polish pieces and because I like the idea of having to design within constraints.

Cassius

Also, a theme makes them more comparable for easier/better judging.

Aleutia

As I said, it was my preference. I'm fine if they keep the theme, I'm fine if they don't. I think they're goofy. All I want is a longer time than 10 days to do so much writing, because this year it was brutal competing in all sections for Arts.

Verexa

Yes, 10 days is not enough even in the best of circumstances. Personally, I was embroiled in final exams so I only had time to write stuff for the usable leg of the contest that was relevant to the theme, and the stuff for the wearable one had to be whatever I had lying around, so some extra time would have been helpful.

Also, would it also be possible to view the tradeskill submissions? I'd love to see what other people did with the themes!

Iniar

Ahkan said:

@Iniar
Combat knowledge would be worse than any other quiz because there's maybe 6 people who know the answers to most of those questions. Don't you read these forums?

But then I might care about it and it may raise the level of awareness amongst the general populace. :< 

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." <- I don't think this applies to Imperian history

Azefel

ToA quiz:

Mathiaus

Eh, I can bang out an 8 x 11 in 6+ hours, but it's exhausting, and I've had three 11x14's I've been working on for real money past few weeks. Figured it was more important than attempting credits.

I do like the entries this past ToA. They were well done.

Leikara

I don't know if this was intentional or not, but the ToA coincided exactly with a Great Hunt over in Aetolia. Overlapping such big events like that was a bit stressful, and I don't think it's uncommon for people to dabble in multiple IRE games.

Regarding the 4v4, I joined off market for participation, but I really really liked being able to play and even got really excited when our team won some matches. I missed the last one because I fail at reading the schedule, but I think if I were barred from competing for top ranks before I even started playing, I'd lose a ton of enthusiasm. 

Khizan

I don't want to bar anyone from competing for top ranks, that's Ahkan's dumb idea.

Here's how I want it to work:

1. All the teams fight all the other teams in the Round Robin phase of the 4v4.
2. The top 4 teams from the round robin go to a single elimination tournament to determine who places 1st through 4th.
3. Everybody else is placed according to their position in the round robin round.

Under this system you play every other team at least once and every team has a chance to go as far as their performance can take them, but you cut a lot of teams from the final bracket. That saves a lot of time, since a 4v4 single elimination is 2 extra rounds of fights, at most.

Ahkan

I didn't ban anyone from competing! I just split them into MLB and AAA

Lalitana

I do think dropping the tradeskill contests down to 1-2 designs each may be helpful. I get the idea of a complete outfit or set but in the case of cooking/libations, the crafter is writing 4-7 oftentimes lengthy descriptions per design. That's a lot to judge in a relatively short period of time.

Overall I would suggest only a slightly lengthier process - no one should get a year to write a design for a parasol, but perhaps the arts theme could be announced a week before the rest of the ToA gets rolling. This gives an extra week for people to paint, draw, and write; it also gives a little more breathing room for crafters to get their items approved. Granted, ahem, some of us will just procrastinate that extra week.

Ahkan

No one forced anyone to submit an item for every category, that was a personal choice. It's like picking and choosing which events you want to participate in. You pick all of the above, you're going to be under a time crunch. Quality over Quantity, rabble rabble.

The arts competition seems sort of the odd man out in the whole tournament because where I had like 4 shots at free-for-alls and bloodbaths, you guys only had one shot per item. All of your work is also back loaded at the end. You have 12 designs due at the last day of the tournament. Where the 'fighters' have events Monday, Thursday, Monday 2 and Thursday 2. If you want to compete to win you have to shotgun method it and participate in 100% of the events. Then that leads to weird things of not submitting your own work, outright stealing, and recycling your crap from 5 years ago (which I have no problem with).

Tbh, I don't see the point in describing sets. Dark bracers/boots/underpants/kilt/shirt. Done. I think sets are a waste of everyone's time in so far as to say workload x 7. I also don't see why you get to double-dip in one trade skill. I thought the old system of "One trade skill, on submission" was pretty badass. I'd also like to see a lightning round where you have like 1-3 hours. Jesse shows up says "The theme is rainbows and demons, you have three hours. Go." That would be badass to see what you guys improv as well as when you have two weeks of preparation and 8 years of hoarding.

I'd honestly go as far as to incorporate a libations contest into a mortal drinking contest, because the overlap is just fun. What I mean here is that you would design the drinks and we would have a great time killing ourselves drinking them.

Ozreas

My only real complaint regarding this year's Tournament was the unrewarding nature of the circle-based events. While I wouldn't want to see any kind of system where everyone who played wins (looking at you, CTF rewards), the lack of any existing reward for participation or rankings below first was rather discouraging to many players. While I know I risk sounding like a conspiracy theorist, I'm sure we all know which circle was slated to win the inter-circle competition. Definitely a hard-earned victory, but not exactly a surprising one, and the lack of incentive for anyone but the winners extinguished the desire to participate for several players. If the chance to participate in the games is supposed to be the incentive for people to get involved, it'd be nice to have a different set of games/events rather than fielding the exact same thing as every other in-game celebration.

In short, not really sure how to reward non-winners without making it seem like cuddly "everyone is a winner" bs, but the infrequency of the event makes "at least we gave it our best!" a poor consolation to losing teams.

 

Leikara

@ahkan - Aetolia does an iron chef cooking competition where anyone who enters (not just cooks) can compete to design something in like an hour using zany ingredients and it's hella fun. It's definitely possible, and very fun for crafters.