March CS Feedback

[dmcaxle1]

Not gonna lie. You guys have a long way to go as tournament organizer. I've seen one time voluntary organizers be more caring and do a better job for tournaments that mean a lot less.


1. No reserves in swiss.
2. Running such a huge prized tournament in a buggy alpha instead of holding it off. Iirc some bugs did take games.
3. No losers go first enforced. Easily done by just restarting the game if the right player doesn't win the coin flip. I was given the response "People won't be happy if they get a good hand." My response to that is there weren't supposed to get that hand anyways because they're not supposed to go first! The opening hand is RNG and if their deck is consistent they should get a good hand again. 
4. Broken brackets not hand fixed therefore screwing people over.
5. Allowing people to change decks mid tournament.

Are you lazy to not ask for their decklist in pm on the forum? You only do this once a month, its worth $300+ this time and all of the things here are easily enforced if you decide not to be lazy. In live events tournament organizers get hand written papers of every decklist! Private messages are so much easier and you're still lazy! If they don't run the reserves they promised or the same cards and reach the top 8 then the people who faced them will vouch for their cheating and you will be able to enforce punishment. Something is better than nothing.

During the last round challonge paired a lot of people down from x-1 to x-2 and it was not fixed. Jtatta also said that the fact that many 4-2s were paired down when they shouldn't have didn't matter and he only cared about the x-1s. Isn't HexTcgPro about "the community"? Or do you only care about the people who are going to top and everyone else can have a shit time? Not to mention you would be screwing people out of the series points you have and what the lesser prize was. Seven hours of my time just for the TO to say I'm not worth the same as the other players and not worth the time needed to manually repair.  I'm really worried about what this laziness means for future events. 

[karn]

1. No reserves in swiss.
5. Allowing people to change decks mid tournament.

- I completely agree with these rules. Enforcing proper reserves online with anonymous players will just not work like it does in real life. It's just not feasibly possible to keep track of everyone's decklist and everyone's sideboard every single round without being there in person or watching them stream. Tiny number changes between rounds or games would be highly unnoticeable.

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2. Running such a huge prized tournament in a buggy alpha instead of holding it off. Iirc some bugs did take games.

- I don't see what the problem is with just running both? It's not like this is a ridiculous prize payout - and even if it was, what's wrong with that? We'll continue having these tournaments after alpha as well. There is plenty of room to have them now AND after alpha. I don't see how you could possibly be upset about this.

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3. No losers go first enforced. Easily done by just restarting the game if the right player doesn't win the coin flip. I was given the response "People won't be happy if they get a good hand." My response to that is there weren't supposed to get that hand anyways because they're not supposed to go first! The opening hand is RNG and if their deck is consistent they should get a good hand again.

- This is a point I agree with. I really want to see the "loser chooses" rule. It would be really nice to get Bo3 1v1 matches built straight into the client in order to do this, but this way of doing it would also be acceptable if the organizers made it a known rule.

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4. Broken brackets not hand fixed therefore screwing people over.

- I also would like to see something done about this. Challonge is pretty bad with matching stuff properly, and - almost a larger point - the way Challonge does tiebreakers is awful. Challonge is by far the easiest and most convenient way to set up these tournaments, but it would be nice to see a better program used if possible.


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So overall, you make two points that I would also like to see fixed, but of the other three points you make, two are unfeasible without a built-in system in the client, and one is completely silly (ie. saying that these tournaments shouldn't be held just because some bugs pop up on occasion).

[dmcaxle1]

#1 Like I said, something is better than nothing. By cheating under the proposed way you run into the risk of someone catching you play a different deck or cards in swiss and getting disqualified from the tournament and further tournaments. Under the current rules there is no risk. I asked the organizer what would happen if between game 1 and 2 my opponent went missing for 30 seconds. I was told that 1 minute is not enough time to change cards and you would have to trust them. However that's entirely wrong and having saved decks with ratios of cards changed is very easy to do. Whether it has happened is unknown but we want to prevent possibility of it in the future as much as we can. Who knows if there will be another circuit before bo3 1v1 is put in but I don't think CZE has priority on it right now.

It's not like the TO has to look at each individual decklist submitted before the tournament. They just get them in their PM box (a separate account for each CS?) and when a problem occurs that is pointed out or the top 8 is posted they look at the decks in question. Players also won't be able to make their reserves JUST to counter the confirmed top 8. For example a rogue deck that no one suspected or put reserves in for was 1st in the table people could sneak in very specific cards for them that they wouldn't have had previously.

@buggy Alpha: I guess it doesn't matter if the Circuit ends before Alpha ends but if not it is also a bit unfair to players who would join during Beta and be very late in the running. Beta is probably long off so you have me there. I don't want to be too stubborn about that. 

[chililili]

Meh, I posted most of this last time after february tournament, albeit I did not and would not call jtatta lazy. He is doing the best he can with a very broken system (challonge) and game. I do agree however that he should have held the prizes for the first beta tournament or something. These prizes were not $300 + they were quite easily $700+ if the game is moderately successful (the lotus garden will be a thing). This is what I said my post mortem post, people do not give a fuck because prices are small, you increase them they start caring a lot, even if you are a volunteer. I am actually somewhat upset at my final placing #24 and I feel that with Mantis I would be placed higher, this translate to some extra packs (meh,I got enough), or CP (meh I am already invited, as I won in February), I do however care about my final rating/placing even if it gives me nothing but personal satisfaction and metric of my achievements. Mind you if prizes get even bigger you might even start to get people who report themselves as winners when they lose, and then shit will really hit the fan, as it will devolve into a he said, you said, slow down the entire tournament and we'll be forced believe the player who has the best reputation/trust and take his word (which may or may not have happened), regardless of the outcome it will be catastrophic to the community.

The only way jtatta could reasonably improve is have everyone feed the data to challonge. Then have him feed it manually to Mantis, then manually pair each round in challonge and give prize handouts and standings with what Mantis says. This would slow the tournmament down and the only way to do this would be to have a hard cutoff of time at the 50 mins mark.

I actually have meaningful feedback that could easily be implemented, rounds are never 50 mins, you almost always get extra time, instead make them 55 mins or 60 mins but actually end them at the time they end, give everyone who is still in-game a tie (or result if they are 1-0) and move on. And look for alternatives to challonge (I know of none). As for the loser chooses who goes first, the game is pretty fucking slow paced, before conceding/losing say I go first or you go first next game. Then just challenge and rechallenge until the order plays out as they chose, that is not hard, I've had people quit the game cause my name in the game is sakaras and in chat is chili and they think they are playing someone else, and I had a good hand and was on the play and was aggro, and I never bitched about it.

[dmcaxle1]

True the "he said she said" thing would be a problem with the game wins as well but if there is video/picture proof like screenshot of wins/losses we can do something about it. It is similar to how life totals of the player using paper+pen is always more trusted than the one using a calculator. Picture > Words. I am not saying all players should be forced to to screenshot their wins/losses but you could suggest players to do so in case a problem like you think does happen. The whole tournament thing is nice and I do appreciate it but I would still say not fixing the brackets is an act of laziness.

Also forgot someone could lie about reserves being different since there are no logs to prove them unless they have video, but at the very least it would be nice to have players locked into a deck. You come into the tournament with a choice for the meta and being able to switch to an entirely different deck when all the favorable matchup decks are knocked out or something is a bit weird.

[GPrime]

Feedback is welcome, but keep it constructive.

All of your points, whether we agree with your opinion or not, are things that were considered. The CS has changed a fair bit from its original form and will continue to through beta and beyond. How it's currently held is the result of testing and planning and it's a constant evolution.

I can address decklists, challonge tie breakers, and "loser picks draw/play", though:

- It's much harder to enforce decklists in 100+ man pool play than you may think, and trying to do so won't prevent abuse. Allowing everyone to change their decks between matches prevents us from rewarding cheaters and punishing honest players. Plus, the less ways there are to cheat, the less the tournament gets delayed due to pending investigations--and it already runs quite long for many people. Until (if) Hex has custom tournaments, this is unlikely to change. It's a similar case with sideboards, but Hex should have Bo3 before the CS becomes really huge. Beta is closer than you may thing and barring disaster should be well underway by the Fall season.

- Challonge is the best system we know of where people can register for themselves and results are easily accessible by all players (plus, inbuilt private messaging really helps get players together.) Regarding tie breakers, John experimented with using separate tournament software for calculating the final standings, and it's proved to be a subpar option. People can't see results real-time, it adds further delays, and also introduces the potential for user error to affect the standings. I agree that challonge's tie breaker formula is a little bogus when you have no-shows, byes, and drops. However, it's what we're going to use until we find something better (or get ingame custom tournaments.)

- "Loser picks" has and is being considered. The sticky point with this is, the more rules and instructions you have the less people will read or pay attention to them. We've observed this first-hand and I'll say I'm surprised how many times I've seen the evidence. This is also another thing that's fixed by Bo3 support as well. In the meantime, both the status quo and the "fix" are quite clunky and inconvenient.

Finally, this is a free, not-for-profit community tournament and "unpaid volunteers" is exactly what we are. When you talk about stakes, remember that we charge no entry fee. We do this to promote Hex and encourage a competitive community, and take naught from you but your time (and if you're not playing to have fun above all, maybe you're playing for the wrong reasons.)

[Admin]

Mar 23, 2014 17:35:04 GMT dmcaxle1 said:

Not gonna lie. You guys have a long way to go as tournament organizer. I've seen one time voluntary organizers be more caring and do a better job for tournaments that mean a lot less.


1. No reserves in swiss.
2. Running such a huge prized tournament in a buggy alpha instead of holding it off. Iirc some bugs did take games.
3. No losers go first enforced. Easily done by just restarting the game if the right player doesn't win the coin flip. I was given the response "People won't be happy if they get a good hand." My response to that is there weren't supposed to get that hand anyways because they're not supposed to go first! The opening hand is RNG and if their deck is consistent they should get a good hand again. 
4. Broken brackets not hand fixed therefore screwing people over.
5. Allowing people to change decks mid tournament.

Are you lazy to not ask for their decklist in pm on the forum? You only do this once a month, its worth $300+ this time and all of the things here are easily enforced if you decide not to be lazy. In live events tournament organizers get hand written papers of every decklist! Private messages are so much easier and you're still lazy! If they don't run the reserves they promised or the same cards and reach the top 8 then the people who faced them will vouch for their cheating and you will be able to enforce punishment. Something is better than nothing.

During the last round challonge paired a lot of people down from x-1 to x-2 and it was not fixed. Jtatta also said that the fact that many 4-2s were paired down when they shouldn't have didn't matter and he only cared about the x-1s. Isn't HexTcgPro about "the community"? Or do you only care about the people who are going to top and everyone else can have a shit time? Not to mention you would be screwing people out of the series points you have and what the lesser prize was. Seven hours of my time just for the TO to say I'm not worth the same as the other players and not worth the time needed to manually repair.  I'm really worried about what this laziness means for future events. 

I'll try to answer these one by one the best that I can. I have thought about each of these extensively. As G Prime said, feedback is always welcome but let's keep in constructive.

1)Reserves in Swiss - this, quite frankly, isn't possible right now. Here's what would have to happen: I would need each and every person to send me a deck list with their reserves, then if would have to compile these and make them public so that players could confirm that their opponents weren't cheating. Athe major downside is that each round, both players will have complete knowledge of the others deck and that isn't really too fair, wouldn't you agree? I'd absolutely LOVE to play with reserves but we don't have a good way to do it at the moment. In the top 8, it's much easier and much more feasible.

2)Prizes - Sure, I'd love for a much more stable client and less bugs. That said, Cory donated these prizes with some clauses that I will not discuss. It's not that I was "forced" to give out these prizes for this event, but it was highly recommended. I'm not going to go against the CCO of the company, obviously. That said, it is "only" $300. We aren't playing for thousands. I am very experienced in high level play and understand how prizes work and would never allow a large prize to be given away in an alpha tournament. I promise.

3)Losers go first - Again, another feature that I would love. That said, it is entirely possible to sit there for 5-10 minutes and restart games upon games until the proper person goes first. Then they get a bad hand and have to mulligan to infinity and get mad and have a negative play experience. Hopefully, CZE introduces something like this to the game but until then I don't want rounds to go 10 minutes longer, at least, so that the proper player can go first. It's just a choice that I made and I'm going to stick with it. In the top 8, perhaps something like this can be enforced but in the Swiss rounds I'm not really comfortable doing it.

4)challonge - This is not something that I can help. I'll apologize 100 times each to the players that it may have affected but it is unavoidable in challonge. You certainly misunderstood me when I said that it only matters for the top players. What I meant was that as long as all the x-1 players were paired against each other, then things weren't going to get too chaotic. Obvious the incident was unfortunate, we can look at Mantis in the future but be prepared to add at least an hour to the running time of the event, maybe longer.

5)Changing decks - This goes hand in foot with #1.. Unless deck lists are public, people have no idea what their opponent played the round before. I can try to enforce it, but I can't monitor it, which bothers me.

Finally, to say that I'm lazy is a big stretch. We are absolutely community first and I don't think that can ever be questioned by anyone. I'm sorry if you had a negative play experience but next time maybe contact me directly and I'll be more than happy to address any issues with you.

Congratulations again to all of the top 8 and to Zubrin for winning!

-John

[dmcaxle1]

Thanks for responding instead of ignoring it. I am a bit peeved by all the trust that must be given at these early tournaments but I will back down instead of creating pages of responses. Tournaments like these is temporary after all and not worth getting worked up for I have realized.

[cabalpapa]

Well, you guys certainly aren't lazy. You are more creative than anyone else at this point, and you are doing something that is generating a lot of interest. Are there problems? Of course.... Tatta, I will say this about decklists; unless things have changed, at most events, decklists are collected but not "made public". Random checks and balances happen (no way for you to check someone's deck in this environment, but I am sure something simple and random to keep people on their toes could be thought up if desired), and really people could pit different decks against each other as long as they didn't get caught. I'm sure it happens at MTG, but who knows. It is a bit of work, and I am not sure the reward is worth how much work it would take. Could it be improved? Sure, but I do not think the reward is worth the investment on this matter. The matter with who goes first is sadly, a matter of sour grapes. Imagine flushing good hands down the drain just because you got the wrong die roll. Bah, if we were all robots, sure... but humans have emotions and doing the rerolling until the right outcome happens would assuredly be negative. The tiebreaker issue is handled simply, I think. Just announce (officially) that Challonge is the system being used, its pairings and tiebreakers are final, and that is that. Those are the rules you sign up for, those are the rules you play.

In parting, I have one possible suggestion. I do not know how feasible it is, and it is not likely to happen. Run the tournament in 8-man pods, using the in-game constructed queue (which is frankly always dead, so we should be able to organize it if needed). I could look up how this works, but winners from each pod could be advanced to another pod and so forth. Not sure how that would work, but maybe it could.

[GPrime]

Using tournament queues is an interesting thought, cabalpapa, but currently the only way to run a Swiss tournament is through external software. Swiss is the format we started with for CS and that's likely going to stay that way.

However, it might be worth a try to do a pilot event separate from the CS using 8-man single elimination pools. Maybe the HexTechs guys are willing to give it a go for their next tournament. =)

[Werlix]

Mar 23, 2014 17:35:04 GMT dmcaxle1 said:

Not gonna lie. You guys have a long way to go as tournament organizer. I've seen one time voluntary organizers be more caring and do a better job for tournaments that mean a lot less.


1. No reserves in swiss.
2. Running such a huge prized tournament in a buggy alpha instead of holding it off. Iirc some bugs did take games.
3. No losers go first enforced. Easily done by just restarting the game if the right player doesn't win the coin flip. I was given the response "People won't be happy if they get a good hand." My response to that is there weren't supposed to get that hand anyways because they're not supposed to go first! The opening hand is RNG and if their deck is consistent they should get a good hand again. 
4. Broken brackets not hand fixed therefore screwing people over.
5. Allowing people to change decks mid tournament.

Are you lazy to not ask for their decklist in pm on the forum? You only do this once a month, its worth $300+ this time and all of the things here are easily enforced if you decide not to be lazy. In live events tournament organizers get hand written papers of every decklist! Private messages are so much easier and you're still lazy! If they don't run the reserves they promised or the same cards and reach the top 8 then the people who faced them will vouch for their cheating and you will be able to enforce punishment. Something is better than nothing.

During the last round challonge paired a lot of people down from x-1 to x-2 and it was not fixed. Jtatta also said that the fact that many 4-2s were paired down when they shouldn't have didn't matter and he only cared about the x-1s. Isn't HexTcgPro about "the community"? Or do you only care about the people who are going to top and everyone else can have a shit time? Not to mention you would be screwing people out of the series points you have and what the lesser prize was. Seven hours of my time just for the TO to say I'm not worth the same as the other players and not worth the time needed to manually repair.  I'm really worried about what this laziness means for future events. 

Wow this is pretty rude feedback to be honest. I'm sure the admins appreciate feedback but you might want to think about how you word it.

1. Can't implement in client
2. wtf?
3. Can't implement in client
4. Can't implement in Challonge
5. Can't implement in client

If it can't be automatically implemented then you open up more opportunities for people to cheat (honest people will abide by rules, dishonest people won't and will get an advantage) and also dramatically increase the stress/work involved for the admins as well as add a ton of confusion.

In my opinion the admins have done an amazing job considering this is free and voluntary work by them. I think they are valuing simplicity over rigidity which is the best way to go to avoid delays, stress and confusion.

[non0ns3nse]

Mar 24, 2014 21:03:55 GMT Werlix said:

...In my opinion the admins have done an amazing job considering this is free and voluntary work by them. I think they are valuing simplicity over rigidity which is the best way to go to avoid delays, stress and confusion.

^THIS

for me, these events are mostly about having fun, and since this is alpha, I'm really looking forward how these events will evolve once we hit beta/launch as they can only improve.