Completed three of these now, last night's probably felt the most chaotic.
1) People not being able to confirm until very late on - I need people to checkin on discord (or be on server) between 7pm and 7:45pm, otherwise it's not clear who is going to turn up. Last night there were a few late "can't make it" and a few late "can make it", but at 7:30 I didn't know if it was going to be 7 people or 12, and final groups were done very much last-minute. Obviously we are all old now and have lives/interruptions so we have to allow for that, but I just felt very unprepared compared to previous weeks, and in the end some games started 15 minutes after others. Or even just confirming "I won't be early but I will be there" is fine.
2) The group-stage-then-knockout-stage has 4 sweetspots: 6,8,12 & 16 people... yesterday was 10 (which actually turned out to be 9) and so I did two groups of 5. While we cut the knockout stage back to be only two games long, it was still a pain. When there are 5 people in a group, the games have to be played in a particular order to avoid 5 rounds turning into 6... yesterday the other group only had 4 due to dropouts and that meant it was even worse as group A (with 4) had to wait around... and then group B had 3 2-1 matches and that made it worse still. Bit of a disaster, I'll try and come up with an imaginative solution to 10 players next time, and avoid 5-player groups in future. Thanks to everyone for sticking with it, we still finished pretty much on time but it could have been better.
3) The skill-gap - this changes with different signups, but right now we have very few div4/5/6 players. This week we also lacked the low-div1/high-div2 players that made previous tournaments so close. I'm not sure if this is through lack of communication (I don't know if people aren't entering through lack of interest or lack of awareness) but if we had enough lower-level players and there was a clear gap in skill to the rest then I'm happy to create a second 'division' tournament, even if that is simple double-elimination or something. I'd rather people could turn up and play reasonably close games, than be the one with little chance. On the other hand if you are borderline high/low division you might get put into low and have an easy time of it - not sure of good solution to that problem. Other than more low-division players signing up
Are there other ways of contacting people that I'm not using? Last week we emailed everyone who played in Thunderdome8, and it didn't seem to have much impact.
4) The map-tossing - this was meant to avoid someone tossing an opponent's favourite map, or picking one they knew they hated. Unfortunately with the seedings being largely made by my guesswork, it can give slight advantage to lower seed, when the opponents are otherwise very closely matched. Generally though I'm happy with how it has worked out, just the "backup choice" section I'm not happy with. As we're going to a map-pool of 7 next week I'm going to leave it as-is (it will be toss-toss-pick-pick-toss-toss) for the moment and see how it plays out, but I'd like to consider alternatives.
5) Ping rules - this is frustrating for those playing from North/South America but I'm not sure there's much we can do here. Currently the rules are "be prepared to play in London, and ping-up to half your opponent's ping or 51, whatever is lower". Is allowing games in New York/Miami and matching pings too much? Minimum ping-up level 70 instead of 51? I'll go with whatever gets the greatest number of players involved.
Also, a little-known feature of KTX that would have come in handy yesterday: admins can pause games. Elect an admin and then do /pause - older versions of mvdsv has a bug and can decide you are a 'userinfo spammer' when the game is paused (to avoid this: leave the console down to talk, and don't alt-tab out) but badplace and other servers on latest versions should be okay. When unpausing, you will be told it will unpause in 2 seconds, then the game resumes.
tldr; it's gone okay but I'm still learning.
I'll do a news post tomorrow about cup #4 - this will be a 7 map pool, with dm6 returning and also possibly/probably skull, as it's currently the most well-known of the kenya maps. The next time we do a kenya tournament I'd like to try out some of the other suggestions and maybe mix the map-pool up a bit, maybe alternating least-picked maps out for trying something new. Something to think about.
1) People not being able to confirm until very late on - I need people to checkin on discord (or be on server) between 7pm and 7:45pm, otherwise it's not clear who is going to turn up. Last night there were a few late "can't make it" and a few late "can make it", but at 7:30 I didn't know if it was going to be 7 people or 12, and final groups were done very much last-minute. Obviously we are all old now and have lives/interruptions so we have to allow for that, but I just felt very unprepared compared to previous weeks, and in the end some games started 15 minutes after others. Or even just confirming "I won't be early but I will be there" is fine.
2) The group-stage-then-knockout-stage has 4 sweetspots: 6,8,12 & 16 people... yesterday was 10 (which actually turned out to be 9) and so I did two groups of 5. While we cut the knockout stage back to be only two games long, it was still a pain. When there are 5 people in a group, the games have to be played in a particular order to avoid 5 rounds turning into 6... yesterday the other group only had 4 due to dropouts and that meant it was even worse as group A (with 4) had to wait around... and then group B had 3 2-1 matches and that made it worse still. Bit of a disaster, I'll try and come up with an imaginative solution to 10 players next time, and avoid 5-player groups in future. Thanks to everyone for sticking with it, we still finished pretty much on time but it could have been better.
3) The skill-gap - this changes with different signups, but right now we have very few div4/5/6 players. This week we also lacked the low-div1/high-div2 players that made previous tournaments so close. I'm not sure if this is through lack of communication (I don't know if people aren't entering through lack of interest or lack of awareness) but if we had enough lower-level players and there was a clear gap in skill to the rest then I'm happy to create a second 'division' tournament, even if that is simple double-elimination or something. I'd rather people could turn up and play reasonably close games, than be the one with little chance. On the other hand if you are borderline high/low division you might get put into low and have an easy time of it - not sure of good solution to that problem. Other than more low-division players signing up
Are there other ways of contacting people that I'm not using? Last week we emailed everyone who played in Thunderdome8, and it didn't seem to have much impact.4) The map-tossing - this was meant to avoid someone tossing an opponent's favourite map, or picking one they knew they hated. Unfortunately with the seedings being largely made by my guesswork, it can give slight advantage to lower seed, when the opponents are otherwise very closely matched. Generally though I'm happy with how it has worked out, just the "backup choice" section I'm not happy with. As we're going to a map-pool of 7 next week I'm going to leave it as-is (it will be toss-toss-pick-pick-toss-toss) for the moment and see how it plays out, but I'd like to consider alternatives.
5) Ping rules - this is frustrating for those playing from North/South America but I'm not sure there's much we can do here. Currently the rules are "be prepared to play in London, and ping-up to half your opponent's ping or 51, whatever is lower". Is allowing games in New York/Miami and matching pings too much? Minimum ping-up level 70 instead of 51? I'll go with whatever gets the greatest number of players involved.
Also, a little-known feature of KTX that would have come in handy yesterday: admins can pause games. Elect an admin and then do /pause - older versions of mvdsv has a bug and can decide you are a 'userinfo spammer' when the game is paused (to avoid this: leave the console down to talk, and don't alt-tab out) but badplace and other servers on latest versions should be okay. When unpausing, you will be told it will unpause in 2 seconds, then the game resumes.
tldr; it's gone okay but I'm still learning.
I'll do a news post tomorrow about cup #4 - this will be a 7 map pool, with dm6 returning and also possibly/probably skull, as it's currently the most well-known of the kenya maps. The next time we do a kenya tournament I'd like to try out some of the other suggestions and maybe mix the map-pool up a bit, maybe alternating least-picked maps out for trying something new. Something to think about.
News