I’ve been trying to round up a couple of other players to round out the 24. In a couple of posts I’ve told people they will have until Tuesday evening, so I’ll close participation on this Tuesday evening.
In the meantime, I’d love to have feedback on the detailed tournament rules which I’ll post below.
Twilight Tournament Second Round rules version 0.3
Game Setup
Tournament format
Result reporting
Winners report results and game scores
Versioning
0.1: Initial version
0.2: Updated for five rounds of Swiss
0.3: Added option for no optional cards if both players agree
Calling @Dave_Perkins! I know you’ve run a lot of Ascension tournaments. Any feedback on the brackets and how to do the tiebreakers? Any good tools for seeding?
If we don’t end up with a nice number like 24, another option would be to use a guaranteed three game bracket like this one (specifically for 23).
http://www.printyourbrackets.com/3-game-guarantee/23-team-3-game-guarantee-tournament-bracket.html
This might also be more robust if we have someone drop out. Not sure how that would be handled.
I’m starting to think we should go in this direction. Thoughts?
Man, I’d enter, but I’ve only played it one and a half times this last Christmas, and I’d be little more than cannon fodder. Dug the game, but this is clearly a game with hidden depths. There’s a couple of old dudes on BGG who’ve played the game together like 150 times.
It’s a great opportunity to learn in a structured way.
I can’t wrap my head around all this at all, but wanted to thank you for setting this up.
For seeding purposes, here is my understanding of participants in the first tournament that were eliminated in round 2 or later (and will be seeded in this tournament if participating). The number to the participant’s left is the elimination round.
Winner: Berbatov
5 jeromeymartin
4 Brian_Reynolds
4 Syzygy
3 east83raider
3 CF_Kane
3 rho21
3 gumers
2 Greatatlantic
2 Courteous_D
2 B4cchus
2 dstone112
2 moss_icon
2 tgb123
2 bmarinari
2 Mark_L
If we go with the 23 person 3-game guaranteed format, there are nine first round byes. Those would go to participants in the first tournament who advanced to the third round or better, and any remaining byes would go to a random participants who made it to round 2.
Based on the above, here is the randomized, seeded list of the current 23 participants.
Berbatov / Berbatov
jeromeymartin / Habbaku
Brian_Reynolds / Cattlesquat
Syzygy / Syzygy
rho21 / rho21
gumers / Gumers
dstone112 / dstone112
tgb123 / tgb
Thraeg / Thraeg
CraigM / millertime059
Chappers / Chappers
Brooski / spacerumsfeld
ForzaA / ???
DoggieMon / Douglas
Infested_Terran / Groovechamp
SadleyBradley / SadleyBradley
Otthegreat / otism
tylertoo / tylertoo
TheRockSal / therockfrog
Borges / I_Borges
buzznaut / buzznaut
tcgamer / tcgamer
Grunden / Grunden
Left_Empty / Danjuro
I think this should be allowed to be increased to 21 days by mutual agreement in the case of players with a big time zone difference, on the understanding that if the game isn’t finished by a results deadline it will be scored as a win to the player who has used less time. Or something like that. In short, I don’t want people being timed out if at all possible, but I also don’t want the tournament being held up.
How do Defcon and Europe control score? Does this have a potentially negative effect for Wargames (players may prefer to increase their score, risking a loss, rather than take victory with Wargames).
With 24 (or byes to an approximation of 24), you would need a 3-player mini group at the end too, or some additional byes. I like that 3-game guarantee bracket, solves a lot of problems.
Thanks for the feedback, @rho21!
I’m definitely sympathetic as I like to play my non-tournament games with the longest timer. However, if we allow people to agree to 21 days, then It’s highly likely that in each round we will end up waiting for one or possibly more groups to finish. So instead of waiting two weeks for the result of a round we’d be waiting over a month. That would mean we’d be looking at a year or more to wrap up the tournament.
There are about 11 rounds in the guaranteed 3 game structure (finals may be more).
Whereas if we went with double elimination, there would be 7 (8?) rounds, and we could use the nifty challonge tool.
See non-properly seeded test bracket below:
http://challonge.com/tournaments/bracket_generator?ref=pv2B4Kyiap
[quote=“rho21, post:289, topic:125448”]
How do Defcon and Europe control score? Does this have a potentially negative effect for Wargames (players may prefer to increase their score, risking a loss, rather than take victory with Wargames).[/quote]
Great points. That’s why brackets may be a cleaner solution and will definitely be less work to track.
Any thoughts on double elimination vs. triple elimination, thus saving a 3 or 4 rounds and shortening the tournament by 1.5 to 2 months?
If you look over in the Twilight Struggle main thread @charmtrap you will see I have played a total of two games against the AI. So… you are not alone.
I’m not worried about playing quickly, I’m worried about the circumstance where available times of day to play result in one player’s timer dropping much quicker, and 7 days each turns into 8 days total rather than 14. One of my games last tournament could only be finished thanks to my opponent staying up late one Saturday night.
Still, I’m very much agreed that rounds can’t be allowed to run on and on. If allowing this, we would have to implement our own deadlines, and make them pretty strict. I just wish there were different timer options.
Anyway, I’ll cope with whatever is decided here. It’s only a problem with an 8 hour or greater time difference, and can usually be fixed at weekends.
The number of rounds is a disadvantage of the bracket structure, certainly. (With groups, the equivalent of triple-elimination would be just 7 rounds, and 3 of those could potentially be played simultaneously if desired.) I have no real preference between double and triple elimination.
I would sooner have “playoff round” or even “random die roll” as a tiebreaker than cumulative score, for the reasons rho describes - don’t want tiebreaker considerations changing gameplay. I’m good for really whatever version of round robin / swiss / elimination you go with though. Preliminary seeding looked correct.
Brian
Thanks for mentioning Swiss, Brian. Not sure why that did not occur to me since I have participated in Swiss tournaments.
Since I think that outside of identifying a winner our secondary objective should be giving all players as many games as possible, Swiss is probably the best way to go. According to Swiss Triangle, it’s likely we could winnow down to a 5-0 winner in 5 rounds with 23 participants.
The smaller number of rounds would allow us to have a faster result while also allowing people like @rho21 who may need more time due to timezone constraints to finish their games.
My wife gets up at 3 am here in the Pacific time zone USA so if someone is far away I can be ready anytime…to get my ass killed.
7-10 days - Anythign more than that and it drags on forever.
And, I’ve played less than CraigM. But, I’ve read tons…we’ll see if that helps at all.
I’ll admit, I joined as much to learn from getting my ass kicked by @Brooski as I did any designs on winning.
Another advantage of Swiss is that for games 3, 4, 5 players who are still new to the game or early on the learning curve will likely be facing one another.
For newer players, if you send an invite make sure your invite screen looks like this with your opponent’s name in the space where it says (Open).
Playdek name “Groovechamp” if this is still open.
It is! Welcome!
