Right now, there are 276 open tournaments waiting for more players. This is way too many. Clearly, there's a problem here that needs to be solved, as the current status makes the Open Tournaments page unusable.

For the number of open tournaments to stay at a reasonable level, we need tournaments to fill up and start at the same rate that they're being created. However, the ratio of people making tournaments to people joining is leaning towards the creation side. After all, one person can easily start a 512 person tournament and then walk away, whereas it takes 512 people joining that tournament for it to begin.

What are your ideas on how to solve this?

Edited 2/10/2015 05:44:46

Actually perhaps an "open tournaments" page/setting on multi-player game page.


Btw give me Falcons back pls.

The open tournaments page is difficult to use for several reasons.

First, the only information you have is the title and the elimination type. This wouldn't be too bad if the tournament title was always informative, but most of them are not. This means you have to open the tournament to see if it is worth joining.

This leads to the second problem. You can't get back to the Open Tournaments page directly from the tournament you just clicked on.

Another issue is that the link to Open Tournaments is quite small and only available on the tournaments page, so I'd guys that a lot of people don't even know it is there.

Edited 2/10/2015 06:00:37

Agreeing with everything kellen said, you need to make them more obvious. Maybe a popup when someone logs on for the first time that day?

Well, there's certainly a reliability factor going on there. There's really no surefire way to actually control the integrity of players to create tournaments that will actually fill. It must be done in a way that would determine the "experience" of players, in my opinion. When I say "experienced" players, I mean people who understand the basic concept of the game, and would be able to make more reasonable choices when creating tournaments. More experienced players (not based by skill, or anything like that) would be able to be better judges of what tournaments they desire, and how they will create them for the effect of their envisioned maximum players versus the type of tournament they wish.

The only thoughts off the top of my head to control this would be to restrict multiple large tournaments to Members only. Because now that tournaments can be accessed by anyone with the required level, there have been people creating tournaments with no idea how to use them. It would seem that players would be less willing to spend $15 or $30 to create tournaments with not much idea how to use them. But there will always be players who buy the membership to support the game, or to automatically unlock features they have been wishing to have with the membership. The "experience" of players would be easily bypassed with this feature, possibly without having the integrity that I speak of to create tournaments that they wish.

Therefore, you could divide the open tournaments into different categories. Such as RR/Single Elim./Double Elim. and even further to Single Elimination Small (1-4 Bracket Size)/ Single Elimination Large (5+ Bracket Size) and RR Small (<10 players)/RR Large(>10 players). This will unfortunately keep the enormous clutter currently on the open tournaments tab, but it would allow players to shorten the possibilities of what they would preferably like to play, and if they find a decent tournament they would like to play in, then they would join. The amount of tournaments could also be restricted with the above proposal. However, one limitation would be if a player wants a specific setting. Could they then have a search bar that might allow them to narrow their searches even further? A more categorized open tournaments tab would certainly appeal to me, but I still rely on people to manually invite me. If I like the settings, then I join. I don't actively go around searching for tournaments, unlike some people. But I think a search tab would also be of great use.

However, the search tab would bank on the concept of having people name their tournaments in a fashion the player looks for, and not have some wacky name. For instance, if I was looking for a Middle Earth tournament, I could search for LotR, Middle Earth, etc. and get different results for each search. Not to mention some tournaments that have creative titles (of which I can't think of any) that would not show up due to it not having the keywords that are being searched for.

Divisions could also be based off of:

• Local Deployments
  
• Multiattack
  
• Luck Modifiers/Attack-Defensive Kill Ratios
  

which would all be unlocked at a specific level, depending on what level you would consider players to be "experienced" in. This could directly relate to when players unlock this ingame feature to use in their created games. Such as having the ability to join tournaments with "Pure Skill" (of which all the necessary components must be obtained: No-luck Cyclic Move Order, 0% Straight Rounded Luck, etc.) once the level that is required to make games with that feature is unlocked.


You could also have a set time limit, such as when creating Real-Time open tournaments. However, I admit there are some massive problems with that off the bat, such as having to restart tournaments if they don't fill in a timely fashion (which might cause some disgruntlement, as some tournaments may be close to starting when they are unceremoniously deleted). However, this mainly might help for the massive amounts of tournaments created by players who've just unlocked tournaments, and are trying to experiment with them. (Speaking of which, are there any ways of automatically deleting tournaments after a certain number of days expire? This would also be able to help, but I'm guessing it's some outrageous figure like 114 days or so.)

I'll post other solutions, if I can think of any.



Again, this is just off the top of my head, and I'm not in the best state of mind to offer great insight. I'm sure there will be other solutions that are better than mine. Questions/Comments greatly appreciated.

-AWESOMEGUY

Edited 2/10/2015 06:22:05

^
Fizzer, you can go ahead and close this thread.

what about tourmaments slowly progressing like normal games

to control this would be to restrict multiple large tournaments to Members only. Because now that tournaments can be accessed by anyone with the required level, there have been people creating tournaments with no idea how to use them. It would seem that players would be less willing to spend $15 or $30 to create tournaments with not much idea how to use them.

I agree. This is, in fact, how the site used to operate. Creating tournaments used to be a member-only feature, but when levels were introduced I threw creation of tournaments in as a level reward to promote the leveling system.

The proliferation of bad tournaments that aren't filling may have been a consequence of that. And the biggest problem is that this compounds -- once a lot of bad tournaments start getting created, people stop browsing the Open Tournaments section, and then they start filling even slower, leading the giant mess we have now.

You could also have a set time limit, such as when creating Real-Time open tournaments.

I thought of this too. However, the reason I don't like that is evident when you consider it from a player's perspective: If you join a tournament, and it never starts, that's a bad experience for the player.

It's also a bad experience if you join a tournament and it starts weeks, months or years later (or never), which is the problem we have now.

The "My Tournaments" and "Open Tournaments" pages will be improved, to show the map as a picture, the boot time, and icons showing the settings much like the multi-player dashboard does now. And Open Tournaments will be made more accessible.

This will help, but it's not going to reduce the backlog of 276 open tournaments, so it's not even close to enough. I think we need something more fundamental.

Like you could originally (at level 3) unlock 16 player/5 player round robins, going up slowly until level 55, where you unlock 512 player/24 round robins

BTW: a lot of clans with <10 members that are not skill based running around, speaking of clutter

I think there should be some sort of expiration if tournaments don't fill but one reason tournaments stall out is because people don't decline and you can't invite more people. So maybe if unanswered invitations expired or there was some way of removing them.

Part of those unanswered tournament invites comes from mobile not having access to join or decline. Once they can join that will help fill things up also.

A redesign of the tournament page should make it more inviting. Some filters would be nice.

I think if the invite lists are updated so that people can organize players into lists more players would get invited to the types of games they like and less of the ones they don't.

How about after a certain amount of time the tournament starts irregardless of how many people have accepted the invite? You fill the holes with byes or AIs.

bad idea Lolowut
AIs are not very developed yet
and even if they were,its not the same as playing with/against a human


how about a rule which'll restrict the "number of tournaments" and "players in it" that we create based on the number of tournaments that we've joined that others have created

for eg:- for creating a 64 player tournament i have to join 1 tourney someone has created
for creating a 128 player tournament i have to join 2 tourneys someone has created
" " 256 " " 4 " "
and so on.....

32 player tourneys start very quickly so we don't have to join any other
tourney to create one

if someone creates a tournament which does not start soon(1 or 2 months),he/she will have to
join other tournaments for every 2 week/1 month their tournament is not starting

many of us don't like the idea of compulsion,so if you don't want to join unnecessary and bad
tournaments,then don't make one

As you say Fizzer, before WL 2.0, only member was able to create tourney. And they used to be between 20 and 30 open tourney.

My suggestion: tourney auto-delete after 30 days if they didn't start yet.

OR like lolowut say, after X time (30 days seems legit), the tourney start with BYE (autowin, like in the WGL).

A drastic solution would be rescrict member only to create tourney. But anyway you need to delete ALL tourney older than 30 days.

I agree with lolowut... after a time OR when the tournament creator decides, fill the places with AI's or byes.

To make it fair, i would say that some prerequisites should be met, like tournament filled over 50-60% of the players or something like that

Make it so that only tournaments created by members are visible on this page.
Tourneys made by non-members would have to be accessed directly by a link.

Or even better solution IMO: make creating tournaments a members only feature again. As well as ladders. I never understood why they aren't member-exclusive anymore.

You know what would be the best incentive to gaining levels? Colours. Make only the basic 6 available to newbies, the other 44 (yes, I mean 44) would be unlocked by leveling. Did you ever consider that?

that is bloddy unfair...

and Fizzer is a money making machine, don't tempt him.


Just because you have paid, doesn't mean we have. I couldn't pay even if I wanted too. And wasn't there some complaints about the 2v2 being too easy? Allowing less people will TOTALLY (sarcasm) fix that.

You've never worked in your life, have you?

nope

Note how I pointed out I can't pay for it. And BTW I know enough about business to know that you have to at least pretend that you care, so people keep buying stuff.

Due to the whole "losing my clan and fizzer not giving a fuck", I am never going to buy a membership. (and yes I know it was at least partially my fault) And I was seriously considering asking my parents (even though they would have said no). That is a potential $45 australian Fizzer lost by not caring.