Why is this issue only open tournaments? I am in lots of private ones where people invited a ton of inactive people that will never decline or join, so the tournament is hung up forever, or until the creator comes back and deletes it. It probably takes up no space on the server side, but it is still a problem because hundreds of people see the tournament on their list and it will never start.

A similar issue is a tournament takes a very long time to fill (again, this can be private). When it finally does, many people are inactive. I am playing at least 3 of those right now where 3-4 people on each side are booted EVERY game because it took so long to fill.

I just don't see why we should only be looking at open tournaments. That ignores the root causes and just treats a symptom.

Memele has a great point, one that has LOTS of votes on uservoice. We need more than one friend list. Then people would invite only the people they want (sub groups), rather than mass invite. There are several other good ideas in here. The point is don't mask the pain...cure it.

@ jz - 8 or 9 brackets is nothing if a solo tourney. Total players is the issue, not rounds.

@Tbest - Bad ideas...sorry. It would make clan league impossible. I have to create 11 tournaments for each division (4 divisions)...so 44 tournaments within the span of a week. All of those are pre-arranged, so they WILL fill up and start in a timely manner. But if you put a cap on tournaments, it would be a total mess to get a bunch of people to create all those.

Vacation idea...horrible. The issue is not tournaments that take long to play. The issue at hand is tournaments not started yet. You are basically not even on topic with that idea.

@ChrisCMU first post, this page

Quote Fizzer Page 2.

We can talk about private tournaments more in a different thread, but let's keep this thread about open tournaments, as the subject says.

Also see Fizzer's post on THIS PAGE

@ChrisCMU 2nd post
Actully, since we are talking about OPEN tournaments the clan league is not a problem.

Quote Fizzer, page 3

We're only talking about open tournaments here. Private tournaments would still be free to create, and since you know who you're inviting for all those leagues then they'd be fine as private tournaments.

As for the Vac. idea, I am well aware that it is not about the waiting for tournaments to start. I used the word "Consider", and double parenthesis to indicate that it was , strictly speaking, not on topic.

However, as Fizzer is doing a redesign of the tournaments I found the issue strongly related. For me players that are on vacation is worse then players that become booted. Players on Vac. bothers you for a long time, booted players bothers you once. Also I would expect there to be less booted players with the redesign completed, while the Vacations haven't been touched so far. Also note that I wanted max boot time for tournaments to be the same as max Vacation time.


EDIT: The current vacation system is unpopular, see Uservoice: Fariness of Vacations (No link, we don't need to get even more of topic xD). What I proposed is a hybrid of that proposal and the current system.

@All What do you think about the Mapmaker idea?

Edited 2/11/2015 00:59:58

@Fizzer
Is it a chance of this happening too? [Randomize teams in tournaments]
https://warlight.uservoice.com/forums/77051-warlight-features/suggestions/1142525-randomize-teams-in-a-tournament

it can bias people into thinking that 64 players is a small tournament, which it really isn't

64 player tournaments can be filled!
https://www.warlight.net/MultiPlayer?TournamentID=12986

I'm in two 64 player tournaments, and they are relatively easy to fill. However, my experience with them isn't stellar. In one, my last game ended nearly three weeks ago, and I'm waiting for other players to catch up. In the other one, one game in round 1 has been going for 3 weeks, with no indication that it's going to end soon (because one player appears to be intentionally stalling).

I might join a 64 player single elimination in the future, but I probably will avoid double elimination because these ones are taking too long (and are too long of a commitment).

Edited 2/11/2015 00:41:12

^^ Same Issue I have, and tried to solve in my first post on this page.

it is fair to say you do not want a bad experience for a tournament creator, but what about the people who join, who wait for a tournament which never starts?

if auto-deleting/hiding is mentioned when the tournament is being created, this would lessen any annoyance on the creator's part, no? personally i would likely have given up on a tournament if it took more than a couple of weeks to fill, but that's just me.

i have not been in a lot of tournaments myself, but the largest ones i have seen work with any efficiency or even start, are either comprised of a lot of small teams, or not very many of larger teams

not seen one of those giant ones work yet, though again, i have not been a huge participant of these tournaments. what i am curious about are what the largest tournament sizes are that regularly get filled. i see 64 size tournaments that get filled somewhat often, but will a larger size work?

limiting the creation of tournaments to higher level players is not a bad idea i think, small tournaments (up to 16 people maybe?) should be ok to be made by mid-level players (40+?), though bigger ones (up to 64-80) should be be made by higher level players.

any point to making the giant tournament sizes available? i am willing to bet that 400 players (the max size for a tournament i think), or even 200, would be a fairly significant section of the player base.

why make tournament creation a member's only feature? if the idea is to have tournaments that are more likely to start, well, most of the people who i like to play with are not spenders as far as i know

what if there were prerequisites to be able to make a basic tournament (following one of several templates), unlockable at say, level 40, and then as you level up you unlock more add-ons/features/styles/sizes of tournament, similar to how level determines what you can do when making individual games right now?

an example of how this might work:
(level 40) you can make, maybe, a 8 or 16 1v1 tournament using any map currently unlocked
(level 45) you can make up to 32 man tournament, or 8 teams of 4, or 16 teams of 2 (along with any map)
(level 50) you can make invite only tournaments, all of the above, up to 64 players

these are all just thoughts I had after reading this thread late at night, and I am no expert at Warlight/Warzone, so take all this with a grain of salt lol

In my opinion, the tournaments that don't start are often there because either there are too many other tournaments this way, or, there are too many players to start. This issue is not exactly easy to fix but I do have an idea. 1, the player who makes the tournament has to invite at least half the players in. If by a certain number of days, the invited player does not or declines, then the creator must invite another player and cannot reinvite a player.

It sometimes happens in tournaments with teams, that the tournament does not start because many of the teams are so called "reserved". This can result in a never starting tournament. When one of these reserved teams gets someone they don't want, sometimes all the players meant to be in the team before the unwelcomed player joined leave. I also think that the tournaments should be like multiday games in the fact where the open seats will close and that the host will have to change the game in some way. This would at least solve the problem I mentioned first about the excessive abundance of tournaments. The max players also might want to be reduced because then, maybe reducing 512 to 128 or so to maximum to make the open seats and or players invited to tournaments. This would make the start time of the tourney much faster.

A final note, like multiplayer games, I doubt people want to join tournaments that they doubt that they can win. It might be a good idea to hide both, the number of players who have yet to join to start the game and who would be in the other teams. If this was an individual tournament, then one would not be able to know if any really good players would be in the tourney. This would not show whether the tournament would be a pushover or impossibly hard.

" 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. "


Fizzer, the same could be said from having open seats expire from regular games, but we do that regularly, and you seem to think that works... why couldn't the same thing be done for tournaments, just with a longer delay..?

*Btw, I am not in favor of this for regular games, as due to the diplomacy crowd, I can't really ever get a FFA started anymore with open seats, but it's been a regular feature that solves many problems presented*

I don't know how many of the tournaments are overlapping (same map, setting), but I would not let to create same one, instead -> give a link to the player about it.

Also my suggestion: for the same map limit the maximum number of tournaments to be created.
That could reduce the amount of tournaments..

agree with taurus

I disagree in limiting the amount of tournaments for each map. Some maps are very popular (1vs1earth or imperium romanum) and old, worse tournaments might take the place away for new, better tournaments

the more popular the maps are the faster will the games begin
so we can have one after other tournaments in those maps
problem is "bad settings"

how about we vote out the tournament based on bad settings?
suppose i see a medium earth with 0 neutrals multi attack and high income(or any such insane template),
i'll vote for the tournament to be cancelled

no one gets to see who voted against that tournament

but once the number of players voting against it exceeds x amount,that tournament will get deleted

clans can misuse this system though
so if we restrict the number of votes a clan can make or reduce the power of vote for every next vote from the same clan by some amount(in percentage following the rules of compound interest),it should work good

those having alts are not allowed to vote against the same tourneys 2ice

@master of desaster: limit can be based on map (popularity) as well. It's your(Fizzer)'s call how fine tune it..

suppose i see a medium earth with 0 neutrals multi attack and high income(or any such insane template), i'll vote for the tournament to be cancelled

These are quite reasonable multi-attack settings.
Solutions that limit creativity are the worst, sorry.

There are some interesting ideas in this thread already. My favourite one was to allow non-members to create max 64-player tournaments, or charge coins for making it bigger. I'd imagine it would result in smaller tournaments in average, which fill quicker and are probably more interesting to majority of players.

EDIT
Okay, I checked the open tournament page. Probably should have done it before giving suggestions...

I see that many tournaments are small round robins. Often multiple made by the same player. I don't like it. I check the "unlockables" page and learn that you only need to be level 13 to make a tournament. It's way too low. Then I learn that at level 46 you can make up to 5 tournaments at the same time.

I think we need to change a few things here:
-higher level required to create tournaments. Level 13 is a total noob. Make it 30 at least.
-max 5 tournaments at the time, but only 1 open.
-max 64 player tournaments without paying actual money, either through coins or membership.
-open tournaments disappear if they don't fill after a long time. As someone already said, when a tournament finally starts after 6 months, when everyone forgot about it, it's much more annoying than when it doesn't start at all.

-filters. Preferably checkboxes so you can apply multiple filters at the time. We need an option to filter by:
---tournament type. I personally never join anything other than single elim.
---1v1, team of FFA
---vacations yes/no
---multiattack yes/no
---local deployment yes/no
---size. I'd love to have big tournaments separated completely from the small ones, like we have separate open games and promoted games on the multiplayer dashboard.

That would be an excellent tournament overhaul. Lots of work though... But I don't see one simple solution that would work, except for giving tournament creation back to members only.

Edited 2/11/2015 12:02:04

I can't see any solution to shorting the list without auto-deletion, I used to check the open tournaments tab when I first joined, but after levels came into being, it really started getting too crowded in there.

I've so far only managed to get tournaments running with 125 and 128 players, I think I stupidly tried a 700+ (teams of 3) tournament once, it wasn't going to fill and I started disliking my settings so I self-deleted. (also because I didn't trust my own teammates to remain active)

Also if you're using a template for a tournament, the tournament needs to pick up the template name, I made one once and then deleted when the template name didn't come across, if people don't title the tournaments well, nobody is going to be interested in them, as no actual game settings are visible before joining.
I'd actually go as far as to say that tournaments need to be made using a previously used in open games template, half the tournaments have settings that wouldn't fill if the game was on the open games tab.

how about we vote out the tournament based on bad settings?
suppose i see a medium earth with 0 neutrals multi attack and high income(or any such insane template),
i'll vote for the tournament to be cancelled

The average WarLight player never seems to get tired of playing the same maps and settings over and over again. Even if it's a setting where the outcome is mainly decided by luck (Europe map with 1 random spot,...) I guess that is because they never check history afterwards and see that their awesome win wasn't because of a superior strategy but simple because Russia beats Portugal and stuff. I really don't want to let Mr Average decide how WarLight is to be played.

Multiattack ffa's with 0 neutrals are very nice games imo. Building huge stacks is still important but unlike as in classical ffas those stacks have a far more offensive character. Usually those games have a very fast pace and one tiny mistake or a surprise attack can cost you everything you build up the last couple turns.

Edited 2/11/2015 12:01:25

after all this i think we must have 2 different tabs for tournaments

one for strategic games where you have to think to win

and other for every other purpose including thinking(at minimum level)

I think theres a risk of making this too complex, or trying to impose too many limits.

Personally I like a few ideas mentioned so far, in combination;

Clean up the tournament list:

- Tournaments stop being advertised if no one has joined for 30 days
- Tournament links can still be sent
- Tournaments are re-advertised when another player joins
- after 40 days all members of the tournament are reminded by email that they need more members.
- after 45 days the tournament is deleted.

Stop drowning players in invites:

Right now a lot of people just click the 'invite everyone on friends list' button, but since almost everyone has the default setting to add everyone they play with to friends, that means players get drowned in invites. I never look at the tournament invites because of this, I rely on people private mailling me to let me know.

Suggestions:
- Remove the 'Check all' button on tournament invites, if it would add more than 100 players (which is really a 'band aid' fix if the suggestion below isnt implemented
- Make the default setting for friends NOT to add everyone you play with.

Limit Tournament Creation

- Players must have completed a minimum number of games to make a single tournament (not level based, lottery has screwed that). Suggest 100 games.
- Tournament size is limited to (20 players?) until the player has completed a number of games (200?)
- Players unlock 5 simultaneous tournaments when they complete Y (say 500?) games

Team mechanics

I often find my clan team is invaded by third parties, this often spoils the tournament, or means I leave the team (if i spot it in time).

Suggestions:

- allow the first person in a team to control who enters the team, by sending the 'attempted join request' as a mail requiring approval to the first person. If the first person doesnt reply within X days, allow the join request
- If when a tournament starts, a player becomes AI on turn 1, allow substitution by another player.

I wouldnt limit to members, that seems a step back in time.

Edited 2/11/2015 12:43:21