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

@Tbest- My question about why this is only regarding OPEN tournaments is directed at Fizzer. Not the people following his directive in the thread. I just don't understand why we would mask the cause. Sure, deleting only old OPEN ones would help. But that is just a band aid. Why not fix the root causes? I guess maybe he doesn't have time, which is fair. But he could easily apply the same band aid to ALL tournaments and not differentiate the two.

Personally, I almost never join OPEN tournaments. I don't check the page at all really. I would bet a majority of good players only play ones they are actually invited to as well. So neglecting private tournaments will likely do nothing for most players.

Edited 2/11/2015 18:02:32

I'd like an option to be auto-removed from a tournament if it doesn't start within a certain time, or if I've been inactive for a certain number of days. If I go on vacation and haven't logged in for 3 days, I'd like to be removed from all un-started tournaments.

I don't see how we have such a problem with private tournaments. Whether the tournament starts or not is a problem of the tournament host. In open tournaments, whether the tournament starts or not is a problem for Warlight because they're broadcasted for everyone to be able to join. Imagine you had 1000s of open multiday games that never started. What kind of perception would a new person have to seeing this? That's the kind of perception they get when they see 100s of open tournaments.

Not sure if this has been suggested before, but I think the answer is pretty simple.

Why does a level 16 need to be able to make tournaments?

Raise the level at which you unlock tournies to somewhere between 40 and 48.

Then, make it required that you have been in at least 10 tournaments before.

Finally, make an open tournaments tab under multiplayer.

I was recently invited to a private tournament that was created in 2010. There are dozens of people who joined it years ago who are now inactive, and it's a team tournament. I'd rather have a tournament be deleted than have it stay open so long that my teammates (and opponents) lose interest in the game and are no longer playing.

I think the other part of the problem is that the host is also inactive (Level 9 player).

Edit: So, what I'm saying is, I'd like private tournaments to remove inactive players or get deleted after a while too. For private tournaments, maybe it's 90 days instead of 30.

Edited 2/11/2015 21:17:58

Lolo - "I don't see how we have such a problem with private tournaments. Whether the tournament starts or not is a problem of the tournament host. In open tournaments, whether the tournament starts or not is a problem for Warlight because they're broadcasted for everyone to be able to join. Imagine you had 1000s of open multiday games that never started. What kind of perception would a new person have to seeing this? That's the kind of perception they get when they see 100s of open tournaments."

The problem in private ones that take a long time to fill up is that you end up with a boot fest because many of the players that joined a year prior no longer play.

This one took 6 months to fill up/start (and has been riddled with boots):
https://www.warlight.net/MultiPlayer?TournamentID=3663

This one took 8 months to start and has even more boots (partially my fault as I made it, but I would have deleted it long ago were it not for the tournament page having no usable filters really):
https://www.warlight.net/MultiPlayer?TournamentID=6025

These happen a lot Lolo. It ruins the entire tournament with so many inactive players. Another related issue...I have never understood why tournament invites are not at the top of your list. I have had many times I get invited to a very old tournament, and you have to scroll 5 pages to find it and accept/decline. So tournament filters/sorts (which has been on uservoice for years), is another big issue with the private ones taking so long to fill.

But I do agree %100 that the OPEN ones are more of an issue by far.

Edited 2/11/2015 21:49:00

Well, i'm not watching the tournament-side because it's nondescript.
I would like to play more tournaments but the search for good ones lasts to long.
First and in my opinion the most important thing would be to add a preview of the map - or have the site look like the new open games. So it's easier to find tournaments and presumably more players join.

Edited 2/11/2015 23:43:47

add search by name example. I tried to create a clan tournament and it took me twenty minutes to just find all the players (as in the little text box you can use in the add players part of normal games

@Thomas 633
I think most clans get around this (today) by having an alt account, that only has the clans members as "friends". Thus the alt can forward invites. Hopfully through, this won't be needed in the future when you can sort by clans.

So right now, the problem is we have too many tournament creators and not enough tournament joiners. It seems like one main cause is that there are a lot of low quality tournaments being made. These tournaments then take up a lot of room on the unorganized and hard to get to Open Tournaments page, making people avoid looking there, making the problem even worse. There are a lot of ideas here to get fewer tournaments created, but what if we could think of a way to get a higher percentage of tournaments to be better quality?

Being able to successfully set up a tournament is different than playing in one and much different than playing in regular games. It has little to do with a person's commitment to the game and it has absolutely nothing to do with their personal financial situation. It has to do with their knowledge of making tournaments with popular (some would say good) settings.

The only sure fire way to have that knowledge is to have experience making tournaments. Sounds circular, I know, but here's my idea: First, I agree with Rento (and others I think) who said a good starting point to allow people to make tournaments is level 30 instead of 13. From there, the ability make bigger and multiple tournaments should only be unlocked by having successfully created tournaments. Let's say you start out with the ability to make one tournament at a time, and that tournament can have no more than 50 people in it. If the 1st one you make starts, you are then allowed to make one 75 person tournament at a time, or maybe 2 50 person tournaments at a time. Each time you make a tournament that starts, you are allowed to make tournaments bigger or more often. But each time a tournament you make doesn't start within a certain time frame that is dependant on its size, you are not allowed to make as many or as big of tournaments.

Another idea: Give tournaments their own tab, because they are different than regular games. Or keep it the way it is except when you click on tournaments under multiplayer, have sub tabs open up, like dashboard, past tournaments, my tournaments, open tournaments, create a tournament, search for tournaments by setting.