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Alshain Open (8 Man Team Tournament)
Saturday April 6, 2013 (9PM Eastern)
The Great House Kurita and DCMS would like to present, the Alshain Open, an 8 man open tournament to promote competition between the best teams within the Combine and Inner Sphere. As an alternative to well known competitions such as Run Hot or Die and others, the Alshain Open was conceived as a open style tournament, in which 8 man teams would battle for supremacy in a simultaneous drop format over a wide variety of planets and terrain types.
Other community based competitions have attempted to build scheduled tournament structures or community warfare maps with widely varying degrees of success. The main obstacle preventing their proper function-ability has been the need to schedule matches between competing teams, an endeavor which is nearly impossible on a continuing bases. The Alshain Open takes place on a single date in which all participating teams will be present and results will be available shortly thereafter. If it is successful, it may be continued and modified as need be for future competition. The competition will occur over a 3 hour time period +/-.
Tournament Rule Set:
Participating Teams and Registration:
* Two threads will be opened within the House Kurita forum for each tournament. The first will be an announcement declaring the date and time of competition with these and other applicable rules. The second will be a pledge thread in which a representative of each team will post their intent to participate as well as a roster of their team. The pledge thread is not for immediate entry but to gauge interest in the tournament.
* All teams must run a constant player base of 8 players who take part in all of their matches. Teams may make three substitutes during tournament play to replace a departed member, but following this, no others will be permitted. If they are unable to field a team, they will not be able to accrue additional matches towards the final total.
* All teams must designate a representative who will be responsible for tallying match results and keeping a screen shot of every results screen. If a team does not have the resources to do this, they can be directed as to where to find them.
* On the date of the tournament, registration will open 45 minutes prior to the first drop time. Team reps must be present at some point within the opening and the start of play in order to confirm their attendance. Each team will be assigned a number for record keeping. Each team is encouraged to come up with an original name which will describe them.
* The tournament drop schedule shall be a 2/2/2/2 combination defined as 2 Lights, 2 Mediums, 2 Heavies, and 2 Assaults. There was concern that not specifying a specific drop schedule would result in an abundance of top-heavy teams and imbalanced matches.
Cycle of Play:
* A total of 12 drops will be counted towards each teams' record in the competition standings. Combat drops will occur as close to 15 minute intervals as practical. The team representative must be present in the tournament room on TeamSpeak in order to drop together with all participating teams. The full tournament time will be on the order of three hours but may extend a bit further if drops are taking longer, which is well within the reasonable play limits of most players. The intent in increasing drop times is not to allow players to tinker with their mechs, but to give time for matches to legitimately be located, played, and finalized.
* Teams will be given the allowance of one missed drop for which they may attempt to drop slightly behind schedule or wait until the next sync drop at their choosing. Successive missed drops will result in a .5 win deduction from their final score.
* Drops will be counted down and completed as close to these intervals as counted by the organizer. Verizon cell system time will be used as the official game clock. It is encouraged that team members have their mechs ready within the home screen of the mech lab as the group will not wait for anyone to set their mechs up or be AFK. There will be zero tolerance for teams not ready on their own volition.
Scorekeeping and Declaration of Winners:
* At the close of the competition, each team rep will convene within the tournament channel and declare their records. The winning team will submit screen shots for verification. Everyone will be encouraged to record with fraps, Bandicam, or any other recorder. It can be used as proof of match results as you said, but could also be posted on YouTube as promotion for the game and tournament, and used to make an edite highlight reel of the action.
Tiebreakers:
1st Tiebreaker: Direct head to head records between any two or more teams tied for first will be the first and most important tie breaker.
2nd Tiebreaker: Team Efficiency. The second tie breaker will be a team efficiency statistic, which will measure the overall effectiveness (or not) of the competition teams. The formulation is based upon the summation of everyone's results for each match and is as follows:
(Kills by the Team - Kills by the Enemy) / Matches Played
The statistic rewards dominance but not attritional warfare, applies to teams who prefer to cap base, but does not reward them as much as others as they may lack the overall kill differential. Kills alone are not a good measure of a team as one or two players may carry a team many times. Damage dealt is also not very accurate as it can be related to weapon choice. An LRM heavy team may inflict much more damage than one with members who surgically core their opponents.
Alternative Tiebreaker: As an alternative, if there are several teams with the same record who wish to play on, one or two matches may be added to the competition to separate them. This tiebreak is dependent on whether the teams wish to continue or let statistical tiebreakers determine the winner and will be decided at the close of the regularly scheduled matches in the case of a tie.
Question and Answer:
Q: The Magician: "I'm assuming that you will be staggering the drop times, so that we don't have more than 2 teams in the tourney trying to drop at a time?"
A: My initial concept was for the field to drop concurrently so that their opponents would be randomized not knowing who or how many teams will actually come for the tournament. We have interest and pledges from some teams that they are coming, but unfortunately, there is no way of knowing until the event actually takes place. I will most likely not be playing it in the interest of objectivity, and so that I can run a master list and spreadsheet.
Q: BigJim: "I think it's a very interesting concept - I dunno about the 15-minute, I know a lot of teams who will take a match to the full 15-min rather than rush a plan from a bad spawn against a team that has a stronger position (and I admire teams that can do that), imo a 20-min cycle would be better, to allow the odd bio, to get a coffee, to get screenies converted to .JPG, renamed, and uploaded after the match, etc..
I think you'll end up with a lot of pissed off teams if it's 15mins exactly & guys end up missing matches because they're stuck in a drop for 14 mins & can't get ready in time (the game can take an age to ready up after a match for some people), but still, I do like the overall idea & think it has merit."
A: I agree, and in the end you may see match starts begin to stagger a bit off of the 15 minute exact timing in order for teams to all assemble. The easiest way to ensure the maximum amount of teams are present is for the reps to preface their names in TS with their team number, so the TS will order it for me (hopefully), and I can see at a glance how many are there.
Q: Khavi Vetali: How do you plan to handle disconnects and crashes at or before match start? Play it through? If I missed this in the ruleset please point it out.
A: DC's and CTD's will be played through of course. Everyone will be playing through at the same time and it is assumed that there will be no purposeful disconnects. That said, it is not the fault of any team to have DC's so the opposing team would still like their result to stand as well given the limited number of drops. So in short, the teams are encouraged to play even if given a handicap due to a random CTD.
Q: Fallen: Your going to run into a lot of problems, I feel, if you do strict 15 minute intervals. Why not just do 20-25 minute intervals and do a mass sync drop at the same time? This allows you to maintain your plan to randomize the matches while also allowing the the random yet inevitable occursions to not destroy any order, I definitely think it could be done;however, the level of planning and manpower needed to keep everything working - to keep all (Number of teams times 8) variables working in synchrony is impractical. This does mess with your time planned of 3 hours but couldn't you simply reduce the number of drops by 3 or 4?
A: The times have been reviewed and revised. 20 to 25 minutes is a bit too long to keep the field waiting while most teams are readied up. I'm assuming that many teams will already know the preferred mech types that their members will bring and will be able to ready up in an orderly fashion. Drop times may tend to creep closer to 20 minutes per, but anything greater than this is impractical. We will aim to drop quicker if possible given the rate at which matches can be played out.
-k
Edited by Kdogg788, 20 March 2013 - 08:39 AM.
