4 replies to this topic

[XxXAbsolutZeroXxX]

What tournament format would produce the most exciting and watchable matches for casual gamers who know nothing about mechwarrior or the battletech universe?

Let's hear some of people's ideas.

Covering the basics.

#1 Ladder. 1st match everyone drops in a light. 2nd match all mediums. 3rd match all heavies. 4th match assaults. In the event of a tie a sudden death match could be arranged.

#2 Split. 2 lances composed of 1 light, 1 medium, 1 heavy, 1 assault. Best of 3, 5, 7 et al. To make things more fun there could be stipulations requiring one of the light mechs to be a locust and one of the assaults a direwolf.

#3 Open weight division. No tonnage restrictions.

#4 Clan vs Inner Sphere. An even number of matches, half with inner sphere mechs the other half with clan mechs.

#5 Tourney via game mode. One match in skirmish, the next in assault, the following in conquest and the last in domination.

#6 Identical teams. The community could be polled on which 8 mechs each team uses. For example if the community decided the 8 mechs used in the tournament were: locust, commando, wolverine, catapult, atlas, dragon, trebuchet, stalker. Each team would use those 8 mechs exclusively.

I'm sure some of you have bright ideas, let's hear em'.

[Davegt27]

Well we play 12 V 12 so to me would be 12 V 12

When 4 v 4 comes out then 4 V 4

Last week PGI did a stream where Proton kicked the crap out of people in a 1 V 1 format

It was interesting for about 10 min

Best thing to do is to try your ideas and see what people like

[Afuldan McKronik]

Tourney divided by weight class. One on one. Round robin. Kind of like uhh... is it RHoD or something? Those are nailbiting matches if it isn't long range poke.

[Roadkill]

I was the SEC for the Seattle Virtual World sites for many years (WotC Game Center, then at the Airlock), and have developed and run many different kinds of tournaments. Probably the most successful and fun that we ran was what I called a "newbie friendly weight loss" tournament. I'm not sure how well it will translate to MWO, though, because it's a Free-For-All format (with return on).

In a weight loss tournament, players are seeded and given initial tonnage values that they can use to select their Mech. The "newbie friendly" part gives new players bonus tonnage. After each round of the tournament, a pilot's available tonnage for the next round is adjusted based on their performance. If you win your round, you lose tonnage. If you come in last, you gain tonnage. I had a points system based on your results in each round to determine who made the finals.

It seems to work best with ~4 rounds followed by a final. We had finals with the full spread of Mechs in them before - from 20 tons to 100 tons in the same match.

Fun times!

[XxXAbsolutZeroXxX]

I was thinking light mech and locust battles were some of the more watchable action this game produces due to the action happening at a faster rate than standard FPS games. A format that encouraged that type of 160+ kph dueling and prolonged it, with some slower assaults mechs thrown in would make for a decent contrast. People who know nothing about MW/BT in general could relate to a type of david vs goliath light mech vs assault mech paradigm.

TTK (time to kill) being high in cases where matches last 15-30 seconds are kind of boring. At the same time matches that last 5 minutes in a battle of 1,000 epic paper cuts aren't so exciting. The last tournament I remember PGI hosting where everyone took static positions on the map and jump sniped weren't much fun to watch. It might be said that an ideal format is one that encourages teams to flank, brawl, snipe with some fast light mechs and slower assault mechs thrown in with different weapons ranges for variety. If only to make things as unpredictable as possible to reinforce the notion that matches are unique and surprising rather than stale and repetitive.