Sunday Community Skirmish #41 (Signups for Sunday 8th March)

[Skrimskraw]

basicly if your team loses 2 times, they are out.

[Velvet]

If anyone has any feedback on our first event with the double elimination structure here is a good place to put it.

[Dr Pantaleon]

Once again a very pleasant SCS! I like the new elimination system. You play against more opponents and you feel like you're progressing more. It feels nice to have a chance at a comeback. Fighting the centurions both in the first round as well as the finals felt great! (Would have been even better though if we'd defeated them the second time, obviously)

[DJ Logicalia]

I liked the new system. Adds an interesting dynamic to the whole even. Net positive,  I think

[Assault Pig]

I'll be honest, I was a bit apprehensive of the best of one format at first. It does however, really ramp up the intensity in each individual engagement. I also like how each team has two "lives" so they're more or less guaranteed to see at least two different opponents in the tourney.

My only concern is teams getting unlucky with map rolls. In my opinion, any teams that draw Duel at Dawn, (in its current, win the first engagement then spawn camp, GG state) for a best of one are quite unlucky. In addition, certain teams are also much more comfortable on select maps than others. Thus, I am not sure it's fair to have say, a sniping team go up against a brawling team on Dunes for a best of one series, (and vice versa for close range maps).

One idea we had to nullify map advantage is to do the map rolls on the fly, with participating teams choosing one map each to take out of the rotation for that match. Of course, this would involve refs having extra work to do pre-match and allow teams to be able to avoid their weakest map, which may not actually be a good thing. It really depends on how much value is placed on (sometimes) forcing teams out of their respective comfort zones.

Overall, a step in the right direction!

[nanoduckling]

I felt it worked very well, congrats to the Romans. The tight time limit on the SCS means it is always going to run into issues and it will always have an unavoidable random element with things like maps. I do question if Duel shouldn't be removed from the roster though, the spawns on the map are currently broken in my opinion. Giving teams a second chance against varied opponents seemed to work well.

Thanks to the organizers, refs, casters and participants, it was fun.

[Kamoba]

Mostly i will echo what Assault Pig said, overall its a good system and it is nice to meet more people throughout the tournament, but it is more luck based with map rolls.
Personally I think if you remove Dunes from the map.rolls it'll fix that (jk) 

[Dementio]

Regarding removing maps, I think it is good that teams fly on maps that they are not good at. If they want to win, they got to figure out how to fly on that map. Thralls did Metamidion and Blenderfish on Dunes against multiple long range ships and they won their matches, so that argument that close range loses against long range on Dunes is not entirely true.

But yeah, Dawn is not a good map these days.

[Kamoba]

Regarding removing maps, I think it is good that teams fly on maps that they are not good at. If they want to win, they got to figure out how to fly on that map. Thralls did Metamidion and Blenderfish on Dunes against multiple long range ships and they won their matches, so that argument that close range loses against long range on Dunes is not entirely true.

But yeah, Dawn is not a good map these days.

Very true regarding removal of maps, infact often times the best way to learn what we (people in general) are not good at is to do it more often so by removing maps it slightly removes the point of the skirmish intended for people to better their skills

[Skrimskraw]

come on guys, scs is just a friendly place to compete or practice.

lets not ban maps because they are considered unbalanced. we will only ban maps if they have game breaking bugs.

also all the fuss about minotaur being op and pyras being shit.
am I the only one finding it hillarious that minotaur isnt that used in competitive, aswell as pyras still being able to function properly? sure you wont get 5-0 with pyras, but you can still win.

[c-ponter]

The layout itself worked really well  from what I saw.
Though I think it was the first time I have seen the Gents take a loss in a rather unsportsmanlike way, and that was only because a slow mo bug bear the end of the match caused a 25sec respawn to take over 2 mins, making the loss all that much more frustrating.

[Kamoba]

Yup Pyramidions still work, they just require people to make choices more in advance than they used to.
Minotaur OP? Nope, its a fun gun but not game breakingly powerful

Ban maps? Well I was joking when I said Ban dunes, because its my least favourite map lol

Slow Mo bug certainly hit a lot of matches my guess Watchmaker did not hit the servers with the mallet quick enough.

[Skrimskraw]

The layout itself worked really well  from what I saw.
Though I think it was the first time I have seen the Gents take a loss in a rather unsportsmanlike way, and that was only because a slow mo bug bear the end of the match caused a 25sec respawn to take over 2 mins, making the loss all that much more frustrating.

I wouldnt call it unsportsmanlike, since if they didnt kill your last ship within time, you would have won. They were faced with either lose or win mid engagement.

Its a bug, we cannot do anything about it. We cant make indepth rules about restarting servers etc. when the timer has been running for so long. if it was the start of the match and slowmo hits we would probaly have changed to a different map if both teams preferred it.

we'll keep an eye on paritan and decide later this week if we want to take it out of the map pool.

[nanoduckling]

I wouldn't call it unsportsmanlike either (unless there was something I missed either at the time or in the replay footage). With the exception of a couple of jokes from the Gents about the slow mo (which seemed in good humour) and a perfectly reasonable question clarifying the rules, the grumpy comments are from the Starbards saying what the Gents obviously cant. No one wanted that match to end that way, not the Gents, not the Starbards, not the refs, not the casters, not the folks watching. It was shaping up for an exciting finale, had the slow mo not happened the Gents had about a minute thirty to get a kill. Instead a server bug made the result a coin toss dependent on if a pyra died quickly enough or not.

This community is very good when it comes to sportsmanship. When a team asks for a pause it is almost never ignored, heck even in events which don't allow pauses. A couple of weeks back when we lost to a coin toss everyone was grumpy then too, Hydra making it clear they didn't want to win that way.

I didn't see anyone cast aspirations on their opposition, or the ref, or the organisers. Some folks might have some suggestions about how the rules might be adapted, although I don't think much can be done in this case for an event which has to be run quickly (except maybe gently encouraging better regression testing from Muse). Everyone gged or their equivalent and moved on. Folks were just pissed because they wanted to know how the story ended. I don't think sportsmanship is about not being grumpy when things don't work out. It's about not blaming things that are unfair on folks who aren't responsible, or are simply enforcing the rules. I continue to hold the Gents in high regard in this respect.

[c-ponter]

I didn't mean that the way in which they won was unsportsmanlike, they played Vetter than us that match, we made so many mistakes we didn't really deserve to wi n either way ( and I don't think we would have won that engagement in real time either) Would it have worked better if I said it's the only time if seen the Gents truly p*seed off about losing a match? ( not just upset about losing, but I know at least 4 of our members  including myself that were really annoyed)
But no I agree that the rules shouldn't be changed to accommodate for bugs like that, as you said it's nobody's fault, maybe next week we will win a match because of it? XD