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Competitive Concept - Single Ship Teams

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Thomas:
So with a new set of events going up and discussions going on I came across an interesting comment that made me think "Why don't have serious competitive events where teams only need 4 players?"

We've had a lot tournaments and events over the years. The more serious ones have generally always required at least 2 ships, and then generally only allowed sign ups of a single ship if it was going to be a 3v3 match or more. Less serious competitions (meaning mostly for fun) have usually encouraged teams of any size to participate.


With the popularity of GoIO fluctuating and the competitive scene following suite, why not have an event that's a little easier for players to sink their teeth into? A lot of people want to compete but have issues getting 8 members, let alone extras for substitutes. Needing only a single ship to sign up does have it's flaws of course, pairing up ships with a random team mate makes it difficult to call something a serious competition, but then I thought up a concept. Hear me out.


First off, this a brainstorming idea, so it's definitely going to jump around a bit. The goal is to create a viable seasonal league tournament for 4 person teams, aimed at players who enjoy serious competitive play. Just about everyone loved the leagues we've had so far, but they've often been non-repetitive. I want to see something that can happen again and again with people looking forward to it. Our annual competitions tend to do fairly well, but they're spaced incredibly far apart, so continuation is difficult.

Secondly, how to make it work in a serious competitive way. This is of course where things get messy. I love point systems, I love tiers, and I love matchmaking. The thought is to use a couple of systems in conjunction with each other to create magic. The first is creating the 2 ship teams for the 2v2 matches (since GoIO is best balanced at the 2v2 level as opposed to 3v3 and 4v4). To do this is pretty simple. First we separate the ships into two groups, winners and losers of the previous week. Then we simply pair the winner with the most points with the loser with the least points, then 2nd highest winner with 2nd lowest loser. What this does is prevents teams from being paired up week after week. Your teams will either win or lose together, putting you into the same category the following week. This also helps balance the teams a bit, so it'll be difficult for two amazing ships to pair with each other a lot, and also for two awful ships to keep getting thrown together.

Along with this is the magical point system. Everyone in the league would start with a particular value, lets say 500 points. Then depending on how close or far the combined points are for each ship depends on how much they win or lose. For example, if the combined points from both teams is within 10% of each other or so, they can win/lose 10% of their points. If it's between 10-20%, the higher team can only with 8%, but can lose 12%. If the teams are more than 20% apart, the higher team can only win 5%, but can lose 15% of their points. This is just an example of a possibility, don't get torn up on the numbers, just the concept. Why even bother? The main reason is for balancing purposes. If you somehow get a super crappy team, you're not as likely to lose as much when you go up against a surprisingly high scoring team. But with the re-balancing each week, most combined points should be quite close to each other, so it might not even be possible to do this. The other reason for attempting this is to create a more varied point system. If everyone wins or loses 50 points each time, there's going to be a lot of points that are exactly the same, making it hard to rank them properly. If this even were to happen, I assume it would be simplified to each team getting 10% or so of the other teams points. With each team doing 2-3 matches each week, their point values should spread nicely after a couple weeks regardless. Using a straight value could take quite a bit longer.


With that mess out of the way, it comes down to duration. For the whole tournament and for each set of matches. It'd be best to follow the 20 minute rule for match length, and try to have each improvised team do 2-3 matches each day. Regardless of wins or losses, they're stuck together for the duration of the day, allowing for more of a point spread to develop for team rankings. This might be tricky depending on how many teams sign up. Since it's only single ship teams there's a possibility of a lot more teams signing up than normal for competitions. Lets say having 12 ships is the norm for competitions these days (6 standard 2 ship teams). That's the possibility of 3 matches going on at the same time, which should take a little over an hour for 3 matches with each team if there's 3 casters. If we double that number but still stick with 3 casters, it will likely be more than 2 hours, which is still reasonable. It comes down to how fast matches can start and finish and how many casters are available.

Potential for a blind-pick type of rule. This will allow matches to begin much faster. Instead of telling teams that they have x minutes to start a match and pick ships, and they can't change within x seconds of starting the match, have them come with their ships prepared. Each week they know who they'll be fighting on each map, and who their partner is going to be. Allowing them to pick their ship ahead of time, and potentially having them pick the weapons on that ship as well. Then when they come into the lobby, they have that ship and can be allowed a much shorter time to start the match. It's encouraging teams to come prepared instead of trying to come up with a game plan in the 2-4 minutes most competitions allow for lobby time. It would be difficult to monitor crew loadout, so that'd be too much to ask a ref to watch. Ship loadouts are easier, even if you allow the weapons to be swapped out. However, letting the weapons be changed might encourage teams to bring ships that are more flexible and less specialized, leading to a relatively boring league. It's something to consider at the very least. How could we do it without forcing teams to lose before a match starts from bad ship match ups while preventing the counter-pick game?

Back onto duration, you have to consider how many weeks the tournament should run for. Assuming it's every Saturday for 2 hours, at what point will teams start experiencing fatigue from competing all the time. You also don't want it so short that teams can't become invested in the league. How many matches should teams play to properly be ranked? I think a minimum of 6 weeks would be needed of league play, while 8 would be ideal. Although I feel 8 might be a little too long (being two whole months and all). Then of course you need the big finale of the league.

Ideally a round robin or double round robin (or triple round robin!) would work best. Have each top team pair up with each other top team to compete against every combination of teams. With 8 ships, this would undoubtedly be extremely messy to run. Each team would have 7 different allies and 7 different enemies (they can't fight themselves of course). That's 7 combinations of their own team going up against 21 combinations of enemy teams. I'm not going to do the math, but that probably comes out to more matches than all the league matches. It might be doable by cutting the number of top teams in half (down to 4), which according to my scribbled math comes down to what appears a simple 3 matches. Totally doable 2-3 times to get a nice point spread. Likely would have to track wins instead of doing fancy points for the finals.


Some other things I can think of: Subs are totally fine, teams don't need to sign up their whole team, show up with whoever. However, each player can only play for a single team during a league, no team hopping around. Might have to relax that down to subs can only play for one team each week or can't play for another team for 1-2 weeks after they do play. Possibility for teams showing up in the middle of the season? I'm open to the idea, especially if it evens out the numbers. What if a partnered ship doesn't show up? It counts as a loss for the team, but all the points lost would come from the ship that didn't show up. Might be tempting to allow another ship to fill in for them, but that would disrupt the ranking/balancing. If teams alert the organizers early enough in the week, changes can be made to the schedule. If the season lasts too long, there would need to be days that teams can opt out of taking matches as well as mandatory breaks for other teams to keep everyone's match count the same. Then of course general rules for disconnects, people being late, pauses, bugs, crashes, player behavior, etc.


Personally I really like the concept, and want to hammer out some details so we might be able to get this thing going sometime this winter, which as far as I know is fairly open event-wise. I know there's a few good tournaments around the corner, so there's no big rush for input and getting things set in stone. Lets take our time with this one.



Any thoughts, concerns? Remember that the goal is a relatively serious competition for single ship teams. I realize that this is difficult. But with the relatively balanced teams each week, it should be a lot of fun for everyone. Is it too long, too short? Too complicated? If you were running something like this, how would you go about it? Should we try to organize this? Do you think we can get this going every season, or would that be too much? Would it be something BoCA would be interested in getting in on? Anything I missed?

Squidslinger Gilder:
What about making it where you do a lottery setup that assigns ships at the start. Those assigned then become a team. So say Team A and F both draw the same letter or number from a pool. They get assigned, then have time to start practices together which leads up to the main event. Maybe run some unofficial preseason action before the formal event.

Fatigue tends to set in around week 3 or 4. Generally 2 weeks at a time seem to be fine I've noticed. A way to solve this with Aero was to to have a bye week after week 4. However, in retrospec I probably should have ran a bye week sooner. Perhaps a way to run a long term event that goes past 6 weeks is to just break up to weeks with bye weeks. Run 2 weeks in, then a bye, then another 2/etc. In the bye weeks maybe run some less serious events. So there is always a mix of competitive and less competitive events going on. Teams that don't want a bye week can then play in those.

Thomas:
Like a weekly lottery or one for the length of the event? Weekly might work out, but I'd like to try and balance the teams a bit, see which ones shine and which don't. By sticking two teams together for the length of the event, it's essentially the same as having an 8 person team sign up, but just randomizing it. Although that in itself would be an interesting idea for another type of event, could even go so far as to have players sign up as individuals and shuffle them onto randomized teams.

One of the things I like about a weekly reshuffle is the balance though. What can happen with random teams is that one team may get a bit stacked while another might have nothing but new people on it. With matches being more balanced, we can hopefully have a lot more exciting matches to watch and participate in.


I like the idea of bye weeks. It wouldn't be too hard to have people skip a week so they don't have to worry. For a serious competitive event though, we'd need to have an opportunity for teams to play the same number of matches. So if some teams take a bye and others don't, the teams that don't have an opportunity to earn more points. A scheduled bye period would work out, or even allow teams to ask for a bye during a particular week before the schedule is out (don't want them skipping matches because they think they'll lose or such).

I think one of the things that leads to fatigue is the amount of time it takes in a day to participate in an event. A lot of the big ones tend to run for something like 3+ hours and it's really difficult to take that much time out of the day every week to participate in and watch matches. By keeping the time down each day, we should be able to have it go for a decent period of weeks without people losing their minds and passion.

As a seasonal thing, I'd like to see this pop up every 3 months or so, so it shouldn't run more than 2 months to give other events an opportunity as well as letting players have a break. Could even space out further and start it up once every four months to make it match up a bit with school semesters or such. This allows for more breaks between events and more room for other big events.

ZnC:
I've been thinking about it a lot too, and while I really think it's a good idea to have 4 player events, it can be difficult to implement. The requirement of having 8 players on a team does make competitive extremely inaccessible, especially for newer teams.

When it comes to this, a group stage, round robin would be the fairest system I can think of - all ships will be teamed with and matched against.

For example, in a group with four ships:
A, B, C, D.

Match 1: A&B vs C&D (5-0)
Match 2: A&C vs B&D (2-5)
Match 3: A&D vs B&C (3-3)

A: 1-1-1 (10 kills)
B: 2-0-1 (13 kills)
C: 0-2-1 (5 kills)
D: 1-1-1 (8 kills)

The ship(s) with top wins and scores, advance/win the tournament. While this would work for even-numbered ship sign-ups (in the case of 6 ships, 'bye' for 2 of them), I have no clue how to match the extra ship in the case of an odd-numbered tournament (i.e. 5, 7 ships). Probably have 3 ships advance from the first group stage, then the next group stage would be even-numbered. In the case of an all draw, which is rarely gonna happen, first kills will have score advantage. If even the first kills are a draw, then it'll be a coin flip.

Thomas:
Round robins tend to work out pretty well, but as more and more teams are added, they get messier. I think it's nice for small number of teams such as proposed, so it would make a nice finale, but for the main part of the tournament it would be rough. This is doubly true since we're using smaller teams and combining them. Trying to get all teams to pair up with all other teams and compete against all combinations of other teams.

So if we get something like 8 teams, we'd need:

AB vs CD, CE, CF, CG, CH, DE, DF, DG, DH, EF, EG, EH, FG, FH, and GH
AC vs BD, BE, BF, BG, BH, DE, DF, DG, DH, EF, EG, EH, FG, FH, and GH
AD vs BC, BE, BF, BG, BH, CE, CF, CG, CH, EF, EG, EH, FG, FH, and GH
AE vs BC, BD, BF, BG, BH, CD, CF, CG, CH, DF, DG, DH, FG, FH, and GH
AF vs BC, BD, BE, BG, BH, CD, CE, CG, CH, DE, DG, CH, EG, EH, and GH
AG vs BC, BD, BE, BF, BH, CD, CE, CF, CH, DE, DF, DH, EF, EH, and FH
AH vs BC, BD, BE, BF, BG, CD, CE, CF, CG, DE, DF, DG, EF, EG, and FG

That's 105 matches just for all possible combinations of team A. Each team would need that many matches. There would be a lot of overlap of course, since we're getting 4 teams in on each match. My lazy-I-Just-Got-Up-This-Morning math that's probably wrong is looking at 210 matches? (8 teams, 105 matches, 4 teams to a match 8*105/4?)

With 8 teams we can only 2 matches at a time (2v2 and 2v2), we'll say each match only takes 15 minutes exactly, letting us get in 4 matches within an hour. Give it 2 hours a day for a grand total of 8 matches a day, and we're looking at needing 27 days. And that's just with 8 teams (the equivalent of four 'regular' teams). Add in more teams and it just gets longer and longer, that's the downside to round robins, which I tend to agree are the most fair by far, which is why I like them for finales.


That's with every team with every combination. We could just make it easier by splitting up the teams into divisions of 4, where they only need 3 matches, then structure that into a bracket style tournament. The top two teams from each tier moving on ahead, and just repeating that process until we have only four ships left and get our winner from that. The downside to a bracket system is that it's not very league like, as a lot of teams would be ejected very early on. The upside is of course a lot less matches, making it doable. Say with 8 teams, we'd have 3 sets for both teams (6 matches), the top two teams from each division move up a bracket to make another set of four and we get 3 more matches. If there's too few teams, we can make it double elimination or double round robin. If there's an odd number of teams in any division, we can set up a pre-lim bracket the week before the scheduled tournament and have all of those ships compete in a round robin. Only the top 4 move on to the actual tournament.

I think it would work really nice for a tournament structure, but wouldn't be great for a league.

On the other hand.. it might get less messy if we toss teams into 4v4 matches for a pure round robin system? I'm not a particular fan of 4v4's, as it's harder on a lot of peoples systems and the game isn't quite as balanced with that many ships in same area, but it would potentially make a pure round robin system doable. It would also eliminate the need for bracketing, allowing for everyone to keep playing every week (with a bye week or such) making it viable for league play.

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