Competitive Concept - Single Ship Teams

[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.

[Skrimskraw]

https://gunsoficarus.com/community/forum/index.php/topic,5667.0.html

?

[ZnC]

@Thomas: The group stage round robin I'm talking about is, as you mentioned, similar to a bracket. Those that advance the group, get into a group with others that advance their groups. Those that don't are eliminated. I still think 2v2s are the way to go, as they are much more playable than 4v4 chaos.

To compensate for odd-numbered participants, revive a ship when a group is lacking one, or advance 3 ships (instead of 2) when there's only one ship in the next group.

[Thomas]

@Skrim: That was a tournament with teams of 8? It had a lot of it's own issues, particularly with low interest from the community, too short and spaced too far apart. A lot more teams than expected fell off the radar before the Summer tournament rolled around. The Summer tournament itself had a lot of scheduling issues, as a lot of other organizers wanted to organize events around that time... none of which seemed to happen. Kind of disappointing.

@Zanc: I think it's a great idea for a tournament.

[Agent Sylka]

You have brought together a lot of different concepts for this that play well together. BoCA will support you in any way that you need if you move forward with this league, from organizing help to publicity. This is definitely something we are interested in getting involved with but our involvement will depend on you and or your organizing teams desire for our level of involvement. 

We like this idea as far as the general set up with 4-player teams, yet still competitive.

8 weeks sounds like a decent amount of time for a league like this. It gives all the teams enough time to gain/lose points to have variation, enough time for the newer teams to have played with more experienced teams that they improve over this duration. But not too long that it becomes too fatigued. An idea for "bye" weeks could be that on week 4 and week 5 (seeing as week 1-3 regular season, week 4&5 "bye" weeks and week 6-8 regular season with week 9 being the FINALE!) half the teams would be off the first week while the other half plays and vice versa the next week. Each team would get 1 week off in the middle of the league.

It maybe a bit hard to add a team during the league for the simple reason they could have a disadvantage or advantage on points over the teams that have been in the league for the whole duration. Or maybe if there are 8 weeks the team starts with either 400 or 800 points (50 or 100 points for each week) and if a team is added in on say week 3 they would start with 300 or 600 points (400-100 or 800-200) so it removes the number of points for the weeks they weren't playing in? Other wise maybe have a "sub" list and if a team doesn't show up or bows out of the competition the "sub" ship that comes in would have points averaged to all the teams in the league?

As for the blind pick thing, Ayetach had suggested a pretty interesting idea on the SCS forums, that may work out well for this idea. It allows for shorter lobby time, refs not to have too much to watch for, teams to be able to "specialize" in ship builds, and for a slight amount of randomization to take into account for enemy ship builds/maps.

When players were mentioning a draft system, why not have each team suggest 2 or 3 sets of ships and loadouts to the ref a day before for instance? and during the lobby they can choose to change from their first preferred set to the next but can’t return to the first one again. That way they have flexibility of changing loadouts but will take a chance by moving forward to the second set with a ‘no return’ policy. That way you have a drafting of 2-3 ‘strings’ of ships that teams pick out. Its worth trying that out as well since these ideas are being tested for the SCS

This is the OP

[Thomas]

Alright, so I've put together a Mock Season for how an event like this might go down. For this mock season, we're having 8 teams (A-H). Each of these pretend teams has a different skill level. Team A has the highest with 80, all the way down to H with 10. When a team is formed, the team with the higher combined skill level will win. So if there's team BF vs DE, team BF will win (100 vs 90). In the event of a tie, the team with the highest individual skill level will win. This is a pretty good example of how it might work in a real tournament, although in reality teams won't be quite so spread out in a skill, there would be random factors involved (such as how well teams work together obviously).

During the first week, teams are assigned randomly. After week one, they're paired from highest to lowest scores. Since we're doing more than one match a week, you can't set them up in a win/loss fashion like I had initially hoped. Otherwise we could do two matches a week and have teams shuffle after every single match. But that would be a mess. Whoever loses has 10% of their points taken, combined, then distributed evenly to the winners. So if team AB loses, and team A has 700, team B has 500; team A loses 70 points, team B loses 50 points. The teams that won against them get 60 points each. Every team starts with 500 points. This makes week 1 points pretty easy to distribute. Each team will play 3 rounds each week, changing partners at the end of the week. This will go for 8 weeks, with half the teams taking a break week 4, the other half on break week 5. Points will be rounded to whole numbers. It should be noted that this would be the minimum number of teams. It actually works out nice for a consistent round robin. With more teams it wouldn't be possible for a full round robin every week, so opponents would be assigned randomly.

Team	Skill Level	Starting Points
A	80	500
B	70	500
C	60	500
D	50	500
E	40	500
F	30	500
G	20	500
H	10	500

Week 1:

Paired Teams	Combined Skill
A G	100
B D	120
C H	70
E F	70

At the end of week 1, the scores and ranking are as follows:

Team	Score
B	645
D	645
A	546
G	546
C	445
H	445
E	364
F	364

This means that for week 2:

Paired Teams	Combined Skill
B F	100
D E	90
A H	90
G C	80

 The scores get a bit messier as we go into week 2, but that's totally fine, as they should separate the teams more and make it easier to rank them. At the end of week 2 and the start of week 3, the scores are as follows:

Team	Score
B	790
A	586
D	563
F	509
H	495
G	397
E	336
C	324

Making the teams for week 3:

Paired Teams	Combined Skill
B C	130
A E	120
D G	70
F H	40

Things are still quite messy in the rankings. By the end of the league, what we'd like to see is the teams being relatively close to alphabetical order, as that's how their skill is based. It's looking kind of iffy, but we'll keep going. At the end of week 3 and into week 4 we have the following scores and teams:

Team	Score
B	930
A	621
D	497
C	464
E	395
F	371
G	361
H	361

Paired Teams	Combined Skill
B H	130
A G	120
D F	70
C E	40

Half the teams are taking a break, and half continue. How we'll do this by pairing the teams up, having half of those combined teams taking a break, and the other half compete in their matches. The just reverse that the next week. For this example, and ideally for a more complex tournament, this actually affects nothing. So we're going to combine weeks 4 and 5 to give us a full week. The scores at the end of week 5 and going into week 6 (and the new teams for week 6) are:

Team	Score
B	919
A	767
G	507
C	410
H	408
D	363
E	355
G	271

Paired Teams	Combined Skill
B H	130
A G	120
D F	70
C E	40

Then of course we come to the end of week 6 and starting week 7. Here's some more tables (we're almost done!).

Team	Score
B	907
A	906
E	494
G	371
C	367
H	365
F	325
D	265

Paired Teams	Combined Skill
B D	120
A F	110
E H	70
G C	40

So it's still quite messy. A and B are neck and neck, which is pretty good, still worrying to see C and especially D that low. Places seem to change a lot from week to week for everyone but the top two teams. In a real league, this might be typical, but in a real league the skill level of teams wouldn't be nearly as easy to categorize.  As we finish week 7 and come into the final league week of 8. More tables.

Team	Score
B	1045
A	891
D	403
F	368
E	360
G	336
C	332
H	265

Paired Teams	Combined Skill
B H	80
A C	120
D G	70
E F	70

So then we finally come to week 8 where we wrap up all the points as follows. The top 4 teams will move ahead to the finals where they will compete in a double round robin. Whoever has the most wins at the end wins. If there's a tie, we will use the points from the league to determine the winner. In the event those are tied as well, we will engage in a GoIO themed jeopardy round hosted by Howard (probably not though). Anyway, the final points come out to:

Team	Score
A	1026
B	1011
C	467
D	356
H	309
G	301
F	269
E	261

So we have our actual top 4 teams going into the finals, which is pretty cool. The bottom half isn't as clean of course, but I feel it would rearrange itself properly if it's run long enough. Considering that real team skill isn't that clear cut, that real matches suffer a lot of random factors, and that teams are more likely to be closer in skill level than these fake teams, I think it turned out pretty well. As for the finals, we have:

A with 6 wins, B with 2 wins, C with 2 wins, and D with 2 wins, making A the champions~




=========================================================

Some things I noticed while running this mock season is that the early random matches set up some teams for an early lead that was difficult to overcome. There was also a huge split in the score near the end. To keep from going crazy with decimals, I had to do some shady rounding at times to keep whole numbers. In an actual tournament, we may have to round better and the total available points between each team might drift up or down accordingly. I ensured the total available points stayed the same, hence the shadiness.


Overall I feel that it would function better in a realistic setting. I understand there are practical difficulties with putting two groups of strangers together and telling them to compete, but where GoIO is right now it's more realistic than trying to keep the 8 man team system going.

[Dryykon]

As an outsider and an unknown within this community, I didn't reply to this thread earlier. I have a limited grasp, at best, of the current competitive scene. That said, I've been involved with multiple small competitive scenes over the years, mostly in dwindling communities.

The tournament above is certainly plausible, and perhaps a great solution to get more teams to join. I especially liked your "points" system, which reminds me of a rating system of another game. The higher ranked your team is, the more punishing a defeat is. If you are lucky to win as lower ranked team against a high ranked team, you will earn a lot of points for your efforts. And vice versa; as a good team, if you crush a lower tier team, you won't earn as much points as you would a fight of more equal footing.

This system has a "League" feel to it, in the sense that it could be carried out indefinably. With this system, the entry and exit of teams is certainly doable.

I thought a bit about what to do in the case of a odd number of teams, and the best solution seems to be a series of fixed BYES. For example, team A sits out the first round of matches. Everyone is still paired highest to lowest scores; A is just ignored. Aside from fixed byes, the number of teams that could join would have to be limited. It couldn't be based off points or wins, for sure, or the same teams would find themselves with multiple BYES. Of course, if teams left or joined the tournament, it would mess up the BYE system. Therefore, BYE's would be shuffled randomly among all initial teams into a looped list. Any teams that joined would be added to the list, and any teams that left would be removed. It's likely multiple teams will have a BYE each week.

Additionally, as someone who has not been in a GoIO tournament before, and who finds the smaller team size more realistic to enter, there are a few questions that come to mind:

-What would be the minimum size roster? Maximum?
-Will substitutions be allowed mid tourney? If so, how many?
-Can the same clan put forth multiple teams?

Looking forward to what becomes of this.

[Thomas]

Thanks for the support, I really liked the input about the odd number of teams and byes. Realistically having a lot of teams come and go would make things pretty messy. I think by having a limited season with long breaks in between, we can limit the number of fluctuating teams to something reasonable. If it became popular enough for back to back seasons, then we'd definitely have to get creative for fluctuating teams.


For this type of league, I'd ideally like to see an 'unlimited' number of teams participating. We generally haven't run into the 'too many teams' problem, but it's a good thing to think about. When it comes to limiting factors, we have to take into account how many matches will be played a day for each team and how many casters and refs we have available. For most competitive events, we usually go for 2-3 casters, and up to 4 casters for really large events, allowing us to run more matches simultaneously. If we run into problems and can only get 1-2 casters, the max number of teams might be somewhere around 16. With 2 casters we can get 2 matches running (8 teams at a time for two 2v2s). Each match being roughly 30 minutes (20 minutes max for a match with lobby time, set up, getting everyone in, etc etc). Might take up to 3 hours, but shouldn't be more than two. Ideally I'd like to have the entire event in under two hours so they don't start bleeding from the eyes for watching GoIO matches literally all day.

But yeah, it really depends on the number of casters for maximum. A minimum number would be at least 4, but that's not much of a league. I suppose 8 would be an ideal minimum, the more the merrier.


Substitutions are something that comes up a lot. There's been problems with other events that have either too lax or too strict rules regarding subs. It's something that would have to be discussed before any final decision is made. For me personally, I'd say up to 2 subs on any team on a particular day. So that you can't sub out your entire team to bring in some ringers. There would also have to be rules to prevent subs from jumping around from team to team every week as well. Perhaps requiring a person to wait 2 weeks before they're available to play for another team. In the past some teams have subbed in for other teams during their bye week, which made things kind of awkward.



I definitely wouldn't want to restrict clans from having more than one team. There's concerns of course that they might work together and try to game the system, but the system itself makes it rather difficult to do. You might only be paired up with your allies for a single week in the whole season, and with enough teams participating you might not be able to throw matches you face against them to help boost their points. Realistically, I don't think any clan would do this, we've generally had very clean competitions with no funny business, everyone tends to be a good sport. It's of course something to keep in mind and watch out for. How to prevent it or punish it if it comes up would have to be considered. Requiring that people in the same clan can't compete in the same matches as their other clan team would be difficult, especially if both teams make it into the finals. Then of course a lot of players actually have alternate accounts, making it easy to bypass that type of system if they desperately wanted to. Even friends who aren't in the same clan could attempt such things if they had a mind to.

So my current opinion would be to allow clans to have multiple teams with no restrictions and have faith that the community is a good sport.


Again, these are mostly my own opinions. I'm looking forward to trying to work with BoCA and get something going a few weeks after the current set of events end. There is of course no first pass at a ruleset or scheduling at this time, just looking for feedback on how to execute something like this as flawlessly as possible.

[Kamoba]

One idea which just came to mind when posting on another thread, just dropping it here to you Thomas in case you like it...

Single ship sign ups, but the team of four have to declare ship and loadout (or choice of two) when signing up. Could be a fun rule...

Just wanted to drop.the idea here.

[Thomas]

So teams would be stuck with a single loadout each and every week, or would they be able to re-declare each week?

It's an interesting idea, and there's probably some good ways to make it work. Some potential problems would be the paired teams having incompatible ships with each other, or having incompatible ships with the map. Newer teams might not pick very good ship loadouts to start and struggle during the tournament.

If they were to pick each week, it would have to be handled in a way where teams aren't able to counter-pick. This might mean PMing the ref or organizer instead of declaring in a thread.

How could we make it work in a way that's not too stressful on teams or organizers and minimizes the chances that teams get stuck with incompatible ships/counter-picked?

[Kamoba]

So teams would be stuck with a single loadout each and every week, or would they be able to re-declare each week?

It's an interesting idea, and there's probably some good ways to make it work. Some potential problems would be the paired teams having incompatible ships with each other, or having incompatible ships with the map. Newer teams might not pick very good ship loadouts to start and struggle during the tournament.

If they were to pick each week, it would have to be handled in a way where teams aren't able to counter-pick. This might mean PMing the ref or organizer instead of declaring in a thread.

How could we make it work in a way that's not too stressful on teams or organizers and minimizes the chances that teams get stuck with incompatible ships/counter-picked?

It would vary week to week, and honestly simply a PM to the person who posts the sign up thread, be it yourself, Gilder, BoCA agent, I personally see no issues with "To sign.up leave your mark on the dotted line and PM bob with your ship and ship loadout"

This would basically make the tournament blind pick, but the benefits could be very fun, building ships which can cope in various maps and against multiple opponent loadouts, which chances are means less meta and more disable (control) or reactive (mix of kill and disable) builds and play styles.