Some sort of league-like function perhaps?

I decided to bounce an idea off the p4f gang and also wanted to put it up here so expand the potential for feedback - please let me know what you think.

infntnub wrote:
One big thing our entire community is lacking since WGA (not that I miss it) is organized functions.

I'm not even talking about showing which clan is best or something, but a function more casual. Rosters big enough to make "no shows" less of an issue, but of course there will always be a potential for this.

If I was able to be around more during the week I'd just dive in and move forward but I'd need some help getting the word out and keep those who choose to take part on the same page with everyone else.

A couple ideas are in my head but I think one key is teamsize. I envision 3 v 3 being ideal (rosters of at least 6 being required so you can have an alternate at each starting spot per team).

To reiterate, it would be a casual thing of sorts. Maybe run it for a couple weekends and then declare the "season" over. The only catch is I really don't know what to have as a prize - there isn't much to offer in the virtual world and paying out to an entire team could be tricky. Unfortunately without some incentive I assume it would most likely fail from the start.

Onto my next section of ramble.. gametype. I was thinking do a cross of ictf and ifreeze and somehow make them mix. Maybe alternate freeze and ctf weekends or something of that nature. Taking part in both would be one of the few requirements I suppose.

Anyways.. lots of random thoughts.

Any feedback?

Good idea, infy.. Let me elaborate a bit more on my thoughts when I read through it.

A combi casual tournament of iCTF + iFT seems really good - that way we will get folks who like either or, in as well (I belong to the former for instance). Wholly agree..

Team size 3 or 4 (4 is ideal from a iCTF, and popular maps perspective). Double that for the roster should definitely help avoid no-shows. I think we should start with 4, knowing that we could bring it down to 3 in the middle stages if we still happen to see a lot of no-shows.

Team balancing... one thing I used to love in LAN parties back in school was; categorizing players in A,B,C and Ds based on skill level (of course we will mention there's no place for ego hurt here). Pick 2 As, 2 Bs and so on and make up a roster of 8, with the stipulation that one from each category (or 2 from the lower skilled categ. will play if players are not available). A group of very active players can easily make this up. Also, gives opportunity for intra clan interaction and overall community fun. Negates the "my clan is best" attitude, and also allows for folks without a clan (there are so many). We even have sites like Qlranks and ictf-stats now to go by to make this happen more accurately. Also note, there are some really good EU players that we can rope in too to make the player pool bigger (they play with 100-110 ping on east coast, but still do really well for themselves to be in A/B categ. with their map knowledge). A win-win I see here.

The other alternate to make teams could be by Geo (I like the EU Nations cup, for instance). Canada, US NY, US Florida, US Tx, US West, US midwest and so on. Could be less competitive teams, but the geo aspect might make folks more interested in playing than with random folks who they might not know (unlikely though that they would not know, and that is what we are trying to make up for too anyway). Floating this idea there nonetheless...

Prizes... best to defer to our EU counterparts and ask them what they have seen people respond to (they have had more tourneys afterall). Could be play gear, QL membership tokens, cash prize via paypal..
Sponsors.. could be folks willing to contribute money (I would be glad to, if its planned out well for instance) + $2 or thereabouts entry fee per person (dont need it if we make up enough)

Ph4nt0m wrote:Good idea, infy.. Let me elaborate a bit more on my thoughts when I read through it.

A combi casual tournament of iCTF + iFT seems really good -  that way we will get folks who like either or, in as well (I belong to the former for instance). Wholly agree..

Team size 3 or 4 (4 is ideal from a iCTF, and popular maps perspective). Double that for the roster should definitely help avoid no-shows. I think we should start with 4, knowing that we could bring it down to 3 in the middle stages if we still happen to see a lot of no-shows.

Team balancing... one thing I used to love in LAN parties back in school was; categorizing players in A,B,C and Ds based on skill level (of course we will mention there's no place for ego hurt here). Pick 2 As, 2 Bs and so on and make up a roster of 8, with the stipulation that one from each category (or 2 from the lower skilled categ. will play if players are not available).  A group of very active players can easily make this up. Also, gives opportunity for intra clan interaction and overall community fun. Negates the "my clan is best" attitude, and also allows for folks without a clan (there are so many). We even have sites like Qlranks and ictf-stats now to go by to make this happen more accurately. Also note, there are some really good EU players that we can rope in too to make the player pool bigger (they play with 100-110 ping on east coast, but still do really well for themselves to be in A/B categ. with their map knowledge). A win-win I see here.

The other alternate to make teams could be by Geo (I like the EU Nations cup, for instance). Canada, US NY, US Florida, US Tx, US West, US midwest and so on. Could be less competitive teams, but the geo aspect might make folks more interested in playing than with random folks who they might not know (unlikely though that they would not know, and that is what we are trying to make up for too anyway). Floating this idea there nonetheless...

Prizes... best to defer to our EU counterparts and ask them what they have seen people respond to (they have had more tourneys afterall). Could be play gear, QL membership tokens, cash prize via paypal..
Sponsors.. could be folks willing to contribute money (I would be glad to, if its planned out well for instance) + $2 or thereabouts entry fee per person (dont need it if we make up enough)

Thanks for all the feedback!

A few points to bounce off of yours - I was actually going to leave it as a "team" thing, but leave it open for those who want to take part only with clanmates.  I'd be afraid that if I demand one way or the other that it would turn some potential participants away.  Regardless which, I would want people to pick their teammates - most likely this will help encourage their activity for the games and also ensure timezones wont impact the team itself.

Grading players can be a potential constraint I'm afraid - I can't think of a really clean way to ensure teams are equal through a system like this but be able to allow the team structure I mentioned in the sentences prior to this.  In generally I want to try to stay away from any sort of hindrance unless it becomes completely necessary. Ideally I agree though - I would love a way to ensure even teams for the most part.

Having ictf/ifreeze together may expose players who like one but don't play the other much and maybe result in more activity in either gametype outside of the "league".  I'm happy to hear this sounds like a good idea to someone other than just me heh.

Starting with teamsize 4 based on the general map designs being very playable for 4's is a good point.  I agree scaling down to 3v3 if it becomes an issue is always an option.

Just a random thought - I was thinking of creating a tag or something people could wear if they take part. Not sure how well that would go over..

Going off this and taking it a bit further.

All good ideas so far. With a good sized player pool I would think a good idea would be to select team captains that are all about equally skilled and have a good knowledge of other people in the community. Depending on the size of the player pool of people that would sign up, you would get your amount of team captains. After the list of all the committed players is gathered the captains will host a draft via irc or some other means. This process should make all the teams fairly even. I would say no more than 8 team captains though. Less teams with bigger rosters increases the chance of no-shows.

The draft format is a format that has seen success in other game types in quakelive. For example the QLRegens that have been hosted in the past have seen success, but these were 1 day draft tournaments. KGB just started a CA draft cup that looks pretty promising, even though there is a high number of teams with only 3 people on each roster. http://stevenwong422.wix.com/quakelive

id_ is also going to be hosting an invite-only ctf tournament with 4 teams of 4 in the coming weeks, which also looks promising.

A problem with ictf and ift tournaments has been the leadership role of the league and determining rules. I suggest the team captains all combined form a "rules committee" and they make the rules and declaring rulings on disputed issues as a group as opposed to the one subjective figure overlooking everything.

As far as prizes I think KGB's tournament has the best prizes. QL subscriptions may not be the sexiest prize to the winning team, but a player with a year pro token has more incentive to keep playing. I think it's better for QL. You may be able to score some tokens off of SyncError if you are able to get together a good group of people play and show him that this is something that can happen and better the QL community.

Just my thoughts.

make it happen nubs

It sounds like someone in the drunk clan has an ifreeze tourney going (or maybe it already finished).

Anyone know anything about this? The player pool is not large enough I think to support 2 similar functions simultaneously. It is supposedly Euro only though so maybe it may not be a conflict:

http://www.quakelive.com/forum/showthread.php?36202-Freeze-Tag-tournament-%28Start-Date-24-March%29-%28EU-only-plz%29

I plan on fleshing out details for this next week; I'm off work from 4/1 through 4/8 so my activity will go from mainly weekends to 4 or 5 days for that week. I can't wait!

          

That's Euro... roll with it.

I think I may change direction entirely - I had a league in Q3 years ago that went pretty well.

It was TDM instagib - no freeze.

This isn't something I see played in QLive and it seems to appease all sorts of players/teams.

It's extremely fast paced.  No downtime.  Shorter games.

I need to explore the options in server setup when I get home tonight from work and see what potential there is for this.

For reference, here is my ancient site for the league I am referencing; I was "ReAper":

http://hurtmeplenty.forumotion.com/

I may actually reincarnate the name for this.

Season 1 went really well then formats and rules changed in season 2 - the fact the # of NA clans was cut in half by then didn't help.

You'll also see some other stuff on there, but at least it's proof it can work.    

Again, more thinking out loud - I hope the more brainstorming that is done up front will help ensure a solid structure for a successful community function.  I guess we'll see how much interest it gets.

TDM with friendly damage on? Sounds promising...

Ph4nt0m wrote:TDM with friendly damage on? Sounds promising...

I'm thinking of a tdm bracket and a ffa bracket - at the very least the ffa bracket would be significantly less impacted by scheduling constraints due to the lack of needing teammates to show up.

Tonight or tomorrow night (whenever I'm on next) I will put up a server and see how it goes over to get a feel for how well it would go over.

I've ran 3 iCTF tournaments with in QL and it wasn't easy. The problem is the player pool is a lot lot smaller then it once was. Back in 2003 you would have 20+ teams of 12-30 players each signup for a league or tournament. We have 6-8 teams for ESL and 4 of them were teams I pretty much put together from a "player pool" and it was a struggle to get them to play matches. Another thing as mentioned is the team balance. Back in the day the top tier players were spread out more at least in the sense that every team had at least one guy that was considered as such. Now days there's one team that pretty much has it won before the games are even played and it puts people off from playing and this wasn't just a QL issue it started happening in Q3OSP at the end and that's why it went from team format to draft. Doing this allowed players that normally wouldn't get to play in the matches a chance to play and play with top level guys and have a shot at winning. It saved the iCTF community in OSP. I feel it's the way to go in QL iCTF moving forward. Of course it took a great group of people running the league (Decebaal, Marky, LK, seifer, arny. HOCK). If you're interested you can check out railwars.herokuapp.com it is an archive of most (it's about 70% complete) of the Q3 iCTF leagues from 1.32.

My biggest challenge currently is finding a structure that is casual yet still functional.  When I play random public games of 8 v 8 on weekends (ifreeze) I honestly ask myself, "what would make people who like playing the game this way have any desire to play 3 v 3 in organized games?".

I'm still trying to find that answer myself, honestly.  Most people seem content with the random publics.

Acid's post in the HMP section is very valid.  People who enjoy insta mainly play for the ctf and the freezetag so I was probably going too far with the "casual" approach when I leaned towards TDM and FFA.  I just figured FFA required no teammates to show up and TDM was something anyone could hop into and have some fun with - no real penalty for dying since there's hardly any wait to respawn etc.

Draft format would definately add an extra element; I see what you mean about teams not wanting to play due to knowing the outcome prior to games starting. I think that prevents a lot of clans from scrimming in general.