So I've got a bit of a problem with the tournament logic which I need some opinions on. In an ideal world I would set the number of starting players so there are no byes.

e.g. for a 4 player game with 1 player progressing each game, the possible starting numbers of players is 4, 16, 64, 256

For a 5 player game with 1 progressing it is 5, 25, 125, 625

So you can see the number of possible starting players is quite limited if you don't have byes. If you do have byes then you could start the tournament with any number of players but it's unfair on those that don't get a bye.

WF gets around this problem by varying the number of players in the game. So even though you said you wanted 6 player games, only the first round of games is guaranteed to have this number of players, the rest could be a different number. This also causes a problem if e.g. the map only support 5 players per game.

Should I allow byes and hence allow more variance in the number of starting players but accept that it's unfair or not? Or go down the varying game size route?

The other issue is the number of players advancing each round. In theory this number needs to a factor of the number of players in each game otherwise when you get to the semi-finals you'll end up with the wrong number of players for the final game. Again this could be worked around by either allowing a different number of players to play the final game (again causing problems with boards that only support a certain number of players) or varying the numbers who advance each round.

So in other words, lots of compromises are needed if I want to be able to have lots of different number of players start each tournament and not force people to accept squares of the game size.

I think people will cry out about byes and them not being fair, and/or there would always be that inkling in my mind that if I didn't get a bye would I have advanced.
Just my opinion of byes, I think they should be avoided, perhaps at great costs.

I'd say with most boards the "sweet spot" is 4-6 players and that the specific number of players is not all that critical.

Given that, I don't see any problem with the number of players in each game being mutable within set boundaries. What we don't want to end up with like on Warfish was the 5-man games w/double elimination and only 1 advancing that after round 1 became a tournament of 2-man and 8-man games.



I don't like anyone having a bye unless it's not a standard-bracket type tournament.

I don't have a problem with more than 1 player advancing if the next round games are shuffled up. If there was a way to seed the next round that would be cool but I have no idea how to do that.
Could tournaments be created so that rather than saying how many people are in the tournament first you set up each round.
How many rounds
How many players in round one games
How many players in round two games
etc, etc
and then the site tells you how many invitees you need and if it has to be double advance or single. If the tournament host has any idea what he/she/it is doing it should be thought out before hand.
If it doesn't work the site just says "Tournament Impossible" or "Check your Math" or something creative and/or snarky.
As a map maker who often makes maps with set numbers of players I don't want my maps to get lost from tournaments but at the same time simple algebra is not beyond me so I can work it out if I want to.
I think you should put the responsibility on the host, not the site engine. Just let it say that it can't happen rather than create what it thinks should happen. I don't know about the coding of that but that would be what I'd want. On another site I used to play on I would set up the number of players for a map to be laid out in good brackets and it would frak it all up from there. Let's not let that happen.
Oh, and no Byes. Ideally, the main point of playing any game is to play it and win and I think I'd be pissed to have to wait 2 weeks to play my first game because I got a bye.

I gave up playing Warfish tournaments years ago because they last too long, they don't deal with absentee players very well, and they're too rigid about the number of players per game.  I'm hoping tournaments will get designed better here on WarGear so that I will want to participate again.

To solve these three problems, I would advocate a radical rethinking of the concept of a tournament.  I'd like a tournament to be more like a season of a professional sports league, with the exception of adding a lot more parallelism.  A football team can't play more than one game at a time, but an online gamer can easily handle dozens of games at once.

When I join a tournament, it's because I would like to play in games RIGHT NOW, but don't particularly want to commit myself to playing six months or a year from now.  When I join, I'd like to instantly be playing 4 or 6 or even 8 games, each with a different set of players, rather than stringing them out in series over time.

Here's an example of what I have in mind, for a quick, highly parallel tournament in three tiers:

Let's imagine we have 128 players who will play 8 player games.  Tier 1 of the tournament would start out by launching 8 games for every player, each with a different mix of players, for a total of 128 games in the tier.  Once all games are finished, a list is drawn up of player rankings.  This list is sorted by first place finishes.  Ties are then broken by sorting by second place finishes, then by third place finishes, and so on.  Final tiebreaker (if it is ever needed) is whoever finished all their games first.  Anyone who has been booted, or who wishes to leave the tournament at this point, gets dropped to the bottom of the list.

Players for the second tier are then chosen from the top of this list.  We might, for example, chose to discard the lower 3/4 of the list, which means the top 32 players go on to the second tier.  8 more games are launched in parallel for each player, just as before.  At the conclusion of all tier 2 games, a new list is made that includes games played in both tiers.

If we discard 3/4 again, we are down to 8 players.  We have reached the final tier, the "playoffs."  At this point we just could play a single 8 player game, winner take all, like the Super Bowl.

This style of tournament format has several advantages over the traditional format:

• Much faster to play
• Deals well with booted players
• No byes needed; the lists will always provide an even number of players
• Players per game is very flexible; you can easily have 8 players in one tier and 5 in the next if you want.

Red Baron wrote:

Tier 1 of the tournament would start out by launching 8 games for every player, each with a different mix of players, for a total of 128 games in the tier. 

That seems a bit extreme, I guess you would want to limit the number of tournaments you're in, but even if you just joined 3 that would be 24 active games of just tournaments.  Perhaps it's just my way of thinking of tournaments, but I don't think of playing in 8 games simultaneously as a "tournament" and not too sure I would be in favor of that.  2 to maybe even 4 could be okay (as long as the map was good), but "forcing" players into a commitment of 8 when clicking Accept seems out there (and Surrendering or being Booted isn't a good solution to getting out of tournaments since it throws off the games those players were in).

Yertle wrote: That seems a bit extreme,

It was intended as an extreme example of a very short (in time) tournament.  Four at a time would be more normal, I think, with more tiers.  I should probably have given a more typical example, but I was trying to emphasize the possibly of having a very quick tournament that still has a lot of games in it.

I've seen double elimination tournaments on Warfish where if you lost one game but eventually won, you'd have to play 17 games, same as in this example.  My point, though, was that in this new type of tournament you could play those games in the time it takes to play 3 games rather than 17, which in my opinion is a vast improvement.  I don't want to spend a year playing in a tournament ever again.

Bracketing tournaments are forced to be limited in the options in the # of players. I use to play in Swiss-system tournaments, which are used in many gaming communities: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss-system_tournament

For a tournament with no byes, you just need a # of players that is a multiple of the # of players per board. No one is eliminated per se - everyone plays in every round. The # of wins are totaled as "points", and whoever has the most points at the end wins.

Say you have 20 people on a 4-player map. You play 3 rounds. After the first round, 5 players have 1 point, the other 15 players have 0. The Swiss system tries to match high performers against high performers, but this can't always be done. So the second round pits 4 of the 5 players with 1 point against each other, and then matches up the rest. At the end of this round there will be 1-2 players with 2 points, a bunch of players with 1 point, etc. If all goes well, there will be a player with 3 points at the end of round 3, but this is not guaranteed.

The main weakness of the system is the lack of guarantee of a winner. This can be dealt with in a few ways: one is that you continue the tournament past its originally set # of rounds until a winner is determined. Another is to use the points as entry into a smaller bracketed system - this is similar to Red's sports analogy (regular season/playoffs).

RB - Well there are going to be two tournament types, league and elimination. In a league tournament technically you can play all your games at once (i.e. you can play one game against every other player). There will be an optional knockout phase for the top ranked two or four players.

Risky - I am designing the system with the capability to support completely custom tournaments like you want, however that won't be in the first 'version' that's released. The way it will have to work to make the math sensible is you start with the final game and work backwards, not the other way round. Thay way you don't get caught up with invalid tournament structures.

So the general feeling is:

1. Byes are a Bad Thing
2. Prefer to vary the number of players in the game (slightly) to accomodate the different starting numbers of players instead
3. But don't mess with the numbers of players advancing

Of course (2) is not possible on maps with only e.g. 4 players per game. In that case the starting numbers would have to be fixed. I'm also conscious that on the roadmap is support for fixed player numbers (e.g. 2/4/6 players only) which complicates matters further.

I also don't like byes, but varying player #'s on maps is also not great if it is being used to gain flexibility. Those who have to win a 5-player game are at a disadvantage to those who have to win a 4-player game.

Nonetheless, with the inevitable boots and dropouts, it would be good to minimize the damage - in a Swiss system, you can keep it to just one game that has a fewer number of players. In games with a strict player requirement, perhaps an AutoSkipBot player could be created for those situations.

I like Red Baron's parallel tournament idea, though I would probably want the # of parallel games created to be something more in the 3-5 range.

Swiss tournaments seem like a good idea when there are too many players for a standard league - I am capping the max players per league at 20 because that's already 19 games per player.

I'm starting to come around to the Swiss tournament idea Hugh... I've realized that the math for bracketing tournaments for a variable number of players is horrendous given the constraints (min/max players, players per games, players advancing / no byes). It only really works for very limited starting numbers of players.

Also I've realized that round robin tournaments only really work for 2 player games.

I think having both a Swiss and custom bracketed tournaments are probably the way to go. The custom brackets will be defined from the final game backwards to ensure they always hang together.

I'd like to voice my desire to not play multiple games of one tournament at the same time.
I already have a difficult enough time when I play multiple games on the same board even when they have different number of players and are started with a week or two in between. I'd hate to have to try and figure out what's going on in 4 different identical games and remember who needs to get knocked down, who I'm got an agreement with, and so on.

If I can also slip something else in here as well: I always wanted (back on WF) a way for the game setup to recognize players rankings on the board being played and to schedule the game accordingly.

You can either place all the higher ranked players together, or spread out the games to have more of a mix (one good, one bad, and fill in some 1000 point guys) of the players.

Swiss tournaments are supposed to be seeded so ranking could be used in that way.

Yes - forgot to mention that, although what I've seen used is a bit strange.

They try to avoid matching the top players in the early rounds (for drama), but also avoid giving an edge to the top seeds by always putting them against the worst possible seed.

It is something like this: seed the players by score (amt of points) first and then by ranking (first round is all by ranking). Group the players with the highest point total together, allowing spillover if it doesn't line up. Then (for two player), match the top in the first half of that group with the top in the last half of that group, 2nd top in first half with 2nd top in last half, etc. For multiplayer, the group would be divisible by players per board, so instead of halves, you'd have quartiles and match the top from each quartile and the 2nd tops from each quartile, etc. Something like that.

Of course, brackets often match top seeds with the least seed, etc, which is in many ways simpler.