hi all

I'm looking for ideas on how better to structure the monthly prize competitions. When I set up the current competition I wanted to really see lots of competition for the prize each month and lots of interest in it which I haven't really seen and to berickf's credit, he's totally dominated it!

I'd like to revamp the competition so that this month is the last one of the current format.

My initial thoughts is to use the prize money instead for a monthly tournament. $50 for the winner, or perhaps split between places. This would run on the most popular boards with WarGear Warfare heavily favored to draw in newies.

I'm very much interested in your ideas and open to other suggestions

cheers

Tok

I like the idea of picking a new map each month.  Either best monthly ranking on the map, or a tournament or several tournaments.

Darn... Just when I was getting into my groove!

Even if you scrap the financial prize, could you still keep the monthly championship going non-monetarily?  Thanks.

Also, I would like to point out that from every month onwards that I were to win it, all the money will go back into WarGear through premium memberships either awarded through gift or tournament... So, even if you were not to discontinue it as is, you'd actually get both, the monthly championships and indirectly tournaments every month I was successful and won...  only, I'd be deciding my tournaments to award the prize for... Not you ;-)  If you wanted I could even make some cash tournaments with my winnings!

I'll keep thinking about the bigger question here regarding alternatives though.

I like the monthly Tournament idea.  You could host WGWF on a bi-monthly schedule ..interspersed with other boards.

Just off the top of my head, some issues that may arise could be accessibility related. How big should the tourneys be? ..format?  Do you want them to fill quickly? If so, and if you start them at 5:00AM on the first Monday of the month, will you be favoring certain players?  How will you advertise it?  You want lots of newbies, right?  An in-house Ad on the Games page or Home page? (that doesn't really count as advertising, does it?)

How about the occasion tournament for Standard Members ONLY with a Premium Membership prize?  New members who join get a special invite?

If it is a round robin tourney, include something for places below first -- it will mean more people are theoretically able to get in the winner's circle for longer ( if I lose two of my first three games I don't just give up and get grumpy)

And have we considered options like keeping the monthly format as it is but adding a rule that you can only win once every X months?  How close is the competition under berickf?

BTdubs wrote:

And have we considered options like keeping the monthly format as it is but adding a rule that you can only win once every X months?  How close is the competition under berickf?

It's very close.  A different person seems to follow me every month, and, before I became interested in it a different person won it nearly every month...

See here: http://www.wargear.net/rankings/winners

There are a couple repeat winners but no consecutive winners till I decided to put my stamp on it.

BTdubs wrote:

If it is a round robin tourney, include something for places below first -- it will mean more people are theoretically able to get in the winner's circle for longer ( if I lose two of my first three games I don't just give up and get grumpy)

or perhaps have second and third place prizes?

Not to re-ignite old discussions but I think this illustrates what's wrong with the Global Ranking system.

So, let's not get into that - but you could instead reward the person who improved the most from last month.  Split it and give $25 each to the persons with the biggest jump in GR and CP each month or team scores.

Actually what's hard for me is with the games I play I have little control over what games I win/lose in a particular month - most of mine take weeks if not months to play out.  So I am not even thinking about the competition in my games.

So, maybe I do like the idea of a monthly tournament.  Thinking about what M57 said - Could you set-up a tourney with an undetermined number of players, but give everyone a month to join?  At the end of the month it just starts with that number of players.  (We could work out the details/algortihm to make this happen.  I would even love to figure out some sort of double-elimination system.  I know it could be done if we played on boards that accepted a range of players.)

One way to 'force' a semi-double elimination system would be to automatically invite/enroll the losers of the first round to a consolation tournament, the winner of which gets the 3rd place prize? (2nd place goes to the loser of the final match in the main tourney).

Amidon37 wrote:

Not to re-ignite old discussions but I think this illustrates what's wrong with the Global Ranking system.

So, let's not get into that - but you could instead reward the person who improved the most from last month.  Split it and give $25 each to the persons with the biggest jump in GR and CP each month or team scores.

I'm not familiar with this discussion of what is wrong with GR... Seems like a very good system to me.  Mine consistently trends up and is very stable when I reach new highs.

Anywhooo... Most improved doesn't seem very 'fair' in that by the way it is designed if you start off higher you just can't gain as much... That seems to be the reasoning behind Tom setting the monthly competitions at the same starting point each month, so, in a way, it is already a 'most improved' competition just with an equal starting position...  CP is no better in that it is not equitable across boards and is finite by nature.  Over the past month the top two CP'ers, who are both constantly active, have remained relatively static in their positions.  You'd basically be saying that they can't ever win while such a competition should be open to everybody!  You could track CP starting from zero at the beginning of each month, that would start everyone off on an equal footing and end with some interesting results?  Anyway, if not the monthly competition... Which is akin to the NHL's president's trophy, then a tournament would be the next most equitable platform and move us into the post season to go for Lord Stanley's Holy Grail of WarGear...  You'd still need to be good, but, a little unpredictability would be thrown into the mix.

I fear that I have killed the monthly championship.  I did it by focusing on a niche where I could but rarely fail... 1v1's.  Me against one other.  I could read it in his announcement tone that his mind was turning with each successive month...

March: Well done berickf for winning this month's $50 competition prize (in runaway fashion!)

April: Well done berickf for winning for the first time back to back titles and taking this month's $50 competition prize - very impressive!

May: For the first time ever, a player has managed the three-peat - berickf takes home March, April and May $50 competition prizes. Is this man unstoppable?!

And June: Well, this is making the announcements just a copy and paste affair - well done again to berickf for taking home the $50 prize for the fourth month running! Impressive stuff...

There was no announcement for July... The Ctrl C/Ctrl V had been broken on Tom's computer...

Did I kill the monthly competition...

I'm sorry

We've done several premium-prize tournaments before. Were they considered a success for this purpose?

It seems like advertising would be the most important part of doing tournaments. The advantage of the monthly competition is that everyone is already participating. Are we trying to get new people to come to the site or just engage people that are already here more?

Whatever we do, it seems like splitting the reward between the top 2 to 5 places would be good.

berickf wrote:

Did I kill the monthly competition...

I'm sorry

berickf, your impressive win record should be celebrated, congrats for being so dominant for several months! 

We could just give berickf a lifetime membership and keep doing the monthly competition without him.

I kinda like that idea: We create a badge:

"Immortal" 

Gotta win 6 monthly competitions in a row - are granted a "free" five year membership - are not allowed to win the monthly competition for the five year period. 

ratsy wrote:

I kinda like that idea: We create a badge:

"Immortal" 

Gotta win 6 monthly competitions in a row - are granted a "free" five year membership - are not allowed to win the monthly competition for the five year period. 

for a 4 1/2 year period... That way they can at least work on a free renewal of their five year membership while they are still premium.

My suggestion is for Wargear to host 5 tournaments each month with the prize of not only a trophy for each winner, but also 3 months of membership fees credited to their account. That would be a total prize value of $50 each month. I suggest each month, the boards used for the 5 tournaments to be chosen based on the most popular tournaments that were created in the previous month. This could be a way to kind of "spread the wealth" a little bit in regard to tournament prizes. I would set each of the 5 tournaments to accept about 25 players.

berickf wrote:

BTdubs wrote:

And have we considered options like keeping the monthly format as it is but adding a rule that you can only win once every X months?  How close is the competition under berickf?

It's very close.  A different person seems to follow me every month, and, before I became interested in it a different person won it nearly every month...

See here: http://www.wargear.net/rankings/winners

There are a couple repeat winners but no consecutive winners till I decided to put my stamp on it.

Just because a different player is getting 2nd place doesn't make the competition very close. The margins can still be wide between first and second no matter which player is in that spot. Sorry, had to point out the fallacy in that arguement.

My assessment of the current monthly system is that it does very little to attract or retain new players. It is heavily biased  toward your volume of play. Very few people can dedicate that kind of time to the site due to  real life. A new player is going to have a very small chance at exploiting the same 1v1 system on complex maps when he is going up against players who already have 25 or even 50 games of experience on that map (most people do not have the time to dig up old game histories) . The overall motivation behind making such an exploit seems fairly dry.

Having the site advertise an official monthly prize tournament could end up being a HUGE draw to the site. This could even draw risk masterminds from other sites to come in and strut their stuff. The new player is not required to dedicate a huge amount of time to the site, but can still make a big impact. This format has the potential to highlight skill over volume of play, and someone with limited time is not left out. New players would then get more exposure to the site and would have good reason to stick around. 

This is my opinion phrased bluntly.