After several weeks wrangling with tournament math, the new tournaments feature is now Live.

There are initially two league tournament types only:

Round Robin: In this format each player or team plays every other player or team once. It is limited to two player or two team games only. The winner is the player or team with the most wins at the end of the tournament. Rounds are pre-defined at tournament start so you can start playing a new round even when other players haven't finished their round.

Swiss System: This is a league tournament where in each round players are matched against other players with the same number of wins. The number of rounds to ensure a result is calculated when the tournament is created. Each player plays the same number of rounds. You have to wait till each round is completed by all players before progressing to the next round.

In both the above tournament types the winner is the player or team with the most wins at the end of the tournament. If there is a draw then the player or team score is used to work out who has won. The player or team score is calculated very similarly to the player ranking score (i.e. loser's score / winner's score * x). I expect this may be an area of contention but it works well in the simulations that I have run.

I will start work shortly on the two remaining tournament types, basic and custom elimination (knockout) tournaments.

Due to the amount of new code involved tournaments should be considered a 'Beta' feature. This means that they are subject to change if (when!) problems are found and need to be resolved. In a worst case scenario some tournament may have to be abandoned or restarted if the problems found are not easily fixed any other way.

Hope you enjoy and please post any bugs / feature requests here.

alrighty, there's a couple already started.

first question: (well statement first) i like the ease of the create screen. how hard would it be to see a graphical representation of the tourney config below the text?

second question: what's it look like to those who join? (i spose this could be answered if someone else would start one...:D) more specifically, when joining a 'specify your own team' game...

alrighty, so there was a double post....

apparently if you try to travel back thru the page history and the page doesn't show up and you hit 'refresh' then 'retry' it will post your message again...

weathertop wrote: alrighty, there's a couple already started.

first question: (well statement first) i like the ease of the create screen. how hard would it be to see a graphical representation of the tourney config below the text?

second question: what's it look like to those who join? (i spose this could be answered if someone else would start one...:D) more specifically, when joining a 'specify your own team' game...

1st qu...this was originally part of the plan for the launch but I dropped it as it was a non-essential feature that was going to introduce further delays. I'll add it at some point.

2nd qu... guess you'll need to wait till someone else starts one :p

Congrats tom! I bet this feels like a huge RiskyBack off your back eh?

question about trophies. i assume there will be some 'standard' for the pic? that way they fit nice and neat in the trophy case, or will they all be whatever huge and small sizes ppl decide to upload?

Yep 11s I can't wait to do something else more fun! Been driving me nuts all this stuff.

Trophy images have to be 400x400px in size. I just made a random call on this, if the consensus is something different then let me know. They have to fit nicely into the trophy cabinet though.

Edited: Creating a team then leaving correctly makes the team go away.  Joining Weathertop's "W'top' team puts me in a new team called "W'.  Apostrophes are annoying aren't they...

Edit: Sorry no fun for you until you fix the 4 bugs I find and the 89 million that Yertle digs up.  Then you can go play.  *evil grin*

Here's a few other little points:

- Anyone except the tournament host can leave (surrender!) a tournament at any time. All their active games will be surrendered so they will lose tournament ranking points for this.

- If a player surrrenders mid-tournament, they will automatically lose all their future games. However their win record up to that point is preserved (i.e. it won't go back and change their wins into losses). This was a tough call to make as it might seem unfair to someone who lost to a player who subsequently surrendered and then all the other players got free wins. The alternative is going back and scrubbing all their wins to losses but this means that the act of surrendering could be used tactically as it could potentially change the leaderboard (by turning a loss into a win for a player who was placed second for example).

- This includes team tournaments, you can surrender as an individual within your team, the rest of the team can carry on (but their likelihood of winning is of course substantially less).

- The tournament host can cancel a tournament as long as noone else has joined. I may change this to say make it cancellable if < 25% of the required players have joined.

- Only Premium players can create a tournament.

- You can only have two Open (i.e. waiting for players to join) tournaments at any time.

- Anyone (Standard or Premium) can join a tournament (subject to invitation if it is a Private tournament).

Fixed thanks 11s... another little bug relating to team names with quotes in to be fixed as well.

When you upload the trophy image there's no notifier of success.

It would be nice if people could see the trophy they're playing for. Personally, I'd be much more likely to join a tournament that would give me a cool looking trophy.

Might be a bug there, it should update the trophy image.

Tropies should be visible and updatable now.

Do games played in tournaments apply to your normal or team rankings also?

Do tournaments count towards the 10 game limit of standard players?

Another question would be, do we have the Active Player base right now to support 64 player tournaments? What percentage of the players who login at least a couple times a week would need to join the tournament to fill it up.

Thanks tom! Does anyone else think the Host's name should be somewhere? I can't seem to find it other than the 1st person who joined. I don't really know if this is important.

RiskyBack wrote: Thanks tom! Does anyone else think the Host's name should be somewhere? I can't seem to find it other than the 1st person who joined. I don't really know if this is important.

When I first glanced at the Tournaments page (20 seconds ago) that was the first thing I noticed missing from the List info.  I think it would be nice to see, along with number of players already joined.

Lightning tournaments seem like a bad idea.
Expanded (5 day) tournaments seem like an OK idea.

You have successfully joined the tournament. When the it's full of players the tournament will start

And needs a period at the end.

You have successfully left the tournament

Period here too :)

Oh and I edited your blue text at the start of this thread, because it's hard to see :P