Greetings,
Colin and I have just finished hosting a civ scoring based system round robin and tournament and wanted to post some thoughts I had if anyone wanted to host something similar. If you want to watch the event it's available on Colin's twitch channel: http://www.twitch.tv/collllllllllllin
We had 6 players play each other 1 Arabia game a week, for a total of 5 weeks, with a win getting you points based on the civ you picked. Worse civs give you more points. We used 1-5 scoring, with most civs falling in the 3 point bucket. The scoring we just made up.
After those 5 rounds we had scores for each player which has how we seeded a 6 player Tournament. Top 2 got byes. We also forced all players to draft their civs at the same time, 5 civs each.
What we saw: a lot of the same civs showed up in the round robin phase because there were "power jumps" where civs were the best in their score group. Vietnamese and Tatars were both 4 point civs and selected often. To counter this in the future I'd recommend more granularity in the scoring. So Vietnamese might be 3.4 instead of 4, and selected less often.
Also, there wasn't a big difference between 3rd place or last place, so players were smart to just pick high point civs. That resulted in mostly 4&5 point picks, reducing the civs we saw in the round robin phase. To counter this I'd recommend having 8 players in the round robin phase, and have the 2 last place players eliminated from the tournament. I believe this would result in those struggling for 6th place to value any points more and would likely pick better civs. 8 players would need 7 games for each, and could make the event last too long, but I think it would be worth it.
The tournament worked out really well. We had g1 and g5 be Arabia, and there was some discussion about purposely throwing g1 to have both of your home maps played, but that seems overly risky to me.
Updates: be prepared to adjust civ scores in the event a balance patch comes out. We banned those civs until we could determine a score and then unbanned them, that seemed to work. Additionally, robo saved our butts by providing us the hc3 beta so we could cast games on an older patch. There should be an easier way to go about that other than relying on a friendly
A huge thanks to Colin for the casting, platform, and organization. As well as a big thank you to the participants: Inc, Obadiah, Sitaux, Ganji, Dragonstar, and Kamigawa. It was really fun interviewing you guys and chatting during the match set ups, I'm definitely a fan of you all in future tournaments.
Cheers!
Brohio
Colin and I have just finished hosting a civ scoring based system round robin and tournament and wanted to post some thoughts I had if anyone wanted to host something similar. If you want to watch the event it's available on Colin's twitch channel: http://www.twitch.tv/collllllllllllin
We had 6 players play each other 1 Arabia game a week, for a total of 5 weeks, with a win getting you points based on the civ you picked. Worse civs give you more points. We used 1-5 scoring, with most civs falling in the 3 point bucket. The scoring we just made up.
After those 5 rounds we had scores for each player which has how we seeded a 6 player Tournament. Top 2 got byes. We also forced all players to draft their civs at the same time, 5 civs each.
What we saw: a lot of the same civs showed up in the round robin phase because there were "power jumps" where civs were the best in their score group. Vietnamese and Tatars were both 4 point civs and selected often. To counter this in the future I'd recommend more granularity in the scoring. So Vietnamese might be 3.4 instead of 4, and selected less often.
Also, there wasn't a big difference between 3rd place or last place, so players were smart to just pick high point civs. That resulted in mostly 4&5 point picks, reducing the civs we saw in the round robin phase. To counter this I'd recommend having 8 players in the round robin phase, and have the 2 last place players eliminated from the tournament. I believe this would result in those struggling for 6th place to value any points more and would likely pick better civs. 8 players would need 7 games for each, and could make the event last too long, but I think it would be worth it.
The tournament worked out really well. We had g1 and g5 be Arabia, and there was some discussion about purposely throwing g1 to have both of your home maps played, but that seems overly risky to me.
Updates: be prepared to adjust civ scores in the event a balance patch comes out. We banned those civs until we could determine a score and then unbanned them, that seemed to work. Additionally, robo saved our butts by providing us the hc3 beta so we could cast games on an older patch. There should be an easier way to go about that other than relying on a friendly
A huge thanks to Colin for the casting, platform, and organization. As well as a big thank you to the participants: Inc, Obadiah, Sitaux, Ganji, Dragonstar, and Kamigawa. It was really fun interviewing you guys and chatting during the match set ups, I'm definitely a fan of you all in future tournaments.
Cheers!
Brohio