Automated Tournaments

(tokamak) #1

I’ve been spamming the Blizzard boards for this for years now and it looks like they’re finally doing it!

We know that StarCraft II players are perhaps the most passionate and competitive players in the world, so for StarCraft II Legacy of the Void we wanted to add a whole new way to compete. With that in mind, an Automated Tournament feature will be released with Legacy of the Void featuring daily and weekly tournaments. To mimic the existing tournament experience as closely as possible, Automated Tournaments will feature group stages that feed into a bracket stage playoff. You will also have opportunities to study your opponents, and maps can be vetoed.

Daily tournaments will be expected to last between three and four hours, while weekly ones… well, they last the week of course! Overall, we expect Automated Tournaments to be an excellent place for players to compete in at all skill levels. Casual players can have a good time, while others can compete at the highest level to earn tournament experience for live events like the World Championship Series.

We need for DB as well. Integrated Tournament rosters. Some official regular ones, some professionale league ones and the ability for any group of clans to set it up for themselves.

(Szakalot) #2

Sounds like a good idea, but if forced to choose, I’d much rather have a elo-style ladder with automated matchmaking. You and your two buddies are online? Let the game match you with another 2 players (perhaps also 2 buddies looking for a scrim) against another 5 players composed by similar groups.

I think automated tournamnets might be useful if you have a really large pool of players, but otherwise, manually organized tournaments should satisfy most comp needs, and devs can focus on awesome matchmaking.

(Anti) #3

We’ve looked at designs for this sort of stuff before, including the Brink ladder/tournament website, but in truth this is an incredibly hard thing to pull off well. Simply put tournaments without admins, and a serious penalty cost for no-shows, it tends to end up resulting in a tonne of byes and defaults until the semis and final.

Killzone 2 tried this and had the same sort of issues. Will be interesting to see what SC2 does to solve it. I imagine it’ll be a touch easier being 1v1, but I can’t see them locking out players from the rest of the game, or something similar, for defaulting their tournament match.

(tokamak) #4

Yeah teams are tough. That needs to be adressed first. An ordinary FPS game is ran on a servere where everybody can switch teams, drop in and out and switch servers whenever they like. It makes teams meaningless and without that weight there won’t be matchmaking and there certainly won’t be any tournaments.

The way WoW organises Arena Teams (especially the 5v5 ones) is worth looking at. There’s some very harsh restrictions and costs tied to how those teams work but it works really well in letting people stick together and work for their team.

Naturally that sould be the priority. Blizzard wouldn’t be anywhere without that.