EPL's 'Everything you need to know about Tournaments'

[Jackluyt]

Hi!

Elvenar Platinum Leaf's 'Everything you need to know about Tournaments' (first edition) is now out and you are free to share it if you like:

https://www.facebook.com/notes/elve...ed-to-know-about-tournaments/1821471361464312

There are a few suggestions from the end of the note that I'd like to share:

Improvements that might be considered by the Development Team:

• Fellowships Leader Board - to see how well we are doing. This would be very popular! There is bound to be some tension within fellowships over 'shall-we-fight-or-shan't-we?' question. Having a Fellowship Ranking List will help to motivate reluctant members to become involved!
  
• Cumulative Bonus display: How’s this for a nice idea? Show all the bonuses that have already been won in a little window inside the Fellowship Tournament Leader Board! And possibly the ones to be won at the next checkpoint too! Wouldn’t that help to motivate reluctant fellowship members?

• Decrease the Check Point totals - discussed above. The nicer the prizes, the more inclined people will be to take part!
  As things stand, not even the strongest fellowships are going to open the tenth chest
  
• Have ‘Mystery Boxes’ as prizes for some of the Check Points. Contents would vary from ‘ordinary, dull, boring’ (high chance of getting) to ‘incredibly good’ - like Blueprint and similar (very low chance).
  The contents would be randomised - like a lucky packet!
  People love surprises! So give anything up to 1oo Spells, KP, up to 5 million coins, perhaps a mystery building or two, a one-week reduction in Scouting Time etc etc.
  Prizes of 5 000, 10 000 Tournament points, 50 000 or (rarely) 100 000.
  And, of course, a 5% chance of a Blueprint...
  Mystery Boxes would mean that fellowships are more likely to win a prize - even if it is not a very exciting one!
  The odds could be adjusted so not many Blueprints are awarded - so the Devs are losing nothing if they implement this.
  And it would add some fun fun fun!
• A Handicap System! Many fellowships are unable to make decent bonuses, because their members do not have well-developed games, with poor goods production and inadequate troop production, and poor fighting skills.
  And don’t forget those fellowships that only have 10 members!
  It would really be great if the Devs could set three special unique goals for each fellowship - calculated in such a way that all the members would have to work hard to open one of three mystery boxes.
  ‘Dangling the carrot’
  This would be a great way to 'level the playing field' a bit, and get all the fellowships competing!

What do you all think?

J


Elvenar Platinum is a growing, public, free-to-share Facebook group with 2 500 members at time of writing.
You are most welcome to join us!
=D
The YouTube Channel is a new venture; we are uploading all our existing videos, and have a whole lot more in the pipeline; with the idea of eventually having full 'City' and 'Battle' playlists, graded from 'beginner' to 'advanced'.

Do you perhaps have some similar videos you would let us share?
Or do you have a talent for making them?
Contact me if you would like to be involved!

 

[Jackluyt]

I just added two new ideas!

• Have ‘Mystery Boxes’ as prizes for some of the Check Points. Contents would vary from ‘ordinary, dull, boring’ (high chance of getting) to ‘incredibly good’ - like Blueprint and similar (very low chance).
  The contents would be randomised - like a lucky packet!
  People love surprises! So give anything up to 1oo Spells, KP, up to 5 million coins, perhaps a mystery building or two, a one-week reduction in Scouting Time etc etc.
  Prizes of 5 000, 10 000 Tournament points, 50 000 or (rarely) 100 000.
  And, of course, a 5% chance of a Blueprint...
  Mystery Boxes would mean that fellowships are more likely to win a prize - even if it is not a very exciting one!
  The odds could be adjusted so not many Blueprints are awarded - so the Devs are losing nothing if they implement this.
  And it would add some fun fun fun!
• A Handicap System! Many fellowships are unable to make decent bonuses, because their members do not have well-developed games, with poor goods production and inadequate troop production, and poor fighting skills. And don’t forget those fellowships that only have 10 members! It would really be great if the Devs could set three special unique goals for each fellowship - calculated in such a way that all the members would have to work hard to open one of three mystery boxes. ‘Dangling the carrot’ This would be a great way to get all the fellowships competing!
  I was thinking of one or two or three Mystery Chests offered to a Fellowship that would STRETCH it and make it try harder!
  So if a Fellowship is managing to open Five Chests on average, offer them mystery Boxes for 6th, 7th and 8th next time round...
  To make the system easier to implement, these 'Incentive bonuses could be linked to the Fellowship's place on a Global Tournament Ranking LeaderBoard?

 

[DeletedUser1887]

I like the mystery box idea a lot.

 

[DeletedUser1887]

Great guide!

One thing i was hoping to see but didn't was a definitive answer on what causes tournament difficulty... Originally i thought it was all about your squad size since higher squad size = more troops you'll see == more losses overall and/or higher catering. Then, i've recently been seeing murmuring here that it's based on total number of provinces scouted. I'm confused and would like to know the answer.

 

[Jackluyt]

Whoops!

I forgot to include one comment:

The re-balancing of strengths of fighting units has generally been a great success.
But this Scrolls Tournament was much more difficult than the others, because IMO the Abbot has been made too strong.
AutoFighting (I test every combination for our Facebook group), the computer ignores the abbots and sends all your players after the Light Ranged stuff - so you get slaughtered.

And the Sorceress in now just about useless!
You lose every fight with them on AutoFight...

There are some Tournaments where you can win everything up to a high level on AutoFight - and others where you most definitley can't!

This is very unfair to those who have that province type as their Boost, don't you think?

 

[Heymrdiedier]

And the Sorceress in now just about useless!

Ive been saying this for a while now, but there is still 1 person who totally disagrees, and inno is listening to him i think, or they are just ignoring all feedback

I find it espacially annoying because the enemy enchantress is sooo overpowered. I think they wanted to make the enchantress less overpowered and thus reduced the range (wich was a good thing). And i think they mistakenly assumed the elf sorceress was evenly overpowered an needed the same treatment.

There are some Tournaments where you can win everything up to a high level on AutoFight - and others where you most definitley can't!

I do 90% if not more of tournament on auto. most you can do a lot on auto, even the last one. The only ones that are a disaster to me are the one that require the Sorceress, so marble and gems. Those are a complete disaster to me.

 

[SoggyShorts]

A Handicap System! Many fellowships are unable to make decent bonuses, because their members do not have well-developed games, with poor goods production and inadequate troop production, and poor fighting skills.

I don't think that players should be given an advantage for any of those reasons, where would the incentive to improve be?

As for FS with fewer than 25 members, if you scale the difficulty based on the number of players, then there will be a strong temptation to kick your weakest members. Unless perhaps in a system where in each tournament only the top 20 scores in your FS are counted towards the checkpoints. Obviously they'd have to re-balance the checkpoints(which they should anyways)

 

[DeletedUser1877]

Have a thought buzzing around, needs a lot of work, but there might be a way of handicapping without exploitation.

What if the FS is given a rating based on the total or maybe average of it's members MH at the END of tourney? The end prevents manipulation by kicking as you might lower the rating, but lose a lot of points to do so. The points made could be valued by this number, with an approximation shown during the tourney. This seems like it might be a way to make all FS's close to even, as number and size of members mean less.

Any thoughts are welcome.

 

[SoggyShorts]

@Gandolfus
It's an interesting idea, but I think there is a flaw in that having a higher MH level does not equal a greater ability to complete the tournament, since the costs to cater increase with number of provinces explored.
FS with 1 or 2 advanced players and many low level players would have a significant advantage as they can feed resources to their small players and complete more for less. Also, it would discourage players from upgrading their MH which brings it's own problems.

The only scaling or handicap that should be considered (in my opinion) is for FS with less than 25 members, and there aren't many ways to do that without encouraging FS to kick weaker/less active players.

 

[DeletedUser1877]

Thank you for the comments. I proposed it to get some "brainstorming" going, with lot of ideas come the seeds of great things.

 

[Jackluyt]

I don't think that players should be given an advantage for any of those reasons, where would the incentive to improve be?

As for FS with fewer than 25 members, if you scale the difficulty based on the number of players, then there will be a strong temptation to kick your weakest members. Unless perhaps in a system where in each tournament only the top 20 scores in your FS are counted towards the checkpoints. Obviously they'd have to re-balance the checkpoints(which they should anyways)

My idea of a Handicap was intended to ADD incentive!

I was thinking of one or two or three Mystery Chests offered to a Fellowship that would STRETCH it and make it try harder!
So if a Fellowship is managing to open Five Chests on average, offer them mystery Boxes for 6th, 7th and 8th next time round

To make the system easier to implement, perhaps these 'Incentive bonuses could be linked to the Fellowship's place on the Global Ranking Leaderboard?

 

[SoggyShorts]

@Jackluyt
I think you might be using the word handicap wrong here then.

In golf a less skilled player is given a handicap like minus 5, so that when he plays with a good golfer he has a chance to get the same score as his opponent.

In Elvenar terms, that would mean reducing the checkpoint requirements for smaller or less skilled players.

Mystery boxes are a good idea, handicaps are not.

 

[Jackluyt]

@Jackluyt
I think you might be using the word handicap wrong here then.

In golf a less skilled player is given a handicap like minus 5, so that when he plays with a good golfer he has a chance to get the same score as his opponent.

I don't know about the semantics of this!
By Handicap I meant 'leveling the playing fields' so weaker fellowships have something nice to compete for; an incentive for the Minnows to improve their scores, not just the Big Crocodiles!

Perhaps there is another word that says it better?

***

What I had in mind was for the computer to determine an unique CheckPoint (or two or three) for each of the weaker Fellowships, calculated to 'stretch' them further than they usually go - and give it to them at the beginning of that Tournament.
That way 'fiddling the books' would be more difficult.
If people deliberately left the fellowship the day before, to cheat - one could make a rule that the 'special checkpoint' would only apply to the players who were in at the start of the Tourney!

 

[Jackluyt]

Here is something you may find useful Mykan?

 

[SoggyShorts]

In north america the tournament starts between 8am to noon depending on time zone, so many players are already at work.
This means you lose 8h of tournament time right off the start since you are already at work and can't start the first round until you get home.
If you work 9-5 (pretty normal) you get home and can log in around 530-6
16 hours after 6pm is 10am. Guess what? You're at work again.
R1: Tues 6pm
R2: Wed 6pm
R3: Thu 6pm
R4: Fri 6pm
R5: Sat 10am just before tournament ends depending on if you live east coast or west coast.

Maybe round six shouldn't be reachable by players that sleep &work 8h a day, but if so that.s sad. Maybe round 6 shouldn't be worth 50% of the points.