Evaluation on July Monthly Faction War Event

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Impregnable
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Evaluation on July Monthly Faction War Event

Postby Impregnable » Tue 05 Jul, 2016 9:00 am

First of all, thanks to all the participants who signed up or joined up on the day. It was my first time organizing an event but I somehow managed to pull through with help of others. However, it is also true that I encountered myriad of unexpected problems as I prepared and did the event on the day. They will have to be dealt with if next Faction War event on August is to be more successful. In this post, I wish to reveal what were those problems and how I intend to solve them. Hopefully, other people who are planning to organize an event in the future can learn from my mistakes too.

Problems encountered while organizing
1. Tournament or an event?
Many people asked this question to me as I organized this event. It can't be helped I guess. My post was at tournament section and I copied the style of Atlas' tournament sign up pages so it is only natural this question comes up.
I am clarifying my intention for this event in this post to settle this confusion. I want to have something in between competitive tournaments and entertainment events. The goal of this event is to provide entertainment for people watching youtube casts and to attract more new players to start this mod. I believe a regular faction war can serve both purposes. Since factions are represented with 3 people each, a faction can bring out almost everything they have from units, global skills, comboes, tactics, strategies available to them in a certain match up. With 21 different match ups possible involving 7 available factions in Elite Mod supported by numerous maps with different lay outs, it would be possible to reveal all of capabilities of all factions we have on Elite Mod.
In my opinion, this will attract new players to actually root for a faction they like and start playing with burning passion. It is safe to say I am trying to generate a sort of similar effects to people's loyalty to local sports team near their town. In this case that loyalty will be to a faction which is one of the major attractions to playing dawnofwar series which allows a player to actually control a faction they like fluff wise. At the same time, being able to see all of a faction's capabilities being fielded can serve as an entertainment.
I am using tools that has been uitilized for organizing a tourney like sign up pages and mrt steam group chats because I want the games to be competitive up to a certain extent. In my opinion, just picking up people on the day of the event and assigning them in to some random teams is a quick way to anti fun outcomes with one sided games and unprepared players. Even if the purpose of this event is to provide entertainment, I think games need certain element of competitiveness in order to make them fun. On the other hand, I want to restrict the event from going way too competitive. That is why I am not going to have things like brackets and chapions. Being super competitive makes people want to stick to safe plays and well known maps. What I wish to see is varied maps and extreme or radical strategies so competitiveness has to be limited at a certain level.

2. Lack of players signing up
People signed up very slowly and I only had about 9 people signed up in the end which was something I didn't expect. I thought I would have lots and lots of people signing up quickly. It must be due to people not visitng forums or checking every new post frequently. Same goes for steam group annoucements. It was my first time organizing this event so many people did not know about it as well. All in all, understandable reasons.
I think time is the only solution for those problems. As this event gets better known in the future, I will most likly get more players.

3. Deciding on match up
Lack of players really hurted me bad in deciding this. I allowed people to sign up for multiple factions midway through organizing the event because fewer people were available then I have expected. It caused problems such as having to leave some signed players out because they couldn't play factions in the match up I chose or being only able to play a faction that has too many players that can play. For example, if 3 players can play both factions but the other team people can only play 1 faction in the match up, I cannot change teams even if there are imbalances because 3 players that with lower skill cannot move over to the other side.
I got a lot of help from people who can play multilple factions with nigh equal efficiency. Players like Torpid, Floid, Zeetorq, 531st made my life real easy on the day. Without them, balancing teams would have been extremely difficult. I think the solution here is also time. If I get more people, I will certainly get more players who can play multiple factions equally which will make organizing easier.

4. Solidifying rules
My rules were set in a way that can cope with lots of people joining but it didn't happen that way so I had to change and adapat to various unexpected turn of events while organizing.
I believe this is only temporary confusion though. As I keep on adapting rules, I believe I will one day be able to find a solid set of rules that can cope with most situations.

Problems encountered on the day of the event
1. Where is MRT group chat room?
Yeah, I put the link in the sign up post but people seemed not to notice :(.
Keep on doing this event regularly will solve this problem I guess.

2. Co streamers
This caused lots of unexpected problems on the day. Forestradio who didn't sign up on for streaming asked whether he can co stream with BbBos who signed up on the day. Since there are only 2 obs slots for a 3 v 3 game, I had to leave the room in order to allow him to co cast. I had to give orders BbBos who became the host to change things while watching his twitch stream but twitch streams were always about 3 seconds late in showing up what happend and it made organizing very difficult since BbBos didn't know the rules by heart and had to ask me through message or read up the post himself. If he was alt tabbing and looking at some other screen, i couldn't see what was going on inside the game lobby. The fact that replays had to be sent to me later after being saved by other player was also a problem since there was a risk of it being lost in case of that person forgetting or miscommunications happening.
In order to settle this problem, I am not allowing a co stream until this event has some solid rules and well going system through trial and error. After this event become a regular one with well known rules and lots of people joining, I will allow a co stream. As for now, I want to be hosting and enforcing rules and saving replays myself.

3. Balancing teams and some players being left out
There were always a mix of signed up players and people who turned out on the day without signing. I decided to give signed up people a priority but there were times make shift players had better skill in one of the factions chosen for match up.
I mean to raise the huddle for registering to counter this problem and also prepare a new system for choosing match ups and dealing with various situatinos. You will be able to look at this new system I am envisioning in sign up page for August Factino War which I will write up soon.

Regarding Results
I failed at balancing teams out in Day 1 and most of the games are unworthy of casting since they were way too one sided. Some matches were incredible though and I plan on sending only 2 games out of two best of three series for Day 1. BbBos streamed those games on his twitch so check that out if you wish to see the game for first best of 3 between Nid and SM. All of the games in Day 2 were very well done. I will send all of them. All games will be casted by Generalsgentlemen soon enough so please check out his channel for casting of matches. BbBos will pick some interesting matches and cast them but not all of them.

Day 1
Match 1 / Tyranids (2) vs Space Marines (1)
Match 2 / Grey Knights (2) vs Space Marines (1)

Day 2
Match 1 / Imperial Guard (2) VS Space Marines (1)
Match 2 / Chaos (2) VS Tyranids (1)
Last edited by Impregnable on Tue 05 Jul, 2016 1:00 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: Evaluation on July Monthly Faction War Event

Postby The Licking Boogyman » Tue 05 Jul, 2016 10:36 am

Could i next time maybe help you with the tournament if you allow :) I mean sure i am also making my first tournament aka beginners tournament, but say as a referee or help organizing :)

Because i think We need some tournaments, Videos and casts, so the game becomes popular and then buy the game for themselves and get some fresh meat for the community (͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
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Re: Evaluation on July Monthly Faction War Event

Postby Impregnable » Tue 05 Jul, 2016 10:50 am

Yes we indeed need fresh meat for the community :P. Your help will be appreciated at my 2 v 2 tournament at the end of this month.
"Excalibur!"
"Excalibur!"
"From the United Kingdom!"
"I'm looking for heaven!"
"I'm going to California!"
"Excalibur!"
"Excalibur!"
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The Licking Boogyman
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Re: Evaluation on July Monthly Faction War Event

Postby The Licking Boogyman » Tue 05 Jul, 2016 12:25 pm

Will do, my friend ( ・∀・)b OK!
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Re: Evaluation on July Monthly Faction War Event

Postby Torpid » Tue 05 Jul, 2016 1:26 pm

I very much enjoy your transparency Impregnable.

I think the primary concern not only you ought to be have, but anyone hosting these events, is drilling it into people to SIGN UP EARLY.

Having organised events on various games (including DOW) this is the thing that always kills them. You can't properly plan ahead if 75% of the people wanting to do the event sign up within 24hours before it, or just turn up on the day... And it's also damn demoralising when you're trying to get something new going and nobody cares to sign up. I know we cannot predict the future and you might not be sure whether you can for 100% play on that day, but so long as you have no strong reason to believe you will be unavailable take 5mins and just sign up! Let us know. It makes organising things far easier and it is good for community morale. Lethargy will be the death of this community!

The issue of people not being able to find the MRT group chat would be related to nobody reading the damn page and signing up. Because it was on that page lmao.

I agree though with this event not being super competitive. If it becomes too competitive the players wanting to participate will be even fewer and ultimately the purpose of this is primarily entertainment. Yet of course, some competitiveness is necessary for good entertainment. Basically I echo your thoughts there.

I don't really have much more to add other than well done and thank you for organising this event and best of luck to you in continuing to do with great success in the future.
Lets make Ordo Malleus great again!

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