Tournament time limits

[RazorOz]

I have all the knowledge on the forums scattered all over, the forums and have meant to make a general post, but haven’t yet. A TLDR from a lot of experience, over 60 tournaments hosted:

1) Tournaments function better as 2p in nearly every way: competition, time management, tournament flow, tournament formats (within BGA limits). Tournaments for 3p or higher should be considered more casual and more often subject to the many issues people complain about BGA Tournaments.

I agree with most of what you wrote, but #1 needs more caveat of being game specific. Because it's not true at all for eg. Heat. First of all, for most games it's seen as 2 player makes them more competitive, but that's not true at all for Heat, because the game needs more than 2 cars to really function, and while you can in theory fill the grid out with Legend, AI players, that's making the game less competitive because Legends can randomly gift/cost someone the game. The game functions far better with at least 4 human players (and 5-6 is probably the sweet spot).Heat also has the best solution of all for a lot of the time issues that arise from tournaments, you can time a player out and the game will play to completion regardless and count, it will not void the game, so if someone isn't playing (I still don't recommend timing out players who are actually playing) you can time them out without it really affecting the integrity of the tournament.

And you may think the whole it works much better at 5-6 players than 2 player makes it a bad tournament game, but Heat is an excellent tournament game and plays well into having competitive tournaments. The biggest issue often is getting your tournament to function fairly and properly under the BGA tournament infrastructure which is very rigid for multi-player games, but it can be done, it just requires a bit more thought into how the numbers will function rather than the very obvious of eg. 64->32->16->8->4->2.

[BananaHarambe]

I agree with most of what you wrote, but #1 needs more caveat of being game specific. Because it's not true at all for eg. Heat. First of all, for most games it's seen as 2 player makes them more competitive, but that's not true at all for Heat, because the game needs more than 2 cars to really function, and while you can in theory fill the grid out with Legend, AI players, that's making the game less competitive because Legends can randomly gift/cost someone the game. The game functions far better with at least 4 human players.

Hey Mr. Heat, yes Heat is a totally different beast and I'm glad it functions so well as a competitive multiplayer game. BGA could do more to support tournaments for 4p+ competitive games like heat, see the bug report below as an easy simple fix that we should all promote so it happens.

Tournaments working better as 2p has more to do with having more options to structure the tournaments and a much easier time getting games completed on time with only 2 players, higher chance to have a game flow well when both players are online. Faster flowing games increases the quality of tournaments in my opinion. I am more invested in a tournament with 1 game per week instead of 1 per month.

Heat works best for 4+ player tournaments because Heat itself is best played at the player count like you said. Being highly multiplayer the Heat devs created a specific way to handle kicked players in order better deal with the time issues from tournaments.

I am also seeing that 6p Heat games in some of your tournaments take only 8-15 days to complete, which is great compared to other games. 4p Vale of Eternity which I am familiar with is 15-30 days to complete. I am amazed that games can be completed that fast for how long the game looks. Is this because I'm only looking at the expert tournaments or is this common in casual tournaments as well? Another example of Heat being an exception.

Re: multiplayer, I really want to get this bug fixed to allow 1 group for group stage to make better Swiss -> Top Cut tournaments. Please thumbs up and comment
https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=77238 #77238: "Group Stage Tournament Mode: allow 1 Group"

[RazorOz]

Hey Mr. Heat, yes Heat is a totally different beast and I'm glad it functions so well as a competitive multiplayer game. BGA could do more to support tournaments for 4p+ competitive games like heat, see the bug report below as an easy simple fix that we should all promote so it happens.

Tournaments working better as 2p has more to do with having more options to structure the tournaments and a much easier time getting games completed on time with only 2 players, higher chance to have a game flow well when both players are online. Faster flowing games increases the quality of tournaments in my opinion. I am more invested in a tournament with 1 game per week instead of 1 per month.

Heat works best for 4+ player tournaments because Heat itself is best played at the player count like you said. Being highly multiplayer the Heat devs created a specific way to handle kicked players in order better deal with the time issues from tournaments.

I am also seeing that 6p Heat games in some of your tournaments take only 8-15 days to complete, which is great compared to other games. 4p Vale of Eternity which I am familiar with is 15-30 days to complete. I am amazed that games can be completed that fast for how long the game looks. Is this because I'm only looking at the expert tournaments or is this common in casual tournaments as well? Another example of Heat being an exception.

Re: multiplayer, I really want to get this bug fixed to allow 1 group for group stage to make better Swiss -> Top Cut tournaments. Please thumbs
up and comment
https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=77238 #77238: "Group Stage Tournament Mode: allow 1 Group"

I have to think the Heat if a player leaves the game rules will come to other games, it was said it was a trial, it's been popular, there's no reason other games couldn't have this, and it will be big for tournaments for other games if/when it does.

I wouldn't take my tournaments as the standard, because they are setup via private group, I effectively filter out players I think will be too slow, this makes the round time at 6 player probably around 18 days when there's still lots of tables per round, it would be closer to 30 days if they were open. I've not played Vale of Eternity but based off BGA, it's saying 4 player is faster than 6 player Heat. Here's a better example of Heat speed wise: https://boardgamearena.com/tournament?id=380606, and most rounds do go close to 30 days at least until the end when they speed up a bit. Another factor at Heat which probably doesn't apply to many games is track can influence play time, Mexico on average is about 50% more turns than Great Britain for example (21 vs 14 roughly)

I have upvoted, it's a suggestion I think I've mentioned in passing before as I'd like to be to create 1 big Swiss league that cuts to a final table. This is actually how eg. Magic tournaments work in real life with a cut to top 8 single elimination, but it'd also work well in the context of something like Heat of cut to a final table of 6.

[BananaHarambe]

Sorry for the topic tangent, I posted on the Heat forum to get more eyes on the bug report

https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewto ... 36&t=45053

Thanks for the comments on timing. I wouldn't recommend Vale of Eternity for 4p tournaments anyways. The games take forever since it is a face up drafting game with snake drafting, action phase, and end of turn phase every round. I think the game gets much less competitive at 4p anyways since more players increases the card pool to draft each round (2 per player).

[koningco]

It would be great if you can write a guide about that on the Heat forum, this game indeed has a lot of settings that can be confusing for tournament creators.

I also agree with you that a 6 player tournament game is barely possible, you have to do strict selection of players in a private tournament. And still you may get issues with different time zones / working hours. I would encourage single race tournaments for multiplayer races in Heat. Single race will bring increase the luck factor compared to tournament tournaments, but at least single race tournaments don't cause too many time limit issues.

[PowerPiet]

Hi, i just joined the My city tournament. Real time a game takes more than an hour, now its turn based and we are supposed to play up to 6 games on 7 days. Can't a player can just wait you out ?

[Meeplelowda]

Hi, i just joined the My city tournament. Real time a game takes more than an hour, now its turn based and we are supposed to play up to 6 games on 7 days. Can't a player can just wait you out ?

What do you mean by "wait you out"?

[PowerPiet]

Hi, i just joined the My city tournament. Real time a game takes more than an hour, now its turn based and we are supposed to play up to 6 games on 7 days. Can't a player can just wait you out ?

What do you mean by "wait you out"?

I mean that a turn based complete game usually takes more than 7 days. I wonder what happens if the 7 days are past.

I don think anyone would do so, but if half way one player is leading, stalling the game to go over 7 days is not that hard.

[Meeplelowda]

Hi, i just joined the My city tournament. Real time a game takes more than an hour, now its turn based and we are supposed to play up to 6 games on 7 days. Can't a player can just wait you out ?

What do you mean by "wait you out"?

I mean that a turn based complete game usually takes more than 7 days. I wonder what happens if the 7 days are past.

I don think anyone would do so, but if half way one player is leading, stalling the game to go over 7 days is not that hard.

Not all games take more than 7 days turn-based. For example, I regularly run a tournament with the round time set at 7 days and I rarely see games not finish unless someone stops logging into BGA.

But for longer games, if the round time maximum is reached without the game finishing, the person who had the least amount of time remaining on their clock loses. So yes, if someone used up a lot of their clock, their opponent could simply stall for the rest of the round and win that way.

This is one reason to carefully look at the time setting in a tournament before you join. If you know based on your experience that there is no way a game will finish in the time the tournament host set, do not join it.

[SpiteAndMalice]

Other than the fact that it would slow down tournament rounds, is there a reason why tournament games don't offer a time setting option similar to other modes, whereby you have an initial time bank, but that time bank gets additional time added to it each time you play?

I'm playing in my first ever BGA tournament at the moment. 2 guys have already used up their time banks, but both are playing regularly from what I can see. One is in that unlucky situation of being in a different time zone than the rest. With hindsight, I think that the initial time bank given to players was too low (30 hours each in 8-player games of Heat), so I can see quite a lot of timeouts occurring through the different rounds, but if the game were adding even as little as say 6 hour increments per turn to time banks then the players who play regularly wouldn't be punished (unfairly IMHO) whilst players who had ditched a game completely could still be skipped.