Meeplelowda wrote: ↑31 October 2024, 13:17
One issue is that there is a lot of guesswork even in just deciding how much time to allot per round. I've only created tournaments for two different games. One of them (Donuts/Insert) is very predicable because there is a limit on the number of player actions there can be. Each players starts with 15 pieces and must place exactly one piece per turn. So you know there will be at most 30 player actions and can plan accordingly.
Then I decided to make a Mojo tournament and I was very uncertain how much time to allow because that game doesn't have a clearly discernible limit on how many player actions there can be. I tried getting an idea by taking an average of the number of moves that occurred in a sample of games I played, but I was still worried it would be a disaster of half of the games timing out instead of being completed.
It would be nice if there were a tool that recommended how much time to allow per round based on comprehensive stats on the number of moves people make per game on average and how many moves per day per person you want to target.
I always think as far as tournaments are concerned you're best just going on the side of caution, the biggest flaw to many tournaments I see is the clock is too ambitious. We all want things to play at a good pace, but once you start going into tournaments, there's so many considerations, with time zones the big one, that it's just hard to anticipate how things will go, and this comes all the more difficult the more players you have in a game, as you can then get some pretty awful time zone mixes where even if all the players play reasonably fast it can still play relatively slowly because of vastly different active hours.
It is something that I think people get better at over time with trial and error from learning from the past. That is what I would do for a game, just look at what's worked in the past, what didn't work so well. So again, take Heat, in the early days people used to set up tournaments with round times of like 7 days or less, those tournaments ended in tears, now the majority of tournaments are now set up with 30 days, purely because most people actually want the games to actually play out, not it all end in tears. And it's mostly just a safety net, eg. that tournament I set up there had 30 day rounds, it started on 30th September, and has 2 games left with a few turns left in Round 2, so it's actually completed nearly 2 rounds in a little over 30 days.
I do think Heat generally is a good example of highlighting tournament issues. It's a game that works great in theory in a tournament setting (as will most racing games), that plays best at a higher player count which obviously significantly slows down play vs say games that play best at 2 player. There must be a lot of games that are a lot slower than Heat, which would appreciate a longer than 30 day clock. Because as I say in theory you could run a Championship tournament, and I'm sure people would want to, but it's just not going to work in current limits (and it's been tried of course), 4 races in 30 days in a tournament setting where you might get 3 very different time zones at a table, it's just too bigger ask. It's also a game that gets badly mangled by quitters, which I assume is the case of many games >2 players, but would actually handle just playing on fine. This where giving admins some leeway over entries to your tournament would help, because you should be able to say this player quit my last tournament I don't want them in my next one, something I imagine virtually everyone would agree on for all games, but you can't unless you make the whole thing invite only.
