Elements PvP Tournament - Suggestions and Feedback

[dragonsdemesne]

I played in today's tournament, and I think pretty much everyone will agree that the stalls were too strong; most games were won by whoever had the bigger deck.  I know that the TOs cannot possibly conceive of every possible deck and counterdeck in any given environment, but this meta was pretty bad and didn't seem particularly well thought out.  (no offense to the planners)

A second thing (which doesn't apply at all to today's tourney, but has been on my mind for awhile) is the numerous banned cards lately.  There's a few that I agree with; nova, immolation, and discord tend to warp the game and make things too RNG-dependent, and really aren't appropriate in most tourneys, but for the last several tourneys I've been in, excluding today's, there was like a 10-15 card ban list, most of which just narrowed the metagame instead of expanding it.  Stuff like poison or fahrenheit doesn't need to be banned every week.

I guess it really depends on what the goals of the organizers are.  In my mind, the best tourneys are the ones where RNG and rock-paper-scissors are as absent as possible, but I may be biased in that those with the least RNG/RPS are the ones I do the best in, so of course I'd want more of those :p

[pikachufan2164]

I played in today's tournament, and I think pretty much everyone will agree that the stalls were too strong; most games were won by whoever had the bigger deck.  I know that the TOs cannot possibly conceive of every possible deck and counterdeck in any given environment, but this meta was pretty bad and didn't seem particularly well thought out.  (no offense to the planners)

A second thing (which doesn't apply at all to today's tourney, but has been on my mind for awhile) is the numerous banned cards lately.  There's a few that I agree with; nova, immolation, and discord tend to warp the game and make things too RNG-dependent, and really aren't appropriate in most tourneys, but for the last several tourneys I've been in, excluding today's, there was like a 10-15 card ban list, most of which just narrowed the metagame instead of expanding it.  Stuff like poison or fahrenheit doesn't need to be banned every week.

I guess it really depends on what the goals of the organizers are.  In my mind, the best tourneys are the ones where RNG and rock-paper-scissors are as absent as possible, but I may be biased in that those with the least RNG/RPS are the ones I do the best in, so of course I'd want more of those :p

I seemed to have dropped the metaphorical ball this week, haven't I?

Here's a little bit of insight on how I plan out a tournament meta (of course, Higs and Jippy will have their own tournament design philosophies which may differ from mine).

After thinking of an initial theme, I first remove any alternate means of victory. For example, if a tournament has a limitation on the creatures that can be used, then I ban pump bolts, Fahrenheit, Poison, and Arsenic, as they facilitate creatureless stalls that don't follow the tournament theme. Next to go are general 'power cards' like Nova, Immolation, Discord, and the like. I try to strike a balance between rush-domination-stall strategies so that there is at least a soft-counter to cards that I know will be built around. After that is some slight tweaks to make sure that there isn't a single deck archetype that dominates all others.

As for the numerous bans, I try to ban 'power cards' and major stalling cards. The reason for the former is to make sure that the tournament meta doesn't stagnate and become Novagrabby City every week, and I ban stall cards (much to Oni's dismay) because they extend the length of time the tournament takes and could disrupt tournament flow -- note the 30 minute time limit per round. I also find stalls to be kind of boring to play and play against because of their largely reactionary style of gameplay (stalls play cards in order to answer threats much more often than to create threats). In addition, stalls cause longer games that are more prone to being replayed in the event of disconnects/desynchs because the AI often has no idea of how to play them when the desynch occurs in mid-game.

[dragonsdemesne]

Yeah, I can appreciate how hard it is to have balanced and interesting tourneys every week.  I agree on the 'power bans', and I'd have no problem if nova/immo/discord were banned every week, since they cause games to be determined mostly by opening draw.  With the limited meta even in unrestricted environments like league, we can't just have unrestricted tourneys every week, either, because there wouldn't be enough deck variety.

If we could simply have, oh, another couple hundred cards...   Alas, that is for another topic  

[furballdn]

Still a lot of noobspam for trying to join tourneys. Maybe have something like a 3 day mandatory lurking period before posting or a 10 posts an hour max for newbie accounts?

[justaburd]

Would it be possible to limit the number of posts you can make in say an hour for new accounts?
That way we can say: You're forced to wait at least 3 hours to get those 30 posts so you might as well make them meaningful.

[Higurashi]

Pointless. We get more legit traffic than spam, and spam gets deleted. The end result is only positive.

[bjessee]

I have a couple of comments regarding the most recent tourney (even apart from how it ended).

First, no tournament organizer was present for the event.  Fortunately, Dm1321 was available to make brackets and graciously agreed to stay and officiate.  Several people left since Dm did not agree to help until asked some 15 minutes after the tournament started.  I know it is unreasonable to expect a TO to cover every possible start time, and I know RL trumps Elements, but it seems like there should be fail-safes to prevent this.  Maybe I am making too much of an isolated incident, but if the tournament had not happened after passing on other options I would have been frustrated, to say the least.

Second, there did not seem to be much variety in the decks.  I applaud the effort at diversity by allowing non-list cards, but it was mostly slightly different takes on the same deck(s).  When your skeletons have to use the 20 least-used cards, I guess that should not be too surprising.  I guess you did what you could given the premise.  And maybe it was different in the other side of the bracket.

So as not to be wholly negative, special thanks go to DM1321 for agreeing to step in and run the event.  I would also like to give thanks (and some apologies) to my opponents.  After my experiences in other card games, it genuinely amazes me how pleasant the members of this community are.

[Annele]

I have a couple of comments regarding the most recent tourney (even apart from how it ended).

First, no tournament organizer was present for the event.  Fortunately, Dm1321 was available to make brackets and graciously agreed to stay and officiate.  Several people left since Dm did not agree to help until asked some 15 minutes after the tournament started.  I know it is unreasonable to expect a TO to cover every possible start time, and I know RL trumps Elements, but it seems like there should be fail-safes to prevent this.  Maybe I am making too much of an isolated incident, but if the tournament had not happened after passing on other options I would have been frustrated, to say the least.

It's not really isolated, the last two tourneys I've been to didn't have a TO either.
Oh, and sorry about my disappearance.

[ddevans96]

There was a long string of tournaments where no TO was present. This is far from isolated. It's actually odd how much tournies have fallen - they used to be huge, even at two a week.

[Dm]

I have a couple of comments regarding the most recent tourney (even apart from how it ended).

First, no tournament organizer was present for the event.  Fortunately, Dm1321 was available to make brackets and graciously agreed to stay and officiate.  Several people left since Dm did not agree to help until asked some 15 minutes after the tournament started.  I know it is unreasonable to expect a TO to cover every possible start time, and I know RL trumps Elements, but it seems like there should be fail-safes to prevent this.  Maybe I am making too much of an isolated incident, but if the tournament had not happened after passing on other options I would have been frustrated, to say the least.

Hey, I was asked by vineroz about ~15-30 mins after the tournament started, and by then it was around ~21:30 my time, and I needed to take a bath. I told him I'd take a quick bath and if there was no TO available by the time I was finished, I'd host. I agreed quickly 'cause I know that tournaments are interesting and are purdy nice, and it sucks when you prepare a deck and there is no tournament (specially when you wanted that tournament to happen.) As a result I took a ~10 minute bath and hosted a tournament for almost 2 hours after I should've left (Y u so stall, meta?).

TL;DR - I agreed to help after I was asked to, but I needed  to do IRL stuff first. My delay was only needed if you take into account I left the tournament room at 00:20, and by then it would probably be too cold (or I'd be too lazy) to go do stuff IRL.

... But ahem, yes. Moar TO's, I guess?

But I'll still thank you for the thanks. =P

[dragonsdemesne]

I know it hasn't even happened yet, but I'd like to comment on the upcoming tournament, since I probably won't get to play in it due to time zones.

The July 29 tournament idea is the best one I have seen since I've been playing elements, which has been over a year.  It doesn't have a ridiculously long ban list like some of the ones that I've seen, it's got a lot of decent creatures left so hopefully it won't come down to who has the largest stall, and it's still got pretty much all the good control/removal, so it also won't just come down to who gets the fastest immodraw.  On top of that, requiring adjacent elements on the wheel means that the metagame isn't completely obvious to anyone looking at the list of allowed/banned cards.  The adjacent element thing also doesn't have the gimmick feel that some other restrictions have had in the past; it's simple, but makes for some very interesting combinations nonetheless.

I don't know whose idea this one was, but they should get a reward code just for coming up with it :p

[pikachufan2164]

The last tournament ruleset not designed by me was on April 28