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Hong Kong9154 Posts
Tournament Design Still Sucks
With thanks to Noam for bringing this issue to my attention.
A new year brings new challenges to our doorstep, fellow tournament design observers.
With the release date of Heart of the Swarm rapidly approaching, tournament organizers struggle with the implications that the impending shift to the new game will have on their overall compeition structures. Some organizers have developed HoTS-specific events, specifically sequestered from their Wings of Liberty competitions.
The most prominent example of a tournament organizer that is doing this is Major League Gaming. StarCraft II competition at the upcoming Winter Championship in Dallas consists of a single-elimination tournament whose participants will have qualified through their invite-only Showdowns. Much ado about this structure has been made by elements of the community who percieved MLG's moves as functionally determining the course of the entire 2013 MLG Pro Circuit. The function of this writing is not to rehash old drama. What is important to note here is that MLG is running a purely HoTS tournament: all stages of the tournament are played on the same game.
Unfortunately, in what seems to be a marketing-driven move, ESL has announced that they are going to take a very different approach to handling the upcoming shift to Heart of the Swarm. In order to be able to say that they will have run the first Heart of the Swarm tounament, ESL has announced that the grand finals of their year-long Wings of Liberty tournament will be conducted using Heart of the Swarm.
This is absolutely monstrous. Think, for a second, of the following mind-numbing equivalent comparisons and their implications:
- A Counter-Strike tournament having its qualifier stage play out using 1.6 and its grand finals play out in Source.
- A fighting game tournament having its early stages start with Marvel 3 and end with Divekick.
- An NFL season with normal regular season rules, but with arena football rules and venues in the playoffs.
A premier StarCraft tournament with tournament rules that make it so that one half of games are played out in Brood War and the other half of games played out in Wings of Liberty. Oh wait
...they are all the same game right? Right?! Wrong.
(Editors note: I am not making a judgement call on the value or competitive worth of any of the above listed games and their variants. Except Divekick. Divekick is clearly the most superior fighting game to have been developed in the last decade.)
Straight-up, having the grand finals of your year-long Wings of Liberty season be in Heart of the Swarm makes the entirety of your qualifier stage quite worthless. The two games are completely different from each other. Seeds granted into a tournament based on performance in one game has no meaning on their potential performance in a completely different game.
The event called the IEM Season VII – World Championship, in tournament design terms, is not fit to be called the world championship of the good Wings of Liberty tournaments that they conducted in their season. It is a travesty that it is being billed as such.
... and tournament design still sucks.
  
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Lol marketing is all I have to say.
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Completely agree. They're sacrificing the integrity of their tournament for, yes, for what? Potential viewership? The privilege of being the first?
After all the things Carmac said about always thinking of the players, helping to grow and support the scene from the ground up with their qualifier system and prize money distribution, I can't help but wonder what went wrong when they ditch the thing that made IEM known and has been applauded by many (fairness to players) and go with the purely marketing strategy that makes you unable to take the tournament series seriously anymore.
After the announcement of the prize money payout, I didn't think they were desperate for views and money, on the contrary, I thought they were on the right path. Straying from it when everything seems to go well is quite a strange move.
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If they want to endorse beta games, they should just make a tournament that offers 1.6M prizepool ez pz
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I don't know whether or not I agree with your opinion. I most definitely see where you're coming from and I don't believe there's any flaw in the argument that you're making.
Yes, concluding the WoL tournament season with a HotS tournament does seem strange and that alone might allow you to discredit and invalidate the end result. But that is only if you look at IEM Seasons as a franchise. And yes, it is intuitive and reasonable for you to do so.
But consider this, most of the community does not discriminate between a regular IEM and the IEM WC, or from an MLG Tournament and the MLG Championship, other than the prize pool. They're all just one-of-a-kind major tournaments with gosu Koreans and top-end foreigners. So if you look at it from this perspective, it just means we get our first major HotS tournament sooner, which in turn helps IEM in terms of hype, excitement, viewership etc (which honestly I believe they've been lacking in their past 2 events).
I feel the problem is more that for some reasons tournaments haven't been able to instill the hype of "guys this is the culmination of our entire season" into the community as well as they managed to do it in previous years. That and overabundance of major tournaments... yeah.
Again, I don't necessarily disagree with you, I believe it's just a matter of opinion and you're definitely entitled to your own.
One more thing:
On February 16 2013 17:47 itsjustatank wrote:
A Counter-Strike tournament having its qualifier stage play out using 1.6 and its grand finals play out in Source.
As a die-hard veteran and semi-competitive player of 1.6, coming from a culture where most young males and teenagers have been at least regular casuals if not semi-competitive players of 1.6, this is absolutely false. The difference between 1.6 and Source is more like the difference between BW and SC2, although even that is quite misleading and a bit of a stretch. Source is to 1.6 like a terrible console port or a mod on a different engine, in that it manages to lower the skill ceiling (after playing it for more than a few days, my friends and I have noticed that it was infinitely easier to spray and prey, as well as to randomly get headshots, than it was in 1.6) while making the controls pretty awkward and clumsy for anyone who had gotten reasonably good at 1.6.
Not a terrible analogy, but not a good one either. /nitpick ;p
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East Gorteau22261 Posts
I feel that this would have been (somewhat) alright if it had been advanced in advance. Like, not a month in advance, but four-five months. I'm still not convinced it'd have been good, but some of these players have been practising WoL solely for IEM and have now been screwed over. I can respect business decisions, but I certainly don't like it.
Nice blog.
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A fighting game tournament having its early stages start with Marvel 3 and end with Divekick.
This would be literally the coolest thing ever though. Divekick is the greatest fighting game of all time.
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Another example: GSL Season 2 2013 Preliminaries are going to be WoL while the actual tournament is switching to HoTS.
I myself don't care much though, as long as we get good games. The preliminaries are not broadcasted either.
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I tried to find the Hybrid Proleague blog from a while ago, couldn't find it (the funny one). I really think it is going to be an awkward transition, but we will make it through.
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I actually think it's the right decision. Pretty much every tournament is going HotS and the players are all practicing it plenty.
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what will pro league do? I honestly dont mind watching either hots or WOL
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On February 17 2013 05:05 Pokebunny wrote:
I actually think it's the right decision. Pretty much every tournament is going HotS and the players are all practicing it plenty.
I think Vortix and some other guys said they hadn't started playing it yet because they were preparing for IEM.
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On February 17 2013 06:47 Wampaibist wrote:
what will pro league do? I honestly dont mind watching either hots or WOL
Proleague will be switching over to HotS.
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Weigh the options from the perspective of a tournament organizer. Would you rather host a tournament that's consistent and fair to the players, but attracts far less viewership, OR one that slightly bends the rules in some peoples' eyes, and attracts an enormous amount of attention?
Or weigh it from the perspective of a player. Would you like to keep on practicing Wings for weeks after everyone else has switched, for the sake of one tournament, or would you like that tournament to switch so you don't fall behind in others?
This isn't like hybrid Proleague where the skillsets are relatively incompatible. Players that excel in WoL will most likely also excel in HotS.
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I think the majority of tournaments need to stop taking themselves soo seriously. They all try to act as if they are the premiere tournament.
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You list CS switch, that's actually something that's been done before. In other games too. GSL is switching their Code S/A qualified players straight to HotS, as if they have earned that eligibility etc.
Please don't pour your dirty water on ESL for being reasonable and keeping with the times in doing what pretty much everybody else is doing anyway.
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I definitely agree that not many tournaments care about their integrity when it comes to the competition. Which is the most important aspect of a tournament to me as a viewer.
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e-Sports is evolving to be mass marketed. I tune into a SM because I see MKP or Machine.
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On February 17 2013 07:10 kollin wrote:Show nested quote +On February 17 2013 05:05 Pokebunny wrote:
I actually think it's the right decision. Pretty much every tournament is going HotS and the players are all practicing it plenty. I think Vortix and some other guys said they hadn't started playing it yet because they were preparing for IEM.
At least VortiX, Kas, Snute, Lucifron and PartinG pretty much haven't played HotS at all.
LucifroN declined the MLG invite as he was focused on IEM and WoL, Snute played and got stomped.
Kas has practically wasted at least a month because he practiced solely WoL only because he wanted to do well at IEM and now he is punished hard for prioritizing IEM while other players qualified didn't practice as much for IEM, maybe because they thought they didn't have much of a chance and now have a huge advantage.
LucifroN started practicing HotS this week and tweeted he had no clue how to win. Will two weeks of training be enough to raise him to a competitive level in HotS? Enough so he can beat Koreans? I hope so, but I doubt it and I feel very sad for him and Kas especially.
PartinG also said he hadn't played HotS at all.
Kas said on twitter:
I dont want make any comment about IEM hots, so guys plz stop ask me how i feel, its a bit killing me.
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EPT
