Last edited on 06 November 2016 - 12:11 PM by lechampionkev

Introduction
This summer, Badlion announced a partnership with ESL America.

“With the support of ESL’s resources and expertise we will look to introduce new game modes and improve the stability, security, and functionality of the current network.”

On August, 15, the Patch Notes of Season 14 was released, and CTF is mentioned officially for the first time.
Hype in the air. The combination of an eSports structure and the CTF gamemode could have been sensational. I suppose developers and tournament managers have worked hard, but this first part of tournament looked unprofessional as fuck. Here’s why:

Tournament preparation
On the tournament thread, it is written “All maps are in the map pool”. What? How are we supposed to know the maps? Yes, you said we can duel others teams, but if you want to see the maps before practicing? We’ve been forced to find others teams, which was not easy, even with the Discord chat, just to discover the map pool. Complete nonsense in my opinion. What about putting some screenshots of the maps on the thread, just to see how it looks like. Or maybe a download link? If you want to make some strategies, it’s impossible because you’re in a scrim or nothing. You can’t even ask someone to spec the match just to see the map and take screenshots because there are no options for spectator mode.
And what about informing players that you changed a map? And what are the reasons for that? I’ve not seen any threads discussing the map pool, where we can report what is good and what isn’t. I suppose all the changes were decided according to staff members playing the tournament and asking map makers to make some modifications and honestly, that’s sad.


Tournament registrations
Worse idea ever: asking rosters between 5 and 7 players.
People are too optimistic, majority of them are just kids who think they can just chose 4 friends and all of them 5 will be there for the tournament.
You know what is one of the worse consequences of this choice? No-shows.
There were 127 posts reporting absent teams, ONLY FOR ROUND 1. On a total of 240 teams, that’s just incredible. If you want less no-shows, force teams to have at least 8 players, and maybe 12 maximum, in their roster. If you have a small team and you are sure everybody will be there, you just put some random people and that’s it. When you can only select 7, and some of them are not sure to be there on the tournament day, it’s stressful for everybody. I don’t see any reason to restrict roster to such a small number of players. Since it will be 5v5 on the map anyway, just let the possibility to teams to select the number of players they want.

Aside this problem of number, the registration system is, honestly, a mess. At first, people had to be in a clan on the forum, and then you changed that thing. You hadn’t thought about the big teams that wanted to make different rosters. That’s fine. Everyone can make mistakes.

But, have you ever imagine the amount of problems that your system can generate? You ask a leader to write down a list of players, but you don’t even know if those people are aware of the registration. We all know the reputation of the Badlion community, and they are not well-known as very serious people. So much registration could be just trolls, or may contain mistakes in nicknames spelling. There are plenty of ways this could go wrong, I think this system is not accurate.

It’s been almost 4 years since OCN is making tournaments with a clean registration system. A leader is selecting players from a roster and each player has to confirm his participation on the website. Everyone is involved in the registration system, has to read things on the forums and no-showing is pretty much non-existent compared to this CTF tournament rate of participation.

Between the closing of the registrations and the start of the tournament
You’ve released the brackets 20 hours before the start of the tournament. That’s not something to do in a competitive environment. Even worse, the tournament match times were given way too late. Not having the times you play and the correct information at the right moment encourages no-showing.

Furthermore, there was a google document but it was quite hidden. When my team saw the bracket, we search for the players of each team we were fighting, and the only option that we had was to go through the 13 pages of registrations. Of course, people had made changes you didn't even notice, like Orbital team name change. We've also change a player in our roster, before the deadline of 2 November, but nothing has been modified in the document. The sub we had put played the tournament without being on your document, and there are probably others players that weren't registered and played without any problem.

Tournament progress
It’s simple. No referees, no chat moderation in CTF lobby, no one to answer players’ questions on the forums or on the game. Only one tweet (https://twitter.com/BadlionNetwork/status/794920900156096513) to answer it all. You’re aware that people playing the tournament are not supposed to follow you on social networks, right? I’m not sure that a tweet should be considered as an official response for something everybody is asking.

The system of match reporting with a screenshot is not that bad, but I’m sure most of the teams had no idea they had to do this. Only the frequent forums users have posted things in the right sections.
Giving the responsibility to report the match results to the players is not the solution; you need a plugin, a referee, or both.

There are too many threads about the tournament. Finding the information you need is very hard, and even the section about the tournament isn't very visible when you don't know it exists. Do something more smooth next time.


After tournament
You have a big section on the forums called “Community Feedback” and nothing is opened for the CTF tournament. An oversight, I suppose…

We are left without any information about what’s going on. The challonge is insanely messy.

PS: by the time I’m writing this, Varicks is updating scores from the tournament. 24 hours after the tournament’s start, 10 teams out of 60 are “Set to Advance”. That’s a little bit late, but things are moving.


That’s a lot of negative aspects, but let’s point out the things that went well:

The seeding: I was not thinking that you‘ll make different groups depending on the regions of the team. That was cool, being EU, to fight EU teams. I hope this will be taken into consideration for the final bracket too.

No lag: If I’m not mistaken, the lag was the big problem with the 5v5 Build UHC/SG tournament, and all was fine for the CTF.


Conclusion
To those who'll say it is hard to organize a tournament with so many participants:
Badlion has now an immense staff, plenty of people who help to plan this for months. I've try it myself, with 2 friends, we've created "Pick'n'Play" (http://pnp.challonge.com/fr) and that's a success. Of course there are not 240 teams of 5 people, but we've had editions with 200+ people, and I'm pretty sure that Badlion could be so much better with their "resources and expertise".

What to do now?
For the last part of the tournament, and for the nexts, here are some advices:
- Take referees and assign them specific matches.
- Allow roster repairing to avoid more no-shows
- Make sure that Mods have their permissions in all the CTF lobbys
- Open predictions on Challonge, that could be fun
- Assign a staff member to answer to players questions on the forums (CTF threads)

My only wish is that the following is successful for everyone. My goal is not to trash the tournament staff, just to improve Badlion competitiveness.

Sorry for my mistakes, English isn't, as you may have seen, my mother tongue.

Thanks for reading.

lechampionkev

Posted on 06 November 2016 - 12:24 PM

This is… just… too perfect +1 I like how the important parts are in bold and It was all really well writen and structured. I hope this thread reaches owners or admins because these problems need to be fixed asap and the funny part is, they were present during the 5v5 build/sg tournament and still not fixed

Posted on 06 November 2016 - 12:38 PM

I was going to make a post like this but you beat me to it. +1

Posted on 06 November 2016 - 12:53 PM

+69

Last edited on 06 November 2016 - 12:55 PM by Kiivo

I agree with many of the points here, if not mentioned here are a few of my own:

Absent teams at the start of the tournament automatically get DQed:
I thought badlion would expect a large amount of absent teams. This speeds up the tournament for the rest of the rounds as I don't think a team can be trusted if they cannot turn up when the time and date was evident for weeks. A reason for challonge taking so long to update was also because of absent teams so removing as many as possible from the start is so much easier for the staff and the organisation of each round

Tournament Helpers + Staff are each given 2 - 3 Groups that they are in charge of moderating:
There are around 20 Admins and Tournament Helpers. Obviously not all of them would be able to make it but I believe organising the games and brackets would be much quicker if each staff had specific groups to attend to. Furthermore each team would be able to know who they should ask for certain things. I don't think these should be "referees" and have to spec each game, but should be responsible for their Group

Have a 5v5 Competitive Matchmaking:
To allow people to understand the maps, having a scrimming system isn't fair for a lot of teams if they cannot find opponents. For people not playing the tournament it is also sad if they want to play 5v5 as they will not have a team or an opponent. I was disappointed that a 5v5 Competitive Game never became a feature because its not easy to get 5 players on with an opponent simply to play a 15 minute game of CTF. Whereas a well made 5v5 CSGO like Comp with a ranking system would be easier to play for both teams and individuals, more fun and allow easier understanding of the maps

Overall I think that Badlion will learn from yesterday, and I hope a future CTF tournament can implement some of these and @lechampionkev's ideas
I do believe however that next week will run much smoother and be a fun final bracket!

Posted on 06 November 2016 - 01:03 PM

+1

Posted on 06 November 2016 - 01:09 PM

This wasn't an ESL tournament, this was a rushed tournament because we promised the community CTF, and this was the last possible time we could do a stand-alone CTF tournament for a long time. CTF was mentioned back in January btw.




Name one well known esports game developer that extensively talks to their pro scene about balance/map changes? The maps were updated over 10 days ago, and were left untouched even though there were more changes we wanted to make. All changes were made by a few select people, none of which were influenced by third parties or participated in the tournament.


Pro teams in the esports world are usually only allowed 1-3 subs, which would be 5-8 in 5 player games. Want to be an esport, get treated like one.


This wasn't caused by the registration system or player count, it was caused because there is no entry fee. I've played in several tournaments across several games, and there are always no shows in the early stages. Hell, I've had no stages in a 8 man automatic tournament where signups were done an hour before playtime. The goal is to eliminate all no-shows before the main tournament.


Wrong again, clans were always able to duel their own clan and have 5v5 internal clan wars. We did it for simplicity sake.


The system is being totally redone, and has been getting redone for the past 11 months. You'll understand more soon, but this was never supposed to be a super formal tournament. We weren't going to program something just for this tournament when we are working on our whole tournament infrastructure.


Don't use a server on life support as an example of doing shit right. If they did so much shit right, they wouldn't be barely holding on to 200 player peaks. They are the reason esport minecraft is set back so many years.

Their registration system has flaws too, trust me, I used to lead Badlion on there and have several tournament wins/second places. Their system used to be pretty close to what we did, other then requiring posts instead - and we are moving a different direction. It's a lot easier to do what they do when you only have at max 40 teams signing up l0l.


The round times were posted in the initial sign up post so I don't know where you are coming from there. Also about the brackets, having brackets earlier would do nothing then allow you to prepare for teams, half of which are expect not to show because of no entry fee.


Most illegal subs were found out and DQ'd. It isn't our responsibility to enforce the rules other then cheat related ones, just like other tournaments. If your opp played on wrong map/wrong roster/etc it is your job to report it, else it shows you were ok with it. Yet again this is how it works in the esports world, we can only hold your hand so much. Some of these issues are fixed in our new system though.


There was a discord channel mentioned several times, over a span of several weeks. If you don't want to join the official support, you get stuck with forum/in game support, which can be shoddy at best. This is ALSO how esports work, there is either an official skype, steam, irc, webchat, or some other chat channel for main support and if you refuse to use it, you have to use something like tickets, forum posts, or lucky chance you run into an admin.


That's weird, because ESL the largest esports company in the world and their system - ESL play - does exactly this. It is not solely our responsibility to make something an esport, it also involves the community putting on big boy panties and doing what's been done in the esports community for decades.

There are too many threads about the tournament. Finding the information you need is very hard, and even the section about the tournament isn't very visible when you don't know it exists. Do something more smooth next time.



Tournament isn't over yet


Like I said earlier, what does it matter if it is done now, or 1 hour before playoff start? It doesn't. Honestly we only had like 7-8 staff members to help out during the whole tournament, and most of them were trying to teach the community how to not have their hand held, or was handling important time blocking disputes.


Said this over and over, this wasn't a formal tournament. There was no external advertising, no official streams for the group stages, nor did ESL help us in one bit. This was a rushed tournament that turned into gberry and I test bed. We were testing the new datacenter and were testing Varicks. We literally were under attack the whole tournament but you didn't even feel a lag spike. Varicks was hired to run tournaments and other competitive formats and he needed to know what is good and what isn't, and if he could even handle it, so gberry and I literally "threw him into the water and told him to either learn how to swim or you're gonna drown" and he handled it very well.


Nope, referees should only be present in every match in late term tournament rounds, unless handling a dispute such as cheating. This is how most esports work that are running multiple games. You have your games, you find your opp, you schedule a time, and then you play and go get a referee if a dispute arises.


Nope, the community needs to learn to be responsible and not have their hand held if they want minecraft to be taken seriously as an esport.


This was a sad issue brought up by the emergency maintenance done the night beforehand. Several mod things were broke across the network, including ban manager.


More community interaction is coming soon.


We need more staff and this would have happened. This was also partially because the admins were letting varicks handle it himself and weren't stepping in unless we hit a melting point.


Agree and disagree. We don't want just Badlion to be competitive, we want minecraft to be competitive and grow into an esport. Sadly, from what other servers have done, we have to undo some stuff they have done which the community expects or doesn't, some of which networks have set back competitive minecraft several years.

Posted on 06 November 2016 - 01:09 PM

+1

Last edited on 06 November 2016 - 01:13 PM by Archybot

Oh I forgot to mention the scrim system. While our scrim system isn't ideal for the growth of esports, it's how top teams in other esports work. They find scrim partners and do it privately independent of the game developers infrastructure/matchmaking.

Playing ranked 5v5 in League of Legends, for example, is great for non-pro teams, but is absolutely a waste of time for pro teams. Same thing with CSGO pro teams, they do their own private scrims and don't use any valve or third party matchmaking.

We will be setting up a more formal scrim/clan battle system here within the next few months, but in reality the top teams are most likely still going to do private scrims with private partners.

PS: scrims weren't hard to find, I constantly was watching 2-3 a day with usually 1-2 going on at anytime with totals of 100s played a day, and on thursday and friday of this week there were as many as 10 scrims going on at once. If you truly wanted a scrim, you could had found one.

Posted on 06 November 2016 - 03:16 PM

Wouldn't worry about most of this to be honest. The whole system is a WIP and it'll only get better.

If this is the first and worst, I'm just excited to see what's coming.