Last edited on 18 September 2017 - 09:15 AM by frogmike

Congrats to bobo50cent and Acrolect for winning the 2v2 Debuff tournament this weekend! They came out of the losers' bracket to ultimately defeat StanMPL and DaGoldBrick in the Grand Finals by a combined score of 6-1. We encountered a multitude of problems throughout the tournament, which led to several tough decisions and numerous delays. It was the first tournament for the majority of our tournament staff, which meant it was in part a learning experience as we prepare to run the next few Diamond Series tournaments. This post will mostly be a review of what went wrong from the perspective of the staff, and how and why the internal decisions were made.

Day 1

We started right around 10am and ran 80% of the matches (including Bo3s and Losers' Bracket!) by 12:30. This was thanks to all of the new helpers who applied during the last call for helpers, especially thanks to our new helpers Buw, IEllieI, BARAGamersSpain, Arrowless, and dev_revs for running matches and thanks to our new helpers Blaszczak and JustDontDie for working on the roster doc. Of course, thanks to the other older staff too for their hard work in making these possible.

We had a couple of issues earlier on. They included:
-Best of 3 match ended after the second game of a 1-1 series.
-Servers were crashing mid-match forcing a restart
-Kits weren't loading in properly for a player

However the devs have been notified about these and we worked around them. The real trouble began at about 12:30, when the /force command we use to start tournament matches stopped working, in addition to dueling as a whole. We tried notifying the online devs but there weren't many arena devs around so after 30 minutes of waiting, we were forced to delay until Sunday. A couple of teams left because of the wait time and forfeited the tournament, which was unfortunate, but we soldiered on with the teams who were willing to wait and to show up on Sunday. We are incredibly grateful for you guys more time on your weekend to play our event, even though it was delayed.

Day 2

We tried to express our gratitude to the teams who came to continue the event on Sunday by being lenient with start times (i.e. letting people take a bit of extra time to get on the server). While we were criticized for this, it really didn't end up affecting the length of the event much.

Sunday was unfortunately a mess, but we believe each of our internal decisions was justified.

Early on, the /force command broke again about an hour in, causing us to have to use duels. This was an inconvenience which slowed us down, but luckily didn't force a cancellation like on Saturday.

One match (which many of you who attended will be familiar with) had an issue where it crashed in the third game of a Bo3. It was tied at 1, and someone had just died when the server crashed. After ensuring we gathered all the possible information about the match, we confirmed that the crash was a problem on Badlion's end and that we needed to restart the single game. We resumed the series from the start of that game, tied at 1 with both members alive with their default kits. The team who had lost a member before the crash ended up winning, starting a lot of controversy and leading to numerous accusations of bias. Here is what you all should keep in mind:

Our policy is and always has been to restart a game in the case of a server side match-altering issue. A server crash, crippling server lag, or a plugin bug would be grounds for an automatic restart. A player crash, fps problems, or a dDoS attack on a player is not. Because the bug was clearly a problem with the server, we were forced to restart the game from the beginning. We couldn't start it with one player down because we have no way of knowing how many pots each of them had, what their health was at, and where in the fight they were. There are far too many factors to be able to resume a fight mid-match after a crash.

With that said, and with apologies to both teams for the inconvenient timing of the crash, we stand by our decision.

Unfortunately we encountered more problems with reports of hacking in the winner's semifinals. Since we couldn't definitively say whether or not the team in question was cheating, we opted for a screenshare, but unfortunately none of our screensharers were around. We decided the best solution was to require BLC for the rest of the tourney for the remaining 12 players. The accused team refused comply with this, so we were forced to DQ'd them. This was also a sensitive decision, but as we move forward we hope to require BLC for every cash prize tourney and the majority of non-cash ones as well. As improvements continue to be pushed to BLC, it will become more of an expectation that every competitive player will be able to run the client. This of course, was a difficult situation, but at the end of the day, without the ability to screenshare, our client-side anticheat is the best way to mitigate cheating.

While there were a lot of issues this time around, I hope everyone understands that every challenge we face now is a learning experience for the future, and helps us make the next tournament better!

Other Things

Seeding this tournament wasn't great, we tried to follow our old method of seeding by ladder MMR and global MMR but a number of the better teams play primarily elsewhere and therefore the seeding had issues. I'd like to hear people's thoughts on seeding for arena tourneys: should we hand seed or keep using arena rating?

We are one tournament away from wrapping up the summer series; our Build tourney will take place on the 7th of October and will likely be hosted on the NA servers. We have also discussed hosting a tournament on the South American servers, and we would love to hear from the South American users what kind of ladder(s) you think should be the focus.

Results & Prizes

Here are the results!

[1st - Champion Title & Permanent Lion Plus]
bobo50cent
Acrolect

[2nd - 6 months of Lion Plus]
StanMPL
DaGoldBrick

[3rd - 3 months of Lion Plus]
Diged
Foched

[4th - 1 month of Lion Plus]
logangsterSPKY
ted_iously

The above players will be contacted about their prizes soon. As always, full results available on our Challonge: http://badlion.challonge.com/eudebuff2v2

We hope to see a lot of you guys again in 2 weeks for our $1000 5v5 Capture the Wool Tournament! Look for announcements over the next couple days regarding the signup details and the map pool. You guys can also start practicing today with your own parties of 5 by dueling in our CTW lobby.

Posted on 17 September 2017 - 05:02 PM

To review:

We would like feedback on our decisions throughout the tournament and anything that you thought was handled unfairly and how it should've been handled.

How should seeding be done in future arena tournies?

What kind of ladders would SA players like to see in a tournament?

Posted on 18 September 2017 - 11:37 AM

Cool thread

Last edited on 18 September 2017 - 12:01 PM by Kiivo

I sadly didnt play the Debuff tourney but I may as well give my thoughts from speaking to others

Last edited on 18 September 2017 - 12:44 PM by Jinxful

Yeah it was a memorable experience for me and lemowel. After having to restart the game after the crash happened we ended up losing the rematch even though we were definitely winning the 1st 2 games. If no one dropped we would have most likely won the whole tournament in my opinion since there was little competition after that important fight. It was clear that we were going to win since the crash was caused by one of our opponents dropping near the end of the game.

It also angered me how I was forced to use the badlion client before the rematch because I instantly knew I'd get the mouse acceleration bug, not something I wanted to deal with when fighting a good team. The bug instantly threw me off in the rematch causing me and lemowel to lose the entire tournament.

For this reason I'm very disappointed in some of the decisions made by the staff which weren't the smartest, saying that is still an understatement.

I hope to see improvements in future tournaments. Next time there is a game breaking bug consider giving the winning team the benefit of the doubt and put them through if there's any uncertainty .It's pretty punishing making the deserved winners compete again. In simple teams you made my team lose the tournament by forcing a rematch.

Ps I don't think there's any excuse not having at least one person around to SS. Maybe in the future it should be a tad bit more organised.

Posted on 18 September 2017 - 04:12 PM

Ggs to everyone, I know not everyone thinks we did it fair but so be it…

Posted on 18 September 2017 - 04:50 PM

congrats everyone but if i was available that day the results would have been different :PPPPPP

Posted on 18 September 2017 - 05:53 PM

I like the idea of one 2v2 NoDebuff tournament :D

Posted on 18 September 2017 - 07:53 PM

We would like to see a Diamond or GApple tournament, it is the most matched for the entire South American community. :)

Posted on 19 September 2017 - 02:12 PM

can you add something in there about the first bo5 set being counted even though BLC wasn't allowing me to sprint all of the time (despite me requesting not to play on BLC as I had a feeling it would be buggy as shit but I got no reponse 10/10)




ya i know i feel that's kind of important

Posted on 19 September 2017 - 11:18 PM

Gg if I'm correct me and ted were the only NA players so I didn't expect us to make it this far.

Last edited on 20 September 2017 - 06:11 AM by frogmike

It was because of your complaints that we allowed the second round of bo5 to continue without BLC, and yet you claim there was no response?
You continued to go into the Non-BLC round losing 3-1 to Bobo50cent's team, and you were still complaining about random variables even then, without voicing any coherent criticisms. Perhaps mid-fight you should have been more concerned about the fight than your image, and if you felt like there was still a problem, you should have been more clear about that problem, instead of just saying something like "WTF" and expecting us or even your opponents to know what you mean.

Last edited on 20 September 2017 - 08:31 AM by DaGoldBrick

Is that a joke? On the forums post, you said BLC was not required, yet when I asked why I have to go on BLC nobody responded. Yeah sure, we lost the non BLC but I did not complain with anything there, why are you saying I did? The fact that you think it was acceptable to count an entire series when a player wasn't able to sprint baffles the fuck out of me, especially since that's a fault of yours. What was the point of a losers bracket if an unfair set was to be fought anyways (bobo and acro will admit this too).

Oh and btw it's funny how you think I give a fuck about my image in a 2v2 tournament as if losing it (in the FINALS??) means anything. I don't care if we did another bo5 and both us got no potted, I just wanted a fair and fun series for both of them, which unfortunately did not happen.

You practically invalidated the whole point of double elimination by counting an obviously unfair fight, which was NOT the fault of the players.

edit: And since you were able to see me in the chat "caring about my image!!!" you were obviously able to see the problem I was having. If my opponents could read that shit whilst fighting and identify what was wrong, I'm sure as hell you could've done the same whilst spectating.

Posted on 20 September 2017 - 11:12 AM

You said your ToggleSprint reset when you opened your inventory, that is far far different from "not being able to sprint."

In the future we will be requiring BLC from the start so there won't be confusion regarding its use, and to allow players more time to figure out settings ahead of time. We will also set up a more straightforward process for getting approval to play without it in the case of gamebreaking bugs or crashes.

In the meantime, if you could report whatever exactly the bug was regarding the sprinting, that was be a huge help to the devs.

Posted on 20 September 2017 - 11:50 AM

It's not far far different all. For one, I didn't even notice this was an issue until the later end of the first fight, meaning that I was literally fighting with no sprint for at the very least half of that fight. 2nd, assuming you were watching the fight, you could see my playstyle was quickly refilling and pearling back at my opponent and I was able to quickdrop acrolect twice by doing this (one of the times was with no sprint, imagine if that wasn't a problem, I could've done this in the other 2 fights). Do you think that's consistently possible to do with no sprint? You have to sort shit like refilling correctly, player positioning etc within fractions of a second, how do you think it's fair that one side is able to do this (if they play that certain way) and the other isn't because of a bug in a client you forced us to use? Again, I don't give a fuck if we didn't end up winning, it's just really fucking disappointing that we weren't able to play 2 fair best of 5s (again bobo and acrolect will literally admit it wasn't fair) despite Varicks reading the chat and only noticing me trying to "protect my image" instead of me calling out the problem multiple times. What was the point of having a losers bracket at all if the winners opponent is just given a free set?

also i already reported the bug dw my man

Posted on 20 September 2017 - 02:16 PM

Complaining to your opponents is not the proper means of voicing a complaint about the tournament. I was directly communicating through StanMPL as a representative for your team. I told him that BLC was required, and that all participants were required to use it. Near the end of the tournament, a team was highly suspected of cheating, and to ensure the integrity of the tournament, we made a call to make BLC mandatory for the remaining matches of the tournament.

As for the tournament being unfair, I can agree that the BLC decision came out of nowhere from someone of your perspective, and was unexpected. However, ALL remaining contestants had to use BLC, not just you. Everybody was on the same playing field. I apologize that you feel cheated, but it's done. We've changed our policy on the matter to make sure this doesn't happen again; all future tournaments will require BLC.

I apologize if I insulted you before, and for the unique problems you experienced with BLC, which is why I requested that you create a bug post that the devs may try to make adjustments/fixes for future tournaments, to prevent this kind of incident again.