Why not make war season into a tournament already?
DNA3000
Member, Guardian Guardian › Posts: 20,818 Guardian
TL;DR: tournaments reduce the incentive to dump rating, force winners to fight winners, and can accommodate the top five tiers of war rating. In turn, they can allow Kabam to relax the restrictions on wars fought below that level during and outside of season.
Twice before I made suggestions for improving alliance war focused on solving a lot of different problems simultaneously, match making, war balance, etc. I'd like to reexamine one aspect of those suggestions: make alliance war seasons into a tournament.
The problem with implementing a tournament is that there are more alliances than can be accommodated in a twelve match tournament. My original idea was to introduce brackets like AQ used to have, where there was a more relaxed lower bracket with less rewards but also less restrictions, and a competitive bracket with higher rewards but more restrictions. With fewer alliances in the competitive bracket, something like a tournament could work. Thing is, Kabam is essentially doing this already.
The recent ratings freeze rules essentially separate tiers one through five from the lower tiers (it also implements a soft boundary between tiers 6 through 9, lets set that aside for now). Tier five and up contain the top 5% of alliances. Using 50,000 as a reasonable high estimate for the total alliances competing in war seasons in any capacity (in my experience when I was tracking war the number was generally lower than that) that means that tiers one through five are composed of about 2500 alliances. That is actually a small enough number to set up a single elimination tournament with twelve wars in theory.
We use rating to "seed" the tournament, but once the season starts and after the first war is fought winners fight winners and losers fight losers. And we set up the tournament bracket paths so that there's an advantage to rating higher at the start of the season: just like in other tournaments high ratings face off against lower ratings in the early rounds to give them a seating advantage. It is now pointless to aim for lower rating because it will not give you easy wins any more. Instead, there will be a huge incentive to maximize rating prior to the start of the tournament, just like in regular sports tournaments. This is something that can be tweaked to increase or decrease the seat advantage as desired (we may not want #1 to fight #2499, for example).
Below tier 5, we continue to fight wars as we do now, but with the added incentive that those fighting in tier 6 will be trying to get a high enough rating to enter the tournament next season. They won't deliberately lose during the season because that will cost them season rewards, and they won't deliberately lose in the off season because that could cost them a seat.
The main problem with this idea was always how do you choose who gets in, and how do you synchronize match making? Well, Kabam has already implemented fixed match making, and they have already drawn a line in the sand for me: tier 5 and above gets treated differently under the new rules, and the numbers work out. And the idea can be expanded to have, say, a "pro" tournament in tiers one through five, a "amateur" tournament in tiers five through nine, and then everything ten and below becomes the casual section with relaxed rules.
Twice before I made suggestions for improving alliance war focused on solving a lot of different problems simultaneously, match making, war balance, etc. I'd like to reexamine one aspect of those suggestions: make alliance war seasons into a tournament.
The problem with implementing a tournament is that there are more alliances than can be accommodated in a twelve match tournament. My original idea was to introduce brackets like AQ used to have, where there was a more relaxed lower bracket with less rewards but also less restrictions, and a competitive bracket with higher rewards but more restrictions. With fewer alliances in the competitive bracket, something like a tournament could work. Thing is, Kabam is essentially doing this already.
The recent ratings freeze rules essentially separate tiers one through five from the lower tiers (it also implements a soft boundary between tiers 6 through 9, lets set that aside for now). Tier five and up contain the top 5% of alliances. Using 50,000 as a reasonable high estimate for the total alliances competing in war seasons in any capacity (in my experience when I was tracking war the number was generally lower than that) that means that tiers one through five are composed of about 2500 alliances. That is actually a small enough number to set up a single elimination tournament with twelve wars in theory.
We use rating to "seed" the tournament, but once the season starts and after the first war is fought winners fight winners and losers fight losers. And we set up the tournament bracket paths so that there's an advantage to rating higher at the start of the season: just like in other tournaments high ratings face off against lower ratings in the early rounds to give them a seating advantage. It is now pointless to aim for lower rating because it will not give you easy wins any more. Instead, there will be a huge incentive to maximize rating prior to the start of the tournament, just like in regular sports tournaments. This is something that can be tweaked to increase or decrease the seat advantage as desired (we may not want #1 to fight #2499, for example).
Below tier 5, we continue to fight wars as we do now, but with the added incentive that those fighting in tier 6 will be trying to get a high enough rating to enter the tournament next season. They won't deliberately lose during the season because that will cost them season rewards, and they won't deliberately lose in the off season because that could cost them a seat.
The main problem with this idea was always how do you choose who gets in, and how do you synchronize match making? Well, Kabam has already implemented fixed match making, and they have already drawn a line in the sand for me: tier 5 and above gets treated differently under the new rules, and the numbers work out. And the idea can be expanded to have, say, a "pro" tournament in tiers one through five, a "amateur" tournament in tiers five through nine, and then everything ten and below becomes the casual section with relaxed rules.
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Comments
Could first do it by number of battle groups (3,2 or 1). Then once entered have a knockout system. Prizes could be based on which stage you get knocked out, which would depend on how many entries there are. Alternatively, just change the winning reward for each match.
Let’s say you lost a war at the start your out while in season you could lose a war at the start and win every other single one and still do really well
At the end of the season, the alliance with the best record takes first place, then the next best, and so on. Where two or more alliances have the same record, total points are the tie breaker. So a single loss doesn't cost you everything, you can still fight for second place. In fact, you could still be fighting for first place if there ends up being no undefeated alliances. If we limit to tiers 1 through 5, after twelve rounds it is possible no alliance remains undefeated. And if one alliance is undefeated, they probably deserve to place first.
The REAL interesting twist would be if individual accounts entered a draft, RNG randomly assigned everyone to a war party, that war party was sealed for 12 wars, best 30 randos win, no need for ratings or any of that nonsense. Hilarity ensues! Do it!
Maybe I would actually join an alliance if it was a tournament.
Could do the same here. There will potentially be David and Goliath matches, but in off season it would be a bit of fun.
In a normal tournament the entire bracket "tree" is fixed, but we can add a random element to it to make it less predictable as to who you will be matched against. For example, we could divide up the alliances into, say, one hundred groups of twenty-five (assuming 2500 alliances, this is just example) and then make a single bracket tree composed of one hundred spots, then randomly place every alliance onto one of those trees based on their group.
So instead of, say, #1 fighting #100, it would be group 1 fighting group 100 and every alliance in group 1 would be fighting a randomly selected member of group 100.
Of course, a detail I glossed over is that bracket trees are binary and thus normally have to be powers of two. But for non-powers of two you would just do the best you can in the early rounds and when you got to the late rounds the highest ranked alliances would get byes (an advantage of being the highest seats) while the others would be fighting in an essentially wild card round to reduce the pool down to a power of two.