PvP Discussion: Automated Tournaments

This thread is to discuss the Automated Tournaments system. As a start, I’ll talk about what we’re working on for tournaments right now.

Swiss Style TournamentsWe’re changing the format of tournaments to Swiss. Swiss style tournaments will give teams more matches in the tournament. One loss doesn’t necessarily mean you’re done. After a number of Swiss rounds, we’ll cut to a Top X number of teams for a single elimination bracket. The finals will be changed to best 2 of 3. The number of Swiss rounds and the number involved in single elimination will be determined by the overall number of participants.

Tournament CapacityWe’re restructuring tournaments to greatly increase the number of teams that can be supported. While this isn’t terribly important with current tournament participation, we want to be ready for our next set of plans.

Special TournamentsThe tournament system was designed in a way that allows us to add one-off tournaments fairly easily. This means, we can do things like add 2v2 or Stronghold tournaments fairly easily. Once we’ve finished with Swiss and tournament capacity, we will start making use of this feature.

@Xuazinegueri.3592 said:And what about a spectate mode? At least for the monthly, please! It could help a lot to learn about rotate since it is harder than learn to play just your class...

Spectating isn't open to everyone because of a technical limitation: we can only have so many players in a pvp match (including spectators). We opened up spectator for partners with the idea that they could stream themselves spectating tournaments, and everyone else could "spectate" by watching these streams.

@Vyrulisse.1246 said:Any thought to having tournaments where random teams are formed from a pool of players queuing or is the population not there for that?

This probably isn't something that we will do as tournaments are designed to be a place for organized team play. While it could be a potential idea for a one-off special tournament, the tournament code currently doesn't support this functionality and it's unlikely that we would do a significant rework for a single tournament.

@bluri.2653 said:All good ideas, I hope you also polish the UI since it's incredibly hard to see and is a bit messy imo, also agree with Ario if theres no general way to open it up for the public eyes to see the AT's I think having a gw2 twitchstream or whatever streaming it would be awesome

UI improvements are in the works, and some of them will be shipping with the swiss system. The biggest issue with having a gw2 stream is that someone would have to be manning the spectator camera which we probably can't support for every daily tournament, but maybe it's something that we could do a few times a week. I can look into it, but no promises.

@Salvo.8290 said:Swiss style tournaments sounds like a good idea. The one thing that might need to be adjusted if you move to swiss style is actually the rewards. If you have people spending significantly more time doing this event, as it sounds like would happen, you would have to bump up the rewards to compensate for this.

This is a good point, and we're discussing increasing the per-match rewards when we move to the swiss system.

One thing you did not mention in your post was about observing ATs. I understand that partners can do this, but is there plans to allow for viewing for all players? If you could go to the tournament tab and watch replays of the previous tournament it would be a welcome addition also. Thank you for the addition of another daily tournament as some people can now get in one a day, and others get two.

I touched on this in a previous post, but we currently aren't planning to open tournament spectating to all players.

One final question for monthly tournaments. This month the tournament is held on the 23rd, and I know it is scheduled for the 4th Saturday of every month. Many people will be with their family at that time. Is there going to be a way in the future to adjust this earlier/later in months around holidays so more people can participate (and adjust required QP if earlier)?

This is something that is always going to be a problem in December. We currently don't have any plans to change the schedule for the monthlies.

@Salvo.8290 said:Swiss style tournaments sounds like a good idea. The one thing that might need to be adjusted if you move to swiss style is actually the rewards.

One thing people don't often realize is that you get 30 silver for winning any PvP match ranked or unranked. 15 silver for losing. We've discussed trying to change this number for tournament play and making it a bit more visible. I think this would help a bit.

@bluri.2653 said:I was mainly thinking the monthly tournament since it's where the rewards are at

Streaming the monthly should be doable. Maybe we wouldn't have a fancy stream setup in the office but I can do it from my apartment. Just gotta convince Ben to stream the other region and we're set.

@witcher.3197 said:Special tournaments

How far can you push the boundaries on this one? GW2 has several excellent PvP minigames/ activities such as Snowball Mayhem and Keg Brawl that have so much potential. In my opinion these would be a lot of fun and a nice change of pace for organized teams, but even after 5 years we can't play them with friends.

Would it be feasible to set up some Snowball Mayhem tournaments during the ~1 month Wintersday event?

We've definitely talked about setting up activity tournaments, but there's some work that needs to be done with the activities before they can be used in the tournament system. It's not a high priority at the moment, but it's possible somewhere down the line. Snowball Mayhem won't be tournament-ready for Wintersday this year.

@Scary.8034 said:Great ideas, for the monthly finals maybe it would be nice to add a pause feature in case someone disconnects, 1 pause per team per map limited to maybe like 5 minutes or so, problem with a feature like this, is that maybe it gets abused and would require admins maybe to be present, which i'm not sure you can support.

This was actually investigated years ago, from what I've been told. Unfortunately, a lot of underlying systems would have to have pretty big changes to support it. It's something we're not likely to ever pursue.