Hi. You may remember me. I'm looking to organize an online Dominion tournament. Details on the tournament are unclear at the moment, but that's mostly because I want those details to be community-driven, that's why I'm here.
I would like to give F.DS the chance to give their feedback on how they think the tournament should go. I have several goals in mind but even those are flexible at this point.
Here's the deal: while a lot of things are community-driven, there are a few things that aren't. I don't really want to post here on F.DS, so the tournament will not be hosted on F.DS. Sorry. Where exactly it's hosted isn't entirely clear yet but it will probably have its own subreddit where things will be organized.
I've made a post on the Dominion subreddit detailing my ideas and the type of feedback I'd like to receive. I'll link that post and quote it at the bottom here for your convenience. If you have a reddit account, of course I'd prefer that you give your feedback there, but that's not realistic for everyone here, so I'll also be following this thread for feedback and potentially answering questions.
Let me be clear: I'm acutely aware of this forum's tendencies to bring up things that are unrelated to the topic and completely derail the thread. While there are many things that people may want to talk about here other than providing me feedback, I'm not going to respond to them. You're welcome to send me PMs if you want to talk about something else. If the thread gets too far away from this topic, of course there's nothing I can do about that, but just realize that what will happen is that F.DS will not get to have its voice represented because I'll just stop following this thread.
I'm going to run this tournament regardless of F.DS's participation in giving feedback or even playing in it. Also, for the curious, I have been in contact with the League moderators and once a format and rough timeline have been established, the mods will poll the League members and ask what they want to do about the League schedule. One of the reasons I'd like to try a format that can be shortened (or broken up into smaller pieces) is to make this decision easier on the people in the league, but all of that is out of my hands, we'll just see what ends up happening.
Anyways,
here's the post. Please read and let me know what you think.
Hi.
So I want to put together an online tournament, I'm making this thread to gauge the interest in this community for a tournament like this, and also to see what kind of format would be most appealing to people.
I am aware that the Dominion League is a thing. I'm currently working with the League moderators to try and coordinate things so that whatever tournament I run will happen between seasons of the League. The purpose of this is to provide an alternative format for online competitive play; something that feels different.
Based on what I've heard from some people, in addition to a couple of things I personally want to see, I want to make a list of goals for this tournament format:
- To provide opportunities for lower-level players to get some visibility with their matches
- To coordinate broadcasting and commentary for any players who want to have this for their matches (ideally giving a larger group of people a chance to try their hand at giving commentary)
- To be novel and exciting
- To operate the tournament with complete transparency
If anyone has ideas for more goals, let me know and I may even edit them into this list if I can remember to do that.
So with these goals in mind, I have a few rough ideas for tournament formats. If any of these sound appealing to you, or you have any ideas, let me know. Here are some things I'm thinking of:
A. Have a couple of different "seasons." So have a mini-tournament where only people at level X or below are allowed to enter, this would take place between two League seasons, then the league has a season. Now, our next season will allow entries from level X to level Y, along with the top Z finishers from the first season.
This isn't perfect, since it means that lots of people would sit out and be unable to play for a bit. Maybe run each of these seasons in parallel? Once you do this, though, it starts to look a lot like the League, which takes away from "novel and exciting." So there's a balance to be struck here.
B. Have significant landmarks at a couple of key points in the tournament. A couple of ideas I have for this are:
- Play three matches, eliminate the bottom X%. Play three more matches, eliminate the bottom Y%, continue until the field is small enough to do some kind of finals thing. This naturally puts the focus on people in the middle throughout the course of the tournament, so not necessarily the top players.
- Break the field up into 4 or 8 divisions and have a champion of each of those divisions. The divisions could be seeded so that high-level players and low-level players are in their own divisions, then once each division has a champion, they ENTER THE COLOSSEUM to battle it out for the title, David vs. Goliath style.
As for actual tournament format, well Swiss and elimination will both work for a lot of these, once there is a concept that seems popular I imagine one of them will be a better fit for that concept.
As for commentary, I sort of want that to play a big role in this tournament. Competitive matches are great for commentary and I know there are a lot of people out there who want to do commentary and who also want their matches to be commentated on. I want there to be a group of people available for commentary so that anyone can say "hey, Jimbob and I are playing a match on Saturday, who can commentate?" and have people available to broadcast the match. I'll have to set up lots of technical resources for commentators as well as a place to coordinate things, but this should get a lot of people the opportunity to practice and pursue it further if it turns out to interest them. Suggestions for that are welcome, but that's sort of independent of tournament format and schedule, so it makes more sense to tackle the specifics of that when/if there's actually a tournament it can go with.
So comment here for the following things:
1. You would be interested in playing in such a tournament.
2. You would be interested in casting games in such a tournament (you can do both of these).
3. You have any feedback for goals of the tournament, any ideas I've suggested, or tournament format suggestions.
4. You have feedback on broadcasting matches for such a tournament.
5. If you aren't interested in something like this at all.
This is designed to be change of pace from the League, an opportunity to try new things out and expand the competitive Dominion scene to reach more people. If there's something in particular you'd like to see that would get you interested in playing competitive Dominion, let's hear it!
Hopefully in the near future there will be enough of a vision to move forward with a more concrete idea. Thanks for your feedback!
EDIT: a couple more details.
1. When the time comes for another step forward, I'll make sure to PM anyone who responded here saying they were interested to direct them towards that. The next step may not be a signup, it kind of depends on how things go with scheduling and the League.
2. In my brain, the vision is that nobody who helps run the thing will be able to play, and that I'll be able to moderate it all myself with the help of some software that I'll write. I want everything to be totally transparent so the software will be open-source. Help with setup and commentary and that stuff is one thing, but in terms of actually moderating the tournament (settling disputes, running the script, etc.) I want to prevent potential conflicts of interest.