Hi guys,

I've been having some thoughts lately, which are quite similar as they were in the past funnily...

I was thinking off a weekly tournament. The idea is to have a tournament day every week, lets for example say Wednesday evening, however that is still open for discussion. With each tournament you can score points which eventually will end up in a overall winner. I have discussed also with gelidis about what kind of point system we should use in this format. We were not really on the same page however, so see this topic just as a start were everything is still flexible with user input. Dspr also had a good idea to use tier systems, and I want to start building on that idea for now.

We pick a game mode each week. This can be either firs, ecs, or normal game, on tropical, temperate, arctic or even toyland. Let's use different starting years each week with a different climate. My idea for the climates and starting years:

-1950 temp 3h -1990 temp 3h -1950 tropic 3h -1985 tropic 3h -1950 arctic 3h -1985 arctic 3h -1985 toyland 3h -1985 firs temp 3h -1985 ecs temp 3h -1990 blitz temp 1h -1990 blitz tropic 1h

As for a point system I would suggest the following:

Tier 1, 2 or 3 winner: 5 points Tier 1, 2 or 3 runner up: 3 points Tier 1, 2 or 3 3rd place: 2 points Tier 1, 2 or 3 4th place: 1 point

As for where the boundaries of each tier are I think we should discuss that further. As not all people play all climates it can be really hard to place people in tiers. For example for 1990 cb temperate 3h i would go for tier 1: >80k, tier 2: 50-80k, tier 3: <50k. For the other climates and starting years these boundaries all need to be defined properly before we go into tournament mode. I will come back to that later with my own idea for this. People are placed in tiers by using their own insights, however also looking at their personal bests and making a good estimate of peoples abilities will be part of this. This point system however, does require a good amount of players. I would like to ask everybody that is interested to point it out so we can go into further steps. Ofcourse it is not reasonable to have only 1 player in tier x to get max points everytime he comes online..

This is all just baby-steps into creating an interesting perspective of playing openttd on Citymania. Also people are quite common to wait for coop partners, even though they are quite capable of going deep themselves. Maybe this will interest more people to play alone when no partners show up, and get more companies/players to duke it out. As for my personal experience, playing alone is good stuff and can be quite statisfactioning.

As for every competition needs a reward, I am willing to put a decent prize on this. As I cannot think of anything else for now I will stick with a money prize. Then I will be competing aswell in order to win my money back :D. Will come into more detail on this if we can move this along further.

So, Lets get this topic open for discussion. I really need a good view on how many people are interested in this. As for what you can read above I want to get this tournament to be as much interesting for good players as well as for lesser players, so everybody has a fair chance to go for the crown of weekly tournament champion!

Greetz,

Solo

hi all,

great idea. I have a few questions about it I can come up with now, maybe more later:

• How many time will this cost for Dp and da? they already have put a lot of time into the servers, and this would require some smart scripting or being a lot online I think.
• how can you avoid that players that can play very often get more point then others.( I don't have time every week to play 3 hours for a tournament) Maybe you can do this by calculating average points, and ask for a minimum of half the tournament games played for being able to win the prize?(I don't mind about the money because I want to keep it fun, but I can imagine some people will go for it)
• If you want to have it to attract people, maybe the first tier is a bit big(people will come for the money, so if you want to get a lot of people you need to get an tier up to +- 15k I think)

Can some more people give their opinion about this?

lol

Agreed, thanks for the input.

I was thinking of using a/the server that we can manually restart to the setup we want, like server 4. But then perhaps we should have a "secret" unpause command to make sure it doesnt get started by somebody randomly joining the server :D. But it can be a pickle if more people are in the server and refuse to leave because we need 1 man to be able to restart it to the desired setting. However setting it up early by some1 could avoid it being restarted into something else. That shouldnt be much to code imo, but you're right the guys already put in a ton of effort and for this we will need a little bit more.

About the point system I was thinking of doing it manually by having an end-pause savegame that i can figure out quietly later, after the game is over. Then having the point ranking being somewhere here on the website.

You're right that it needs some thinking about not being able to play all games, as it would clearly have a disadvantage. Having a minimum required played games for end-ranking and using the average, or the best rankings of the top 50% of the games could be something.

I agree totally, we need more user input, and i do not see much interest here yet unfortunately :).

As for me, I might go off-grid or semi off-grid for a while. Me and my gf decided to break up and we have a house together and we need to split up everything properly and make a lot of arrangements ofcourse. Dont feel bad for me, I think this might be a very good thing because we have had a rough period together lately.

Speak you soon,

solo

I know Dp has been working at some kind of interface for server configs to let other people do some work. I don't know how much he did already, but if that is finished maybe it is able for some other players to start the tournament maps without Dp and da being online

lol

Good idea, its always good to have people around, tournament could be great, and indeed, I remember some magic event in luuk/nova that were really fun. And then we are now missing players, somehow the world has some trouble understanding they need to play openttd.

Playing money should be ok, maybe finding a service who can deal with that should be good, as I'm not sure we want to manage money here ;) Regarding how to share the winning prize, I'm sure you will come up with something interesting, and yeah the goal is to avoid that only the best players get it.

The new servers are now working great, dP did an amazing job, and we have by far the most advanced openttd server. We have no problem of load/speed, we have several servers, and I don't see any reason to even put some more. dP build a new admin interface that give the ability to setup and configure a server from our backend, and use it easily. So right now, we have the possibilities and the tools, we just need to decide what to do with it.

Doing a restart command accessible only to admin and or mod should be doable and not too expensive, but yeah, dP should know better.

I'm willing to review and change how the servers are mapped today, dP also had this idea of killing the gs servers, and we would like to have some goal servers as they attract some other kind of players, I will open a thread about the new setup I guess.

Sorry for late reply. I've had some other things to think about lately, and kind of forgot a this a bit.

solo wrote:

As for a point system I would suggest the following:

Tier 1, 2 or 3 winner: 5 points Tier 1, 2 or 3 runner up: 3 points Tier 1, 2 or 3 3rd place: 2 points Tier 1, 2 or 3 4th place: 1 point

This seems weird to me. Most players will pretty much know which tier they'll end up in before they start, and then they can stop playing when they have reached that goal. It's in the nature of a competition to rank players against each other, so something like 5 points to the winner, 4 to 2nd, 3 to 3rd 2 to 4th and 1 for the rest makes more sense to me.

That being said, it's not very important to me how the scoring system works, or if there are prizes or not. What matters is to get some fun games going :)

The Great part about the scoring system solo lroposed with tiers in it is to attract playera that never played citymania. If you want to finsh in the fop five you have to Be really pro. With the prize and tier idea we van maybe attract new playera to grow our community. I hope you understand what I'm trying to say

Lol

Yes, I have no problem understanding what you're saying. But having a score system that is so little suited for competetive gameplay in a tournament/competition seems absurd to me. And I don't think one thing excludes the other. If you look at btpro's events there are players who are pretty clueless and don't have a chance against the better players, yet they seem to be having fun.

Hi there,

As the score setup was just an idea it is good to know how y'all think about it. I would also prefer some replies from "lower tier" players, maybe they have some swell ideas on this topic too.

We will go further with mixing of multiple ideas and points of views after that i think.

Gr,

Solo