[quote=Cooper]Well-played, everyone. Congratulations to the winner. I have elected to donate my coins back to the SRS, and so has Nero Keller, meaning we all wasted a large number of actions. Whoops.
This was my first tournament, so I cannot compare it to past tournaments in terms of rules and structure. I will say that this format encouraged a weirdly predatory style of play, where I would look for whomever was scoring badly or not geared for late game and immediately challenge them. This helped me rack up my point total, but did not feel remotely fair. I really am a Remorseful Opportunist. Towards the end, short of people to duel, I stopped caring and just fought whomever.
The point differentials for attacking vs. defending were interesting. It has been proven that defenders have an easier time of it, but you needed to attack in order to have a chance at the title. Again, this led to me actively avoiding other similarly geared members of the SRS in favor of only attacking the weak, and waiting for stronger members to take the initiative where I had a better chance of winning. This does not feel fair, and would probably have been solved by a heavyweight/lightweight league like other contests have had. I have no idea how many people we would have had for each respective league, however, and it would likely have slowed things to a crawl.
One duel took an entire week to conclude and the person I fought with offered no explanation or apology. That was a little irritating. I am sorry to say that I did not provide this individual any wound healing in response.
I had a blast overall, and hope the next contest is not too far off. I did not think I would take second, and I was wrong. I also did not think I would beat the Archbishop, and I was right.[/quote]I’m glad you enjoyed it, and thank you for both the feedback and the generosity in returning your winnings back to the Society. The prizes for future events are going to be even more impressive at this rate.
The decision to not split this tournament into separate leagues based on stat levels was deliberate, because weaker participants would be free to refuse challenges from opponents that they perceived as too strong. Of course, if they accepted such challenges, then that’s a gamble they were willing to take (or they didn’t do their homework by researching the leaderboard stats and their challenger’s profile page). I hoped that players would end up more or less self-sorting in this tournament, fighting only people of similar skill levels, but there’s enough randomization to keep things interesting even for lower-stat players.
One issue that I didn’t consider is the possibility of poor sportsmanship via stalling, where someone who’s lost a round in a sparring bout might drag their feet in finishing it (sounds like that happened to you); or, worse, cancel the sparring bout entirely (which I should have put in the rules as not allowed). Some players might have even been stalling in hopes of drawing a mood card; I didn’t disallow this because it’s impossible to enforce, but maybe I should make a note for next time that mood cards aren’t allowed, just to dissuade players from waiting for them.
As you can see from the final scoreboard, a bit over 1/3 of the participants actually ended up completing the necessary 15 lethal sparring bouts. This is about what I expected, but I think some people may have gotten discouraged when more active players (i.e. The Archbishop) racked up a number of bouts in the first couple of weeks, gaining what must have seemed an insurmountable lead. It might have been more effective to create incentives for prizes beyond only the two highest scorers, to keep interest higher.
If anyone has any further feedback or suggestions for future tournaments, it would be greatly appreciated.
