Criticism, ideas, suggestions...!

Since this was our first TA Tournament there is of cause many things to improve! Any feedback regarding organization, rules, or whatever you may think of is very welcome!

Warum waren die Termine gestern Abend, dem 01.04.2011, nicht hier im Forum aufgelistet? Ich habe extra das Forum hier gecheckt. Dann komme ich heute Abend online und stelle fest, dass mein Team ohne mich spielen musste. Von anderen Leuten habe ich erfahren, dass die Termine auf WT gepostet wurden. Wie kommt es, dass ihr extra ein eigenes Forum für das Tunier hier auf die Beine stellt und am Vorabend nicht mal die Termine dastehen? Ich nahm an, dass das Ganze erst die Tage stattfindet. Super Organisation *Vorsicht Sarkasmus*.

Dass die Tunierregeln ohnehin nicht vollständig sind, die Aufteilung der Teams 10min lang davor angekündigt wird und während dem Tunier einfach an die Situation angepasst werden ist ein anderes Thema. Ich habe mich über die Idee einer "TA-Wiederbelebung" gefreut und eure Idee ist gut, aber die Umsetzung war grauenhaft. Hoffentlich lernt ihr aus den Fehlern für die Zukunft.

I wasn't actually sure on the date, I just assumed the tournament was today. A couple of points:

• The tournament took almost five hours
  
• Each team only got to play against their group (hardly fun to wait 50 minutes against forfeits, too)
  
• The area on Jade was rather horrible and you basically brought return or lost (also everyone ran mirror builds - it felt way, way too much like codex
  
• Everyone good forfeited at some point in the tourney (Java, [DirT], Identity, Cyner...) (?)

I love the idea of non-sealed deck 4v4 and I do hope that we can see more in the future, just perhaps with a better map, faster matches and matches against more than just your group of teams.

Exactly, i checked the website yesterday in the evening again just to make sure there is no new information available, i couldn't find any information about it taking place today. So it's not only me who "was not actually sure on the date" (like Gangster). Therefore i haven't been here in the afternoon today (and my team hat to find another monk) ... a joke of an organisation.

I'm really happy about the idea of trying to revive the TA feeling somehow, there were just several things not going right in that tournament. Like (again in english):

- Gangster's points
- no information about the actual date of when the tournament is taking place in the evening before it takes place on the forum here
- not all tournament rules were defined (what happens if someone forfeits, what happens if a team doesn't show up, what if something is not written down in the rules, how the whole group system works + including who is going to face who depending on the outcome of the old results)
- the /roll100 about who faces who at the start of the tournament was announced 10min (!!!) before it took place in the guildhall of [Boo] (was is that?)
- the tournament staff should not play their own tournament normally
- in the middle of the tournament new tournament rules have been defined
- not all group leaders (responsible for the organisation) have been defined until right before the tournament

Nevertheless lets hope the best for the future, there are definitely people out there who think quite positive about the chance of doing some nice 4vs4 matches.

Gangster wrote:I wasn't actually sure on the date, I just assumed the tournament was today. A couple of points:

• The tournament took almost five hours
  
• Each team only got to play against their group (hardly fun to wait 50 minutes against forfeits, too)
  
• The area on Jade was rather horrible and you basically brought return or lost (also everyone ran mirror builds - it felt way, way too much like codex
  
• Everyone good forfeited at some point in the tourney (Java, [DirT], Identity, Cyner...) (?)

I love the idea of non-sealed deck 4v4 and I do hope that we can see more in the future, just perhaps with a better map, faster matches and matches against more than just your group of teams.

1. Point: I like that it took a long time
2. After the group-phase every team (besides the 5th of every group) had to play in the K.O.-Rounds. Not only a groupphase.
3. What map would be better? We wanted a mix of: space to fight+room to hide.
4. Identity+Cyner weren´t even here to play.

TA wrote:
1. Point: I like that it took a long time

I think he was trying to point out that the waiting times between the battles were quite long since you had to wait always to the same minute to start the match. I'm curious when i'll get an answer to my points here, since the answer to Gangster was that quick.

Fairwell wrote:Warum waren die Termine gestern Abend, dem 01.04.2011, nicht hier im Forum aufgelistet? Ich habe extra das Forum hier gecheckt. Dann komme ich heute Abend online und stelle fest, dass mein Team ohne mich spielen musste. Von anderen Leuten habe ich erfahren, dass die Termine auf WT gepostet wurden. Wie kommt es, dass ihr extra ein eigenes Forum für das Tunier hier auf die Beine stellt und am Vorabend nicht mal die Termine dastehen? Ich nahm an, dass das Ganze erst die Tage stattfindet. Super Organisation *Vorsicht Sarkasmus*.

Das Datum und die Uhrzeit standen schon wochenlang fest, u.a. im Sign-Up Thread zu finden. Schade dass du nicht dabei warst, hätt mich gefreut :/ Nächsten Monat vielleicht :p

@Gangster: Time is an issue we had been thinking a lot about and we tried to figure out the best way to reduce waiting time as much as possible. After having talked to the Group Coordinators, I think that most of the time you had to spent waiting was caused by other players being afk / not getting set on time. We still stayed within our schedule tho. I hope that in future tournaments, when players got used to the procedure, everything will run more smoothly.

I know that 5 hours also is a lot especially for casual players, but people who are more 'addicted' to TA wouldn't be happy about playing less. If we had wanted to make it shorter, we also would have had to close registration earlier. Putting a limit to 16 teams so every group has only 4 teams would be an option tho (every team would be able to play in every round, no break in between).

I've heard many different opinions about Jade Isle - many like it because it provides opportunities to hide and it rewards good position play. Others find it rather boring, because, like you said, people use teleports a lot to take advantage of the stairs. We might try a different map next time.

The teams who forfeited were mainly those who couldn't qualify for 1st Division.

faster matches and matches against more than just your group of teams

Could you make a suggestion on how to improve that? If you want only 1 match against every team of your group then you will have a lot more waiting time since teams need to be switched more often, put into different guild halls etc. We also have a guest limit of 20 per guild hall.

@Fairwell's other points:

I think overall the tournament rules worked very well. The incident regarding the DirT-forfeit based on a misunderstanding between a team member and a group coordinator, but we'll try to establish rules which can avoid such situations in the future.

The group lottery will be announced earlier next time. There's been members of other teams there too to verify the result.

the tournament staff should not play their own tournament normally

This is not a normal tournament tho. I spent many hours of my free time to be able to play TA myself too and I am very thankful to those who spent a whole afternoon+evening as Group Coordinators to make that possible.

I don't know about your last too points, what do you mean?

I'll try to move this into the feedback section...

My 5 cents.

I really enjoyed the tourney. Fought good teams and had quality matches.

As far as I saw, the start date/time was clearly stated in a thread (when I checked a few days before). Forums aren't the easiest to navigate through tho. A proper website would be in order if interest stays, it could perhaps also help with organization by automating certain things.

Even though I wasn't really responsible for anything, and just followed my team around and played, it felt like information could have been passed around more efficiently. I was a bit confused in the beginning at least. Having said that, it seemed everything went through with pretty much no scheduling issues that I could see. Pretty impressive for the first time if you ask me, good job. ANet certainly hasn't made it easy for us TA-ers at heart with all the scrimmage madness.

I understand the coordinators or something were on TS. I'm not sure how well that worked, but since I like IRC I'd also suggest joining or creating an IRC channel where everyone can communicate (pity GW doesn't have a "create chat channel" option).

I think it was a touch too long if you got to play until the end.

I liked the Jade map, but I wouldn't mind swapping around, as long as it's not just plain ground.

Maybe it's not the worst idea to exclude forfeit in any way.

This means we need a system running without delays more than 5mins or something

Admin wrote: Das Datum und die Uhrzeit standen schon wochenlang fest, u.a. im Sign-Up Thread zu finden. Schade dass du nicht dabei warst, hätt mich gefreut :/ Nächsten Monat vielleicht :p

That's unfortunate to hear. Some people i know also checked the website and couldn't find it, but they told me that others told them ingame (and i just happened to not log on early that day...).

Admin wrote:
@Fairwell's other points:
I think overall the tournament rules worked very well. The incident regarding the DirT-forfeit based on a misunderstanding between a team member and a group coordinator, but we'll try to establish rules which can avoid such situations in the future.
The group lottery will be announced earlier next time. There's been members of other teams there too to verify the result.

Tbh, i had nothing at all to do with the incident that happend with DirT, because i was not even on their team, i just happened to be on Vent with them for GvG. I'll try to clarify what i was talking about in the above post:

- not all tournament rules were defined ... : like i wrote, many many things were not defined in the rules, you definitely should work on that to prevent problems in the future (for example: (what happens if someone forfeits, what happens if a team doesn't show up, what if something is not written down in the rules, how the whole group system works + including who is going to face who depending on the outcome of the old results ... etc etc) -> I still can't find information about it in the tournament rules.
- about the /roll100 was clarified already, no matter what or how you do stuff but always make it public (at least including all people in charge), so nobody even gets the wrong ideas
- the tournament staff should not play their own tournament normally: That's a tough one since you invested all this work in order to play it yourself as well (at least i think that was your intention). But if you want to manage a tournament and make sure that all kinds of small problems which might occur get solved quickly, the tournament staff should not play themselves ever.
- in the middle of the tournament new tournament rules have been defined: This means that many rules were missing (like stated above) and were just made up in the middle of the tournament (like what happens if a guild doesn't show up in time, what happens with the other guilds ...).
- not all group leaders (responsible for the organisation) have been defined until right before the tournament started: There were people responsible for organising the groups (Ray, Fretty, .. etc). Some of them didn't even know that they were going to do it and how long it will take as well as how how to deal with certain situations. All this can be fixed by organising in time and defining the rules better.

I hope you can fix these issues, because the idea of at least partially reviving the TA (those matches can never be the same like in TA) is just great and i'm glad at least some of the old people took the chance and played there. Without certain rules tournaments can't take place, so that's a necessary thing to have prepared (especially when the appearance (wartower+website) aim to have a professional look). I talked with people playing the tournament, most really liked the idea, there were just some issues that need to be fixed. But who knows, this all might be the start of a prolonging active pro-TA-community series which might even make ANET alert of what terrible terrible thing they once did to all those people loving to play the TA some while ago.

Fairwell wrote:
That's unfortunate to hear. Some people i know also checked the website and couldn't find it, but they told me that others told them ingame (and i just happened to not log on early that day...).

Well the date is in nearly every single post of the Sign-Up Thread, the sticky thread there has the date and time within the title. But I'll try to make the date more clear next time.

Fairwell wrote:
- not all tournament rules were defined ... : like i wrote, many many things were not defined in the rules, you definitely should work on that to prevent problems in the future (for example: (what happens if someone forfeits, what happens if a team doesn't show up, what if something is not written down in the rules, how the whole group system works + including who is going to face who depending on the outcome of the old results ... etc etc) -> I still can't find information about it in the tournament rules.

- in the middle of the tournament new tournament rules have been defined: This means that many rules were missing (like stated above) and were just made up in the middle of the tournament (like what happens if a guild doesn't show up in time, what happens with the other guilds ...).
- not all group leaders (responsible for the organisation) have been defined until right before the tournament started: There were people responsible for organising the groups (Ray, Fretty, .. etc). Some of them didn't even know that they were going to do it and how long it will take as well as how how to deal with certain situations. All this can be fixed by organising in time and defining the rules better.

We did have all Group Coordinators long before the tournament started (even though we didn't know how many we would need because many teams signed up just before registration deadline). One came late to the GC meeting so Fretty came in as backup. Ofc they knew how long it would take, timetables, information about the group system etc also were all in place and worked out well. The only rule which I see was missing was about how to proceed if a team forfeits during K.O.-phase.

Although we can't adopth the old TA-rules 1:1 there should be a clear decision to make it either more like AT/maT or TA.

And i'm with Mishi. Me for myself knew about the date and time since the very first news on wartower. Nothing was changed. I'm not sure if you need to know your GCs that long time before. It's upon Mishi. I don't see problems there.