Hey Tankers!
There was some confusion in the first round of the qualifiers last night on how many people are needed to not get a technical defeat. That number is 7 players must be in the tournament room and ready for battle.
I am going to try and address some common questions and concerns I have heard
7 players is a lot, why 7 as a minimum? EU did 5 as a minimum.
The logic behind this is that we are paying for a team of 7 people to fly out in order to represent NA in a best of the best server vs server situation. If your team wants to aim for this, 7 people are going to be needed. EU did have 5, but I'd rather have our team of 7 from NA vs their team of 5 at the finals.
Why only 1 reserve? Eu has up to 3! That would have helped.
When talking with the tournament organizer and looking at the available budget, it was decided that only 7 people per Blitz team would be flown out. When I spoke with the PC team about it they suggested that I limit it to 8 as that is what they do. That was so teams would only have to cut a single person rather than 3.
Ok, but there wasn't very much time to get organized with a team of 7-8 people that required a minimum of 7 to participate.
Agreed, timings were very tight. This was not only on your end but on the organizational end as well. The short and sweet of it is that a decision had to be made and that is what we have to stick to whether it was the most ideal one or not.
It was unfair that my team of 6 lost to a true AFK team - can't you just move forward teams that queued against the real no shows?
Unfortunately I have no way to tell the difference between a fully no show team and a team that had 6 people readied up. If I was able to do this, I'd manually go in and change all the scores myself. With the time constraints and other factors, this is not an option that is able to be considered.
Can't you change the number of players required to start a match? Even if 1 player shows up they should be able to play.
This goes back to the first question a bit. While I can change the minimum number of required players to start a match - changing things midway through the tournament, especially one with these stakes, was advised against. As a result we will maintain the 7 required players rule for the remainder of this tournament.
Can't you just redo the round? That seems like an easy solution.
Honestly - I'd love to. There is just no time and it would require more man-hours than I have available to me.
So what is going to happen for the next round?
This is still in a bit of flux. It will be either the top 1 or 2 teams moving on to the next round. I have pulled the data and the top single team from each group will move on. In the case of ties all teams tied will move on. The exception will be if the entire group of 8 teams didn't have 7 tankers throughout the entire round. (Meaning no battles were fought and no one in that group was awarded a Victory.) What this does is cause all 8 teams to tie for 1st and move on. These teams will be manually removed and will not proceed to the next stage.
What about filtering out teams that don't meet the requirements at the registration phase?
I'd love to. Part of the reason the Tier restriction was open from I-X in NA, was that there is currently no way to filter Tank Tiers at the registration level. This means I can say it is Tier VIII-X but a team who only has tier 4 tanks can still register and take up a spot. The filter only kicks in once people are in the room itself. It would prevent any tanks Tier VII and below from readying up. We run into very similar issue with that system. So it was decided to open it up to Tier I-X.
Let's talk about the cost of running these battles! It is ridiculous! They should be like training rooms.
Well, first off, let me be 100% clear that the current system treats these battles like Random Battles. You can earn credits and lose credits just like if you hit the "BATTLE" button. I have 0 control over that fact. Though I will be sure to pass along the feedback to the devs.
So does that mean that all tournaments in the future will have similar rules to this one?
No! For the Twister Cup, due to the highly competitive nature of the qualifiers and the decisions that were made, we had to keep the 7 minimum. This does not mean that future tournaments will be run the same. This is a new tool that we are getting used to. I need to figure out and calibrate tournaments so that they are the most fun and engaging for the community. I want your feedback on this one so I can do that.
Edited by CC_Sly, 03 October 2016 - 08:32 PM.
Updating