Haidar's Tournament

Thaisen

Tysandr said:

I'll echo Iaxus, big shoutout to @Atalkez  for streaming. Was really fun.

Thanks to admin for organising this.

The stream was the best part. Thanks @Atalkez!

Utianima

Thaisen said:

Tysandr said:

I'll echo Iaxus, big shoutout to @Atalkez  for streaming. Was really fun.

Thanks to admin for organising this.

The stream was the best part. Thanks @Atalkez!

Absolutely! Was so much fun. Kudos and thanks @Atalkez 🙏

Atalkez

Huge thanks to the admin team for putting this event together. This clearly was an absolute ton of work, and it went pretty smoothly for the most part. The enchantment/pact issue at the beginning was pretty funny. My name was horribly amazing, and that fucking sword (speaking of, if someone wants to give me a replica that I can't actually do anything with ever and doesn't interfere with my actual blade I would gladly accept this mockery) really made me laugh.

My big takeaways for this are pretty obvious issues with the way the event went down:

1. World-wide transport was really ridiculous to contend with (worm warp in particular), as well as being able to go to Meropis/Wilderness was a real oversight. People were happy to hide and not engage whatsoever in an attempt to simply last as long as they could. While this isn't necessarily a bad thing, in an event (and small numbers of people) like this, I think it devalued the ability and the chaos of the event pretty sharply. No worm warp, no wilderness, no Meropis would have made the fights a lot more interesting and organic. 

2. The change/addition of rules mid-way were a little frustrating. We all had the same 5000 credits to spend, and being told that I was using one of my items wrong because others didn't have the foresight was weird. That same item was removed from my ability to use in the finale, so where they were without it during most of the event, I was without it during the final part - so it amounts to the same thing. I did like the area locked part, and that was certainly a great way to approach the finale. That same respect should have been given during, the same as I would have SoL if someone had bought a Lyre. Just would have stared at them with nothing I could do, and that is entirely due to your decisions. So it seemed a bit disingenuous to say "using X artefact that way is not fair" while there were many, many others that affect things just the same - and moreso in the final. No one would have said I was abusing my abilities if I had Blizzard everything since I was the only one with goggles, etc. I made the decision not to buy buckawns (surprise) and I would have had to deal (and did!) with the consequences of that no matter what. 

3. The finale (not counting the area lock) was really frustrating. The final 5/6 was great, bit of chaos and chasing people around to try to tie someone down was probably a great way to push the ending. The final 3 was disappointing, though, because inevitably (regardless of who it was, mind, not just speaking because of what happened to me) someone was going to get dumpstered and have no real way to do anything about it. I understand that was the spirit of the event in not being 'honourable', however, it really removed hours and hours of intelligent gameplay and decisions. If Penwize had hit Farrah instead, it would have been me vs him 1v1 for the end, because she would have just died to us. It could have gone either way, and I think that is a frustrating way for it to end. 

4. I know Makarios said you guys would review these, but the honours lines. It's disrespectful to Penwize and I to finish 2nd/3rd largely on chance (as detailed above), but our honours line is the same as the first person that got put and did absolutely nothing. We played Survivor until the final episode, but got the recognition of the first guy voted off the island. I think that's a really, really ridiculous thing to push - and I hope in your review you do something here.

Otherwise, I truly think this was an absolutely fantastic event, and I really hope to see more of these (in some form or fashion) in the future. The stream was great, people were engaged, I think I had nearly 40 people watching me get murked at the end - and oh my god the reaction when we found out that the infuriating Sylvan was @Crixos of all people. My goodness. I don't want the above criticisms to take away from the appreciation that the admin are owed for doing this, and putting this all together for us. You all were awake earlier than I even was to get everything together, and with us every step of the way. Huge kudos to the team, and thanks for being awesome!

Thanks to everyone that watched the stream, it was a great time and maybe we can do more during PK events in the future!

Accipiter

So since everyone saw it anyway, what was the arte Atalkez was being obscure about?

Atalkez

Wings! Sorry guess I left that out

After securing 15 kills he fell to Penwize in the finale of the Kashari Tournament of Names.
After securing 8 kills he fell to Atalkez in the finale of the Kashari Tournament of Names.
After securing 17 kills he fell to Farrah in the finale of the Kashari Tournament of Names.
After securing 3 kills she fell to Crixos in the finale of the Kashari Tournament of Names.

Thanks for taking that feedback and making some changes, team! This is much better and I'm sure all of us can agree that we appreciate this move quite a bit!

Armali

Maybe wings. I was actually going to do a quest to get high wings right at the start but I botched it and then I was too tired later to go do the quest again.

Yen

1.  I agree the event would have been better on Sapience continent, no wilderness/ferries/Tree etc.  Sapience is big enough.

2.  The deathsense mechanic was important and it would have been better if we all knew about this before picking classes, strategies, etc.

3.  I'm not sure how I feel about the participation line being "He/she FAILED ... "  I mean, you want to recognize the accomplishments of those who were able to rise to the top of the heap, and of course the winner, but you also want to encourage participation.  These are compatible goals.

4.  Some kind of EVENT STATUS would have been fun for spectators!  Though we could generally manage with qw/deathsights/commentary.

Overall though it was fun and I appreciate the effort to make something new for us to try.  My main motivation in participating was to learn more about Kashari culture, and experience a bit of what it's like to be a runaway slave with limited resources and abilities.

Atalkez

Yen said:

4.  Some kind of EVENT STATUS would have been fun for spectators!  Though we could generally manage with qw/deathsights/commentary.

Definitely this. I would have loved to have been able to see who was killing the most, and who was teetering on the edge of elimination. Would have made it a lot more interesting to see people pushing those pesky serpents on 1 life, instead of relying on the BMs to hamstring them and hope. 

Elyon

ok firstly I read this guy's name like a goddamn lolcat every time I see it and that's kinda a nice throwback 
BUT
please auction morning carp damnit that sword was wonderful. 

Makarios

One goal we had here was to make this genuinely as open world as possible for the majority, which is why we had Meropis open. I think for me personally (we haven't done a retrospective here yet as a team) this was fine, though the real issue was the journey - I think having Meropis open is good, but if we did it again making it easier to hop between continents would probably keep things moving more smoothly without those big pauses where everyone trecks through the wilderness.

I do somewhat sympathise with the situation where you're the chosen target in the final 3 way brawl, but I also think the value here is that next time people will realise that killing the strong contenders during the open world segment has a very high late game payoff. It is possible we can do something to mitigate that a bit more, but I think in some capacity this is good motivation to take the riskier fights. Something we'll talk about anyhow if we do run this again.

We did not have player testers for this as we wanted there to be no advanced knowledge advantage of mechanics, so we did miss a few obscurer things - thanks for everyone's patience with those.

Saonji

Fucking @Crixos of all people with the Sylvan outta nowhere.

Biggest plot twist in Achaea history.

Tysandr

I feel that one of the things that hindered aggression was the competitive decision to preserve life count when it got down to the last phase of the tournament as you were much less likely to be able to replenish your lives.

Even a skilled competitor will become naturally more defensive when they are playing with their last life against others with more than one; that may be a reflection of how they arrived at that discrepancy but also hinders more aggressive play.

I feel that during the last phase, the additional lives should be converted into something of value, so that while the competitors are rewarded for their ability to preserve their life count, they are not maintaining 1 or 2 full resets against an opponent that may only have one life left. An example would be exchanging each additional life for added health pool or additional credit pool to purchase artifacts for the last phase.

This way, the last round starts with everyone at one life & bonuses that they might accrue based on how well they preserved their additional lives.

Verdell

Oh, not sure if this was intended or not.. But traits carried over between the Kashari and your player. So on my avatar, I reset my traits.. Then when I was back on Verdell, I had to use my free reset to switch them back to what they were. 

Akri

Something to encourage or force aggression would be good, I think. Like losing a life every X amount of time, UNLESS you killed someone. This would make the event a bit more intense, though it'd also make killstealing more annoying, on the other end of it. Alternatively you steal from every battle royale game out there and start with the big, wide open world and keep shrinking it, perhaps with some kind of area effect that does increasingly severe damage to any Kashari in it, but wouldn't affect non-participants? Just spitballing.

Accipiter

I'd think adding a timer that strips lives would make it a little too frantic, but some penalty for not killing someone within X amount of time could be interesting.

All in all I love the idea, and it certainly a good compromise for the common question 'who would win without artes?' and not forcing people to completely rewrite offense because they rely on their artes.

I don't PvP but I hope the people who do enjoyed it enough that it becomes a staple at the YX00 games and the like.

Namino

You don't do it based on survival, you do it based on kill-death deficit. Everyone has unlimited lives. At the 1 hour mark, you sum each competitor's kills and deaths (+1/-1) and whoever has 0 or less is immediately ejected from the tournament. 15 minutes later, you do the same calculation and anyone with 1 or less is ejected, and so forth and so forth with the threshold creeping upwards until enough of the field has been removed that your final can commence in whatever shape that looks like. The final group represents the people who were not only good at keeping their deaths low but also were able to score kills in the process -- the sort of combatants that this was supposed to find. By making it only about survival, you immediately encourage passive play -- hold your lives for the final and hope everyone winnows each other down in the meantime, which is exactly what we saw happen, which wasn't in the spirit of the contest or particularly engaging to watch. Luckily there were good sports who actually played suboptimally by actually engaging in fights, but the hypothetical ideal move here was to just wormwarp back and forth across the continent, never hitting back to preserve your original three lives until the end.

Once you get to the final, I would have much rather seen a single elimination bracket of duels rather than a freeforall. We just had a freeforall for the last five hours in which our survivors demonstrated their ability to disengage, run from ganks, participate in ganks, steal kills, and just generally be utter bastards. Now prove that you can actually square up mano e mano and detonate people. The final fight is going to be a 1v1 anyway no matter what you do, so you may as well make it a process of elimination to find the best in class for that out of your finalists.

Shirszae

I honestly think the only thing that need fixing are clouds and meropis and maybe wormholes. As annoying as the serpents and the backstabbing, I think they captured what thr event was supposed to be. I do not think it was ever about finding the most skilled combatant, but perhaps the most resourceful
 
In Kashar the event was held between slaves and  I can very well imagine most would behave in exactly the same way if their actual freedom was on the line. 

Accipiter

Travel abilities are part of a class though. I liked the feel of the throwback to old Achaea when not everyone had insta-travel everywhere. I think people are just overreacting to things that a little meta-gaming would shake out, next time I think a lot more people will grab wings/vibrating stick if they think that is more valuable than something that will help in the finale.

If Meropis is gonna be open probably let contestants buy a pebble equivalent though.

Shirszae

Or make a portal in New Thera like for the Asterian Restoration. 

Namino

It's not the instant travel necessarily that's the problem. The ability to instant travel isn't a problem when it's used to, say, quickly move to engage and disengage from opponents. The instant travel was just exacerbating the actual problem here, which is that it was patently a superior tactic just to avoid fighting and hang on for the final. The incentive to fight was simply to recover the lives you lost, lives that would not have been lost in the first place had you simply constantly hiked up your skirts and rushed away from the slightest whiff of danger.

Iaxus

Namino said:

It's not the instant travel necessarily that's the problem. The ability to instant travel isn't a problem when it's used to, say, quickly move to engage and disengage from opponents. The instant travel was just exacerbating the actual problem here, which is that it was patently a superior tactic just to avoid fighting and hang on for the final. The incentive to fight was simply to recover the lives you lost, lives that would not have been lost in the first place had you simply constantly hiked up your skirts and rushed away from the slightest whiff of danger.

This was attempted, or a variation of it, by multiple people and none of those made it to the finale, though. Partially due to the admin being on point and making use of Tharos/etc to call out people who were hiding and not fighting, and then those people were hunted down multiple times, usually in quick succession. 

Namino

I disagree with that take.

The five people in the finales:

Armali: Hid on Arcadia, ran for the duration of the event, made it to the finale with two kills.
Crixos: ...Well, let's not talk about it. But needless to say, he wasn't taking fights.

The other three, Penwize, Farrah, and Atalkez, are three of the most experienced combatants in the game and were some of the 'good sports' I mentioned, but even they would have had better positioning going into the final had they just never fought anyone. Specifically, Atalkez only lost lives when he chose to engage and got hit in the back by a third party. Had he never chosen to engage, he would have gone into the final with 3 lives and we'd probably have a different winner. In fact, when he was down to his last life, the thought process was oh, I'm down to my last life, I need to stop playing suboptimally by fighting people and just run until the finale, and surely enough he never died again and everyone started whining, having forgotten the past four hours of him repeatedly doing the suboptimal thing -- fighting at all.

The only reason we saw any combat at all was because people wanted to have fun, not because it was the correct move from an optimal strategy standpoint. Had the three finalists, who are clearly so adept they can take the suboptimal strategy of exposing themselves to danger and still succeed instead played turtle like the majority of participants, they would have all gone into the final with all their lives intact and 1-2 kills a piece.

The rules should be adjusted if this is rerun in the future to encourage conflict rather than what we saw. Kills, not lives, should determine your placing. You don't have to get those kills in 'honorable combat' so we can still see resourcefulness.

Edit: Forgot Davok. Davok was a good egg too but undoubtedly wouldn't have lost lives had he just done what he was doing defensively and never committed to offense.

Armali

I mean I straight up beat Penwize and Davok both 1v1, and made Farrah run like hell as much as she did me, while doing that at a disadvantage because I didn't have a philosopher's stone so I don't know why you think I don't have the credentials to make it there. It's not my fault people chose not to engage me.   

Crixos is a great fighter too, and doesn't deserve your shade.

Are you just salty that you lost to me as Tekura monk against a dragon so hard you didn't know how you lost and had to accuse me of abusing a bug?

Shirszae

We already have Twins and plenty of arena events to decide who is the straight better combatant. This, assuming it happens again down the road, doesn't have to become another iteration of that.

I really fail to see the trouble with it being free range and people more or less behaving as they will for most of it. That's part of the charm. 

Namino

Avoiding personal attacks and pointless baiting here, my point is simply by what we witnessed, a large amount of effort was dedicated in this event to avoiding fights, and the ruleset can definitely be altered to make the event more... appropriate?

Edit: I can understand that argument, Shirs, but given the fact that even Tharos and Pandora were shouting statements critical of the people who were dedicating too much of their efforts to running, and then unannounced rule changes regarding clouds to make it harder to run like that, the overall signalling I was getting from the top here was this was supposed to be a free-for-all style battle royale in which people were encouraged to fight rather than camp in their respective corners. And that can be achieved by a reconfiguring of the ruleset. The system I propose doesn't deny people the opportunity to wormwarp around and stab people in the back and generally be assholes -- you can keep the finale intact the way it is, honestly, though I'd rather see something a bit more regimented. The 'kills not lives' approach just means people are encouraged to mix it up rather than sit in foxholes, even if the ways they're mixing it up are the 'free ranged, bad behavior' stuff you're implying.

Shirszae

Maybe. But I mean, IC Pandora is pretty much critical of everything that is not Her, and Tharos is an announcer, obviously he is going to egg people to fight and make it more interesting for him to comment on.

I would be interested to know whether the admins as such were disappointed in the way people played it, outside of any other IC role. 

Atalkez

I also would like to know what the admin think after they have their internal review of everything.

What was a surprise, who did better than expected, who let you down etc. Tell us the secrets!

Also, for those interested, I made an enemy table for them all so I could highlight their names. I am not sure if I got every single one, but this is the list that I have!

  "Cairistine",

  "Matei",

  "Imani",

  "Veniamin",

  "Ashvark",

  "Swanhild",

  "Norvello",

  "Embla",

  "Gumarich",

  "Gerens",

  "Julijanu",

  "Settimo",

  "Hayleye",

  "Matija",

  "Chidi",

  "Saliza",

  "Collyn",

  "Teodora",

  "Ustdyn",

  "Shefki",

  "Oluchi",

  "Arttu",

  "Maroica",

  "Lerold",

  "Chauncey",

  "Perould",

  "Rashman",

  "Claudiu",

  "Molloyi",

  "Kalald",

  "Kamalani",

  "Vaitere",

  "Kynastone",

  "Chikhu",

  "Franggar",

  "Surindu",

  "Sawdu",

  "Andile",

  "Nirmala",

  "Hendra",

  "Klaran",

  "Joakim",

  "Miloslav",

  "Sabola",

  "Aristak",

  "Seigmar",

  "Katlego",

  "Noora",

  "Beda",

  "Torkom",

  "Jusuf",

  "Suman",

  "Baishan",

  "Trinton",

  "Tinorua",

  "Bandile",

  "Lovita",

  "Glewas",

  "Finnegon",

  "Emem",

  "Maijar",

  "Azubah",

  "Slavko",

  "Roizin",

  "Giove",

  "Serapio",

  "Hereiti",

Astarod

Makarios said:

One goal we had here was to make this genuinely as open world as possible for the majority, which is why we had Meropis open. I think for me personally (we haven't done a retrospective here yet as a team) this was fine, though the real issue was the journey - I think having Meropis open is good, but if we did it again making it easier to hop between continents would probably keep things moving more smoothly without those big pauses where everyone trecks through the wilderness.

I do somewhat sympathise with the situation where you're the chosen target in the final 3 way brawl, but I also think the value here is that next time people will realise that killing the strong contenders during the open world segment has a very high late game payoff. It is possible we can do something to mitigate that a bit more, but I think in some capacity this is good motivation to take the riskier fights. Something we'll talk about anyhow if we do run this again.

We did not have player testers for this as we wanted there to be no advanced knowledge advantage of mechanics, so we did miss a few obscurer things - thanks for everyone's patience with those.

I think this was a wonderful event and I think you’ve addressed a lot of concerns. A lot of us look forward to you pursuing events similar to this in the future. 

Why did you guys go with failed in an honours though? Couldn’t you have done “ <x> fought in whatever” 

I’ll be honest, I logged in late, didn’t realize that affliction curing was off and got rolled. Not saying I need some kickass honours line, just a reminder that a lot of people put a lot of effort into this and I think that failure in an honours line is kind of ridiculous- even if there are some of us who deserve it. This is honestly my only gripe, the whole thing was pretty kickass. I just want to know what the thought process behind "You will all be honoured" translating to Failed to do something. Should be celebrating those who tried to play the mechanic you created. 

Taryius

For the record, I absolutely love the honours line.

Iaxus

I'd venture to guess you're in the minority, Tary. I was a bit miffed at first because the use of the word "failed" is very strong, but if you think of it ICly from how the tournament origin was described, it's accurate.