Tournament Poll – Part 2

Results From Part 1

A few weeks back I posted a poll on some of the format for tournaments. The vote on the skill tier format ended up with just under half the community voting in favor of leaving it as HGGSB, while the other half was evenly split between 4 different options. While the vote on if teams should be chosen by a first come, first serve basis vs having some kind of faction support for priority resulted in a 2/3 majority in favor of teams being given priority based on the support of their faction.

What does this mean? Well, in the event that more than one team ends up being submitted for the same faction in a future tournament, I’ll post up a poll in that faction’s subforum on the Thursday before the tournament (I will have to talk to CrazyMLC about getting a post on a private subforum). On Friday I’ll take the team with the highest number of votes in its favor and announce it as the official team to represent their faction. If only 1 team is submitted for a faction by  the Thursday, which is usually the case, it will be that faction’s team for the tournament by default.

If multiple teams are not submitted by Thursday, it goes back to the first come, first serve basis for priority. This is mostly due to the fact that having a poll open for less than a day does not usually work out well and the teams that are playing need to be announced by Friday at the latest. Team submissions will still be open till Friday as some factions do have trouble getting their team together until the last second.

Second Poll

Now, onto for the vote on the skill tier format. The HGGSB format was the clear victor in the original poll, but there was a LOT of discussion on the skill tier formats for the tournaments after the last tournament of Nyroth. There seemed to be a strong amount of support for allowing a faction to send their best without skill tier restrictions, or at least with much more lenient skill tier restrictions.

This point is somewhat valid, a faction would want to send only its best summoners for a grand tournament with high stakes, but it does have some other problems. First is that without skill tier restrictions, it becomes more of a competition of what faction can get the most high tier players for the tournament than actually training for the matches. Second is that factions is meant to be a fun, nonexclusive game mode for league of legends; a lack of skill tier restrictions would undermine a big part of this by creating a situation where factions would be rewarded for excluding lower skill tier summoners from some of the largest events in an arc.

I thought about this and came up with a format that should solve most of these issues. We make the tournament itself have a format something like HHGGG (doesn’t have to be this exactly), but the featured matches the week before are all mixes of Silvers and Bronzes. And, it wouldn’t be the normal setup for featured matches, it would be like the round robin of tournaments, but split up into 2 days (ties would be settled on Sunday). It would also be organized with the standard featured match sign ups and not pre-organized teams.

The winning faction of the low ranked tier featured matches the week before would get a buy into the finals, leaving the round robin between the other 3 factions, greatly shortening it from 6 games to 3. Since the only possible tie in that scenario is a 3 way tie, the team that placed 2nd in the low tier featured matches would automatically win any ties and go onto finals.

This would let factions send more of their best to the tournament, but still let the lower tier players have a chance to impact the tournament in a meaningful way. The major downside I see to this is it creates a high possibility of forfeits during the silver and bronze featured matches as it is very hard to fill the lower skill tiers due to the inability to underfill. However, even if a faction did perform horridly in the featured matches the week before the tournament, they wouldn’t be completely destroyed during the tournament; the faction’s tournament team could still get them into the finals through the round robin.

This leads me into the second part of the poll. I would like to know if the faction’s community prefers this new format idea (I’ll call it the “Split Format” for simplicity’s sake), or the HGGSB format it chose in the last poll. Please let me know what you think and it will have an large impact on the decision making process.