Originally Posted by ZoranTheBear
I have been working on a setup to host and run tournaments for various outfits on different servers. With the upcoming Battle Islands, I think it would be very neat if we could have
community ran tournaments. Either done by me or others in our community.
I have a few questions though on what YOU the people want to see in a tournament type setting.
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Definitely have some thoughts after the Reachcast event I participated in; we had a lot of fun, but it highlighted some things I'd like to see happen in the future.
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1. Would you like 2 people commentating? Who are knowledgeable about the game and it's various aspects? Or 1 person to fill the roll of informant and entertainer.
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For 12v12, 2 seems sufficient (it would take one really skilled/charismatic person to do it), but I don't think that'll be enough as we scale up to 48v48.
Depending on the number of lattice "lanes" on the battle island, I'd suggest having two overall commentators with individual "field reporters," as people have suggested, for each "lane." The can inform the main commentating team that something cool is happening in their section and give a little context when the main team switches over.
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2. What would you believe would be right to ban? For example, no maxes, no rocket pods, no mass amounts of one class (Such as mass infiltrators).
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I don't think there's enough data to call for across the board nerfs yet from a competitive play standpoint. Each faction has a strength to play to right now: NC has Jackhammers/Scatmaxes for complete domination on a lot of cap points, TR has Strikers/Vulcans (though the nerfs to these need to play out) for great vehicle denial, VS has ZOE. Banning anything might result in removing someone's faction advantage, or the ability for a faction to counteract that advantage or weakness.
Resource limitations of some sort would be ideal, but out of the scope of what a caster can accomplish.
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3. What scale would you like to see these tournaments? Platoon vs Platoon, or squad vs squad?
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Squad vs. Squad for now. I don't think we have the teams for platoon vs. platoon gameplay. 24v24 might be interesting, though...
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4. What objectives should the contestants go for? Should it be to capture a base and hold it for a certain amount of time? Should it be a deathmatch? Should it be Destroy the enemy sunderers and whoever gets 3 enemy sunderer kills wins the match?
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Capturing/Defending a base. Deathmatch would be over too quickly, boring for the viewers, too unrelated to general PS2 gameplay, and *~*revive grenades*~* would make it a a pretty cheesy/chaotic affair.
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5. Should each faction ONLY use NS weapons? Or only their default weapons, with a few alterations to match faction specific weapons? Such as the NC's bolt driver compared to the VS/TR's default sniper rifles.
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All weapons should be available or it should be NS weapons only; if you're going for balancing the infantry weapons, go all the way. Otherwise leave the flavor in so existing players can relate and the match can be a showcase for new players.
EDIT: To clarify... it depends on what you're going for. If you want to build a super competitive, no doubt who's the best, perfectly balanced environment, a lot of weapon/vehicle/MAX bans are probably needed. If you want to build this as a showcase of what PS2 can be, I wouldn't ban anything (yet). I would prefer the latter personally.
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6. Should contestants pay upfront a 5 dollar or so minimum to a. Prevent random people from signing up to troll and b. Help pay for the costs of prizes/shipping if it's not a game code. Or should it be completely free with a lower reward?
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Some sort of minimum cost, no real thoughts on this one though.
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7. Do you prefer these tournaments to be live streamed and then published via VOD format. Or recorded and made into a higher quality VOD?
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If you're doing this on the live servers, I don't think livestreaming is an option. Reachcast did it with a 15 minute delay, and that still allowed people to figure out where the fight was so they could disrupt it.
Now, if you'd do it on the test server...
I know some of the balance/weapons would be off, but after playing in a match, I would have rather dealt with the test server bugs than the interference. Might be something to try.
Other notes: I've watched both the War Report matches and the Reachcast match now, and the Reachcast match was a lot more enjoyable to me simply because they had a much better idea what was going on in the match. The knowledge of the casters was a night and day difference and really improved the experience from my perspective. Given the choice, when you're looking for people to help you commentate, I'd pull PS2 players and teach them how rather than pulling good commentators and teaching them PS2.
Just my .02. Good luck, hopefully I'll get a chance to jump in a match you're running!