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Skullbats EU PC

This is @Muro now:
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(and also me about beating him)
 
Skullbats EU PC might be going through some drastic changes and I want some suggestions from the community.

I'm thinking of dividing the European Skullbats tournament by Seasons that run around 8 weeks (Or maybe 10 weeks? I'm open to suggestions) and end each season with a Top 8 tournament that will get streamed and commentated. Here are some questions I have:

  1. What kind of a simple ranking system should we use to qualify 8 players? I could make a spreadsheet, count the wins of each player and add them up, but what about players who are not available every weekend? Is there a ranking system that does not punish players for missing 1 week of Skullbats?
  2. Our current weekly Skullbats matches are FT2 and there are 7-8 Rounds depending on the amount of entrants. The current tournaments usually last 90-120 minutes unless there are delays because of some player's connection problems. Should we go back to 5 Rounds where each match is a FT3 battle?
  3. When should we start the Autumn season? How long should a season last before the Top 8 tourney? 8 weeks? 10 weeks?
  4. Who can stream AND provide hype commentary for the Top 8 tourney?
  5. What kind of prizes should we offer? Steam gift cards? These tournaments are not for profit and I would like suggestions on prizes that won't cost organizers too much money to obtain.
 
I think that's a fantastic idea!

1 - Frost uses a modified Elo system for the London Blazblue and Arcana Heart weekly ranbats. I'll ask him about it.

2 - I prefer FT2. FT3 results in new players getting stomped 3 rounds in a row if they're matched against good players in round 1 (unless we start seeding players using their rank), and even if players are good and evenly matched then FT2 is the current standard tournament format anyway. FT2 also lets you feel like you have the chance of beating a better player, whereas beating them in a longer set is trickier. That said, if everyone else prefers FT3 I'm fine with it.

I don't really mind how many sets are in the weekly Skullbats tournaments either. 8+ feels like overkill to me, especially when people have internet problems and the whole thing drags out for ages. Maybe this has been getting better recently, but I've been busy on most Sundays for the past month or two so I've missed a lot of the recent Skullbats.

3 - I guess we should start it as soon as we're ready, unless there's a good reason not to. The main (US) Skullbats does 6 week seasons, so I guess 6-8 weeks is a good number.

4 - No idea :(

5 - I personally don't think prizes are necessary, and the main (US) Skullbats found that prizes didn't make a difference to attendance. That said, if anyone can donate anything it can't hurt.
 
Dumb question, but since I ran 48 tournies already is there any point in naming the tournaments with the new format "Skullbats EU PC Season 1"?

US Skullbats runs 6 week seasons. Let me get this straight: they run ranking tournaments for 6 weeks, run the Top 8 on week 7 and take a break on the 8th week or do they start a new season?

EDIT: I might keep all tournies 7 Rounds long from now on in case there's a turnout of like 10-12 players.
 
So we wanna get serious, uh? I'm fine with that.
But yeah, we don't need a prize.

An interesting way to run it would be topanga ranking battle style. Everyone play in a big round robin, but the time or day to play against isn't fixed. People play FT2s against each other when they get the chance and when their internet isn't too crappy, and the result are given out by third-parties who spectated the match or with video footage.
The round robin results in a ranking to choose the players who will attend the top 8.

I have no idea how much work it needs to organize such a thing, maybe it won't be hard and we can even keep the sunday skullbats running at the same time for a more "classic" tourney experience, or maybe it's not viable at all.
Just saying.

About streaming, I should get good enough computer and pc for that in september, but hype commentary? I don't think my oral english is ready for that. But it's worth the try.
 
Vladislav_Paizis said:
Our current weekly Skullbats matches are FT2 and there are 7-8 Rounds depending on the amount of entrants. The current tournaments usually last 90-120 minutes unless there are delays because of some player's connection problems. Should we go back to 5 Rounds where each match is a FT3 battle?

YES !!!
 
This is a pretty interesting idea overall!

ad 2. I'd say a more standard FT2 format works better for "lower level" tournament matches. Very rarely did a set end with a 3-2 result. Most of the time it was a 3-0 or 3-1 that went on for longer than needed. FT3 is pretty good for finals, though.
 
Vladislav_Paizis said:
When should we start the Autumn season? How long should a season last before the Top 8 tourney? 8 weeks? 10 weeks?
Who can stream AND provide hype commentary for the Top 8 tourney?
What kind of prizes should we offer? Steam gift cards? These tournaments are not for profit and I would like suggestions on prizes that won't cost organizers too much money to obtain.
Oi oi~ the work

No real idea on the season length, but 10 weeks sounds too long.

I can stream and provide myself playing Harmonica. That's something, I'm sure??
No idea who would be good at commentary in EU. I sure-as-heck ain't.

If you go with Prizes, the easiest solution would probably be to ask around for steam codes that people have leftover. Lots of people buy Humble Bundles for 2 of the 5 games and then have 3 codes left over.

What kind of a simple ranking system should we use to qualify 8 players? I could make a spreadsheet, count the wins of each player and add them up, but what about players who are not available every weekend? Is there a ranking system that does not punish players for missing 1 week of Skullbats?
ELO would do that and be a really good ranking system in general, because wins against good players become more important. Is a whole lotta work though, and it is *REALLY GOOD* at not caring about players not appearing - probably too good (eg if 5 people are roughly as good as each other, and 4 of them keep playing in SBats, and the 5th just joins two tournaments and wins both 7-0 "on a lucky streak", he will have a rating that is very hard to surpass - in fact, it will be in his best interest to just not join further tournaments, as he's likely to just lose rating)

The simplest ranking system would be to just assign points based on ending rank, eg "10 for 1st place, 7 for 2nd, 5 for 3rd, 3 for 4th/5th, 1 for 6th/7th/8th", and then go through the tournaments like that and add up points.
While that would punish people for not joining on all weeks, I don't see that as too much of an issue - if you place well often enough, you should still make it in, and this actually creates a bonus incentive to.. join the tournaments! Which would give us more players per week, more often.
Eg if Woof were to want into that Top8 tourney, he'd have to actually play through most of the weeks, rather than winning 3 tournaments and then not caring about the Weekly anymore.

Bonus downside of ELO is that it *discourages* you of joining on a bad day - eg yesterday I was pretty tired; if it was ELO ranked I woulda just said "Screw it, I'm not gonna risk ruining my rating" and stayed out of the Weekly; with "Just points for placing", there is nothing to lose and I may just join in the hopes of at least getting 1 Pt from a 7th place.

If you decide to go with the "Points for Placement" system, then one can edit that to one's needs, eg "Give points based on %age Placement rather than raw number" (so a tournament with 8 entrants doesn't have everyone getting points), and/or "Give points based on attendants" as a little bit mix-with-how-ELO-works (cus 2nd place here is more of an achievement than 1st place there)

Should we go back to 5 Rounds where each match is a FT3 battle?
I'll just look at the last Skullbats EU, #49.
There were 7 Rounds, with 10 matches each, and these are the results:

Round1: 8x 2-0, 2x 2-1
Round2: 10x 2-0
Round3: 8x 2-0, 1x 2-1 (Ruri forfeit)
Round4: 8x 2-0, 2x 2-1
Round5: 6x 2-0, 4x 2-1
Round6: 8x 2-0, 2x 2-1
Round7: 8x 2-0, 2x 2-1

For a total count of [56x 2-0, 13x 2-1]

The utmost of the 2-0s would end in 3-0; with almost all others ending 3-1, and a SUPER MINISCULE part actually turning around to a 2-3.
For the 2-1s it possibly helps, but those aren't even 1/5th of the total results. I don't think that's worth it *at all*.

What you get from switching to FT3 with lower roundcount is:

--- Less usable results
### Going with *7* rounds, we had:
- 1 clear winner
- 3way tie for 2nd place (got resolved via Tiebreaker)
- 6way tie for 5th place (two top candidates even with tied Tiebreaker)
- 6way tie for 11th place
This is *already* not exactly optimal, and it would be much much worse if we lowered the amount of rounds to 5

--- Less matches with people you "want to fight":
MrPeck vs ThatNewGuy will go over 3 rounds instead of over 2. It ain't no fun for either of them.
After losing the first 3 rounds 0-3, ThatNewGuy only has 2 more rounds to fight people roughly on his skill level, as the swiss system takes a while to "put you where you belong"
2 FT3s are something between 6-10 matches. 4 FT2s are something between 8-12 = Less matches than in 7x FT2.
And that's with 7xFT2 taking overall shorter than 5xFT3 (full count being something between 14-21 matches vs 15-25)

--- Worse at adjusting to lots of players
Making it 8 rounds instead of 7 in FT2 is 2-3 matches more, 6 FT3s instead of 5 is 3-5 more. Not hard to see that it's less of a "okay let's go with this" kinda thing and more of a commitment.

TL;DR: No
 

Also, got an announcement concerning my past recordings.
In a few days Twitch will be deleting everyone's existing past streams. In light of that, I've moved all my Skullbats recordings to my Youtube channel. The 60 fps to 30 fps conversion is unforgiving, but it's better than losing all the match videos.

v57hccD.png


The order in which pre-Skullbats #49 matches were uploaded was pretty random due to the chaotic nature of moving a few hundreds of vids, but all* matches can be found by searching my channel with the opponent's name and/or tournament/round number.

*A few recordings were damaged and couldn't be moved:
Global UOTS 1v1 #3 - round 1 - vs Squire Grooktook
Skullbats EU PC #3 - Round 4 - vs kenz< vs Muro
Skullbats EU PC #4 - Round 1 - vs Steinspisar
Skullbats EU PC #10 - round 2 - vs 123 Button Masher
Skullbats PC EU #24 - round 5 - vs Veritas
 
Muro said:

Also, got an announcement concerning my past recordings.
In a few days Twitch will be deleting everyone's existing past streams. In light of that, I've moved all my Skullbats recordings to my Youtube channel. The 60 fps to 30 fps conversion is unforgiving, but it's better than losing all the match videos.

v57hccD.png


The order in which pre-Skullbats #49 matches were uploaded was pretty random due to the chaotic nature of moving a few hundreds of vids, but all* matches can be found by searching my channel with the opponent's name and/or tournament/round number.

*A few recordings were damaged and couldn't be moved:
Global UOTS 1v1 #3 - round 1 - vs Squire Grooktook
Skullbats EU PC #3 - Round 4 - vs kenz< vs Muro
Skullbats EU PC #4 - Round 1 - vs Steinspisar
Skullbats EU PC #10 - round 2 - vs 123 Button Masher
Skullbats PC EU #24 - round 5 - vs Veritas
Isn't there an option to just save Twitch recordings as "Highlights" to keep them?
 
There is. However, while exporting a video to Youtube takes just two clicks and can be done to following recordings via the video manager, highlighting requires: opening the video, click, click, setting the start time, setting the end time, click, adding the title, adding the description, click. Not so bad once, but I could find neither the time nor the determination to do it a few hundred times.
 
Skullbats EU PC Tournaments will be now played in "Seasons". These seasons will consist of 7 weekly Swiss-style tournaments and the 8 players with the biggest amount of wins will be qualified for a Double Elimination tournament. The DE tournament will be played the next week (This Season it will be on 19/10/14) and McPeanuts has volunteered to stream and provide commentary for the tournament.

I will be keeping scores in this currently empty spreadsheet - http://goo.gl/s06GUF

NOTE: Players who leave mid-tourney because of connection issues or an emergency will still have their wins counted, despite Challonge results "saying" that their score is 0.
 
Boy that is CONFUSING to me but 19/10/2014 is actually October 10th, right? I can set aside that date for strimming.
 
Skullbats EU PC tournaments will be now organised by Mr Peck the original SBats EU organiser during the PSN days. Thank you and Good Games to everyone who took part in the 50 or so tournaments I organised. Skullgirls is not one of mine main fighting games currently, but I may still show up in tournaments in the future.
 
No recording from round 1 due to tech problems, boo.
Yes recordings from rounds 2-7 due to fixing said problems, yay!

 
So I have a suggestion for the next Skullbats:

I think it would be nice to run a small team tournament after the main one.
Basically, the 1st and 2nd player of the main tournament choose players from the bracket, and it's last man standing.

Of course, we probably wouldn't be able to put everyone in the same lobby to spectate, but someone is streaming most of the time.

I would be short (~30mn), and I think a good way to see how everyone plays (and get to know eachothers, bromance, blablabla)

Who's interested?
 
RexLeRouge said:
So I have a suggestion for the next Skullbats:

I think it would be nice to run a small team tournament after the main one.
Basically, the 1st and 2nd player of the main tournament choose players from the bracket, and it's last man standing.

Of course, we probably wouldn't be able to put everyone in the same lobby to spectate, but someone is streaming most of the time.

I would be short (~30mn), and I think a good way to see how everyone plays (and get to know eachothers, bromance, blablabla)

Who's interested?
I like the idea of it, but it might take a while and a lot of people want to take a break after playing in Skullbats for over an hour. Each round would take around 4 minutes (assuming FT1) if nothing went wrong and players were fairly quick to join and leave the lobby, so a 7v7 tournament would take 30-50 minutes to play (plus the time it takes to pick teams) if there weren't any delays or lobby problems whatsoever.

That said, no one's forced to take part in it and streaming matches so everyone can spectate together sounds fun, so you could run it and see how it goes. I'm sometimes busy straight after Skullbats but I'll play if I can!
 
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