Dawn of War tourny at next LAN

[Sideshow]

The last LAN was very good, mainly because it was a lot less fractious than previous LANs: when a game was being played, almost everyone joined in. Because of that we had some ace BF2, and of course, loads of people playing DoW. So many, in fact that I think we can get away with having a tournament at the next LAN, so long as you guys want one.

Format: 2v2 (team games are more fun). We had 14 people playing at the same time before, and a couple of potential DoW'ers not present, so I think we can get 8 teams.

Stage 1:
Three rounds of Swiss (since that'll mean everyone gets to play a few games, and you can still come back from a loss).
Each round lasts 30 mins. Any game lasting the whole round length gets stopped, and the team with the most total points gets the win.

Stage 2:
The four top scoring teams play semi finals, untimed knockout.

Stage 3:
Final two teams, playing the final, untimed. Winner takes all!

Map-wise, I suggest:

Swiss:
Each round a random pick from:
Doom Spiral, Ice Flow, Mountain Trail, Refinery, St Mathias Bridge

Semis:
Into The Breach

Final:
Apocalypse Later


I had a look at a bunch of 2v2 replays, almost all of them finished inside 20 mins. The only one that didn't was extended due to an awesome comeback (nice one Ru).
We can put breaks between stages (even delay the final until the next day if desired).
Whaddaya think?

[Bluepixie]

Yup sounds sweet as. We'll have a chat about it this evening, with a beer. :D

[Captain_Caveman]

Sounds excellent, we may want to opt for some larger team games, 3v3 or even 4v4 for the guys who go out early. Also point the players in the direction of relics forums. They have some good strategy advice on there.

[Sideshow]

The bulk of the tournament will be the first three rounds - I don't see the semi's or the final taking that long. No-one drops during that time - everyone plays for the first three rounds.

Sorry, should have explained Swiss trounaments:
Example of a Swiss round system:
Teams are randomly paired up. The winners get a point, while the losers do not. Next round, teams are randomly paired off against other teams with the same score (if possible). Repeat for X rounds (in our case, 3).
Note, after 3 rounds with 8 teams, we will be left with 1 team who have won every round, so we could declare a winner right then. I find this lacks the excitement of having semis and a final, though, which is why I suggested a play-off afterwards (a play-off also means that a loss in the first three rounds doesn't eliminate you).

[YegaDoyai]

count me in, thinking a Ru + X might win the tourny though.

[Ru]

Count me in!

[Captain_Caveman]

http://forums.relicnews.com/showthread.php?t=40999

Good article on team play. Brings up an interesting point. Are we going to be using shared resourcing as it seems to be a good balancer for less good players. But the teams of good players still gain an edge.

[Sideshow]

Resource sharing means that every upgrade you make to your own economy increases your team economy more than it would with resource sharing turned off. This means that if a team builds more upgrades than their opponents then they will gain a greater advatage with NS turned on than if it were off. So NS actually emphasises the difference in skill level.
Also, since your economy is accelerated, the pace of the game is skewed, tiers dropping away faster. I don't see any combat happening in tier 1 with NS turned on, and little tier 2 either.
I'd be against using NS for those reasons. What does everyone else think?

[YegaDoyai]

well I have no idea how it would affect our games so why don't we try it and find out.

[Captain_Caveman]

anybody read the article. Theres lots of little features I hadn't realised like ping has a variety of "flavours" attack here, defend here etc as well as default look here. Also found out how to queue buildings. Dead handy stuff some of which aint even in the manual.