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VGO Feedback Thread


Capn Doug
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It has been a frantic few weeks of gaming for a lot of people on the site. The VGOs afforded people the ability to participate in a number of small events and game the way that they would like. It seems like a lot of people enjoyed the competition, which is always what we strive for in these competitions. But now that it's over, we want to know what you thought. What did you enjoy? What could have been better? Would you like to see the VGOs become a regular competition along the lines of GSL? Let us know. And don't be afraid to voice constructive criticism. This is a safe space. But keep in mind that the forum rules still apply.

 

So, let's start with a few things that we already know about. First, the head to head. Many of the problems stemmed from an inflexibility on the part of things like the schedule. We originally tried to make things as fair and balanced as possible in the H2H as well as adjusting for the fact that we had team mates facing off against each other. It proved to be too much for some people and led to a smaller competition than we would have liked for Halo at least.

 

Now, one thing that you may have noticed was that each of the events had a different type of schedule and match up. There was a reason for that. One thing we learned is that there is still a demand for H2H events, so we decided to see what the potential drawbacks and advantages of various systems were. While it is early, the CET is working on an idea for future H2H events that will run on a regular basis. We hope to have the details hashed out for this later this year.

 

One thing that we have heard a few times was that the awards should be weighted in some way. This option was actually never on the table during the discussions as we were forming the competition since it is not something used in the actual Olympics. Granted, the Olympics also do nothing to recognize multiple winners or countries with multiple wins, so we were left with the options utilized by television networks and National Olympic Committees. Our other option was to have the winner declared entirely on number of gold medals with silver and bronze being the tie breaker. However, we felt that this would be likely to lead to people giving up after the gold was out of reach. We did not want that to happen so we chose the option that encouraged participation.

 

And make no mistake, throughout the competition our goal was to be consistent in our adherence to the theme of the actual Olympics. It was why we insisted on using Snowbound on Halo 3 when people claimed that other maps would have worked better with the number of people we had in the matches. Consistency is important moving forward as well. We are hoping to be as consistent as possible in future tournaments, just as we were consistent in not making drastic changes after the events were finalized in order to remain as fair as possible to people who were looking to sign up or had already signed up. Inconsistency was something that we received feedback on from previous events and would like to see it avoided in the future.

 

Finally, one of the biggest problems that we had was requiring that everything be unlocked online. It seems that a lot of people had trouble staying connected to Live. I'm not sure what we could have done about this, but in the end we pretty much counted every achievement that people let us know about in advance.

 

Oh, and a few people are probably very glad that we did not impose penalties for bad links and math fails. Would have been a lot of duck faces handed out to one or two teams....

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Just tossing out minor feedback for now:

  • VGOs should be every other year - it's too big and "important" to be run every year
  • There needs to be more head to head events
  • Minimum of an 8 team sign-up, as 5 seemed way too small
  • More variation in events - Bobsleigh and 4x200 were too smilier
  • Awards should not be weighted

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I think the best aspect of the VGO was that it had one of the most even playing fields. Enough events that everybody could do what they were good at. The medals not being weighted also contributed to this and how you performed as a team rather than the one guy who gets 9 gold medals. One thing I dislike about many competitions is how money and time control them, but the quantity of events definitely made it feel like everyone was more equal.

 

I think the VGO has a good formula. Something that could be expanded and improved upon, but is strong and functioning nonetheless. Like what BiggD said, more events are more teams would definitely add to the excitement.

 

*Edit*

In regard to H2H events, games need to be selected where the host connection and the advantage that it comes with don't determine the victors. For example, I suck at Gears but I feel like how much of an advantage the host has contributed to how competitive the game actually was. We got wooped because of an average multiple second delay.

Edited by StayonTarget
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My biggest issue was the awards were not weighted. This was a competition, and the team with the most golds (therefore in my estimation performed best) did not win. That isn't me saying that as a bias as I was on that team, as if you check the Vgo thread I said the same thing before it even started.

 

I understand the need for participation, which is why a weighted total instead of outright golds is the best in this situation. The current setup meant teams could limp home and collect the same point total as a team who really went to town. It's the only thing thst annoyed me about this Vgo from the start,and now it's finished has really annoyed me. The only people who would be in favour of not weighting awards, are those who are trying to limp by.

 

Apart from that, it was well structured and well ran. Some of the events impo were a bit pointless as they were too similar to others. Bigger teams is an interesting concept, but I think five was a decent number. No one knew how this tournament would pan out, and I think every team had a member who didn't really contribute, so maybe four is a better number impo. I dunno on this one.

 

Only other slight thing I would mention, is you need to be a bit more flexible. I understand you make choices as a team, but when something is suggested to you, it is shot down because you've already decided. If you can name one suggestion that was made publicly after the rules were announced you listened too, I'll retract this. But I can think of plenty of things you overruled despite them being a valid suggestion. When we suggest things, we aren't criticising you or your work, we are trying to help improve things. When one person suggests something, have a quick think. If multiple people are suggesting or questioning something, maybe you got it wrong, and that doesn't mean you did a bad job or made a bad choice. It just means maybe a different perspective presented a better option.

 

Overall it was fun, and your judgement proved good enough for me which is why I don't really need to offer any feedback apart from the above. You did a good job.

 

Edit - one more thing. I hate, hate, hate not having offline achievements count. That is purely for my work situation. It ruled me out of any the marathon events etc. now, my issue is thus : if you can see I start a game in week one, then I earn achievements in week three offline, you still know with 100% accuracy they were done within the specified time period. That ruined it for me, as I really wanted to partake in marathon and some of the other events it would of been viable for.

 

Feedback on my feedback is welcome. In fact, referring to the above point, it'd be nice to know what the cet things when we suggest stuff. Like why u don't like something, instead of just no thanks.

Edited by Lavindathar
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It looks like a number of the issues mentioned are things I brought up. I hope I'm not that guy.

 

I'm going to break my feedback up over a couple of posts because I don't have time right now to type it all up.

 

Awards

 

I have two different opinions on the awards.

 

1) Weighted Olympic Ranking

 

This applies to the overall awards.

 

One thing that we have heard a few times was that the awards should be weighted in some way. This option was actually never on the table during the discussions as we were forming the competition since it is not something used in the actual Olympics.

 

You are absolutely correct. No one uses a weighted medal scheme. I think the problem is that some people are confused when they are asking for weighted awards. A weighted award ranking would work like this:

 

Assume gold is worth 3, silver 2, and bronze 1

 

Team A has 2 golds, 1 silver, and 1 bronze

Team B has 1 gold, 4 silvers, and 1 bronze

 

Team A has 9 points, Team B has 12 points and are therefore the winners.

 

This is not what I was asking for. I was asking for Olympic ranking. Team A has more golds, therefore they should be the winners.

 

Granted, the Olympics also do nothing to recognize multiple winners or countries with multiple wins, so we were left with the options utilized by television networks and National Olympic Committees.

 

The Olympics doesn't do anything for winning more than one medal. That is strictly a creation of the various National Olympic Committees and television networks.

 

You've mentioned this twice now, the first time in response to me, so I think you are also confused about what I was asking for. I have no idea what you're trying to say in the bolded part.

 

Our other option was to have the winner declared entirely on number of gold medals with silver and bronze being the tie breaker.

 

This is exactly what I wanted, and this is how the real Olympics are officially scored.

 

Proof: The Sochi 2014 Official standings puts Belarus in 8th place above Austria in 9th. Belarus had one more gold medal, but less than half medals overall.

 

2) Tiered Awards

 

This applies to the event awards.

 

Now that we're using Issue Reason for the awards again (yay) people should receive one award for their highest medal performance. Eg, if I earned one gold, one silver, and one bronze medal I would get only the gold award and it would detail my performance, instead of getting three awards.

 

The reason for this is that people can sandbag themself in an effort to receive more awards. One person who shall remain nameless mentioned this to me explicitly, so it almost definitely went on in this competition. I could have done it myself. My team had already won gold in Handball, so I very easily could have made myself come second in National Anthems. This goes against the spirit of competing, so if you do the awards this way you can avoid it altogether.

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I agree the medals should have been weighted, I understand what you are saying about the IOC not weighting but the IOC also isn't awarding anything for an overall finish so why would they? Here are three separate sources that all show official standings for the 2012 Olympic games. All of them are weighted.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_olympics#Records

http://www.bbc.com/sport/olympics/2012/medals/countries

http://sports.ndtv.com/olympics-2012/medals

 

My reasoning is the same as Lav's if you know that all medals are equal, coupled with the fact that you know some teams aren't going to even bother trying you can just cruise to a medal and it holds as much weight as someone who takes it seriously and goes for a gold. I'm not saying this because of how it ended, the decision was made and outlined so I'm not going to argue the point with the CET while the competition is ongoing, they had enough on their plate.

 

I think having a minimum number of team requirement is a mistake, there may have only been 5 teams but that's 25 people, that's a decent field for a tournament. Personally I though the events were pretty varied, I have to disagree with you on that one too Bigg, Bobsleigh was a full retail completion by each team member were your individual times were added and an average was taken for your score. 4x200 was any 50 achievements by each team member consecutively were your total time from first achievement by member A to last achievement by member B is your score. Completely different events from were I am sitting. I'd also say every year over every 2 :p Sorry D!

 

Overall I thought the VGO's were great, I had fun, the events were well thought out and interesting. The only H2H event I competed in was Judo and we were all on the same team so I never encountered any of the scheduling issues that seem to have been a big problem for some people.

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Now that we're using Issue Reason for the awards again (yay) people should receive one award for their highest medal performance. Eg, if I earned one gold, one silver, and one bronze medal I would get only the gold award and it would detail my performance, instead of getting three awards.

 

The reason for this is that people can sandbag themself in an effort to receive more awards. One person who shall remain nameless mentioned this to me explicitly, so it almost definitely went on in this competition. I could have done it myself. My team had already won gold in Handball, so I very easily could have made myself come second in National Anthems. This goes against the spirit of competing, so if you do the awards this way you can avoid it altogether.

 

Is this referring to me?

 

I made the point before the VGO started this could happen. The response I got from staff was basically 'the decision is made, its not open for discussion'. Then I believe another staff member, I think it was Troy said 'if you want to do that, go for it'.

 

So I attempted it. I ultimately failed, and hit gold when I was aiming for bronze. I even posted my scores 24hrs and didnt play the last 40 hours so people could overtake me.

 

Not hiding the fact I attempted it, I even stated it publicly at the time in the discussion thread I wanted it. This goes back to the major flaw of the medals not being weighted....there was no reason to get gold. It was worth the same as a bronze, another point I made before the VGO started.

 

Oh, and I also vote for every year.

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This has been my absolute favorite event on the site! I LOVED the variety of options available to each competitor; that we could CHOOSE what types of events we wanted to compete in and that we could participate even if it was just in one or two things. The majority of our tournaments are strictly about gamerscore or completions and those don't really appeal to me.

 

I'm sure we all learned a few things from the pvp events. I'm looking forward to seeing how it all gets implemented in future events. (We can has card/board game events? I will kick all of the ass at backgammon! well.. a lot of it anyways :D)

 

I would really love to see this as an annual event that runs in the gsl off-season (6 months apart maybe?) but I could understand if you guys opted for an every other year rotation.

 

I understand why the medals were done the way they were. And I understand why some folks would prefer they be done differently. Not sure if the reasons for doing it the way we did will change in the future or not. From an outside observers perspective it seemed to me, this first time was about encouraging maximum participation and trying things to see how they worked. To that end, I think we were very successful. Most of the competitors that signed up actually participated in their events. There was broad enough range of events and they were set up in enough different ways that you guys could gather data about things that work and things that don't.

 

Enough of the general rambling "feedback" from me. Seems the best, most helpful feedback I can give you is about the specific events I participated in.

[spoiler=subtextdoyoureadit]I'm hoping other participants will take note of the bold text and try to give the same kind of feedback. Can we please talk about something other than the damned medals and wait for the CET to respond?

So here goes:

 

Marathon: Great event idea. It really felt like I was running a marathon trying to push myself to finish that game. One thing I would suggest based on the results is to not allow games like Beautiful Katamari that are basically a 50-60 hour completion and then just afk the rest overnight (which you can do while you're working on the rest making it a FAR shorter total time than many of the other titles). They give a HUGE advantage to people who haven't played them yet. It's like letting some runners hop on a tram for half of the race. Technically the same distance is being traveled but some of the competitors aren't actually running for a chunk of it. If you're looking for ways to include more games, dropping the time down to 85 or even 90 hours will open up a lot of possibilities.

 

Synchronized Swimming: This was a fun event. Great idea to whomever came up with it. My only real feedback on this one is to do with the scoring. I feel that 1K:gsicon: a day as the only way to actually increase your score is too much. Maybe when more of us have moved over to the XB1 and its 1K:gsicon: arcade games it'll be a different story. I also feel that teams that exceed whatever that score threshold is should be granted more than 1pt. It can be quite difficult to manage large scores like that and still end on the same number. Honestly, it made it not worth the effort to exceed 1000. It was more important to end on the same score than anything else.

 

Handball: I only participated as an alternate for my team to help with the whole scheduling thing. That worked out pretty well for us. It may be beneficial to have a designated scheduler for the PvP events. Not someone that just arbitrarily picks a time and date but someone who can cross reference players/teams availabilities and schedule the match-ups. Availabilities is definitely something the players themselves need to take into consideration when they're picking teammates too. It was a pain in the neck just trying to figure out when our whole team was available let alone when we could get together with other teams.

 

All in all, I really enjoyed the events I participated in and I'm very grateful to you guys for all of the work (both in the planning and implementing) you all put into this. I had a great time. Thank you :)

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Marathon

 

Maybe instead of focusing on what seemed like mostly grindy games,the focus should be on games with lesser time requirements but an increased difficulty level. I'm not challenging that some of them are genuinely hard but games like Beautiful Katamari, GoW 1,2,3, bomberman star ocean, etc are more focused on grinding out certain things like time, kills planting bombs, trophies etc instead of actual skill.

 

Using games like dead space 2, spec ops the line, COD WAW, Duke nukem forever, etc would in running terms have provided a better test of your cardiovascular fitness then a a run around the block. (i may be just BSing the last point but im hoping my real one gets through.)

 

 

As for synchronized swimming, instead of it being a pesdo solo event (besides communication on how much you guys are going for each day.) have it be a co-op event.

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Marathon

 

Maybe instead of focusing on what seemed like mostly grindy games,the focus should be on games with lesser time requirements but an increased difficulty level. I'm not challenging that some of them are genuinely hard but games like Beautiful Katamari, GoW 1,2,3, bomberman star ocean, etc are more focused on grinding out certain things like time, kills planting bombs, trophies etc instead of actual skill.

 

I think that could actually function well as a separate event rather than an alteration to the current Marathon. Call it the Strongman event or something like that.

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I hope everyone had fun and that the drama wasn't too great for people to handle.

 

I know I didn't take part but I thought some feedback about WHY would be helpful too - as that way maybe we can lure more people in here next time, as it would be great to have an even bigger roster of competitors to make some of the events a touch more interesting.

 

First of all it would be nice if you let people sign up on an individual basis for some events. Sure they could do that this time but they had to be part of a team just to be allowed to do so. I'm all in favour of team work but would have only wanted to do one (maybe two events) and didn't want to sign up and then cost my team a medal by not taking part in more things.

 

I think if you have a bunch of events for people on teams and then a bunch that people can sign up for solo - you'd get a lot more people in general.

 

Secondly, keep an eye on the competition. TA (as much as I hate them) ran an Olympic style event of their own about a month before ours started. A bunch of the events/requirements were similar and, as we all know, a lot of people use both sites. So they may have done the TA event and then been too burnt out to do ours. So perhaps the smaller than expected sign ups could be down to a timing issue? Though I do agree that our event was better organised and had a lot more variety - but just highlighting that the clash and similar style may have lead to some not signing up.

 

Thirdly, I said it earlier (and Troy mentioned it above) but 100+ hour games that you can AFK grind for the majority of the time required are hardly fair in terms of the Marathon. If people are taking part in a bunch of different events then they SHOULD have to plan their time accordingly. Being able to just set up their console to do the work while they sleep/are at work etc is hardly the same as someone that has to sit at their console for 100+ hours playing Tales of Vesperia and thus means they can't be playing games for other events. Maybe a few tighter restrictions next time?

 

Finally to avoid the potential problem of people "throwing" events to get a lower medal (and thus more awards) perhaps keep all scores and results for every event hidden until the entire competition is over? Then have a giant medal ceremony where everyone finds out what/if they won. Would make things more competitive. Though I appreciate that might be impossible for the PVP events - so maybe hold the "finals" for those on the last day?

 

Anyway, been fun to watch and it seems everyone had fun.

Edited by jackanape
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I think that could actually function well as a separate event rather than an alteration to the current Marathon. Call it the Strongman event or something like that.

 

Dident really think of this when i posted that, but yes this would work as well. Perhaps maybe even as a replacement to marathon.

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Overall I thought that the VGO was well executed and fun. Good job CET.

 

Now for my feedback:

 

Awards: I personally don't really care which way that you decide to use the medals to calculate who won the tournament. No real feedback in there, but since everyone has basically shared their opinion thought that I would add mine.

 

Triathlon/Decathlon: Didn't participate in decathlon but my feedback would apply to it as well, probably more so. I don't see these as viable long term events should the VGO be continued. There are only a handful of gamers that would want to do these events and only a limited amount of games to do these from. Once the gamers have exhausted their supply of those games they want to play, the events will get less and less participants.

 

That said triathlon was the favorite event that I participated in and the one that I put the most time towards. To bad I screwed up the event run.

 

Curling: While the event itself went great and the feedback that I have wouldn't have applied anyway, I didn't like the scoring system that was presented. I have come up with a few alternatives ranging from a different formula to a complete reformat of the event (not personally a fan of this one) if anyone would want to see them.

 

The other events that I participated in, I thought were good the way they were presented.

 

Marathon: Great event idea. It really felt like I was running a marathon trying to push myself to finish that game. One thing I would suggest based on the results is to not allow games like Beautiful Katamari that are basically a 50-60 hour completion and then just afk the rest overnight (which you can do while you're working on the rest making it a FAR shorter total time than many of the other titles). They give a HUGE advantage to people who haven't played them yet. It's like letting some runners hop on a tram for half of the race. Technically the same distance is being traveled but some of the competitors aren't actually running for a chunk of it. If you're looking for ways to include more games, dropping the time down to 85 or even 90 hours will open up a lot of possibilities.

 

I agree with this, at least for ones that the achievement is play X amount of time. For instance back when I did Beautiful Katamari it took me about 60 hours to do all the non-time achievements. Had I not got so many levels to 120 points and all the eternal modes unlocked I could have easily finished those ones in under 50 hours. Knowing this, I could have finished the game 0:gsicon: to 1250:gsicon: in 50 hours (not quite as the time achievements unlock after a level and time for sleep, work, etc.) by just sitting and waiting and doing everything after I got the 50 hours achievement. Would definitely take some planning but possible.

 

I think that could actually function well as a separate event rather than an alteration to the current Marathon. Call it the Strongman event or something like that.

 

I think that should the VGO be continued it would be a good move to make a rotation of some core events that would be played every other time, much like the olympics. I think that the most of the team events and many of the solo events could be used every time. With the endurance events, the remaining team events, and some of the solo events going into this rotation. H2H events and the remaining solo events (skeleton and wrestling) would be considered on a VGO to VGO basis. I think that this would add a level of consistency to the VGO while still making it seem fresh when it would roll around again.

Edited by exit9500
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Plus GSL? That's exhausting for the CET and competitors alike.

 

Yes, yes it is. I feel like I've been in constant tournaments since the 3LR tournament which lapped over into the GSL. Granted I did sign up for each one though. :p

 

If there was something similar to the VGOs that occurred every year/twice a year, I think it would be better to limit the time from a week to a few days and possible have a break in between. The tournament was pulled off nicely and great job to the CET for pulling it off, it was just exhausting. I liked how we were on teams. It encouraged me to try harder as I didn't want to let my team down.

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Well, I'm hoping to let most of the discussion happen naturally and don't want to get too involved in anything until the weekend. I do want to weigh in on this, though:

 

 

Plus GSL? That's exhausting for the CET and competitors alike.

 

Right now, we're looking at either 8 or 10 events per year. I'm well aware that the tournament schedule has been rather intense for the past year, so we are hoping to stream line it for 2015, and as I already mentioned, the next tournaments are not going to be as long (probably 2-3 weeks)

 

 

At this point, here's the most promising schedule:

January/February: Subscribers only tournament (4 weeks give or take)

March: PvP tournament (one weekend, open to everyone)

April/May: Joint Subscriber/Ambassador tournament (VGO every second year? 6 weeks or less, allow regular members in team events if "sponsored")

June: PvP tournament (one weekend, open to everyone)

July/August: Ambassadors only tournament (4 weeks, give or take)

September: PvP tournament (one weekend, open to everyone)

October/November: GSL (6-7 weeks, unless cross site returns, open to most)

December: PvP tournament (one weekend, open to everyone)

 

 

That's all very preliminary, since we don't know what the PvP will look like fully yet, but it is sort of what we have in mind. But either way, you shouldn't have to worry about not having down time between events anymore.

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I didn't take part, but I'll throw in what I thought:

 

The awards: Ok, like other people have suggested, I'm not sure why someone who has placed gold, silver and bronze would then get 3 awards. They should just obtain 1 award (the gold award) and the description should state that they got a Silver in X and a bronze in Y.

 

Personally if I took part I would have sabotaged myself just so I could get all 3 awards.

 

The team based events: I personally thought that the team events was a mess. Now let me explain, there was a total of 5 teams, in 4 of the team events (out of a total of 6), there was only 3 competitors. Hence they were pretty much guaranteed a medal. Now yes I know I mentioned this before, and I know that all competitors would have to finish the event to get a medal, but let's be honest, all the team had to do was reach the bare minimum to attain an award, that's half hearted, there's no competitive edge to it.

 

Solo events: I'm not sure why multiple people from the same team were allowed to do the same event. This allows for people to double or triple stack medals. This also totally removes value from the TEAM events. It's like: "Yea man, we couldn't get that medal in that team event, but don't worry, we just got 3 medals from Judo, which is equivalent to 3 team events since you can only get 1 medal max from a team event anyway".

 

I know if you didn't allow this to happen, then most solo events would only have 3-4 people if you didn't allow multiple people from the same team to partake in the same event (which then goes back to the team event problem, where you simply get a medal for finishing which removes the competitive element).

 

This leads to my point about the underlying problem of the whole tournament: participants. Now let's all be honest, we all know that there weren't that many people who signed up. Yes 25 people is alot compared to the past tournaments, but keep in mind the PVP tournament AND the 3 lives tournament had a player cap on it. This tournament was on a bigger scale and more participants was needed to do it justice.

 

 

 

Sorry if I'm coming across as negative (as I usually do :)) but I'm not going to beat around the bush. The tournament was handled well, and I congratulate you guys on running it smoothly :).

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Part of the problem with designing an event this big and this complex is that sometimes what you think will happen ends up being something that only you thought of. There have been a lot of great suggestions made for how to run this in the future (see you in Rio?) and rest assured that I think a lot of them will be integrated. Now, one little wrinkle might be the PvP tournaments that I hope to get up and running again. That may make the Head to Head aspect of the VGOs a little trickier, but there are many team style events that we can use, along the lines of Handball for the VGOs that might not be possible in the PvP tournaments.

 

 

I've read every response, so even if I don't respond to you directly, I have read every response.

 

 

Minimum of an 8 team sign-up, as 5 seemed way too small

 

 

It's funny, when we were approaching the point where we were getting ready to post the sign up thread, Grifter and I were discussing how many teams we would get, I thought 8 was a good number, though we thought as many as 12 might sign up. Ultimately we got only 5, which still gives us the highest participation level for any non-GSL event since I've been on the site. And we almost had 1 more team. Which brings me to:

 

My biggest issue was the awards were not weighted. This was a competition, and the team with the most golds (therefore in my estimation performed best) did not win. That isn't me saying that as a bias as I was on that team, as if you check the Vgo thread I said the same thing before it even started.

 

I understand the need for participation, which is why a weighted total instead of outright golds is the best in this situation. The current setup meant teams could limp home and collect the same point total as a team who really went to town. It's the only thing thst annoyed me about this Vgo from the start,and now it's finished has really annoyed me. The only people who would be in favour of not weighting awards, are those who are trying to limp by.

 

In order to do this, I think we would need to get more teams involved. If we got 8-12 teams, there would be less need to encourage people to keep going with awards. Remember, I've been very competitive in 3 GSLs. One thing I liked to do was have one member put up a massive score in the first week and scare off a lot of teams. People drop out really fast when they realize that they are going to have a hard time winning that early. However, had we gone with Gold as the primary determinant of the winner, we would not likely have made the decision that we did around Hockey. The VGOs are likely to continue to be a fairly open event, so hopefully knowing that thy are coming, we can get more teams next time.

 

 

Only other slight thing I would mention, is you need to be a bit more flexible. I understand you make choices as a team, but when something is suggested to you, it is shot down because you've already decided. If you can name one suggestion that was made publicly after the rules were announced you listened too, I'll retract this. But I can think of plenty of things you overruled despite them being a valid suggestion. When we suggest things, we aren't criticising you or your work, we are trying to help improve things. When one person suggests something, have a quick think. If multiple people are suggesting or questioning something, maybe you got it wrong, and that doesn't mean you did a bad job or made a bad choice. It just means maybe a different perspective presented a better option.

 

 

In hindsight, yes, there were a few of things that I would have changed had I not felt that it was unfair to do so. Let's use Judo as an example. We selected Street Fighter IV over Super Street Fighter IV because it had a higher user base if you look at the number of people who have played it, was cheap to obtain and was readily available. Now, one thing I did not realize about fighting games is that they are like sports games, after a new one comes out, many trade/sell the old one and adopt the new one and that user base was largely historic. That meant that we would have had a more robust competition by using SSF4.

 

 

However, to change the game after it was announced would not have been fair if there were people who had the first and were going to sign up. Everyone who signed up knew that they were going to have to play Street Fighter IV.

 

 

Edit - one more thing. I hate, hate, hate not having offline achievements count. That is purely for my work situation. It ruled me out of any the marathon events etc. now, my issue is thus : if you can see I start a game in week one, then I earn achievements in week three offline, you still know with 100% accuracy they were done within the specified time period. That ruined it for me, as I really wanted to partake in marathon and some of the other events it would of been viable for.

 

Yeah... We developed a few systems for offline as a result of the disconnect plague that seemed to happen during this competition, and we are likely to be more... permissive in the future. Seriously, some of our competitors seem to have terrible internet connections...

 

 

Marathon: Great event idea. It really felt like I was running a marathon trying to push myself to finish that game. One thing I would suggest based on the results is to not allow games like Beautiful Katamari that are basically a 50-60 hour completion and then just afk the rest overnight (which you can do while you're working on the rest making it a FAR shorter total time than many of the other titles). They give a HUGE advantage to people who haven't played them yet. It's like letting some runners hop on a tram for half of the race. Technically the same distance is being traveled but some of the competitors aren't actually running for a chunk of it. If you're looking for ways to include more games, dropping the time down to 85 or even 90 hours will open up a lot of possibilities.

 

This was a problem with us being consistent. We made the decision that idle boosting wasn't a problem for I believe Command and Conquer, which involves 100 hours of online, which can be multibox idled. Since we made that decision for C&C, we kind of had to apply that standard to the rest of the games. Dropping it to 80 hours would have opened up a whole range of options for us, and is something we are likely to do if we go with a shorter competition (4 weeks, perhaps?)

 

 

Handball: I only participated as an alternate for my team to help with the whole scheduling thing. That worked out pretty well for us. It may be beneficial to have a designated scheduler for the PvP events. Not someone that just arbitrarily picks a time and date but someone who can cross reference players/teams availabilities and schedule the match-ups. Availabilities is definitely something the players themselves need to take into consideration when they're picking teammates too. It was a pain in the neck just trying to figure out when our whole team was available let alone when we could get together with other teams.

 

 

A lot of those issues lead to one of the changes that we made to allow teams to participate with fewer than 4 members on the team. I hadn't considered getting a schedule set up for availability, but it may have solved the issue we had with Guitar Hero. It does make things far less flexible for teams, though.

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Marathon

 

Maybe instead of focusing on what seemed like mostly grindy games,the focus should be on games with lesser time requirements but an increased difficulty level. I'm not challenging that some of them are genuinely hard but games like Beautiful Katamari, GoW 1,2,3, bomberman star ocean, etc are more focused on grinding out certain things like time, kills planting bombs, trophies etc instead of actual skill.

 

Using games like dead space 2, spec ops the line, COD WAW, Duke nukem forever, etc would in running terms have provided a better test of your cardiovascular fitness then a a run around the block. (i may be just BSing the last point but im hoping my real one gets through.)

 

 

The problem with using difficulty is that is largely subjective. Originally, that was what we had envisioned for the Triathlon, complete 3 games with an 8/10 difficulty rating or higher, but one of the conversations I remember having is "why is Call of Duty 2 in the Tier 1 of the shooter award when it's a 9/10 difficulty?" Turns out that the only person who thinks it is a 9/10 is the guy who wrote the road map.

 

First of all it would be nice if you let people sign up on an individual basis for some events. Sure they could do that this time but they had to be part of a team just to be allowed to do so. I'm all in favour of team work but would have only wanted to do one (maybe two events) and didn't want to sign up and then cost my team a medal by not taking part in more things.

 

I think if you have a bunch of events for people on teams and then a bunch that people can sign up for solo - you'd get a lot more people in general.

 

Originally we thought that increasing the team size to five would allow people to pick up a solo person for the marathon or a head to head event, kind of the way it seems like things worked out for Fire Hawk D. I'm not against allowing an individual to participate outside the team, though obviously we would like to see people encouraged to find a team.

 

 

Secondly, keep an eye on the competition. TA (as much as I hate them) ran an Olympic style event of their own about a month before ours started. A bunch of the events/requirements were similar and, as we all know, a lot of people use both sites. So they may have done the TA event and then been too burnt out to do ours. So perhaps the smaller than expected sign ups could be down to a timing issue? Though I do agree that our event was better organised and had a lot more variety - but just highlighting that the clash and similar style may have lead to some not signing up.

 

 

We started planning this in July. Basically, the first conversation I had with Grifter when I was brought on staff involved the VGOs. And a few of the key events had already been laid out by the time August rolled around. Also, TA bizarrely did not inform us about their event so that we could ensure that we did not duplicate events. How inconsiderate of them. :p. By the time their event had come up, we were basically just discussing final details and how to tease them, so I didn't even bother looking into their event beyond knowing that it existed.

 

 

I also don't think I'm alone in thinking that how TA does things should not effect how we do things.

 

 

Finally to avoid the potential problem of people "throwing" events to get a lower medal (and thus more awards) perhaps keep all scores and results for every event hidden until the entire competition is over? Then have a giant medal ceremony where everyone finds out what/if they won. Would make things more competitive. Though I appreciate that might be impossible for the PVP events - so maybe hold the "finals" for those on the last day?

 

 

There are probably easier ways to accomplish that, maybe just having an auto moderated subforum for scoring, or any of the other options that have been suggested for awards. It's good to know that have options, though.

 

Triathlon/Decathlon: Didn't participate in decathlon but my feedback would apply to it as well, probably more so. I don't see these as viable long term events should the VGO be continued. There are only a handful of gamers that would want to do these events and only a limited amount of games to do these from. Once the gamers have exhausted their supply of those games they want to play, the events will get less and less participants.

 

That said triathlon was the favorite event that I participated in and the one that I put the most time towards. To bad I screwed up the event run.

 

Switch to the Pentathlon, perhaps? ;)

 

 

I think that should the VGO be continued it would be a good move to make a rotation of some core events that would be played every other time, much like the olympics. I think that the most of the team events and many of the solo events could be used every time. With the endurance events, the remaining team events, and some of the solo events going into this rotation. H2H events and the remaining solo events (skeleton and wrestling) would be considered on a VGO to VGO basis. I think that this would add a level of consistency to the VGO while still making it seem fresh when it would roll around again.

 

 

I'm sure that some of the events will be main stays, while others will rotate in and out.

 

The team based events: I personally thought that the team events was a mess. Now let me explain, there was a total of 5 teams, in 4 of the team events (out of a total of 6), there was only 3 competitors. Hence they were pretty much guaranteed a medal. Now yes I know I mentioned this before, and I know that all competitors would have to finish the event to get a medal, but let's be honest, all the team had to do was reach the bare minimum to attain an award, that's half hearted, there's no competitive edge to it.

 

As mentioned, we were kind of hoping to have more teams, which would have negated that issue.

 

 

Solo events: I'm not sure why multiple people from the same team were allowed to do the same event. This allows for people to double or triple stack medals. This also totally removes value from the TEAM events. It's like: "Yea man, we couldn't get that medal in that team event, but don't worry, we just got 3 medals from Judo, which is equivalent to 3 team events since you can only get 1 medal max from a team event anyway".

 

I know if you didn't allow this to happen, then most solo events would only have 3-4 people if you didn't allow multiple people from the same team to partake in the same event (which then goes back to the team event problem, where you simply get a medal for finishing which removes the competitive element).

 

This leads to my point about the underlying problem of the whole tournament: participants. Now let's all be honest, we all know that there weren't that many people who signed up. Yes 25 people is alot compared to the past tournaments, but keep in mind the PVP tournament AND the 3 lives tournament had a player cap on it. This tournament was on a bigger scale and more participants was needed to do it justice.

 

Honestly, I think you answered your own issue there. To go into more depth, we didn't want people to not be able to sign up for the events they wanted to. If we only allowed one person from each team in each event, a lot of people would have been prevented from participating in events. In addition, there are often cases where two people from the same country compete against each other in the Olympics, so we didn't have an issue allowing it, though we did make sure to take steps to avoid collusion in the head to head events.

 

 

Feel free to keep the suggestions coming. We are always happy to get feedback on these things.

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