Tournament rules can cause health problems


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Shoals Surfer

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Post Monday, 27th August 2018, 18:17

Re: Tournament rules can cause health problems

Demiham wrote:The tournament rules are only a problem for the more serious players ~top 50 or so.


Not quite. It's also a problem for possibly hundreds of other players who had a fair chance to be top 50 if only they were able to dedicate 14h/day to the game for the whole duration of the tournament.
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Post Monday, 27th August 2018, 18:33

Re: Tournament rules can cause health problems

Demiham wrote:
tasonir wrote:
njvack wrote:I guess I don't fully understand the intent of having a tournament that's this long. If the idea is "make it so people have a two week window in which they can schedule a couple days of play and be competitive" then it's not working very well.

I actually think the 16 days is very effective at letting people schedule a couple of days and be competitive. You can't hit #1 off just a couple of days of play, but you can compete, and there's lots of things to go for that aren't just "win the tournament." I know I do. I just set generally reasonable goals, like trying to be in the top 100 players, rather than top 3 (or top 1). I'm currently #96, but who knows if that'll hold :)

There's about 2200 players signed up, although the bottom few hundred haven't played very much, so maybe something like ~1750 or so people giving it a serious attempt. I'd argue that the vast majority of them are not in the "health problems" range of playing too much; this thread is really only for the top ~50 players or so (in terms of real time, although it's probably loosely correlated to the top 50 by score).

That's basically my hesitation with this thread - there's a legit concern for those top 50 or even top 100 players, but I'd argue the other ~1700 aren't straining themselves, and probably appreciate having 2+ weeks to schedule games in. The proposal to have a tournament version which limited time per day and force quit would solve this without impacting the few hours a night players, but then you need someone to actually program and test the limitations, which is work. Still if someone wanted to do that, I think it'd be fine.

Shortening the tournament to a single weekend would probably be worse for more people than it's better for. Especially if you have a trip or other plans that weekend and you just miss it; it's unlikely for people to have plans on all 16 days the way it is now, so you can always play at least a little bit in each tournament.


Hey guys, I think Tasonir is 100% on the money here.

The tournament rules are only a problem for the more serious players ~top 50 or so. The tournament format is perfect for me. For instance, I was out of town the first 3 days of the tournament, i probably missed some decent points from easy combos but at the end of the day it doesnt matter that much, I had 13 more days left to play crawl. There was a stretch of 4-5 days where I barely had time to play, but again, 16 day tournament.

I'd consider myself an intermediate player, I won 7 games this tournament, placed #130, with a winrate of ~15%, averaging about 4 hours a day over the length of the tournament. My average win time was about 3 hours and 40 minutes, which means i spent about 60% of my time playing crawl on games in which I ended up dying. To me, this indicates that the reason I didnt place higher is not due to time played, but lack of skill.

I appreciate the current format. I know that at the highest level it seems a bit brutal, but like Tasonir said, the vast majority of crawl players are not experiencing that.

I still think that keeping the current duration, but limiting the *number of hours per day* you can apply towards torunament score is the most sensible approach, this will not effect the vast majority of players (as they already self-limit to reasonable play times) it's only a limitation for the upper echelon of self-abusers out there, who just *can't help themselves* and it would make a lot of people who can't (or shouldn't) devote crazy amounts of time per day feel better about their ability to invest time to play.
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Post Monday, 27th August 2018, 18:43

Re: Tournament rules can cause health problems

The play-times per day of the top 10 players were much lower this tournament than people in this thread think, with only King Poopsock himself playing more than 8 hours per day to once again dominate the tournament:

  Code:
Yermak: play-time/day 11:49:39, total time 8d+9:04:06.
ManMan: play-time/day 7:03:58, total time 5d+0:07:35.
justnoob: play-time/day 7:36:36, total time 5d+1:45:43.
n103509: play-time/day 6:18:28, total time 4d+4:55:37
dynast: play-time/day 4:42:57, total time 2d+22:44:27.
MalcolmRoseTourny: play-time/day 7:05:18, total time 5d+0:30:16.
YTcomUltraviolent4: play-time/day 6:01:30, total time 4d+6:25:37.
beargit: play-time/day 6:38:58, total time 2d+18:29:40.
bluepin: play-time/day 4:38:34, total time 3d+6:55:48.
NormalPerson7T: play-time/day 5:33:58, total time 3d+11:29:43.


I listed both the play-times/day and total times because some players quit before the tournament was over, so their play-time/day is misleading.

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Post Tuesday, 28th August 2018, 01:16

Re: Tournament rules can cause health problems

First of all, ManMan, I don't really like this title above.

Concerning "health problems": I'm not under-age, you're not my parents. So, please, fu back off.
Limiting play time per day for "health reasons" is ridiculous in my opinion. Limiting it for tournament to be fair is another question, which I think was already thoroughly discussed. I wholeheartedly agree with what svendre wrote here:
svendre wrote:Limiting the amount of time per day a person can play any of their games seems like a supremely annoying thing. It can be that some people don't have much time to play for long stretches and then have large blocks of time. Trying to limit by hours/day could punish as many people as it helps. It could also screw with people who don't care at all about tournament results and just want to play when they want to play. If someone can't regulate their own schedule to the point of becoming ill, I don't see how that can be (or should be) attempted to be fixed by altering tournament rules. What might make one person ill might not affect another person.


I rules are to be changed somehow, so be it, go ahead.

P.S. I completely ignored tiles chat during the tourney (thanks to devs now I can even hide those green "269 new messages"), if anyone was offended by that, I'm sorry.
If you spot a grammar mistake in my post I will appreciate if you PM it.

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Post Tuesday, 28th August 2018, 05:58

Re: Tournament rules can cause health problems

It is not like I expected "I cannot stop playing, please help".
Yermak, do you play 11+ hours every day when not in tournaments?
If you do, then you are an alien and should not be allowed to take part in human competitions ;)
As of humans they CAN get health problems when playing that much.
For the record in your country there is a law about 40 hours per week jobs and I can easily compare mind energy spent on work and crawl. I remember how exhausting it was to play 6 hours in working days, I literally slept less for that because 9 hours job + 8 hours sleep + 2 hours to get to/from office would allow to play just 5 hours.
Also yes, it would be more fair to compare players when they spend equal amount of time on crawl.
Based on ManMan's comment I feel like he believes he would win the tournament on "equal time" terms.
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Post Wednesday, 29th August 2018, 00:24

Re: Tournament rules can cause health problems

how about only counting the first game played for each species/background? should cut down on the grind without much if any negative impact on casual players. probably increases variance at the highest level but if that's even a bad thing i think it's still the lesser evil.

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Post Wednesday, 29th August 2018, 04:22

Re: Tournament rules can cause health problems

emikaela wrote:how about only counting the first game played for each species/background? should cut down on the grind without much if any negative impact on casual players. probably increases variance at the highest level but if that's even a bad thing i think it's still the lesser evil.
I think points for low turn wins, low real time wins and high score should ignore this limit, they require multiple runs naturally.
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Post Wednesday, 29th August 2018, 05:13

Re: Tournament rules can cause health problems

emikaela wrote:how about only counting the first game played for each species/background? should cut down on the grind without much if any negative impact on casual players. probably increases variance at the highest level but if that's even a bad thing i think it's still the lesser evil.
This would make the tournament into "last poopsocker standing" - the first time you die, you lose a massive amount of potential points. So it'd basically be a matter of everyone trying to streak every background while getting as many additional points as possible within those games (extra runes, turncount, realtime, etc.). This would result in excruciatingly slow play, except of course for the one game you do for realtime points, and would likely have the opposite of the desired effect due to there being 23 backgrounds. Of course, if your streak breaks on the 10th game, then you just give up and don't play for the rest of the tournament since it is now literally impossible for you to win, so that would save some playtime...

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Post Wednesday, 29th August 2018, 05:24

Re: Tournament rules can cause health problems

Of course, if your streak breaks on the 10th game, then you just give up and don't play for the rest of the tournament since it is now literally impossible for you to win, so that would save some playtime...
Or perhaps the point system for streaking could also be changed, if this idea is adopted...

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Post Wednesday, 29th August 2018, 11:44

Re: Tournament rules can cause health problems

The idea of limiting total play time counted for the tournament to 80 hrs. seems good to me. Some players toward the top of the leaderboard probably play more than they'd like to during the tournament, in order to remain competitive. A limit of 80 hrs. is high enough that it wouldn't change the metagame too much, but low enough that a seriously committed person with other obligations can still put in the time.

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Post Wednesday, 29th August 2018, 20:32

Re: Tournament rules can cause health problems

If we are going to put in hard limits, I would prefer a turncount limit to a time limit.

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Post Thursday, 30th August 2018, 06:38

Re: Tournament rules can cause health problems

We also hope to rework the tournament format so that players won’t be required to put in so many hours in order to be competitive. Details on this aren’t finalized, but of course we’ll communicate those changes before the next tournament.

http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/0-22- ... nt-results

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Post Friday, 31st August 2018, 07:59

Re: Tournament rules can cause health problems

chequers wrote:
Of course, if your streak breaks on the 10th game, then you just give up and don't play for the rest of the tournament since it is now literally impossible for you to win, so that would save some playtime...
Or perhaps the point system for streaking could also be changed, if this idea is adopted...


I think points for streaking would be completely redundant with this proposal, since it already makes you care about winning each individual game just as if you were on a streak.

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Post Friday, 31st August 2018, 17:57

Re: Tournament rules can cause health problems

emikaela wrote:how about only counting the first game played for each species/background?

I can't believe that you guys are actually seriously discussing this idea. The bar is pretty high for the "worst idea ever" title, but this certainly qualifies as a candidate.

An average player probably loses 20-something games on the first day. Maybe in the first hour. And then that's it, end of tournament for him? I mean, come on.

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Post Saturday, 1st September 2018, 05:06

Re: Tournament rules can cause health problems

Magipi wrote:
emikaela wrote:how about only counting the first game played for each species/background?

I can't believe that you guys are actually seriously discussing this idea. The bar is pretty high for the "worst idea ever" title, but this certainly qualifies as a candidate.

An average player probably loses 20-something games on the first day. Maybe in the first hour. And then that's it, end of tournament for him? I mean, come on.


Pretty certain they meant that you can only play each combination of species and background once, so several hundred games before you're out. It's still a pretty bad idea IMO, but it's not that cruel.

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Post Saturday, 1st September 2018, 05:10

Re: Tournament rules can cause health problems

Oh, in that case it doesn't do much aside from making speedrunning and Nemelex's Choice combos trickier.

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Post Saturday, 1st September 2018, 07:26

Re: Tournament rules can cause health problems

Magipi wrote:
emikaela wrote:how about only counting the first game played for each species/background?

I can't believe that you guys are actually seriously discussing this idea. The bar is pretty high for the "worst idea ever" title, but this certainly qualifies as a candidate.

An average player probably loses 20-something games on the first day. Maybe in the first hour. And then that's it, end of tournament for him? I mean, come on.


I would have guessed the average player plays a lot less than that. probably not too hard to conjure up the actual stats, if it matters. but yeah, it would certainly cut way down on the play time, which is the point. tournaments being over in a day or a weekend is the norm in most games after all.

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Post Saturday, 1st September 2018, 07:36

Re: Tournament rules can cause health problems

ion_frigate wrote:
Pretty certain they meant that you can only play each combination of species and background once, so several hundred games before you're out. It's still a pretty bad idea IMO, but it's not that cruel.


that would indeed do very little and is not what I meant, though I did consider it. if abolishing the mandatory grind for several days is considered cruel I guess I'm all for cruelty.

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