Wednesday, 12th March 2014, 19:26 by Moose
I think removing the divisions is the way to go. They get in the way, confuse things, probably make the scripts more difficult, etc ...
If their raison d'être is to give newer (or bad) players incentive to play, I would suggest an alternative (which ironically creates as much work as getting rid of divisions rids, but at least mitigates any confusion and slotting problems). I really like the bonuses in each tournament, but for a highly inexperienced player like myself, I either don't possess the intelligence or talent to complete them, or I'm fairly confident that attempting them will cost me a victory, which at least to me, is important.
I think that having a goodly number of static challenges, similar to the release tournaments' banners would be a start. Things like:
Worship a god
Enter a branch (perhaps a reward for each branch)
Enter orc:4 before Lair:1
Kill Cerebov while in treeform with rc--- and brainless
etc...
stuff like that coupled with game-specific challenges (as it is today) would give newer and incapable players milestones and goals that they would be more likely to achieve and earn tournament points.
To me personally, my relative ranking in my division is completely irrelevant; I only pay attention to my ranking against the entire herd, which seems a more interesting metric. Also the slotting process is and will always be somewhat arbitrary, since using someone's win count as a gauge of their relative ability doesn't really measure well their ability to perform well in the tournament (though I will say tha the placings for Division I seem pretty apt).