Cool. I think, based on all this feedback, I’m not going to mess with a good thing. I’ll run IYL5 in the same format as IYL4, more or less, to try and open it up to those folks that can’t make it to one-day tournaments. Perhaps I’ll make a later effort at pulling together all of the tournaments folks are running into a Yomi Cup of sorts.
4 Likes
I am already running a sort of capcom cup with one day tournaments as the base for it btw ^^
3 Likes
Oh, cool. I didn’t realize that was part of the NFTT series already. Yet more reason to keep IYL as a match-a-week format.
1 Like
Couple of questions for all you old-hand TO:
-
Think it’ll be a problem to have IYL running concurrently with 19XX (esp @mysticjuicer)?
-
What’s the general feeling on alternate formats for IYL? I was considering using the stable format where you lose access to a character after winning with it (I forget the name), just to try and open up more variety in the games. But I worry that folks would be put off. Should I just run it vanilla for now, and consider an alternate format in some future edition?
1 Like
I’m not familiar with the alternative formats. What else is there?
The particular format I was considering was used in the Sibling Rivalries Tournament. The basic explanation is
Conquest-style means that each player has a “stable” of characters to choose from for EVERY set in the tournament. In each set, once you win with a given character, you can no longer use that character for the rest of the set. You win the set once you have won a game with each character.
Oh that’s neat. How many in the stable?
I think the last IYL was best-of-5 for the round-robin portion, and best-of-7 for the single-elim at the end, which would imply a stable of 3 for the round-robin, and one additional for the single-elim.
I was thinking about requiring a fixed stable across the round-robin, and then allowing the selection of one more character before the single-elim. One thing I like about that setup is that it would mean that after the round-robin, players would get to tailor that additional pick based on the known stables of the other competitors. On the other hand, maybe there should be an option to evolve your stable based on past experience (you can change one character each week?)
IYL was always intended to be an event friendly to all players, new and old, skilled and unskilled. This was the reason for the round robin cutting to a finals bracket, and also for no character restrictions, (just standard counterpick), and also for best of 5.
It was designed by CKR to be as newbie friendly as possible with the opportunity for glory still present for those who prove themselves.
Whether or not that’s how it remains… well, that’s up to the yomi community. But that was certainly the original spirit, and that of Leontes and I when we ran it.
1 Like
Sounds like a pretty good argument for sticking to those rules for now, and then surveying afterwards to see how to keep going in future instances.
I despise conquest, I like to have full control of who I pick ^^
1 Like
Hi everyone!
firt of all, i’d like to thank for your efforts in TO!
For tournament format, I agree with @neigutten and @Bryce_The_Rice: i think that for newbie (i.e… me 
) could be quite difficult master all chars, or at least enough chars to win a set 
.
1 Like
Thanks for taking this on, @vengefulpickle.
One of the problems with long tournaments like this, especially with newer players, is that as it goes on people can lose interest and stop participating. Sometimes this happens if they feel like they can’t possibly progress to the next stage. The last few IYLs effectively combated this by making the cutoff to get out of the group stage as large as possible. This created the ‘play-ins’, a mini elimination tournament to decide who got to the playoffs.
Each group in the round robin stage had 10 to 12 players, and if you got in the top 5 you had a chance to get through to the play-offs. If you placed 1st or 2nd in a group you got through automatically; 1st place getting a bye. 4th and 5th fought and the winner would fight 3rd for the right to qualify for the play-offs as well. It was a little messy but it achieved the goal of giving more people a chance to make it to the play-offs deeper into the season.
You don’t have to do the exact same thing, but implementing some encouragement to keep people engaged as long as possible by keeping them in contention for as long as possible is a good idea.
3 Likes
For the inaugural season of the @vengefulpickle run, I wouldn’t change too much. I would tweak a few things, but not do anything too dramatic. After you get a feel for how the tournament plays out, then I would make changes for season 2.
Something that I used to do was to give out surveys to everyone that played in the league after the season concluded. Realistically, there weren’t too many new ideas that came out of this, but I wanted to allow everyone to have the ability to have input for next season’s changes.
ThreeHeadedMonkey hit upon the league’s biggest potential pitfall. For a hypothetical example, Joe is 0-6 going into week 7 of a 10 week tournament. What keeps him playing? If he doesn’t play, then four record warping wins are given away. This was the main problem that I thought about alot. The play-in games was an idea to alleviate some (not all) of it.
I would work on adding some other ideas if there are any to help with this problem. My final advice would be to read the IYL rules from previous seasons and put together your own ruleset and throw up a sign-up sheet. I want to see the IYL continue on as a strong entity. Let it fly.
3 Likes
Keep in mind that after the third or fourth week 19XX will have eliminated all but 25% of its participants. So if you stagger it by a month, you should be fine.
2 Likes
As much as I personally like conquest tournaments, I have to agree that probably it would be best to stick to traditional rule sets, at least for the first go-around.
I’d also like to just reiterate that I am willing and available to help organize and/or TO this event. Just let me know!
3 Likes
Cool! I’ll definitely take you up on TO assistance.
2 Likes
So, it looks like we’re going to have in the 40-50 range of players (assuming there’s not a sudden influx). Seems like either 4 RRs of 10-13, or 8 RRs of 5-7 would be the setups that work. I think I’d lean towards the 4 larger RR groups, rather than more smaller groups, but I’m curious what those of you with more experience with IYL and Yomi/FG tournaments in general think.
In my mind, the pros of the larger RR stage is that it (hopefully) keeps more players in longer, which plays well towards IYLs long-form nature, and it lets each player play a wider variety of opponents. However, it would also mean that the post-season would only be 1 round of playins, and then would have quarter-finals, semis, and the Yomi-Bowl, which might seem short?
The other thing is that 11-12 ppl per group is what IYL4 ran at, which seemed like it went ok, so I’m inclined to stick with what seems to be working (for now).
The thing to remember about division size is that it generally helps dictate how long the season will be. The best weekly format I’ve seen is “one match per week, two weeks per match”.
Players need to be in similar time zones (or have similar preferred windows; maybe I am PST but I want to play at 6am every day, so I fit better in the Europe division) to facilitate matches getting done. Then, you have to be prepared to hand out forfeits, make judgment calls on who is failing to schedule, etc. It can get pretty stressful! So those are the two major factors in getting through the season; proper divisions based on preferred playtime and doing the hard TO job of making those tough calls.
In the last season, I split up these duties (overseeing match conversations, handling disputes) among four people in relevant time zones so that those divisions would each have an accessible TO. It doesn’t make much sense for me to be the Asia TO because I’m in California, so it would be tough to actually talk to me if somebody had a dispute that needed solving immediately (thanks again to @CloudCuckooCountry @Corroyeur @Bryce_The_Rice for all of your help).
So depending on how many sign-ups you get overall, it really helps to split up the duties so that you aren’t one person handling all of the match conversations yourself.
Remember also that 10 person divisions mean a 9 game, 9 week season, but an 11 person division means an 11 week season (5 matches per week, one player has a bye and each player plays 10 games). So the higher you go above 10 per division, the longer the season gets especially if there are byes involved.
The last consideration is how to determine the playoffs. You need to keep participation high so that someone who is 0-5 still feels like it’s worth showing up to play. If there’s no chance to get into playoffs at that point, then you might end up with a few 0-10ers in each division and you have a season with a ton of forfeits.
It’s tough to find the balance!
1 Like
For this season, I’m going w/ the same format you laid out IYL4 (as far as getting into the playoffs, that is), which is to say, top finisher is in automatically with a bye, the second player is in without a bye, and then 3/4/5 play a series of matches to find out who plays against 2. Given that, having a 5-7 RR would give nearly everyone in the RR a chance to make it at least into the play-in matches. I’m not sure if that’s an upside or a downside, though…