Organizing IYL5

In a separate thread, there seems to be interest in getting an IYL run this year. I figured I’d make this thread to put in the thoughts I had about things that need to happen to make it go, so that others can chime in (or take it over, if they want to run it).

So, miscellaneous TODO:

  • Get access to https://iyl.challonge.com, and create a place for people to sign up
    • @Leontes, do you own that organization? I saw that you created at least one of the tournaments for IYL4.
  • Decide on a time frame that won’t conflict horribly w/ other running tournaments
  • Post to the SirlinGames forum (use this as the signup thread?)
  • [s]Post to Yomi | Morningstar Sanctuary
  • Post to Reddit
  • Get retweeted by the SirlinGames Twitter account (?)
  • Get onto the SirlinGames Events page
  • Post (multiple times?) to the SirlinGames #Yomi discord
  • Post inside the Steam chat
  • Make a google calendar to put matches onto so that interested parties can find out when they are happening
  • Set up a page with the embedded IYL calendar on it for easy linking
  • Make a twitter account for tweeting IYL things to spread the word (?)
  • Auto-tweet about upcoming IYL matches that are on the calendar
  • Create a bitly short-link for the IYL signup page
  • Fund a pot (?) (It seems like there was no pot for IYL4, but many of the current tournaments do have a prize pool)

I’m sure there are lots of things I’m missing, so chime in!

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I’ve created a Twitter account. Follow (and retweet) @IntlYomiLeague.

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You definitely have a good handle on the social media aspect. This was something that I never did. I used the Steam forums (almost useless), in game chat (probably not as helpful now), and the old forums to promote the IYL. I am definitely interested to see how your campaign turns out.

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A couple of things you’ll need to do:

  • Decide on a format. Maybe wait on this until you have an idea of how many people are going to sing up. But you’ll want to have at least a few formats in mind. IYL was a one-match-a-week event that had several divisions (typically based on player time zone-ish) that played round robin to determine top 2 (or 3?) but with a smaller number of sign-ups, you might want to just do double elim.

  • Figure out how to handle double KOs. Figure out how to handle ties and forfeits in round robin format, if you’re using that.

  • Figure out how you’re going to get matches scheduled between people who may not use the same forums. Typically this has been done with PMs sent over forums, but if you have sign ups from people who are only active in one place, or who are banned from posting in one place, you’ll want to state how this is going to occur.

  • Get some people to help you run the event. Obviously more important the larger the event is. Even if its small, you’ll prob want at least one person who’s run or helped run and event before to be available to help make judgement calls, or to give their opinion on weird situations that come up. I’m happy to help in that capacity.

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The last time I contacted Leontes about IYL he didn’t reply. I don’t know if he’s just busy, lost interest, or isn’t allowed.
As for me, I’ve lost most of my interest in yomi.

If you particularly need any advice from a guy who helped run two seasons though, I can probably give some insight.
I can also post a link to the ruleset we were using too.

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I found http://game.fantasystrike.com/forums/index.php?threads/international-yomi-league-4-official-signup-thread.11483/, and was planning on using basically the same ruleset from that. Although, to @mysticjuicer’s point, I’ll consider an alternate format if we don’t get enough players for a Round Robin first. (Although, maybe it would work, even with only one or two groups, just to give folks more opportunities to play more different opponents?)

@Bryce_The_Rice, do you have access to the IYL organization on challonge? I’d love to be able to use that, if I can find a previous owner to give me access.

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Whoops! Honestly just really busy with everything else and I probably missed it. Sorry Bomber :frowning:

I approve of trying to run/organize another large scale Yomi event! I always wondered what the best way to do it was. Should it be the weekly format? A series of 1 day qualifier tournaments resulting in a big 1 day event (Capcom Cup?) When we had tons of players in IYL3, it took four of us just to handle the conversations, so the weekly format is possible, just very difficult.

I feel like league format = easier on players, harder on TOs, and single day tournament = easier on TOs, harder on players. It was always in our best interest in the past to make it as easy as possible for players to participate, but our audience now is possibly mostly veterans and hardcore fans who wouldn’t really need a league format to ease them into playing.

So I’m kind of more interested in seeing single day tournaments at this point. Something to get a lot of players online and on the server at once, and provide big spectacles for streaming. It’s been too long since I’ve fired up the ol Twitcheroo and I’d love to be able to stream a full day of Yomi again.

If the weekly league format ends up happening, that’s okay, too! What I tried to do in IYL4 was encourage players to schedule matches on Fridays so there would be 3-4 games going that evening, so that streamers would know when to be around and spectators could flood the rooms. I just don’t think it benefits the community THAT much to have silent private matches being played at random times etc.

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Yeah, that all makes a lot of sense.

One of the things I’d love to get out of this IYL, if it’s possible, is to actually make it possible to enlarge the community. To that end, trying to figure out a tournament format that a) doesn’t need any given player to be in every week, and b) let’s you start in the middle without being penalized too much would be awesome. Also, having things happening weekly, so that any new players can be sure to be able to join in without waiting too long would be a nice benefit as well. So, maybe a bunch of weekly events/one-day tourneys that award points, leading up to a large tournament at the end (much like the Capcom Cup, as you were saying).

Having weekly tournaments would also give the opportunity to run a number of different formats (19xx meta, mirror matches, or other types of semi-restricted formats), which might help widen set of characters played over the season (although I wouldn’t want to step on @mysticjuicer toes, or any other folks that have ongoing tournament series). In fact, if this is the way that IYL goes this year, then I’d love to partner up with other folks running tournaments to perhaps include their results in the IYL point standings, as it were.

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My personal preference always leant towards the single match per week rather than one day tournaments, due to living in Australia and often having difficulty committing several hours at awkward times.
But I guess there aren’t many people my time zone that play Yomi. IYL was roughly 60% Americans from what I recall, so it’s probably not a huge deal.

I would be very careful about transforming the IYL from weekly match play to another form of tournament/hybrid. Historically, single day events have much lower turn outs. I eventually gave up on single day tournaments altogether because we struggled to get eight players for two consecutive tournaments.

This community has always (since my 2014 involvement) had larger turnouts for long form tournaments. I think it is because showing up at a tournament start time is more difficult than a match that the player schedules. I know this is the way it usually works better for me and can only assume based upon the numbers that this is the case for others, as well.

I must admit that I strongly prefer the season format. The IYL was modeled similar to the National Football League season and playoff structure… The reasoning was that the NFL has the strongest regular season meaning of all the sports that I follow. The premise was simple. Have a 12-16 match season and allow the top 30-40 percent of players into the playoffs. Most of the matches would have tension and mean something.

The season is just long enough to allow for some losses (this really helped to distinguish the IYL from double elim tourneys, i.e. you could lose more than twice), but you cannot afford to let the losses pile up or you will be out of playoff contention.

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The thing that makes IYL so good is the format. Weekly, round-robin league in usefully sized divisions, based on active timezone. If it’s going to be a different format then I’d say just make a new tournament with a new name.

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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.

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I am already running a sort of capcom cup with one day tournaments as the base for it btw ^^

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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.

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Couple of questions for all you old-hand TO:

  1. Think it’ll be a problem to have IYL running concurrently with 19XX (esp @mysticjuicer)?

  2. 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?

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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.

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