Public Demand: Who wants to see Titans of TH, RD, BoB clashing?

[Treeburst155]

Why not go all out and play this for money? Heck, we're talking about the best of the best here. Let's go professional. Say 10 guys pay $20 US to play. The winner would get $200 US. The entrance fee should be somewhat high so that only the best would be interested in risking that much hard earned money. The entrance fee will naturally weed out all but the best.

The battles, IMO, should be mirrored QBs with the players negotiating their own games. These are experienced guys. If they get screwed by tricky negotiation that's tough. These guys know what they're doing. The final agreements would be sent to the manager in case of disputes. These final agreements would have to be very carefully worded and detailed. No ambiguities or omissions.

Off the top of my head, I think the chess system of one point for a win and 1/2 point for a draw would work. It would have to be a round robin deal I think. Depending on the number of players, TCP/IP might be a good OPTION if both players could agree to play that way. Just a thought.

Treeburst155 out.

[zukkov]

now you're talkin'! with money on the line, i'll bet there'll be a few drops of persperation running down their spines. it's the closest thing to the fear factor in actual combat you can get in a game.

[Tarquelne]

Originally posted by Treeburst155:

[QB]Why not go all out and play this for money?

Futher, facetious, money ideas:

Allow the invited participants to wager as little or much as they wish. The more confident they are the more $$ they put on the line - hopefully "shaming" others to pony up more dough.

Not an especially healthy social dynmaic, but an intersting one.

Charge a fee to view the AAR website.

[Combat Opinion Staff]

Winecape wrote:

The following players (they will represent themselves in TITANS, not their tourney houses) so far seems to be interested:

FIONN,

SWAMP,

GHOST,

WRECK

Count me in for sure, if there will be a spot.

I know Wreck wants in(he might not show it here) and is well qualified and Von Schalburg is another big one.

Swamp

Combat Opinion

Tournament House Forums

[ June 02, 2002, 01:08 AM: Message edited by: Combat Opinion Staff ]

[WineCape]

Well,

The wine prizes as such will stand. It will be up to the players to decide if they want to, in addition

(a) pay an entrance fee, winnner takes all

( wager money on their own game outcomes

© both above

(d) 10% of the total non-player bets going to the winner

The last suggested by Fionn below, which I think is an excellent idea.

Surlyben,

Thanks for showing the interest from BoB's!

Treeburst touches on the excellent "Nabla" scoring system that we use for unbalanced scenario's, which excels in the Rumblings of War Tourneys when there is predesigned scenario's and forces given to the commanders.

[ June 03, 2002, 03:25 AM: Message edited by: WineCape ]

[Fionn]

I play to play. I don't play for money. It would, for me at least, cheapen the games.

What I WOULD suggest is the following:

1. A trustworthy person volunteers to handle all bets by NON-PARTICIPANTS...

2. A certain percentage of the total money wagered ( say 10%) gets donated to the winner's charity of choice. Titan, you know which charity I'd like to donate to.

Titan, I feel that this shouldn't be cheapened by player bets or entrance fees etc ( only the best should be invited and they should get in because they're the best, not because they pay x amount) AND as you know I don't care about a prize. I'd rather make a donation to that charity we talked about.

[Agua]

Originally posted by WineCape:

I have edited my 1st post.

Agua,

Could you refer WarfareHQ's and TheBlitzKrieg to this thread so that they can foward their nominees? Please note again that players will represent themselves, not their tourney houses.

Done! Fantastic idea WineCape!

[Jarmo]

This is sounding better and better all the time.

[windstarz]

I think a field of 5 is a little too small. I think 8 would be more appropriate.

[Fionn]

[ June 02, 2002, 07:40 PM: Message edited by: Fionn ]

[Titan]

I feel honoured of my name

[WineCape]

Windstarz,

I would like to keep the amount of players as close to 5 as possible, as each will play a double match against the same opponent. This will keep the total amount of matches for each player down to reasonable proportions. I'd rather see a player play about 8-10 matches total than a drawn out 14+ matches for the combatants. Duration of this TITANS tourney should be relatively short and intense. I don't want to go as per the current Invitational.

Therefor, we NEED the best of the best combatants participating given the small amount of berths available, not just "merely the very good players"

Anyways, it seems more that this TITANS will be held after Rumblings of War III, the CMBB tourney, with the same game. I'm interested in the best tactician with a relatively less known game.

I stress again, this will be a PBEM tourney only, no TCP/IP, even if the players both decide to go via the latter route in their match-ups.

I'll volunteer to play the broker part and keep track of all non-player bettings. That is, if the board members/players-to-be here trust me.

[Combat Opinion Staff]

Originally posted by WineCape:

Anyways, it seems more that this TITANS will be held after Rumblings of War III, the CMBB tourney, with the same game.

Why the change? Your original idea is good and much appreciated. I don't know what goes on behind the scenes, but if you are delaying it then may I propose to yobobo that Tournament House hosts Titans for CMBO? Think of all the AARs.

Originally posted by WineCape:

I'm interested in the best tactician with a relatively less known game.

Well I'll point out that Fionn is a beta tester for CMBB. As for tactics, I don't know how else someone would win this tournament with anything less than the best tactics.

Swamp

Combat Opinion

Tournament House Forums

[WineCape]

Originally posted by Titan:

I feel honoured of my name

Can I take it that you have put your name in the hat Titan?

Swamp,

The reason I mentioned CMBB as the game platform is that it seems nobody is willing to host/administrate this tourney now or before CMBB's release, apart from redwolf so far. As I don't want to rush things, it just seemed obvious that CMBB would be the game of choice. Nothing set in stone though.

Of course you can approach TH to host the TITANS clash with CMBO, if they are willing to do that. Let me know if they are interested. If they are able, then by all means we will use CMBO as the battlefield. Just remember that players, thought they come from different tourney houses, will ultimatlely represent themselves in TITANS.

If TH host TITANS, then a kind request is that the AAR's should be made public on this very forum for the battlefront members for their perusal, and not only at TH.

[ June 03, 2002, 08:15 AM: Message edited by: WineCape ]

[Stixx]

Just keep one thing in mind guys.

Playing for money "could" get rather nasty, people accusing others of "fixing" a game etc.

I wouldn't advise any of this betting.

That's my view anyway.

Stix

[zahl]

I feel Rugged Defense must be represented by one player. I nominate Broken. He doesn't play much, but has thrashed some of the best RD veterans repeatedly, losing only once, obtaining a winning percentage of 90%+ and reaching RD 2001 tourney finals unbeaten. He has a positive record against everybody he ever played.

[Redwolf]

I strongly feel we should make that a CMBO, not CMBB event.

I thought the whole point was to see who accumulated the most experience in this game and can come up with an answer to everything the other titans can come up with.

CMBB doesn't really preserve some of the game-specific knowledge. Not really because of new units, but because of changed game mechanics. The more effective MGs alone will NIL a large part of the currently most effective CMBO battle style. I for one would like to see who is the best in what CMBO offered, subject to appropriate unit limits like old Fionn, new Fionn, my, Scipio or whatever rules. These are part of the CMBO experience, too.

As for running the thing, we need more umpires and/or an idea how much people trust me and people should start posting their preference for gameplay. We don't even know whether this will be Quickbattle, scenarios, designed maps with custom units placed by umpire or whatever.

[Treeburst155]

It seems to me QB Meeting Engagements are the way to go for several reasons:

1)They are the most even, especially if maps can be rejected a time or two.

2) The force picking phase demonstrates knowledge of the units (price/performance ratio, etc.), a significant part of CM.

3) It's the easiest way to do it. The players "create" the scenarios themselves.

4) Scenario imbalance cannot be blamed on human designers.

The only good (fair) alternative to this I see, is a Rumblings Of War style tournament. The Titans could even form a section for the RoW II tourney that is about to kick off. The median for these scenarios will be decided by 36 games! Balance WILL be determined accurately.

I would need six Titans to form a section. They would NOT be a part of the RoW II tourney, but they would play the same scenarios, and they would be scored with the Nabla system. The RoW II tourney would simply provide accurate scenario medians for the Titans' contest.

I see two problems with an RoW style Clash Of The Titans:

1) Wreck would have to choose which he wanted to play in.

2) The outcome of the Titans' clash could not be decided until RoW II game results were all in. We need that median to determine scenario balance!

Just another idea to throw in the pot.

Treeburst155 out.

[Redwolf]

Originally posted by Treeburst155:

It seems to me QB Meeting Engagements are the way to go for several reasons:

1)They are the most even, especially if maps can be rejected a time or two.

Small nitpick: it should be specified that a map reject is only for actually rejecting the map. No forces changes are allowed. The umpire may have to be CC'ed in setup terms to verify that.

The problem is that people use map rejects to first try a very specialized force and hope for a suitable map on first try. This especially applies to forces with many guns and/or vehicleless forces.

Note that I don't say this is cheating or anything, but it must be mentioned and specified as allowed or forbidden.

The only good (fair) alternative to this I see, is a Rumblings Of War style tournament. The Titans could even form a section for the RoW II tourney that is about to kick off. The median for these scenarios will be decided by 36 games! Balance WILL be determined accurately.

Or place selected forces on scenario maps (but maps not known to players beforehand).

I think human-selected forces are an important part of this competition. We have many tournaments to cover scenarios. In special, I know that some people here will be very unhapy when forces to play with many tanks. Not to speak of many halftracks.

[Treeburst155]

Human maps would work as long as the games were mirrored. Then they wouldn't have to be perfectly balanced (symmetrical?).

Treeburst155 out.

[Scipio]

Thank you to invide WarfareHq to this tournament. I will ask my elite player(s). No comment about the rules. I think the best ones will win everywhere.

[Wreck]

I agree with redwolf that this should be a CMBO tourney. A similar CMBB tourney is fine, but let us play at least two or three games each before starting.

I think that player force-selection is important. So I favor doing more quickbattle style of scenario.

However I don't see that we have to be limited to actual quickbattles. We might, for instance, have fixed maps for various scenarios, but using player-bought forces. Obviously this requires more work from the umpires, which is a downside. But it would tend to make the resulting battles more comparable to each other.

Regarding scoring. The easiest thing to do is to total final scores for/against, probably normalizing to 100. The problem with this sort of system is that it requires fair battles, or else symmetrical pairs of battles each similarly imbalanced. I would prefer a system that does not require mirroring battles; this gets a lot more variety.

If we could convince WineCape to allow 6 players, then we could do a system rather like that used in the finals of ROW. Players play 3 similar battles; the player scoring highest score for his side (allied or axis) gets 2 points. Getting the second highest score is worth 1 point. Getting the lowest, zero. In ROW we played three battles; with six players more like 6 battles would seem to be enough to weed out a winner.

I would suggest, just as a very rough proposal, something like this for a battle sequence. Three MEs, three attacks. In each group of three, there will be one using referee-chosen forces, one with player-chosen forces (unlimited), and one using player-chosen forces limited by Fionn's 75.

Another thing we might do is use different types of forces; i.e. an armor ME, or a combined vs infantry attack/defend.

[Fionn]

Couple of points:

1. MEs are probably the least realistic battle type in CM ( everyone rushes for flags etc, end-game rushes etc). Playing MEs might lead to a lot of gameyness.

2. I would be concerned with the idea of playing scenarios created by others as mirrored games. Scenarios are invariably unbalanced and that's going to screw the whole thing up if you go with just "straight up/down, win/loss" measures.

3. The ROW tourney thing is interesting. I wouldn't mind that at all if others are agreeable.

Personally I don't mind playing unbalanced games etc so long as some variant of Nabla scoring is used to normalise the results. I would just be wary of playing scenarios designed by others which, while the might look balanced to casual inspection, really aren't... thus possibly screwing up a few of the participants before a singl;e move is even made ( if only straight win/loss scoring was used).

One point though...

Group Titan players should have their scores etc calculated JUST for that group without reference to other groups IMO. In the Titans group you are unlikely to see newbie vs vet massacres (which are a feature of some tournaments) which skew scoring. I feel that scores in the Titans group are much likely to skew towards the median than they would in other groups. For that reason I think that the Titan group should be isolated for scoring purposes.

The benefit of this is that no-one in the group can complain that the result was messed up... they were, after all, simply compared to how the other people they played did... AND the results will probably be in much earlier than the ROW II results ( since they'll probably take longer to finish their games).

Overall though I don't think the rules matter all that much. The best player will win irrespective. What matters is just making sure everyone's reasonably comfortable with what is decided upon and that no-one feels strait-jacketed into anything. (IMO) After all this should be fun ( I know that I was in the process of arranging games with at least 4 of the people mentioned as participants of this tourney privately just with a view to having good, fun games against tough opponents).

4. As re: purchases etc. We're all adults and we've all played a few hundred PBEMs. IF we go for a QB tournament of some sort as opposed to the ROW then I suggest the purchase guidelines etc are left up to the players to negotiate. If these guys really are the best players they aren't about to shoot themselves in the foot during negotiation.

4. Alternately player-created maps with player-purchased forces seems a good way to go. That way players can't blame anyone but themselves if things go wrong.

[Wreck]

Fionn, I certainly agree that MEs are unrealistic. On the other hand, they are also very common (at least on ladders), because they are widely considered to be well-balanced with minimal negotiation.

So one question worth discussing here is: how much should Titans be about WWII realism, and how much should it be about gaming?

I like the idea of joining ROWII from an organizational point of view: it makes getting good scenarios (and scoring) easy. But it will clearly deemphasize the skills generally used on ladders: force-buying, ME playing, and more generally playing scenarios that are evenly balanced.

I also don't like having to wait for the rest of ROW to finish to get the scores, even though that would be the fairest way to do it. Fionn suggests we don't use them, but we can't really do that. Nabla's system needs many results to function well; with only 3 games of each scenario played I guess it might work but I don't think it would work very well. I think my simple 2-1-0 point system would work just as well; probably better given that Nablas might do weird stuff with outriding scores.

If others do want to use ROWII for Titans, of course I would want to drop my current entry there and join the Titans.

[Redwolf]

Originally posted by Wreck:

I also don't like having to wait for the rest of ROW to finish to get the scores, even though that would be the fairest way to do it. Fionn suggests we don't use them, but we can't really do that. Nabla's system needs many results to function well; with only 3 games of each scenario played I guess it might work but I don't think it would work very well. I think my simple 2-1-0 point system would work just as well; probably better given that Nablas might do weird stuff with outriding scores.

Also the other way round, the Titans must not publish their results before the main tourney is over either. It would allow people to tell how balanced a scenario is.