Indroduction

The following column is based on my experience as tournament organiser having hosted various rtcw cups throughout the years as well as my experience as player. The reason for the post is my frustration with tournaments having stupid, inconsistent systems, mostly because of admins blindly copying mappools and systems from other tournaments. In particular this harms the introduction of new maps because putting them into the wrong mappools for the wrong tournaments can have a more harmful effect on thir reception than not introducing them at all.

CTF & TDM - New maps

The introduction of new maps into mappools is a tricky task for a tournament organizer and requires a lot of thought. There have been many attempts to introduce new maps the ‘regular’ way through simply extending mappools of existing tournaments and I don’t think that has ever been particulary successful. There are a variety of reasons why that doesnt work: If you introduce new maps into tournaments you need to give players an incentive to practise them. There is no incentive for players to practise maps when maps are picked through a map elimination system. Not only do they not have to play them (can always just drop the map) but even worse if someone does practise the map there is no guarantee that he will ever get to play it because opponents can drop it.
The next popular map picking system is pick-pick. This is only a minor improvement. Now instead of risking to waste time playing a map players are at least guaranteed they will get to play the map if they want to. But the incentive to learn the map is still relatively small because people think that since their opponent is unlikely to learn the map they aswell can get away with not playing it - especially since noone knows if any future mappools will contain the map. Investing a lot of time into learning a map only to play it a few times is not very encouraging. Not only that but for a player who does not pick up the map instantly and then has to play it because his opponent picks it, that will often give them a distorted impression of the new map and discourage them from learning it even more.

Now from what I have seen these have been the only two systems for picking maps used in quake live. Not for a lack of alternatives, much rather for a lack of thinking made by tournament admins. I’m under the impression that a staggering amount of tournaments are created through simple copy/paste without putting any kind of thought into the system.

So what do you have to do if you want to include a new map into your tournament? First of all not every kind of tournament is suited for that purpose. If you are a zotac admin or you run a ctf lan you are not the person who should be the first trying to introduce new maps. House of Quake recently announced their new tdm and ctf seasons. This would be the perfect opportunity to indroduce new maps. But that isn’t going to work with map elimination or map picking. In my opinion the perfect system is having fixed maps for every matchweek. This not only bears the obvious advantage of forcing people to play the new map and giving them a very clear incentive to practise the map. It’s also generally a great system to encourage teams to practise and be more active, because practise sessions are more efficient and teams can prepare for games much better. On a mappool of 6+ maps where every one of them could potentially be played, unless extremely active, teams do not have a chance to develop detailed tactics. At the same time games typically have significantly more depth when teams that put weight onto practising specific maps play each other. So I would encourage league admins to adapt that system for long-term tournaments even if they aren’t implementing new maps. It’s a system that’s very popular in other games and would work great in quake live aswell.

Another thorn in my side are votes to determine mappools. They are so dysfunctional, I can’t believe admins keep putting up those polls. I don’t believe anyone seriously votes the maps that he would consider are best for quake live. Instead the vast majority of people is going to be voting for their best maps. I know I do. New maps never get voted in such things because people aren’t going to feel comfortable to play maps they barely know. There is no other way to make a new map popular than just putting it into mappools and having people play them for a while. In particular I hope that Reflux is given a chance in the coming ctf tournaments. The majority of the ctf community agrees that the mappool is bad and maps such as Shining Forces and Troubled Waters need to be replaced. Of what I heared Reflux was considered ok when it was played in pickups and it also has a very spectator friendly and entertaining feature with the battlesuit. Yet it doesn’t get included in any of the tournaments, presumably because of getting less votes than other maps. If i was Syncerror I would think twice about continuing to create maps for quake live if they aren’t given a chance for no other reason than poor decision making on the part of tournament organizers.

Duel - The Mappool situation

Perhaps if I have convinced you, you are now thinking why anyone would ever want an elimination system to determine maps. While I think it is a very bad system for serious long-term competitions it does have it’s advantages. People don’t have to play maps they dislike. In the worst case they have to play maps that they are indifferent to and in the best case players get to play their favorite maps. This is why it is a good system to use in Zotacs and simular one-day cups. Everyone is free to participate who happens to be around at the time of the tournament and noone apart from the best 3-4 players takes it too seriously. With that in mind you just want to attract the most players possible and give them an enjoyable experience.
However, the more serious a tournament is the less suited the elimination system is. Because people stop eliminating their least favorite maps and start eliminating their opponents best maps. This leads to an overall lower level of the game. A pick system is a significant improvement but doesn’t completely solve this problem because people can still pick their opponents weakest map. Which is also why serious tournaments need smaller mappools so that players get the chance to practise all maps and such ‘obviously weaker maps’ don’t exist.

Generally duel has a different problem than the teamgames. Instead of being infested with horrible maps as ctf or (to a lesser degree) tdm, duel has the problem of having too many maps. Zotac has a 7-map pool featuring t4 and Battleforged and the current ESL EMS has Hektik in place of Battleforged. A year ago the mappool looked completely different with Dismemberment, Campgrounds and before that t9. So learning a new duel map in quake live is a risky business. It might rotate out of the mappools within a month or two. Personally I’ve played with the idea of practising t4 for a long time now but it really isn’t worth the effort with the elimination system for mappicking and the constant risk of it being dropped from the pools. What needs to happen is that tournament organizers need to agree on a mappool for a certain period of time and have all tournaments run the same one. Ideally this should be a 5-map pool because the fewer maps a pool has the more people can practise each individual map and as a result reach a higher level of skill.

Conclusion

Reading over this I realize I might come of quite harsh when talking about tournament organizers - people who do this job completely voluntarily and put in a lot of time and sometimes even money into the tournaments. At the same time tournaments and how they are run is one of the key elements to the success of Quake Live that is often overlooked and decisions concerning them need to be thought through properly so that the tournaments can reach their full potential. I hope I can give some ideas as to how tournaments can be further improved to hopefully also improve the competition within the scene.