Rant: The Weekly Championships

Okay, look.

I love the Free League more than anyone. I love Weekly Championships. I love the Milestone Mettle tournaments. It's a great way to enjoy PvP, they happen very often, and the rewards are pretty decent. They're all fine and dandy.

But, there's a huge problem.

Weekly Championship rewards are skewed. Ridiculous. Completely unbalanced, even. The winner of the Weekly Championship wins a Heavenly Horse that lasts for 7 days. That's cool. But they also win a base of 15 Atlantica Gold Coins, with another gold coin per participant in the tournament, with the maximum possible that can be earned 50 per tournament.

Atlantica Gold Coins sell for 1,200,000 gold. That's pretty much 60 million gold for reaching first place. And that's not even counting all the Atlantica Silver Coins you get every time you beat someone, and the Atlantica Copper Coins you get for each fight you participate in. All in all you can probably walk away with something like 70 million gold every time you win a Weekly Championship.

That's awesome. But that isn't the actual problem, nor is it the reason why the rewards are so skewed in the first place.

The biggest problem is that the rest of the players get completely stiffed on rewards. Players do not get anything resembling or even remotely compared to the amount of money that you get for winning first place. I'm not saying they should get a ton of money, but I'm saying that there should be more incentive to participate in Weekly Tournaments than to pretty much give your current server's impossibly dominating force an even larger amount of money than he or she already has. And you know why that player will continue to remain unchallenged in the top seat of the Weekly Championships? Because there is simply no way for any other players to amass the amount of wealth he has in that amount of time, short of turning into Chinese gold farmers or spending an incredibly large amount of real money to buy gold from said Chinese gold farmers.

The player in first place can effectively buy himself anything. Not only that, but sometimes they allow the player in first place to participate in the tournament on the next day, so they can play on Saturday AND Sunday. Not only that, but with their incredibly dominant position, those people are guaranteed at least one victory every weekend, which means 50 additional million in gold for that person, with no actual sizable rewards for second place, third place, fourth place, top eight, and so on. There is absolutely no incentive to participate for people, save for the small amount of money they might get for participating in the first place (which, incidentally, is trash), which only people who are practically broke will begin to appreciate.

I propose a solution to the system, of course: give more rewards all around to more players, and slightly curb the rewards that the first place player gains. This is not difficult to do, and can be done relatively easily if you adjust the way the Championship tournaments work to be more similar to the Free League time-per-game system. Not only that, but you have to rework the tournament system entirely: make it like a real tournament, with a real progression.

First off, cut off the minimum registration requirement to 9-man teams, so as to cull out the players who do not really have any realistic chance of victory. After that, determine the kind of bracket you're going to need, anywhere from an 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512 or 1024-man bracket. From there on you're going to need to see how many people are "over" in the bracket. Cap entries at 1024. Make your brackets properly seeded by separating the highest divisions from the lowest divisions as normal. However, if you have a mismatch in the amount of people (let's say you have 128-256 people, but not exactly either amount), have the lowest division/level people fight each other first in what you will call a preliminary qualifier round. You accomplish this by matching enough of the lowest division/level people so that when all the matches between those players are over, you will have effectively "cut out" enough of the lower division players to make a bracket of the proper size, say 128 men.

So if I had 130 players, I would have an entire round to start dedicated solely to two matches, each match featuring two Division 16 players with 9-man teams against each other. The winners of those two matches "qualify" into the real 128 man bracket, and the bracket is immediately generated with standard seeding, highest division VS lowest. If people disconnect, make sure the game remembers where they are in the bracket, and give the appropriate people byes in the tournament rounds, instead of simply having them play someone else. If you just have them play someone, this will skew the brackets near the last matches and you will end up with situations such as 3 people in the semi-finals, with one person just waiting for another to win, which is a situation you do not want. When you get to the top 4, and after you have decided what the finals are going to be, have the people who are tied for 3rd place face each other to determine who will actually be placed 3rd.

With this you now have a clear record of the following: 1st place, 2nd place, 3rd place, 4th place, top 8, top 16, top 32, top 64. Your main bracket for this tournament was 128 men, right? So this, surprisingly enough, is the easiest part:

• 1st Place: 64 AGC = 64
  
• 2nd Place: 32 AGC = 32
  
• 3rd Place: 16 AGC = 16
  
• 4th Place: 8 AGC = 8
  
• Top 8: 4 AGC = 8 x 4 = 32
  
• Top 16: 2 AGC = 16 x 2 = 32
  
• Top 32: 1 AGC = 32 x 1 = 32

What does this mean? Well, to place Top 32, you have to have won a certain amount of fights. You start off 128 men, so win once to leave 64, and win once again to be in the top 32. That means that winning two fights effectively gives you a certain amount of gold for your relative success. You've all of a sudden handed out a lot of wealth to a lot of players. And while it's understandable that, yes, you've just managed to give the first place winner even more gold, here's the kicker:

Earning at least 16 AGC at any point in time throughout a weekend through tournaments will lock you out from participating from any other tournaments that weekend.

This keeps players from amassing too much wealth by, say, consistently trying to place 2nd. This will make people want to aim for the top. It also keeps people from colluding and forfeiting their final match so that they can get even more rewards to allow themselves to participate again. The only thing it realistically doesn't prevent is people who, being able to win first place relatively easily, will try to run the system to place themselves in a situation where they will have about 15 AGC and then win the tournament. This is relatively easy to monitor and cap: simply enforce by code that you can only win up to 64 AGC total throughout a weekend by the means of tournaments. You've effectively set a limit to the amount of gold that can be won throughout a weekend by the means of tournaments.

Anyways, what about smaller tournaments? The trick is to cut rewards when things are smaller than 128, and keep rewards the same even when tournaments go up to 256 or 512. A 256 man bracket simply means you'll have to win 3 fights instead of 2 to land in the money, and 512 means you'll have to win four. If you're good enough, this is probably already feasible and possible, and in all reality I don't see tournaments suddenly getting that kind of attendance throughout the weekend. For smaller tournaments, simply remove the top reward amount and shift the entire thing up, so that now 1st place wins 32 AGC, 2nd place wins 16, 3rd wins 8, so on and so forth.

Having participated in, run and volunteered to staff a large amount of tournaments for fighting games (notably Evolution, which is the biggest tournament in the USA, which I have attended twice and was part of staff last year), I think the above system could possibly fix all the problems the Atlantica tournament system currently has. Tell me what you think about this, and if you're a developer or a GM, please pay some attention.

We could all use a little more wealth for being good at PvP.