New Competitive Dueling System!

[Lucifer]

So Rotem mentioned it'd be cool to have a competitive dueling system. I'm gonna chuck together a simple system as food for thought.

TWC Ranked Dueling

Ranked Dueling would be a new Tab (or just commands) on TWC that would have two verbs.

• Join Queue
• Rankings & Leaderboard

If you click Join Queue you would then enter the queue to duel against another person. When the game detects someone within your bracket or enough close to it also in queue (I'll get to brackets below) - you'll get a prompt on your screen. "A match has been found! Best 2 out of 3 to win. Are you ready to duel?" with a Yes or No prompt. If you click No, you exit the queue. If you click Yes, you get teleported to a private dueling arena to face off against your opponent.

The dueling arena wouldn't be a mat. It'd be something around the size of the large dueling room. Lots of space to run around, but not so big you have to run forever to find your opponent.

In this room there'd be a countdown then the first duel would begin. Standard dueling rules, projectiles only etc. Once someone kills the other person, the room resets and you fight another. The first person to win 2 games would be the winner of the match. The winner of the match would get +5 bracket points. Loser would get -5 bracket points.

When the match is over, the two people would be returned to wherever they were and can go on about their day. That's how simple the system would work.

Brackets

These bracket names are up for discussion, I'm just copying them from League to give you an idea.

•Bronze
•Silver
•Gold
•Platinum
•Diamond
•Masters
•Challenger

If you decided to join competitive dueling you'd start in Bronze with 0 points. If you lose your first match, you'd stay at 0 points. (No going into negatives) If you win a match you'd be "Bronze - 5 Points" all the way up to "Bronze - 95 Points" - once you hit 100 Points you'd successfully make it into the next bracket and would be Silver - 0 Points. From there you should get the idea.

All the brackets would be like this up until Masters & Challenger. Masters & Challenger would be brackets that would not have a cap points wise. I'll explain:

Once you hit Masters 0 points - from that point onward you would just keep gaining points indefinitely. So you could be Masters 180 points or Masters 655 points or whatever.

How do you get to Challenger? Challenger would be the top 5 ranks in Masters. They'd get their own bracket called Challenger to signify they are the best of the best. To get into Challenger bracket, you need to knock someone out of their spot from Masters. So say if Blaze was 5th in Challenger at Challenger 710 points. I'd need to get 715 points to become Challenger 715 points. Then Blaze (being knocked out of Challenger) would fall down a bracket to Masters 710 points.

So that sums up the brackets. Onto the Rankings & Leaderboard verb.

Rankings & Leaderboard

When you click this verb, it'll pop up a list which shows your current Ranking and an overall Leaderboard of every active dueler from Challenger (1st place) all the way down to the lowest of Bronze. This public leaderboard is for you to see your current rank and see how you're doing on the ladder.

Prizes

If you're going to have a system like this, you need some kind of prizes. The way I see it, you would have competitive "seasons" that would reset every... 3 months. At the end of the 3 months there'd be an overall winner for the season. They should get some kind of BIG prize and it should be noted they were "Season 1 Champion" or whatever.

Can't think of any more prize ideas right now, but prizes are always cool.

Why program all this in? Why not just organize tournaments manually or weekly or whatever?

I think the #1 reason this is better than manual is that people are lazy. When you host a tournament yourself you need to organize the rules, invite people, make sure they're on at the right time, organize rankings, blah blah blah the list goes on. Too much work involved. Even people who want to participate are likely not to because they're just busy, they'll forget about it or whatever.

This kind of system makes it so simple all you have to do is click "Join Queue" and then BAM you're a competitive dueler. You can log in, read books to level and just click Join Queue then when a match pops up, go play your match, then just go right back to reading books. It makes it SUPER easy for lazy people like myself to just join a big competition and try to climb the ladder. Everything is ogranized by the code itself automatically so no GM needed. All the GM would have to do is "reset" it every 3 months and hand out the prizes or whatever.

If anyone has anything to add, go ahead. I think a system like this would be very cool if people were up to participate in it.

[Rotem]

It's too simple it scares me, like, I imagined I'd have to study up on Elo and figure out how to properly determine skill groups rather than earn "win points".

Another question is what prevents two people from just spam-fighting to farm points? Since we don't scale skill groups based on community and just earn points, they can do this:

Let's say Rotem and Blaze spam fights.

Rotem - 0, Blaze 0
Rotem wins, she now has 10 points, Blaze is at 0 because no negatives.

Blaze wins, he's now at 10, Rotem's at 5.
Rotem wins, she's at 15, Blaze is at 5.
Blaze wins, he's at 15, Rotem is at 10.

etc etc endless increase.

Except the bracket names (I'd want to make our own creative ones) and how points are gained, I'm in complete agreement, I even already have quite a bit of idea as to what prizes I could give and to be fair, I have /a lot/ of unique prizes to give.

[Lucifer]

It's too simple it scares me, like, I imagined I'd have to study up on Elo and figure out how to properly determine skill groups rather than earn "win points".

Another question is what prevents two people from just spam-fighting to farm points? Since we don't scale skill groups based on community and just earn points, they can do this:

Let's say Rotem and Blaze spam fights.

Rotem - 0, Blaze 0
Rotem wins, she now has 10 points, Blaze is at 0 because no negatives.

Blaze wins, he's now at 10, Rotem's at 5.
Rotem wins, she's at 15, Blaze is at 5.
Blaze wins, he's at 15, Rotem is at 10.

etc etc endless increase.

Except the bracket names (I'd want to make our own creative ones) and how points are gained, I'm in complete agreement, I even already have quite a bit of idea as to what prizes I could give and to be fair, I have /a lot/ of unique prizes to give.

Good point on the farming issue. Either change it so a win & loss are equal in points (either 5 or 10). Or, you'd have to impose limits daily or something on fighting the same opponent.

Probably be easiest just to keep a solid win a match gain 5 points, lose a match, lose 5. Then people could just duel with no limits.

Only thing you'd have to watch out for is people creating multiple accounts and farming with their friends (could make it a rule that you can't do that and just impose competitive bans if anyone does)

[Rotem]

It really wouldn't be too hard or complicated to use a skill rating calculation and scale the ranks, fake accounts won't really matter as they'd all fall down to the lower ranks and just not matter. I feel that for this to have any competitive aspect we have to learn from how CS GO or League does it, or Chess for that matter, we really have to consider the skill rating of another in order to do it.

All it really changes is the addition/subtraction of 'bracket points', instead of doing a +5 it does +crazyassmath.

I'm honestly more concerned with using SwapMaps and creating theortically unlimited 'Arenas' so that we're not a shitty naruto game that uses 1 arena and if you try to queue it'll be like THE MAP IS USED, PLEASE WAIT.

I'd also want to add a timer on that thing, like a duel should take maximum of x minutes. I wonder how long would a standard duel take? Maybe 5 minutes?

Then there's the issue of disconnects, Justin wants there to be a reconnect time.

And then, last but not least, even with this system it's very important to remember this is just giving the community tools, it does not create or hype the community. The prizes would also not be enough.

We kept special wands just for this, there's also my stat trak wand suggestion I can add in. We have special title wearables and trophy objects. We can even give out portable duel system which is very very rare right now. Of course that's just a taste but I wouldn't want to give those prizes all to 2-3 people who fight because the rest of the community feels it's too hard and isn't worth the time or the trouble.

You'll notice I make a lot of fancy changes but eventually you can't dodge the fact the only thing that makes a game good is the community and this is for any game, you'd see a ton of guides and youtube videos, you'd see a friendly helpful community and sometimes even a douche community that you want to take revenge at. All those things that make you want to play. This suggestion will just give people tools can I really can't express enough how much it's important to build a hype after this.

I do plan to do this suggestion soon but just remember that when it's added it'll be wise to build a hype and actually get the community involved.

Further down the line the 'arena' system could be used for different game modes that aren't 1vs1 but first I'll get a simple thing in place.

[Lucifer]

I guess a system that does crazyassmath for points gain or loss could be cool. All I'd ask is you make it clear what the crazyassmath is based off. Because in League of Legends there's always games where you do really well and win yet for some reason only gain like 6 points, other games 25 points. It's so ambiguous.

If you wanted to go the crazyassmathroute I recommend having a visual list of what the points are based off to make it transparent, even a public algorithm if that's possible. For the points gain or loss you could factor in:

-If the enemy is higher than you in bracket points or lower.
-Whether you swept the match 2-0 in games or whether it was closer 2-1.
-How many hits you got on your opponent (although that could become skewed with people who do less hits because all their statpoints are in damage).
-How long the match lasts.
-??? maybe more.

Orrr you could just stick to the +5 / -5 to make it easier. There is something to be said for simplicity.

Glad to hear you'll work on it, I'll definitely participate it in myself. And I agree, you could start with a simple 1v1 queue/rankings and expand down the road if it gets attention.

To promote it more, maybe you could have your competitive ranking show in "Who" rank or visually display something that shows your bracket outside of the leaderboard.

Additional ideas:

• Maybe it'd be cool if the entire system actually announced when someone climbed a rank. Like "Blaze has just climbed from Bronze to Silver bracket in Ranked Dueling!"

"Blaze just reached Challenger bracket and is now a part of top 5 ranked duelers on the game!"

Yeah, the announcements could get annoying but maybe a "disable" option would suffice. Stuff like that would promote people to join in.

• Spectate mode. Once again this could lead to too many announcements, maybe there could be a non obtrusive way to let people know about this stuff. But everytime there's a competitive duel there could be an message saying "A Competitive duel is about to begin between Blaze and Banana. Click here to spectate!" and then anyone could watch it from wherever they were without needing to Telendevour or anything.

Once again, stuff like that is great for lazy people because they don't have to think. There's just entertainment that pops up in front of them.

[Rotem]

You jerk had my brain wheels going before I went to bed, I actually already made a system that loads an arena. Fights are limited to 5 minutes right now.

Each player has a 30 seconds grace period where they can disconnect and reconnect however this is per match, if you disconnect once for 7 seconds the next time you disconnect you'll only have 23 seconds.

Now I have to finish up skill rating then debug and make things pretty (add spectate, prizes etc).
But about that, I'd love any artwork people can make to make it a little more pretty.

I hate ugly pop ups and I'd even love a fancy duel image to pop up with an accept or coward away button for when a match is found.
Or tiny duel stars icon that can go near your names in Who.

What I also need is creative bracket names... We can't just flat out use League's...

[Severus]

I have to say I love this idea so much.

In terms of "hype", be aware that I would be willing to non-stop promote this. I ensure you that it's probable that I could bring in a team of at least 8 - 10 competitive duellists per quarterly comp.

[Lucifer]

You jerk had my brain wheels going before I went to bed, I actually already made a system that loads an arena. Fights are limited to 5 minutes right now.

Each player has a 30 seconds grace period where they can disconnect and reconnect however this is per match, if you disconnect once for 7 seconds the next time you disconnect you'll only have 23 seconds.

Now I have to finish up skill rating then debug and make things pretty (add spectate, prizes etc).
But about that, I'd love any artwork people can make to make it a little more pretty.

I hate ugly pop ups and I'd even love a fancy duel image to pop up with an accept or coward away button for when a match is found.
Or tiny duel stars icon that can go near your names in Who.

What I also need is creative bracket names... We can't just flat out use League's...

Awesome. I'll try to think up bracket names... if anyone has ideas feel free to post.

Also, when you get a match I don't think it should show who you're against. It should just say "You have a match. Accept or decline?" if it shows your enemy and you think they're someone you'll lose to so you decline... that kinda goes against the point of competitive dueling. Either be ready to compete in the system, or not.

[Rotem]

I agree, it shouldn't tell you who, just an accept with a warning there is no forfeit. But since this is TWC there might only be 2 people in queue so it'd be obvious but whatever!

Theortically if two people decide to log out or time out, you'd get a draw but I'm not certain how a draw will effect skill rating yet, it might have impact or "balance" things out. Basically the only way to cancel a match would be to disconnect during the 3 2 1 GO.

[Lucifer]

I agree, it shouldn't tell you who, just an accept with a warning there is no forfeit. But since this is TWC there might only be 2 people in queue so it'd be obvious but whatever!

Theortically if two people decide to log out or time out, you'd get a draw but I'm not certain how a draw will effect skill rating yet, it might have impact or "balance" things out. Basically the only way to cancel a match would be to disconnect during the 3 2 1 GO.

If that's the case, do you think there should be a dodging penalty if you leave during that time then? Whoever logs out during the countdown would just get a negative points penalty or whatever. (Or if someone logs out and doesn't re-connect after the 30 seconds grace period)

You could just count it as a loss if anyone dodges during the countdown/leaves mid game for more than 30 seconds.

So to clarify, the events would go like this:

• Two people in queue get matched up. They're asked if they want to accept or decline.
• They accept. They're teleported to the arena and quickly explained the rules (That the match is a best 2 out of 3, time limit 5 minutes, etc). At the same time an announcement or message somewhere says "A competitive match is about to begin between X & Y. Click here to spectate it!"
• A few seconds later the countdown begins. (If someone dodges during this point it's a loss)
• The first game begins.
• Someone dies.
• Duel resets back to the beginning. Message displayed to the two players "Game 2 beginning..."
• Countdown begins.
• If someone wins 2 games in a row, both players are teleported back to wherever they were and they receive their appropriate point adjustment.

[Rotem]

TWC is small and has a close developer that can answer problems instantly so I feel I don't want to add things that might make life complicated for legit people that lag. If it's abused we'll just have a GM step in then I'll patch it right away some time after.

[Lucifer]

TWC is small and has a close developer that can answer problems instantly so I feel I don't want to add things that might make life complicated for legit people that lag. If it's abused we'll just have a GM step in then I'll patch it right away some time after.

[Lucifer]

I have to say I love this idea so much.

In terms of "hype", be aware that I would be willing to non-stop promote this. I ensure you that it's probable that I could bring in a team of at least 8 - 10 competitive duellists per quarterly comp.

There we go.

[Rotem]

Everything's done except the fancy accept on queue and skill rating itself.

I'll do brackets and skill rating when we have creative names and after everything is fully debugged, it should be the easiest part of this.

Later I'll hold a server to allow people to fully debug this, it'll give them level cap and all spells on login.

[Lucifer]

Awesome!