Guild Wars 2

As most of you probably know by now, the trio tourney by DnT got cancelled because of not enough participation. I know some people were looking forward to it so I was thinking that perhaps we could try to think of an alternative. Something to spice up the stale game.

Here are some options (feel free to suggest more):

Tournament

Big event, big effort, big prizes.

• Either dungeons or fractals.
• Solo, trio or full party.

I don’t personally have any ideas. I think DnT have done a very good job with their tournaments. Fractals are plagued by RNG so I don’t see any better method than KING used. It would be very hard to match either of these in quality. I think to have any chance with a successful tournament we would need some really good and fresh ideas.

Weekly mini tournaments

Kind of similar to tournaments. I’m not very familiar with how it exactly worked so any information is welcome.

DnT used to run these too. As far as I know, there was also a lack of participation.

Monthly paths

This is actually the reason why I made this topic. The idea is to promote record running, casually. Every month few paths (or perhaps just one dungeon) is selected. At the end of month, players who have the best time would get rewarded.

• 2-4 paths.
• Trio, full party or both.
• Fractals?
• 20-40 g for each winning player?

Prize pool can be a problem. 250g-1000g would be required monthly and I definitely don’t have that kind of a gold.

Any ideas, opinions or suggestions?

Weekly Bounty
Best kill time of a specific boss/ encounter for solo/duo/trio (same category – 15 gold in total x 1 slot).

Weekly Trek (community challenge) – Limited small prize (1 gold x 20 slots)
Traverse the dangerous dungeons/fractals to find the special little spot in the screenshot.

The weekly ones were stopped pretty much because of time zone issues having them on weekdays, i.e. hard to get EU guilds to stay up until 3am to run them during NA prime time and we couldn’t run them during the week during NA working time.. If they were moved to a weekend day it would be pretty easy to revive.

I think you have a good idea here. The weekly tournaments were more of a head to head grudge match previously. I think a PvE GvG concept would be cool, but I don’t know if you want to rope it off to guilds only or allow multi-guild teams to play.

What I am about to say is strictly my opinion. I think most people in this game are pretty casual and just prefer to make gold. If you want people to join these events, you have to make it so its actually more profitable to participate in it than doing dungeon tours. People also just don’t have time to practice so you have to make a format where you don’t need to practice much to win something.

Anyways my suggestion:

A Best of 2 Bi-weekly 1 round swiss style Trio Challenge :
First week you let teams register. End of First week you pair teams up and decide their paths.(Reason is so teams only need to practice 2 paths in 1 week which should be easy)
End of 2nd week you have teams compete. For every path a team wins, they get x gold and circuit points.

This is very casual friendly as teams only need to compete 2 times and they don’t need to practice every path to stay competitive.

Also maybe you can include like charity challenges like for example a person puts up 50$ and will donate to x charity if a team win. This way the competitors will know they are doing something thats helping society.

(screw you forums, why do I always forget to copy before submit…)

I’d be willing to donate if people participated and it was fun to watch.

I will say I always liked the initiative proposed a while back, I think it was Zelyhn. The idea being putting on restrictions to make people approach things differently. My favorite gameplay videos are easily the silly ones, but also the kitten impressive ones. Goku’s 2 button lupi solo is amazing, Sesshi makes me feel absolutely terrible in the best way, and rT’s no dodge Arah is always entertaining.

So what I’d propose is that type of thing. You could create challenging competitions or even just silly ones. Practicing of course would lead to better times, but people could just throw up casual runs they do in the format and maybe grab some gold for simply recording their screwing around.

Some ideas would be:

• RP walk only Arah path
• 5X profession runs
• Disable forward movement
• Singular weapons (everyone in group only using D/D or Staves or whatever)
• First person camera

I think it’d be entertaining to watch, and I’d be willing to toss gold at someone who made me laugh or sit in awe.

Monthly tournaments would be pretty sweet, I’m sure someone at Anet would payout since they’ve had some extremely good viewer figures with previous tournaments.

Fractals could perhaps be setup as a single head to head fractal and a best of X scenario, other people could be holding those maps in each region ready for each team (if people are dedicated enough?). The point system was good but it’s tough to balance fairly, I also didn’t like the use of consumables for obvious reasons.

EcoRI.9273:

What I am about to say is strictly my opinion. I think most people in this game are pretty casual and just prefer to make gold. If you want people to join these events, you have to make it so its actually more profitable to participate in it than doing dungeon tours. People also just don’t have time to practice so you have to make a format where you don’t need to practice much to win something.

I don’t know if I agree. I mean, yes you’re not wrong most people just want to farm and get their shinies. However, I think shorter time limits and different rulesets creates a more dynamic situation. People won’t be sitting there grinding it over and over just to catch a prize, but with how readily available recording software is now people could simply do whatever path is on the list for that week/month and record it and toss their best run they catch up for the competition. Win/Don’t win, whatever, no need to grind.

That’s how it often was for my old MMOs, with an ever changing set of content you really only got a month or two where you were all set up and maxed out to really approach an optimal time before you got new content and gear out dating the old stuff and rendering it obsolete. So the speed runs generally consisted of a competition on daily/weekly farming runs you’d do.

That’s what I’d imagine a shorter competition time would do. You might get some people tryharding and grinding it out to get first place but people could still win with a good daily run of whatever path with whatever rules at whatever time. You play a little more focused and maybe take a little longer if different rules are implemented for a single path of your daily tour and you might grab some extra gold. Pretty simple idea.

I do think Monthly is better than weekly in that it’d be easier to supply decent prizes. Weekly would drain wallets pretty fast.

Jerus.4350:

EcoRI.9273:

What I am about to say is strictly my opinion. I think most people in this game are pretty casual and just prefer to make gold. If you want people to join these events, you have to make it so its actually more profitable to participate in it than doing dungeon tours. People also just don’t have time to practice so you have to make a format where you don’t need to practice much to win something.

I don’t know if I agree. I mean, yes you’re not wrong most people just want to farm and get their shinies. However, I think shorter time limits and different rulesets creates a more dynamic situation. People won’t be sitting there grinding it over and over just to catch a prize, but with how readily available recording software is now people could simply do whatever path is on the list for that week/month and record it and toss their best run they catch up for the competition. Win/Don’t win, whatever, no need to grind.

That’s how it often was for my old MMOs, with an ever changing set of content you really only got a month or two where you were all set up and maxed out to really approach an optimal time before you got new content and gear out dating the old stuff and rendering it obsolete. So the speed runs generally consisted of a competition on daily/weekly farming runs you’d do.

That’s what I’d imagine a shorter competition time would do. You might get some people tryharding and grinding it out to get first place but people could still win with a good daily run of whatever path with whatever rules at whatever time. You play a little more focused and maybe take a little longer if different rules are implemented for a single path of your daily tour and you might grab some extra gold. Pretty simple idea.

I do think Monthly is better than weekly in that it’d be easier to supply decent prizes. Weekly would drain wallets pretty fast.

I believe if you are catering an event to the hardcore pve guilds, it will have a low turn out. Believe it or not, but there are a LOT of dungeon guilds in this game that no one has heard of. If you can get those people interested, I think it will really foster the growth of these events.

Competition grows over time. Speed running is not hard, it can be easily taught and to most people there is no incentive to learning how to speed run because as long as they can get their dungeons done they are happy. If there is an event that slowly trains people to speed run and heavily incentivize them to participate, I believe it can be really successful.(Basically every sport has a minor league and even super casual leagues)

PS http://www.twitch.tv/gamesdonequick is a speed running community that has 100k viewers and has already got over 300k$ in donations for charity.

I totally agree Eco, and it’s why I think head to head tournaments are the wrong way. That requires people change their schedules. Recording and posting and just limiting the time of entries is IMO a better option. It does lend to more devoted teams doing better, but has a much lower required time investment. You simply take certain paths a bit differently than you might in your typical daily tours and record them for a chance at extra money.

I think recordings are more hardcore than real time events. The thing about records is that you have to constantly reset to get the perfect run which means casual guilds have no chance of winning. Real time events are much more forgiving in my opinion. I am sure you have watched the previous tourneys and have watched top hardcore pve guilds messing up really badly. In real time events, it is more about getting a good run rather than grinding RNG to get the perfect run.

Aye, that’s true, but how many of those more casual players/guilds are willing to change their schedule?

Well I guess both of our suggestions are going to fail then :-D.

I have to say I didn’t read all of your posts. I would really ‘ve up for something like that, but we need to fix up a way to make timing easier. Zelyhn and I did indeed do a project such as this before. it was called the ascension project, and he wanted to try it again some time. It proposed weekly challenges of all formats to give rewards for and keep people busy. This didn’t give any issues with timing as it was simply the goal to record the challenge as fast as you could.

I am anxious to see what people come up with if we were to try something again which I could actually compete in xD.

With a bored community it might not be so bad to have people say “hey, why don’t we look at what the current challenge is on gw2dungeons?”

High end PvE competition entirely hosted by a neutral, democratic, and trusted body, could the dream come true at last?

:)

Oh boy, let’s not have this thread turn into another one of those.

Zelyhn Lekovitch.2867:

High end PvE competition entirely hosted by a neutral, democratic, and trusted body, could the dream come true at last?

:)

So Gaile Gray is going to host it?

If I may offer my two copper…

An event like this doesn’t really feel like something that’s catered to the casual community. Why? It’s too much of a time investment for, realistically, a very small chance at a price.

My initial reaction when I saw this post was immediate hype from the idea of speed clearing/killing competition since that’s something that I’m passionate about. But then I saw the same ol’ players with tags from DnT, rT, vC, etc and gave up all hope.

I have nothing against you guys. In all honestly, the guilds I’ve worked use with your strats to improve our own in-house speed runs. At the end of the day though, we will never come close to the performance levels that you all are at. I mean, take a look at this very own sub forum; nearly the same guilds are posting record run after record run. I understand that those are the ‘best’ runs that were recorded and published, but if I’m being blunt I’d argue to say even your sloppy runs outmatch even some of the more hardcore guilds’ best runs.

If you all are wanting to draw in a larger crowd for participation you’ll need to make the goals/challenges broad enough that multiple type of players with varied skillset can achieve. Otherwise you got a situation of a High track team going up against a Kenyan Olympic Gold medalist in a 400 meter dash.

Edit: If the event mention in this thread is purposely geared toward THE Dungeon speed clearing groups then disregard my comment.

I have no comment about events. The schedule is a problem. And most people wont’ even bother because it is too hard to win.

But for the solo records run, I think there should be a separate category for different class. Instead of seeing who’s the fastest to solo a dungeon, it can be who’s the fastest guardian or necro etc. It’s probably much more impressive to see a necro soloing some of the dungeon instead of warrior or elementalist. Though it might be a problem to maintain so many records.

@ savacli
It would be great if we can host something with a broader perspective, but its hard to do so without input from others. if you have any suggestions, it would be great if you could post them

Also I don’t think timed records are the best idea for such a thing, not just simple dungeon speedclears at least, it adds no fun factor and won’t be liked too much.

I have a probably bad idea to help newer and scared players, what if people register as player and not team, this way we could randomly form team and put 2 head to head. Like people could register saying which class they can play, and random team would be formed. I can see 100 ways this could not work, but it would definitely attrack a new audience.

There was actually a lengthy discussion about that idea Trice, I don’t think it ever happened though but it sounded entertaining.

Zelyhn Lekovitch.2867:

Entirely hosted by a neutral, democratic, and trusted body

^^Best way to ensure that nothing comes of it.

The best way to ensure something actually happens is someone who has the willpower to overcome the community’s collective ennui to make it happen.

That idea sounds nice on paper, but will have the same problems as PugQuest: how to seed players in a team? How to make it competitive and fair but not frustrating for a good player in a bad team? RNG factors and such.

NikeEU.7690:

Zelyhn Lekovitch.2867:

Entirely hosted by a neutral, democratic, and trusted body

^^Best way to ensure that nothing comes of it.

The best way to ensure something actually happens is someone who has the willpower to overcome the community’s collective ennui to make it happen.

Here comes the strawman. Let’s burn it!

I like Iris’s idea of a trek as that takes away the ‘experience’ advantage a lot of the more seasoned guilds would have.

I think something like Trice’s idea would be great. That way, one particular team isn’t stacked compared to another.

One concept we used was the idea of random builds going into an instance. Back in the days we would use sites such as GW2 Bravery, have all parties involved use builds generated from that site, and wish them luck.

Edit: We would have builds as terrible as Double Longbow Ranger. That way he could swap to his second longbow while the cooldowns were running on his first bow….because it totally works like that right?

Iris Ng.9845:

NikeEU.7690:

Zelyhn Lekovitch.2867:

Entirely hosted by a neutral, democratic, and trusted body

^^Best way to ensure that nothing comes of it.

The best way to ensure something actually happens is someone who has the willpower to overcome the community’s collective ennui to make it happen.

Here comes the strawman. Let’s burn it!

Strawman would imply that I’m just making it up and there isn’t a ton of evidence behind it.

How did you pug tournament work out? Or the Ascension Project? Or any of the other initiatives that required people to, you know, want to get off their butts and do them? These things don’t die because the ideas are bad or the people coming up with the ideas are missing something, it’s just extremely hard to motivate people.

I completely agree that autocracy has some advantages, and democracy is not better not worse in comparison.

When an autocrat is skilled then the initiative can shine bright, but it is unstable.
(By the way I am not saying that you are not skilled, nor that your initiatives are unstable)
On the other hand, democratic projects cannot shine as bright, but they will satisfy a large audience and they will more likely be stable.

I think this is really easy to setup.
Weekly tourneys in the weekends. Participating teams each pay a set amount to join, winner gets the gold that both teams paid to join.
More than 2 teams can prticipate ofc, can use separate streams to show all of them. Think 3 streams will be more than enough for a weekly thing.
So people like Nike, Brazil and whoever else can shoutcast them.
I understand that doing this weekly for shoutcasters can be tiering so I’d suggest them receiving 10% of the prize pool or something. Just an idea.
Add a leaderboard to this and it should be perfect.
Obviously big tourneys should still happen but if they do, please do it 5 man.
Trio tourneys aren’t really that atractive anymore.

savacli.8172:

Edit: We would have builds as terrible as Double Longbow Ranger. That way he could swap to his second longbow while the cooldowns were running on his first bow….because it totally works like that right?

Hey with quick draw you could get a lot of rapid fires!

Ofcourse I want the coolest stuff for the community. It’s pretty clear to me that large scale tournaments, at least at this point, are tough to support with the playerbase and developer support we have. That’s no slight to anet either, they didn’t have to give us all those gem codes and they did which is awesome, but I was as clear as could be almost a year ago to them that “gold and gems are not enough to motivate people, we need unique rewards.” Without something exciting, and I gave them some baller ideas that would have gotten the community on fire if they approved any of them, its just ho-hum gold and gems.

I think a smaller weekly or monthly series is workable because you don’t need as large a player base to support it or big developer support to fund it.

Wethospu.6437:

Weekly mini tournaments

Kind of similar to tournaments. I’m not very familiar with how it exactly worked so any information is welcome.

DnT used to run these too. As far as I know, there was also a lack of participation.

I’d definitely like to see more frequent, ‘casual’ speed run tourneys that is open to the public. I think this is a great opportunity for the speedrun scene to incorporate new faces. I think the tourney sign ups should allow for full teams, incomplete teams and solo sign ups, then allow for matchmaking at the start of the week/month so that they have time to work and practice together before the tourney at the end of the week/month.

I’d also be interested to see a ‘PUG’ speedrun tourney where we get 5 random people from a pool of participants to team up and compete, perhaps with a ruling such as no more than 2-3 people from the same guild etc. This way I think more people who do not have a dedicated team would be more interested in participating. Also think it would dilute the skill pool so that the teams are more balanced, cuz as much as I enjoy rooting for my favorite teams, I would like to see more competition and creativity in speedrun strategies.

To add to this, I think that if you are doing a open/public tourney you may want to charge some ‘admission fee’ or ‘guarantee’ to participants. eg. 10g per sign up, which you would return after the tournament if the participant shows up/makes an effort but disregarding tournament standings. I think this might help lessen last-minute drop outs or troll teams which would be a waste of time for both their teams and the tournament themselves. Besides that, you might want to reserve a few ‘neutral’ players as backups in case a team is missing a player or two and can’t participate because of this. I think there ARE people in the community interested in this kind of stuff, but the problem is not being able to get into the scene or finding people with a similar mindset.

NikeEU.7690:

Iris Ng.9845:

NikeEU.7690:

Zelyhn Lekovitch.2867:

Entirely hosted by a neutral, democratic, and trusted body

^^Best way to ensure that nothing comes of it.

The best way to ensure something actually happens is someone who has the willpower to overcome the community’s collective ennui to make it happen.

Here comes the strawman. Let’s burn it!

Strawman would imply that I’m just making it up and there isn’t a ton of evidence behind it.

How did you pug tournament work out? Or the Ascension Project? Or any of the other initiatives that required people to, you know, want to get off their butts and do them? These things don’t die because the ideas are bad or the people coming up with the ideas are missing something, it’s just extremely hard to motivate people.

If it’s a sound initiative, I would pay it myself to follow it (Best of 2014 Voting, hello?). However, as previously stated, the idea was nice, but the implementation itself sees problems. That’s how I drop out on Pug Tournament.

There is also the Dungeon Mentor Initiative which was dropped on me alone for awhile and I quit from burning out, but people have picked it up again. If it’s a good community project, it’s fated to stay alive and floating.

Please don’t put all your blames and flames on the so-called “community”.

Iris Ng.9845:

Weekly Bounty
Best kill time of a specific boss/ encounter for solo/duo/trio (same category – 15 gold in total x 1 slot).

Weekly Trek (community challenge) – Limited small prize (1 gold x 20 slots)
Traverse the dangerous dungeons/fractals to find the special little spot in the screenshot.

Time to clarify my ideas
Weekly Bounty

Target: Casual, Semi-casual and Hardcore dungeon running individuals

Format: A bounty of a Dungeon or Fractal boss will be posted on gw2Dungeons.net at the start of a weekly cycle. Participants will claim this bounty by submitting their records of the boss killing to the website. Entries will be kept unseen from the public. At the end of the cycle, every entries will be revealed and the one with the fastest kill time will be rewarded.

Gambit: To promote challenge and skilled play, gambits will be added to award bonus kill time.

Team Format: Limited to solo, duo and trio

Prize: One single bounty of 20-30 gold. Soloist gets all, duo or trio splits.

Rule set: No elementalist stacking. Everything else is allowed.

Example: (stolen from Ascension Project)
This week bounty (Saturday 1/8 to 8/8) are the Champion Ettin, Champion Flame Legion Shaman and Champion Rabbit.
Bonus time: 30 seconds awarded for killing the Champion Rabbit last. Also, an extra 10 seconds awarded for every minute the Veteran Bandit was left alive.

Weekly Trek
Target: Casual and Semi-casual dungeon runners.

Format: A screenshot of a place in dungeons or fractals will be posted on gw2dungeons.net. Participants need to reproduce the exact screenshot (with their open Hero panel). Twenty (or fifteen) most early and accurate submitting entries will be rewarded, as soon as the quota reaches or when the time expires (1 week).

Gambit: To promote challenge and the attention to details, screenshots from goating PoV or from a Jumping Puzzle angle are welcome. The challenge can be submitted by anyone; if it is used by gw2dungeons.net the challenger will receive a tip of 1 gold.

Team Format: Unlimited.

Prize: 1 gold per prize.

Rule set: No rules. Everything allowed.

Example: See picture attached.

I would say the key issue here is how to get people to participate. Rewards have been suggested but making it “worth of it” would require enormous amount of gold or unique rewards, both requiring heavy interaction from Anet. It also raises the question what the people organizing it should get, definitely not a lots of work and a huge bill.

I think the only way to get this work is that people forget about the rewards, and think what’s fun. If that doesn’t sound realistic then we might as well just drop this whole thing. Obviously rewards work as an extra incentive, but with our resources it won’t ever replace the fun.

Another issue is the organization. People who organize these rarely get anything out of it (which seems to be quite often forgotten). A heavy organization is always a risk for people burning out, especially if the result is not good (=people don’t participate).

The truth is that people don’t enjoy pure speedrunning. If they did, we would see a lot more record runs being done, even quite sloppy ones. This means any format with pure speedrunning has a high risk of failure because you will likely have only the few top teams participating.

Personally I feel we shouldn’t be doing a pure speedrunning tournament because of the poor expected return (success/work). That’s why I suggested “Monthly paths” which would be very lightweight to organize.

• Deciding which paths to run: Trivial.
• Checking the winners: Approvers just doing their job (work gets split).
• Prizes: Split any donations / entry fees.

Prizes would probably be low because it’s not that fun to watch so there wouldn’t be many donations. But the entry barrier is low because the schedule is free and you aren’t really losing against anyone.

For a big success I think we need something casual. There are some nice suggestions already and I will get back to them once I have been thinking a bit more.

I like iris’ idea, though rules may need to change depending on the challenge, why not make people try fastest 5necro kill? would add some variety and remove issues with the definition of ‘ele stacking’. Also the fee would be fine as something like 5 or 10 gold. that way we can make prizes high numbers if people show up, making more people show up.

I like Weth and Iris ideas.

The advantage is that it’s not heavy for my actual casual playtime. I think it would ensure to have a lot more participants. I would be happy to participate to both, and i know some of my guild mates too

I’m looking forward to it !

Sanderinoa.8065:

I like iris’ idea, though rules may need to change depending on the challenge, why not make people try fastest 5necro kill? would add some variety and remove issues with the definition of ‘ele stacking’. Also the fee would be fine as something like 5 or 10 gold. that way we can make prizes high numbers if people show up, making more people show up.

First, I don’t really want to force people to do a certain role (like 5 necro kill) while we are trying to cater to a larger audience. I know someone would throw a kittenstorm on a slight mention of the class, ha! It would be fine as an incentive (for example, a bonus for each necro member etc).

Second, with the current state of the game, there are hardly any challenges left for a 5-man team. Looking for people to fill a team would be a tall task for semi-casual soloists.

Third, entry fee sounds reasonable for a tournament format. However, it doesn’t sound right with a bounty format.

Last, yea, gambits are subject to change depending on the challenge. But definitely, no ele stacking must be a general rule since glyph/icebow/meteor shower are indisputably OP.

Here’s my 2 cents. For a tournament like that which is done for fun, I’d have each player register individually and then according to the number of players registered, we’d have teams chosen randomly and it would be 5 / 4 / 3 man. Obviously, we would need to have a list of the people who can stream to have 1 streamer per team and maybe having some seeds so players from known guilds won’t be with each other.

Better do some events for casuals to introduce then to your “High end PvE events” it would be better for your small community and to get potential new people into it rather than doing again some event with some rules for the same guilds over and over again and just artificially keep the “competition” for yourself and just “be cool”. Maybe people simply don’t care about your tournaments ?

Jeremlloyd.6837:

Here’s my 2 cents. For a tournament like that which is done for fun, I’d have each player register individually and then according to the number of players registered, we’d have teams chosen randomly and it would be 5 / 4 / 3 man. Obviously, we would need to have a list of the people who can stream to have 1 streamer per team and maybe having some seeds so players from known guilds won’t be with each other.

That would be great to coordinate with new people. Some fun can come out of it

Great salty contribution Bartek, thanks for the input.

NikeEU.7690:

Iris Ng.9845:

NikeEU.7690:

Zelyhn Lekovitch.2867:

Entirely hosted by a neutral, democratic, and trusted body

^^Best way to ensure that nothing comes of it.

The best way to ensure something actually happens is someone who has the willpower to overcome the community’s collective ennui to make it happen.

Here comes the strawman. Let’s burn it!

Strawman would imply that I’m just making it up and there isn’t a ton of evidence behind it.

(Not referring to a specific person) (Some quotes got lost) And this is one of the reasons, why ppl dont want to be part of this dungeoncommunity.

(Did not read all) I like the idea of monthly (or maybe weekly) paths, but I think it be more entertaining if no1 (else than the approvers) could see the runs before the end of the month. Every1 would need to do their own tactic etc and would have no idea how much faster they need to get
I also like Jerus’ ideas.

Bartek.3568:

Better do some events for casuals to introduce then to your “High end PvE events” it would be better for your small community and to get potential new people into it rather than doing again some event with some rules for the same guilds over and over again and just artificially keep the “competition” for yourself and just “be cool”. Maybe people simply don’t care about your tournaments ?

Could also be that no one cares about your comment here.

GrimmR.3541:

Bartek.3568:

Better do some events for casuals to introduce then to your “High end PvE events” it would be better for your small community and to get potential new people into it rather than doing again some event with some rules for the same guilds over and over again and just artificially keep the “competition” for yourself and just “be cool”. Maybe people simply don’t care about your tournaments ?

Could also be that no one cares about your comment here.

could be that you only saw salt on this post, cos its part true, still, you need to do sth to grow community, after that start doing tournament cos any new players don’t care about it right now.

Hey, I do care.

Wasn’t the tournament canceled because there are not enough participating teams? We are trying to design events that bring more people in. We, or at least I, want to hear other opinions about what would tempt them to do things.

This is a brilliant initiative. I have always been wholly supportive of the tournaments, and want nothing more than to see this community have fun “activities” to do that Anet promotes. I guarantee, if you can’t do it yourself already, that I can get you gem cards for weekly tournaments. I’m sure with Nike’s involvement that isn’t a problem, but at a minimum a gem card is worth like 200+g right now so that’s probably the best possible reward system you’re going to get. I’ve pushed for more, but we can’t have nice things for, you know, reasons.

I really would enjoy the monthly path idea, and would offer my services to any NA guild who wanted to participate in them as a “free agent” (lol). I’m good, I swear! I think that would be the most likely to get people involved who tend to be “camera-shy” (this is a real thing), as they could just work in private with a group to do it. I also think a month is a reasonable time frame for things like this. Weekly tournaments are stressful (I played in/won a couple of the PugQuest ones) and would do better by being spread out more if that format is chosen.

That said, participation is hard and savacli.8172 raises among the best points presented thus far: why should pubs participate when guilds are SO MUCH BETTER? This is the same exact problem monthly WTS has with its dwindling group count, it can’t motivate people to compete with the big names because the big names are so much better than they are. This is why PugQuest received a huge participation list; there were rewards and people could not only feel like they had a chance but also participate alongside the celebrity players.

I’m sort of all over the place here, but I’m just trying to draw attention to what demonstrably works and hopefully from there we can spitball a way to merge it all together into something meaningful for the community.

Just curious, did you play PugQuest as a team or as Free Agents. The difference of playing quality between premade teams and free-agent teams is like Heaven and Earth. Nick has been criticized quite a bit for his policy of making 4 decent ESL-quality pug and 12 crappy pugs just to raise the viewing quality of the stream. But he has the point!!! No one would want to watch mediocre teams fighting each other and the good player has to suffer for he couldn’t carry his whole team. If we were to do PugQuest format, this issue really needs to be addressed.

Also, you can only milk gems from ANet if the tournament has more than 8 teams actually playing :’(

Why don’t you just let each player apply individually and then randomly make teams out of 5 players, that have one month to come up with their own tactic for one path.
In the end all the “big names” are split up on smaller groups and people don’t have to be shy anymore.

Iris Ng.9845:

Just curious, did you play PugQuest as a team or as Free Agents. The difference of playing quality between premade teams and free-agent teams is like Heaven and Earth. Nick has been criticized quite a bit for his policy of making 4 decent ESL-quality pug and 12 crappy pugs just to raise the viewing quality of the stream. But he has the point!!! No one would want to watch mediocre teams fighting each other and the good player has to suffer for he couldn’t carry his whole team. If we were to do PugQuest format, this issue really needs to be addressed.

Also, you can only milk gems from ANet if the tournament has more than 8 teams actually playing :’(

The number of times I played I pugged and got pretty good teams because the PugQuest admins seeded me really low compared to my skill. I frequently ended up with Wakkay or Phant or Gengar or whatever and wrecked premade teams with our pugs. I do agree that it should be all free agents and no premades because premades are generally better than crappy pug teams, but many times a good pug team would floor those premades anyway.

I think there are team limitations for gem cards, though, yeah. They don’t want to feel like they’re just handing out gem cards for participation. ;-;

Aradox.6140:

Why don’t you just let each player apply individually and then randomly make teams out of 5 players, that have one month to come up with their own tactic for one path.
In the end all the “big names” are split up on smaller groups and people don’t have to be shy anymore.

This sounds good!

Again, the key factor to bring in a bigger audience is that you need to have a gimmick in place that puts casuals and the top teams on somewhat of an even playing field. Otherwise, you’ll ward off players since they know there’s no chance of winning unless they already belong to the best of the best. As such, I don’t think that speed killing bosses would be appealing; I’ve seen you all take down a boss faster in a duo-trio than I do in your average PUG team. However, I think Iris is on to something with her ideas.

Trek: Solid idea, the skill difference here would be limited to knowing swiftness stacking and knowing which classes to pick for the best maneuvrability. The only gotcha with this particular challenge is to make sure it’s as timely available as possible in order to make sure one time zone doesn’t have an advantage over others. This could be mitigated two ways.

-Announcing ahead of time when the screenshot will be revealed so that players/teams can plan accordingly.
-Following the first suggestion have maybe 2-3 treks on that day on varying time zones’ prime times so that players could more easily accommodate their schedules.

Back to Bounty though. I like the idea of adding a gotcha/gimmick (keep certain boss alive, kill in certain order) to make the fight interesting rather than seeing who can roast the bounty the fastest.

Alternatively, you could do something like an escort to where each team have a level 2 player that has to stay alive; downing is acceptable, but a full death would be a disqualification. To ensure that the ‘escort’ is not just hiding out in safe spots there would need to be a requirement such as the escort having to make the first hit.

Eventually, the events can be more geared towards speed running/killing, but having those events right off the bat would likely not bring you the player participation you all are wanting. In order to bring in the crowd, you effectively need to dumb things down a lot and slowly work your way up to the events you all tried to get going originally.

Edit: Dungeon Instabilities! Add some factor that the team has to adhere to while completing the dungeon. The first idea off the top of my head in no dodging.