I made a similar error in the cut in London. I drew a card with click one then rezzed a SanSan and tried to IAA the Astro I drew. Fatigue is a big factor.
The two-day event structure certainly cures that problem, but it creates others. It’s costing you a whole weekend to play an event now as you will have to plan travel and accommodation around the possibility that you make day two. People who travel in groups are priced into staying over if only one of their group makes the cut.
I’m not that interested in the draft format quite honestly, I’d rather just be able to go home if I don’t make the cut.
The double elimination format hinges on the balance between corp and runner - if that gets upset then the whole format falls apart. The tournament rules will have to become very reactionary in order to maintain that balance if this format is here to stay.
I used to play a lot of Legend of the Five Rings back in the day. We had Koteis, which were the equivalency of Regionals, but better (the Worlds for that game were at Gencon every year. They had two qualifying tourneys on THU and FRI, with a round of Swiss on SAT, with a cut to Top 32 on SAT/SUN. Kotei winners got a bye into SAT’s Swiss.). Those tourneys were typical 80-100+ players, and were almost always 2-day events. Most people travel to these exclusive tourneys, and are already staying, so 3-4 hours of play the next day doesn’t seem out of hand.
Simply because of the travel distances involved ('murica y u so big) I’ve gotten a hotel for the night for every big tournament I’ve been to anyway, because who wants to drive 5-6 hours starting at 1am after a 10 hour netrunner day.
I think you will see seriously reduced attendees by making it a 2 day thing, which would be the kiss of death for a game in a fledgling state like Netrunner. Already, the bulk of players aren’t traveling to their “local” regionals because of distance, another issue that needs to be addressed next season.
It’s not clear to me what the format of the Kotei is?
I can understand people going to Gencon and having accommodation sorted for a whole long weekend, but were the Koteis themselves two days?
Two day events are a big deal. As soon as accommodation is involved it becomes a barrier to a lot of people and makes the logistics of peope travelling in groups much harder. It puts a strain on anyone who has a family too.
I’m a serious Netrunner player with very few other commitments (both professionally and family) and not too many financial worries, but I would have serious reservations about playing in a two day Regional unless I could commute - which realistically means a 90 minute radius from where I live (which was none of this year’s venues in the UK).
But we’re not just talking about Regionals, it’s Store Champs too and they’re definitely not worth spending a whole weekend on.
Koteis were big Swiss tourneys, with a cut, ala Regionals in ANR. Typically, they were 7-8 rounds of Swiss, with a T16 single elim cut. L5R was like MtG, in that we played one game per round. We played more rounds, and typically had the T4/8 that were left play the next day.
No one likes playing cards after midnight. That’s drinking/business time.
The really big ones were (80+ attendees). First day swiss and possibly first round of knock-out (normally single-elim), second day knock-out (best of three). People traveled serious distances to go to them and they ran in a “season” over a couple of months, normally staggered so people could go to several. Second day there was generally a secondary tournement or two for those who didn’t make the cut in the Swiss on the first day or who got knocked in the single elim, so no-one lost out by booking two days and not qualifying.
When attendences started dropping off most Kotei reverted to one-day events and they were poor by comparison. The venues ran out of time, people conceded rather than miss their train home etc etc. And so attendences dropped off even further. I don’t know how many two-day Kotei there still are, but I imagine Euros and Worlds are still two/three day events.
I second Arkhon. In order to be a multi day tournament a viable option in netrunner atm, it should fullfill the following requirements:
It must be THE annual tournament of the season, like Worlds or a Continental Championship. A lot of players plans to attend multiple regionals and it’s quite a lot to commit 2-4 weekends in three monts timespan.
The side events must be interesting enough to justify to play them, in case you don’t make to thesecond day. I’m afraid that Draft has bad cost/fun ratio to fullfill that.
Otherwise a two day regionals will have too bad commitment / liability ratio to be attractive for lot of people.
What about Regionals capped at 32 players, but where people with Store Championship byes are able to register early and guarantee a seat? With 32 you could comfortably play in one day and even have some good final matches, and it would be fewer players that just showed up to get a promo.
Store championships here in the US were 32 players or less and done in a single afternoon easily; there were 7 within 3 hours of me. The closest regional, though, was 5+ hours away, the next closest 6 hours, which was not uncommon. I travelled 90+ minutes to get to store championships!
Unless you live in one of a dozen major US cities, you were looking at a long day of travel for any regional event. Even truly major cities missed out (like New York having to travel to Philly / Boston) :).
I guess Milwaukee really lucked out, then. 10 or so SCs within a 2 hour drive, and 3 Regionals within a 5 hour drive. Could’ve hit Louisville and St. Louis, as well, if I wanted to drive 7ish hours.
Remember, for most people Regionals will be their once a year event. But I’m not saying every event should be two days, just the big ones (i.e. regionals/tour events likely to get more than say 50 people).
Honestly, it works both ways. If you give people a two-day event, with one or more side tournements (the main one being the same format as the main event) there is more incentive to travel further than for a one-day event. My L5R playgroup and I wouldn’t have made the trips we did from the UK to Germany and the Low Countries for one day events. But we were willing to for two-day events. Heck, when I was in Australia people came from Perth to the Brisbane and Sydney Kotei. And when you come to plan it out, actually there is less difference in time commitment between an event that starts at 9 am on Saturday and finishes at 2 am on Sunday and one that starts at 11 on Saturday and finishes at 6 pm on Sunday than you might think.
I think that would disincentivise stores and players alike. Players wouldn’t be able to car pool if they couldn’t all guarantee a seat, which raises the cost of the event on an individual basis. Stores would have their events filled up by players pre-registering with a bye and their locals would feel austracised. There was a lot of debate in the UK because our Nationals were a closed event that you had to pre-qualify for, I think there’d be outcry if Regionals went the same way.
Can we stop trying to defend the double elimination format by justifying a two day format or smaller turnout? Both of those suggestions are an implicit acceptance of the fact that double elimination lengthens an event to unwieldy proporitions - which is a weakness.
But there are so many other flaws with it as well. The fact that you can play the same matchup three times is mental, and the whole system hinges on the game remaining balanced between corp and runner. As soon as that asymmetry is broken the whole thing becomes a dice roll. I think it’s bad for the game and needs to be re-examined… again!
Two-day events IMO should be avoided whenever possible, as they seriously constrain who can attend. I’m probably not going to Nationals because it’s a two-day.
Restricting number of players is not a good idea. I already think FFG should more carefully select host stores that don’t have a low number of available seats (sub-100). The objective here is to promote the game, nothing is more detrimental to that then turning players who want to play away from a tournament.
There should have been MORE regionals tournaments, likely 3 per region. That way people wouldn’t have to travel as far. I also think it is a little silly only 1 US player will have a bye at Worlds. Surely the number that had byes last year was too high, but 1 is also too low. I don’t want to have to go to a convention like Gencon in order to play in Nationals. Maybe regionals, now that they are more restrictive, should have that bye to worlds, I don’t think 24 is too many byes. Then Gencon can be some big tournament to promote the game, but has nothing to do with the SC -> Regionals -> Nationals -> Worlds structure.
I agree that restricting attendences is not a good idea. How do you grow a game when you tell most people that they can’t come?
I think we are breaking into a seperate subject here, but one observation I would make as someone completely new to competative Netrunner is that I find it odd that the whole competative season is over in a matter of a couple of months. Running the “Tour” season, the store championships, regionals and nationals in quick sucession and leaving the rest of the year bare makes very little sense in the context of a game where the environment changes every month. Why not have the Tour season in the autumn to sprad things out a bit? From my point of view, having first picked up the game in January by the time I was actually playing enough to want to go to a competition, there was literally one store championship left to go to.
I think the intention there is to leave the rest of the year for smaller, local events that use the Game Night Kits for prizes. Of course, there’s a bit of an issue there as well - basically, as a TO you have to be on your toes all year long, and plan about 6 months in advance. GNKs need to be pre-ordered, and once they’re released, they’re basically snatched up and you can’t get any until the next ones come out. If, by some random act of fate, you can’t get your hands on one release, you’re stuck without prizes for 4 months at the very least.
I agree 2 day events, and limited player numbers should be avoided.
We could save about an hour by making a harsher cut. Instead of cutting to top 16 cut to top 8, or instead of cutting to top 8 cut to top 4. This should save 2 35min games.
Swiss rounds would be more unforgiving. This also reduces the chance, of somebody just slipping in to the top cut, and lucking out on the tournament (I don´t care for this argument, but it has been brought up).
I don´t know if this is generally the case, but at all the tournaments I went to a cut to top 4 would have been fine. It´s usually around 6th or 7th place where point differences get smaller.
This is of course different for bigger tournaments, but I think smaller cuts cut be fine.
We will not get a format that is easy to run in one day. Even if we would play single elim only (no swiss) a tournament with more than 64 people would take 7 rounds. And nobody wants to play single elim only right?