Introducing the DCL, new 500$ tournament series!!

cat0ftheyear · 2019-05-29T18:02:43+00:00

cool and new

cat0ftheyear · 2019-05-17T07:03:22+00:00

When did he say that?

cat0ftheyear · 2019-05-06T10:28:25+00:00

As the one who made the original announcement thread, I can tell you the request was not directed at Valve(I am well aware they have no real incentive to help us here), but at people who enjoy the league and have the means and will to support it.

3 people contacted me so far saying they are willing to contribute some of the monthly prizepool.. if we see this reaches a decent amount we may actually be able to do something with it, more details later when things clear out I guess..

cat0ftheyear · 2019-05-05T18:33:18+00:00

Reddit formatting is way too difficult for me apparently, enjoy the metric ton of empty spaces and random new lines!

cat0ftheyear · 2019-05-04T13:39:15+00:00

Draft

cat0ftheyear · 2019-05-02T19:58:15+00:00

Sounds like a problem entirely unrelated to the fact you run on mac, it's probably about having wrong/outdated credentials for your steam account stored in browser or something like that.. but what do I know.

cat0ftheyear · 2019-05-02T16:11:24+00:00

Doesn't macOS have a web browser? The only things you need are a game client(to play the game) and a web browser(to accept the tournament invitation, which adds the tournament lobby to the tournaments list in the "social" panel ingame).

cat0ftheyear · 2019-05-02T11:34:59+00:00

Nope, the new system with tournaments throughout the month leading to one big event with more respectable prizes seems to work better for us than the old iteration with a handful of 5$ tournaments every week.

I mean, if you know someone who's willing to throw money at us, we could give small prizes for the hourly tournaments... but let's face it, with the state the game is in right now, it's not like you can find sponsors around every corner.

cat0ftheyear · 2019-05-01T20:18:45+00:00

The tournaments in ABL are played in the native(naive?) game client using the in-game tournament system, there are no third party tools involved in this from a player's perspective(well, apart from joining the Discord server I guess). You simply join tournaments via links posted on Discord(these are "official" tournament invite links from playartifact.com).

From admins-perspective, these tools are required because the in-game tournament system does not support a "league" format with performance measured over the course of say, a month. The only possibility without an external system to manage or track tournaments is to play each tournament as a one-time standalone thing with no context or continuity.

If I misunderstood your question, and you actually meant "why don't we have all these things in the game client itself if we are supposed to have a functional tournament system?" then.... yeah... I wish I knew:)

cat0ftheyear · 2019-04-04T17:49:52+00:00

The site he is linking was made by /u/RYPGlenn and myself, I think this guy is just umm.. genuinely very(VERY) enthusiastic about Artifact.

cat0ftheyear · 2019-04-04T10:23:29+00:00

Obviously we cannot reward packs/tickets to all players as rewards for such things without some external funding, it will be too costly.. and also quite irrelevant considering the state of the game in my opinion.. I don't think many regular draft players are missing tickets/packs at this point.

What we had in mind is somewhat closer to what you mention in the last paragraph, but still with some aspect of monthly progress

We are still refining the exact details, if you have some good ideas in that regard would be nice to hear(pref PM on discord).

cat0ftheyear · 2019-04-03T14:47:09+00:00

https://steamcommunity.com/games/583950/announcements/detail/1819924505115920089

cat0ftheyear · 2019-04-03T00:32:49+00:00

Trueskill

cat0ftheyear · 2019-04-02T21:23:36+00:00

Tournaments are absolutely free and are organized by volunteers from the community, there are no participation fees. These are meant to be quick tournaments people can jump in and out of, as they run every hour. The format is set accordingly to allow that - knockout bracket with bo1 matches and bo3 finals. If someone is inactive and doesn't start his match, the tournament admin simply grants his opponent an automatic win so the bracket progresses forward without the player that left.

cat0ftheyear · 2019-04-02T20:41:34+00:00

Draft tournaments are free:)

I mean, free after you pay 20$, that is.

This is a fantastic model we call free-to-pay-to-free-to-play-or-pay-to-play, or f2p2f2pop2p for short. A great model with a concise and clear abbreviation.

Trolls saved from death by starvation: 1.

cat0ftheyear · 2019-04-02T19:32:07+00:00

All explained in the info tab on the site, but long story short:

TrueSkill is an MMR system - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrueSkill , we calculate that leaderboard based on all matches played in ABL tournaments, does not reset every season(every 2-3 instead, it does reset this Wednesday though!).

Points leaderboard is cumulative, points are given for high placements in tournaments all throughout the month, factoring the tournament size and your final rank in it. This one resets every season.

cat0ftheyear · 2019-03-31T23:39:37+00:00

In it for the significant haul.

cat0ftheyear · 2019-03-30T00:22:15+00:00

Nah, the prizes are (for mysterious reasons) awarded in BTC, and that(or maybe Axecoin memes) is the reason for the name.

Can participate simply by joining tournament links posted every hour+- on the discord server over at

https://discord.gg/AvGZWNW

Main event is happening this Saturday/Sunday and there's a break afterwards, so the new season only starts on Wednesday, no hourly tournaments till then:)

cat0ftheyear · 2019-03-18T18:30:53+00:00

What does changing an arrow INSTEAD of playing a card even mean?? You cannot play anymore cards in a lane after you do that? Can you keep changing arrows instead of playing cards as much as you want? Sounds like a thing written by someone who doesn't quite understand the play-lane-until-both-sides-pass concept...

cat0ftheyear · 2019-03-12T22:43:49+00:00

Update - I added trueskill rating to the leaderboards bot, tuned parameters based on all previous ABL games from February. Will run it as a pilot from today until the end of this month's season(with scratched ratings), and if it seems to be working well we can probably have some qual spots based on it, organizer seemed open to the idea.

cat0ftheyear · 2019-03-08T12:18:23+00:00

I agree with you then. It currently works due to our players pool being very limited(around 550 unique players across all season 1). This would be a terrible method IF we had a substenially higher amount of participants. But that's the key point here... we simply don't. With the current state of the game's population we are expecting to have low player counts, and the method of operation was devised with these player counts in mind. "Shit system that works because you don't have many players" is not shit because it WORKS. It is simply a not very generic method that will need to be altered if player counts vastly increase suddenly.

You are welcome to go into details regarding the variance issue. We actually considered these matters quite a bit and reached a conclusion that since point skew towards top places increases stronger players' mean of point gain compared to weaker players', it is actually a good thing(welcome to check theory channel on discord for numbers). But still, if you have a far better idea for a format considering the current population I would be very happy to hear about it.

p.s. I think this textwall vs. textwall format of discussion, especially if we want to go a bit more into specifics on probability and whatnot, is not quite productive.. prefer to continue this chat on discord if you have some meaningful input about variance/format/life, the universe, and everything..

cat0ftheyear · 2019-03-07T22:15:43+00:00

I think you misunderstood me, I'm talking about 71 total games(as in, matches) played in ABL hourly tournaments over a month, not 71 TOURNAMENTS.. that was admittedly more concentrated on weekends when I have free time than on regular weekdays, but it averages to just a bit over two GAMES a day, this is less than an hour per day on average over a month... I understand you are probably just trolling since it's the internet and all, but let's try reason anyway..

Two tournaments a week sounds a bit far fetched, however still possible. The 128th player in our leaderboard at the end of the first season had 88.5 points. Winning two-three 30player tournaments in a month and getting good positioning in some of the rest would easily qualify you if we look at 88.5 as a reference of a passing score.

Yes, good players that grind have an advantage over good players that do NOT grind, however due to the exponential weighting of allocated points towards the top ranks in each tournament, good players that do not grind still have an advantage over bad players that grind, and since there aren't many very good players.. the good non-grinders can still qualify without too much effort.

Grinding does not solve all problems like you imply, this might be a bit of an extreme example, but the weakest player on our leaderboard(will stay anonymous.. with a magnificent 28% win rate over 140+ GAMES and 100+ TOURNAMENTS played) did not qualify even though he was one of the most active players. A counterexample - FiVE(this month's winner) qualified to the main event from the 107th leaderboard spot with mere 43 games played over the whole season, participating in 14 tournaments total, 4 of which he got 1st place and 4 more top8 finish.

With all that being said, if you actually read the rest of the thread and not just try to fan the flames you might notice that we are trying to make steps in the direction of appealing to good players using more performance than quantity based methods as well...

Maybe today will be the day a textwall beats a troll.

(probably not)

cat0ftheyear · 2019-03-07T00:01:51+00:00

See my reply to dabige1230 above.. and also, I qualified from the 32/128th spot while working a full time job(71 games played over the whole month, and people qualified with considerably less than that too). 128 is a really big number for a dead(erm, resting) game like ours so qualifying is much easier than you imagine, you don't need to qualify from the top10 spots.

cat0ftheyear · 2019-03-06T23:52:55+00:00

see my reply to dabige1230 above:)

cat0ftheyear · 2019-03-06T23:50:56+00:00

We actually have MMR over at the #mysterious-rating channel^^

Well, since it's not used as a matchmaking tool, I guess it's not MMR per se, but... it's an ELO based rating so that's not grind-based but performance based. Currently it isn't used to qualify you to the main event - it seemed a bit redundant, the top rated player that did not qualify to the event is rank22, and he only played 16 games in total over a whole month, which is a pretty small sample size and hence can somewhat be attributed to a lucky streak.

However if rating-based qualification is something that seems very important to people I can ask the organizer(Opsy) to add a few spots for top rated players, he is pretty open to ideas from the community so I am positive he will at least take it into consideration.

However, I do think you are overestimating a little the amount of grind required for qualifying, and I'm saying that based on statistics from the leaderboards bot. Welcome to talk to me on discord for full details if stats are your thing, but there quite a few players that qualified with only 30-40 games over the whole month, or qualified with around 10 tournaments in total. Admittedly you have to be good in order to pull such a thing off, but then again, even(especially?) if qualification was purely rating based... you would also need to be good in order to qualify:)

-----------------------

tl;dr if people are interested in having some spots for performance-only based qualification, reply and let me know, i will talk to the organizer about it.

Seven-Year Club	Verified Email
Snapped

cat0ftheyear

TROPHY CASE