Weekly Cups

So, as I observe, KZ audience finds live events entartaining. I thought that we should provide this kind of stuff more frequent. What I'm thinking of is Weekly Cups.

Pros of Weekly Cups in comparison with Tournaments:

- Tournaments (as we're observing from the current one) take too much time. Although one could say it's not a bad thing
- Weekly Cups offer a bigger room for participants (biggest Tournament offers 32 slots and lasts months, while Weekly Cups offer 16 in just one week)
- Weekly Cups offer opportunity for revealing more talants and making the show more diverse
- On plan, Weekly Cups should be played within one or two weekend days. This way schedule is maximum clear and precise, hence we have good chances to provide Stream and Commentating for every event

Cons
I honestly can't find any, although those are kinda two different things, tournaments and cups.


Structure:

-16 slots, single-elimination
- First 16 to apply go in. Every player can only participate once a month.
- 16 slots, sinlge-elimination, bo3, finals bo5 = around 4 hours of all playtime. I guess breaking the Cup in 2 days would be appropriate. Let's say 1st stage Saturday and the rest Sunday.

Maps:

Maps will be chosen randomly by an irc-bot a few minutes before the match starts, so there is always a surprise effect (one could say it's unfair, I'm up for your thoughts). If one or more chosen maps happen to belong as a WR to a participant then bot chooses substitute(s) for a map(s).

Stream & Commentating:

The point of all this is to make the event look more of a show. Hence both Stream and Commentating play big roles. I am currently looking for ones, as of now CamelCloud gladly agreed on providing both.
Spider1 is in for streaming too.

Prizes

Community is who shapes this event (that's why I posted this publicly), and prizes depend on donators. Coppenst was too kind to offer supplying the event at minimum $30 each week, perhaps even $50. Perhaps he will inspire someone else with his example but on a plan (hopefully), $50 is the weekly prize. We will see if XJ's budget could be investing some money, too.
I'm happy to say that D2B nicely offered to sponsoring us $20 each week for Weekly Cups.

I'm currently talking to leggie, perhaps it would be a good idea to even shift his challenge to a cup plaing platform. Answer is going to be given shortly I think.

EDIT: leggie denied the idea.

If donations go beyond needed sum, then rest of the money are kept for the next week event.

I thought that each week we would only have 1 winner, who takes all $50.

Subtitutes:

Of course there are always missing guys when it's about to start and subtitutes wil be taking their places. I'm not sure how to pick them, prehaps the one who was faster to respond to an admin (steam/irc) takes the spot?

Time regarding:

Signing-up newspost is coming on Frrday. All action starts the next day on Saturday.
Check-in time: 16:30. If player is not there after 5 minutes from Check-in then replacemnt is going to be found.
First Match is tarting at 17:00, then non-stop all matches till the Winner is revealed.

I posted this publicly, so hopefully, you have something to add or fix. Basically I want it to be shaped by the community, so all are pleased. Any feedback is highly appreciated.

Any help with: streaming, commentating, donating and even administrating matches is highly appreciated as well.

that would be really nice, and maybe have some sort of bigger monthly cup where the weekly cups are like qualifers into the bigger one :^)

either way it sounds nice, especially changing leggies challenge into something like a cup

That would be awesome. :)

http://xtreme-jumps.eu/e107_plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?336457

Thread I posted a few months ago discussing this a bit. Anyways it's a great idea and good initiative that we need to build from the ground up and eventually stabilize it. But I feel it would be worth the hassle, especially with community-funded prizes giving a bit more incentive to participants and viewers alike, wanting to see some awesome battles.

Most of my personal thoughts on how beneficial this would be in general are in that initial thread, so go ahead and check it out if you want to view that. So this post will be more about specific things like format, maps, streaming, etc.

Maps – I don’t think maps should be chosen randomly a few minutes before the match starts. This is basically saying you need to pretty much know all 600 or so maps or at least be somewhat familiar with them. And say a player does actually hold the record of one of the maps picked, he gets punished and has it replaced? Seems a bit contradicting in my opinion. I was thinking maybe randomize at least thirty maps from the entire pool, and further randomize that into a five map pool to be used throughout the month. Maps like fu_extreme or any other map not suitable for cup play would be then removed and replaced. We should go through the trouble of manually making a huge official cup/tournament list with these maps already removed, although it could take awhile.

I can’t really think of any optimal way to go about picking maps besides making it entirely random, which in the end is always going to favor one player over the other (no matter if he holds a record or not) just based on styles and strengths. Maps would then be posted early on in the week, with each round leading up to the Grand Finals being Bo3, dismiss two and the finals having all five played. Meaning you need to actually learn all five maps beforehand if you want a good shot at winning.

Time Zones – As it stands now the cups would cater towards European players heavily, which makes sense since majority of players who sign up are predominately from that region. Just looking at your proposed times, although in rough draft obviously, it’s quite early for me personally. 16:30 check in is something like 9 am my time, which on a Saturday or Sunday I’m most likely not going to wake up to play video games.. or any day for that matter. I’m sure I’m not the only player from NA, SA, or hell from anywhere who has some concerns about this and you’re limiting any potential players from these regions to really actively partake in these cups.

Format– Honestly I like how you currently set up the format. Single-elimination, sixteen players, best of three for all matches up until the grand final, which would be best of five. I think this provides just enough matches for people to catch a glimpse of action over the span of four hours or however long you estimated it to be. The question that I am curious about is: four hours every Sunday vs. split into two days (Saturday/Sunday)? Personally I think it should be just every Sunday because things could become messy if it’s split into two days. You’re asking every participant to free up two days in a row whereas you could just knock it out in one day instead. Also it’s kind of ruining the momentum and hype of the tournament. Like oh sick Toffifee vs Chasquido in the semifinals next.. oh wait that’s it for today come back tomorrow. Both players could be coming off a high too and then suddenly they have to play the next day. I guess it depends on who you ask though, because I could see how four hours in one day is a little taxing especially when it would be every week or so.

I like kayne’s idea of having the first three or four weeks be qualifiers and the last week of the month being the final showdown between all the winners. This sort of builds up the hype and storyline for the entire month, potentially having some rivalries being born. For example, player A meets player B in the week one semi finals, but was swiftly knocked out. Player B, feeling a bit bummed out decides to enter week two (Qualifer #2) and wins it. Player A and player B now meet in the first round of the week 4 (Finals) for a grudge match. However, you probably have one big question like I do. There would be only three people qualified for the final week, which isn’t going to work. So maybe both players who made the grand finals each week are qualified for the final week which gives six total qualifier spots if I can do basic math. But then you still need two more players to make eight and a solid bracket.. so yeah I’m a bit stumped with that one. Perhaps do four weeks of qualifiers and at the end, overlapping into the next month, maybe a monthly cup. Then it becomes a bit disorganized and hectic though, so yeah honestly I don’t know where I’m going with this.. maybe I’m overthinking it. Any ideas?

Steaming – Streaming.. okay. To be blunt, I think the current tournament has utterly failed on this aspect. The streaming was never consistent, schedule wise or quality wise. When CamelCloud streamed the quality was watchable, but he also rarely streamed after like the first round of two. Obviously it’s awesome that he streamed at all, but for these cups streaming has to take #1 priority. Spider1 also occasionally streamed but the quality was god awful, which to be fair it was his first time streaming so he was still working out the kinks. So yeah first thing is to get a watchable quality, decent volume control, all that jazz. I can try to help out any streamers with this, although I’m still quite a novice at streaming myself. I’ll also try to help out with the streaming; I just need to test the bit rates and settings with 1.6 and stuff.

I have a feeling there’s people who would rather not launch up CS and join HLTV and would instead prefer to watch it over twitch. Of course it’s totally preference, but for those people who are in the twitch.tv boat they need that to be a consistent alternative or else they are just left out to dry. Also the twitch.tv chat can actually be somewhat regulated unlike HLTV which is basically a cesspool of immature kids most of the time. Not saying twitch.tv chat is any better by any means, just that there could be active moderators and stuff.

Also there’s the whole commentating thing which some people actually enjoy listening to. I know CamelCloud occasionally would commentate, or just blast some music. I honestly don’t know how you commentate a game like KZ, since there’s not much to really analyze but rather a lot of play-by-play action. I guess if you get two people who really mesh well together and have some chemistry then anything could work given the right personalities. The problem is finding the right people, so it would take some experimenting over the course of a few weekly cups. Doesn’t hurt to try though I feel.

Prizes – Big ups to Coppenst and D2B you guys are really awesome supporting KZ. Although I feel a lot of players would still play regardless of money it still adds another dimension to these cups. As a viewer I don’t mind watching tournaments that provide cash prizes as it makes it more exciting to see how player’s styles change when there’s more than just pride and glory on the line. And for players it obviously adds extra incentive to actively participate in cups, which is never a bad thing I think. However, I think $50 a week is asking a bit too much of our two really generous donators. Leggie proposed the idea of having reduced prizes for the qualifiers and a bigger prize pool for the finals, if that’s the way we end up going. What do Coppenst and D2B or any other potential donators feel is the best way to go about it? It is your money afterall and I’m sure you guys got some ideas of your own. More feedback is never a bad thing.

Final thoughts – Overall I feel this is a step in the right direction and am glad some people are putting more effort into getting this idea rolling. Even though KZ is a pretty niche game and community it’s still cool to make what we can out of it. And it seems there are some other passionate people around here who want to see some new things come to fruition. Hopefully this really takes off, still a lot of details to hammer out.

TL;DR – Read it, post more feedback.

Good idea, but i think the price is too big.. Do like 20$, becuz there can be like 1 week all pros second not so pros, and 3 week noobies can take 50$... No no no..;\

Originally posted by CamelCloud

Sorry to disappoint you, ShoCk, but I'm not going to be a part of this. Good luck.

Originally posted by leggie

Originally posted by kayne

Originally posted by CamelCloud

Sorry to disappoint you, ShoCk, but I'm not going to be a part of this. Good luck.

must have something to do with you no longer being admin :^)

you see, this is the type of attitude that makes people dislike you kayne, clearly it's because he's no longer admin, he cant do admin work if he's not an admin can he?

Originally posted by kayne

Originally posted by leggie

Originally posted by kayne

Originally posted by CamelCloud

Sorry to disappoint you, ShoCk, but I'm not going to be a part of this. Good luck.

must have something to do with you no longer being admin :^)

you see, this is the type of attitude that makes people dislike you kayne, clearly it's because he's no longer admin, he cant do admin work if he's not an admin can he?

nothing wrong with what i said? you seem to be the one who reads it in a negative way, it wasnt meant that way.. but you just have to read it in a negative way because you personally dont like me.

Sounds cool to me, would also motivate me to play some more.

As for streaming, I might be able to help out. I haven't tried streaming CS yet, but I did it with several other games. So I think this should work out. Also I'm not sure if I can provide high quality with my current internet connection. Anyways, you can contact me if you want me to try it out.

I can help you with streaming, if you want.