The Energon Pub

I see some code in HMW for Tournaments, but it looks like an unfinished aspect to HMW as far as I can tell. However, I see you guys talking about tournaments and see some info about tournaments in the news section. How are tournaments currently working? Has Burn been manually handing out awards? How are the results tallied and the winners determined? How should it work if it's not working properly? If there are some things actually working with Tournaments, can you guys provide me with links and a really brief description of what I'm supposed to be seeing in the links provided? Thanks in advance!

Short(ish) answer; for the current 'Campaign for Cybertron' tournament, I plan the tournament rounds in advance (with help from Sustain and Wingz), each a different game, in the staff forum (with Burn's full permission). I write the narrative about it and roll it out with support from Wingz and Sustain (who you may remember as Soundwave when she was also a mod here). Any prizes or rewards are overseen and given by Burn and Wingz (should she get access to the panel.)
We have varying styles of mini-game that we play, all counted up by hand by one of us. It's time consuming but very rewarding.
The previous tournament before that was Silent Night, also mostly run by myself and Burn, which was about 4-5 years ago.

The tourney code you can see there is likely to be one of 2 things...
1) Glyph ran a tourney over Christmas 04-05 (I think) where there were specific highlighted missions (they came up in red on the mission screen) and automatically counted up missions won and processed the result.
2) He also coded in a counter for the 'Althunt' game style, where a particular set of altmodes were chosen as targets and the player who CR'd the most targets won. He and I chatted about it in a bit of depth as I created the alt hunt game style a few years beforehand and they were very popular. He never got it fully running though.


I'll list the individual tourney styles we use below if it'll help? There are roughly 4 or 5 of them that we can run pretty easily, although we are facing the problem currently that the Autobots are heavily outnumbered so making the sides fair is a big issue we are currently working on.

I'm collecting together suitable links as examples now, watch this space...

Edit: to be honest there rally isn't anything to show you. The threads I created and Burn news'd in the HMW news section contain just about everything we have, and you'll be able to see the planning threads in the staff forum.

In a nutshell, we do it all ourselves. There is no working code that we know of for tournaments.

On the question of how they should work...

This varies from event to event, I'll use the Campaign ones as an example.
The original post for the campaign is here.

Althunts, are as described above. A group of altmodes are picked as a target, whoever kills the most wins. A fair-play rule was introduced recently that to join you much have a target in your team, and it must be used once a day. Round 1 of the Campaign for Cybertron was one of these. These are easy to run and the players keep score themselves.

Scavenger Hunts, a list of achievements are given to the players who must hunt these down and collect them.First to complete them all is the winner. These are usually run by Sustain, which she did for round 2. Players again track their own scores.

Scalp Hunts, a very popular game where a particular team, individual character or collection of characters have to be CR'd by either a faction working together, team or individual character. This was round 3, and by far the most popular round to date.
Complicated to score, but most of these were done via the faction forums, with various players organising the scoreboards.

War, the more traditional tourney type. These are however complicated by uneven player numbers so we've had to add in various mechanisms to help run them. Usually we would pick a particular mission set (using the last digit of the mission log number, e.g #1234560) and all of those 0 missions would be counted, but there has to be at least 3 players on each side for it to be scored. Additional measures were added in as that still didn't work, however these were only partially successful and are under review now.
Scoring these tourneys is a royal pain in the arse and even though drafted in extra help for the last one, it is considered a bit of a failure due to lack of planning and an unexpected emergency absence on my part.


Most other ideas are variations on these four styles. For example: We had a jailbreak scenario a few months ago that was great fun as the captured commanders from round 3 (who recoloured their entire teams orange by choice!) had to be rescued by two 'heroes', whilst the remaining players had to capture their teams to prevent it.

The only other thing is often the tournaments had themes like one of the alt hints were Star Wars related. I came up with a Dungeon and Dragons because I saw some connections between the classes in D&D and the tactic combos HMW has. It should start next month but high chance be down the road once the general details get worked out. How my idea been implemented is unknown since the solid planning never got started.