Scheduled Tournaments and Swiss Pairings

Scheduled tournaments are coming in this patch and I wanted to communicate our internal roadmap for this feature. I also want to touch on the philosophy with which we approach Swiss pairings.

Scheduled Tournaments

A scheduled tournament is a tournament between 16 and 128 players that happens at a specific time (as opposed to 8 person queues that happen whenever there are 8 interested people). Scheduled tournaments are 4 rounds and award prizes based on the number of match wins you get in the tournament. They also use Swiss pairings to determine the matchups (more on Swiss later).

Our current plan is to open up constructed tournaments with no entry fees and monitor the stability of these tournaments. They will have the following prizes:

4 wins: 15 packs and 30,000 gold.

3 wins: 7 packs and 15,000 gold.

We decided not to charge entry fees for these tournaments, because they represent a significant time investment from our players. We want to make sure that they have a high completion rate before we start charging for them. To avoid having players sign up for free sealed tournaments and dropping after receiving their 6 boosters, we will not offer these initially. If we did, the amount of drops during the tournament would not give us any meaningful testing data.

When we are happy with the stability of free scheduled constructed tournaments, we’ll add entry fees and the following rotation:

Every 4 hours a Scheduled constructed tournament will start.

Every 4 hours a Sealed Pack tournament will start.

Sealed and Constructed will alternate their schedule every 2 hours. In other words: a scheduled tournament will happen every 2 hours and the format will alternate back and fourth.

As we create more formats, we may add them into the scheduled tournament rotation.

Once we are happy with the stability of the scheduled tournaments, we’ll distribute VIP codes from the Kickstarter campaign and introduce a new scheduled tournament type: VIP tournaments.

These will happen on the last weekend of every month. We may add VIP tournaments on other weekends if there is more demand (tell us on the forums).

VIP tournaments will require a VIP entry ticket and an entry fee to participate.

There will be a few tournaments scheduled to accommodate different time zones, but in practice a VIP subscriber will only be able to play in one tournament per month.

When these tournaments go live, we’ll audit the existing VIP subscribers and retroactively grant them VIP tournament tickets that they missed (because the system wasn’t up and running). While they have those tickets, subscribers will have the opportunity to play in multiple VIP tournaments.

Finally, when all of this is running smoothly, we’ll schedule the tournament for Pro Players. This format is waiting on a few more features (all of which are in the works). Specifically these are:

Ability to play N rounds based on tournament attendance.

Ability to produce discrete standings using tiebreakers.

Ability at the end of Swiss rounds to take the Top 8 players in the standings and start a new 8 person single elimination tournament (top 8 cut).

Of course, we’ll give you plenty of notice for the Pro Player tournament to adequately plan for it.

Swiss Pairings

There are two things I’d like to address about Swiss Pairings. One, prizes that players should receive after the tournament concludes. Two, the perceptions of what is and is not allowed during Swiss pairings.

Prizes

There are a number of issues reported with the Swiss 8 person queues on our forums about prizing. The majority of the issues stem from the way we hand out prizes. Essentially we run 3 rounds of Swiss, produce some sort of standings based on number of match wins with some internal tiebreakers for people with similar records and award prizes based on standings. With the release of this patch, we’ll be changing the way we award prizes based on the number of match wins (instead of standing). This should fix issues like losing in the finals to the undefeated player and getting prizes for third place. Post patch, while you may still get placed 3rd in standings (because we haven’t implemented proper tiebreakers), the server won’t care: It’ll look at your 2-1 record and give you the proper prize for 2 match wins. It will also give proper prizes if theoretically there are 2 players with 3 match wins at the end of the tournament.

Swiss Pairings

If you did a double take at the above statement, then this next section is for you. Swiss pairings come with a lot of baggage from other popular board games and TCGs. Our design philosophy for Swiss pairings boils down to 1 rule and 5 guidelines.

That’s right, there is only one hard rule in Swiss pairings and it’s not what you think:

In Swiss pairings, the server must always produce a set of pairings for the tournament so that the tournament can continue.

That’s it. Any other rule of Swiss is a guideline that can be broken. We only get one shot at not halting the tournament. This may mean that we may do this at the expense of breaking all of the 5 guidelines. So what are the 5 guidelines you ask? These should be familiar to anyone who played in other tournaments that use Swiss pairings. In order of importance, they are:

A player should not play against the same opponent twice in the tournament. The top 1/3 of the tournament players (based on number of enrolled) should not get a bye. A player should not receive a second bye in a tournament. If there is an odd number of players, players with the lowest record (or a random player among those with the lowest record) should get a bye. Players should play against others with the same record as them. For each of these groups of player with similar records, pairings should be random.

A player should not play against the same opponent twice.

We try to avoid this as much as possible, but theoretically, if 16 players enter into a schedule tournament and 14 of them drop after round 1, you’ll see the same two people playing against each other in rounds 2, 3 and 4. This is unlikely to happen during a tournament, but QA assures me that it does work.

The top 1/3 of the tournament players should not get a bye.

This is a new guideline we are trying out. Basically, The tradeoff is:

Do we give a player with a record viable for Top 8 a free win? OR

Do we frustrate a player with a record not viable for Top 8 with a free win and subsequent 1 hour wait?

We decided that the tournament integrity at the top is slightly more important. Of course, whenever possible we won’t do this because of guideline 3.

A player should not receive a second bye in a tournament.

Whenever possible we tend to avoid giving the same player a second bye. While the bye is a free win, part of the reason why we play in tournament is to play! Waiting for the next round to start is not fun. However, there are some scenarios where we break this guideline. One example is guideline 2. Another is a hypothetical tournament where 17 players enter and 14 players drop after round 1. The remaining 3 players (one of which was the player with the bye in round 1) will have to take turns getting a bye until round 3. During round 4 all of them will have gotten a bye and someone would have to violate guideline 3.

Odd number of players in the tournament results in a bye

A bye is a free win for when we don’t have an opponent for everyone. We tend to give this to the group of players with the lowest record in the tournament (at random if there are more then 1 player with the lowest record). But we are also happy to break this guideline if all of the players with the lowest record already received a bye. For those curious, byes will not affect your tiebreaker calculations when we introduce tiebreakers.

Players should play against others with the same record.

Part of the alure of Swiss pairings is that after a few rounds it is a reasonable method to find the best players in the tournament. Fundamentally it does this through pairing those with like records. Of course as most tournament goes know, this isn’t always possible and to find a valid set of pairings without violating any of the rules above this one we will frequently pair with records above or below them.

At the end of the day, our goal is to get you playing against others in the tournament in as fair environment as possible. Our team has a lot of experience with the tournament structures for Trading Card Games and familiarity with how other popular video games handle their organized play and esports. We are constantly monitoring feedback from players and certainly welcome and act on feedback. Use the link below to tell us your thoughts. I personally read all of organized play related threads on the forms and will make an effort to investigate pairings of any scheduled tournament that you guys bring to my attention (try to note the tournament number to make my life easier, please).

Thanks for reading,

-Chark

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