What (vanilla-ish) S-Tier would you love to see added to the calendar?

[Admin]

If EGCTV was in a position to add another online S-Tier event to the calendar, what would you most like to see? Question might not be totally hypothetical

Taking into account:

Feasible in current game state (ie Nations Cup might be hard due to depth of player base and Hidden Cup hard due to lack of replays).
Most likely 1v1 or at least including 1v1.
A relatively vanilla ruleset that broadly mimics ladder games.
Broadcast friendly (creates big, top level matches).

Interested in opinions!

 

[ZertoN]

16 or 32 player tournament, group stage into single elimination. maybe a few weekends long, including qualifiers.

 

[MrMerlin]

I would love to see a Hidden Cup for Aoe4.
I feel like it would be great for viewership too as it engages the audiance much more with them trying to guess the players

 

[Shawn_Flint]

if u want a long series i have an idea but it might be a bit boring on the early part, first pick the best player for every civ, my first idea is having 1-2 days mirror tournament for every civ so we can have someone that can be considered the best option to play that civ, lets call that stage civil war, and then after every civilization consolidate their power under one ruler (winner of each civ mirror tournament) they will move to world domination stage, on this stage the one that "rule" the civ will keep playing the same civ until the tournament finish. The unique part regarding the world domination stage is that one can subjugate others. So how this work is that during the first round of the stage, the loser will be subjugated by the winner so the winner can bring the subjugated civ into the next round as teammate, however the teammate will be limited into dark age, the only way to remove the limit of your subjugated teammate is by subjugating more civ, so if u have 2 civ subjugated you will unlock feudal, 3 civ will unlock castle, and 4 civ will unlock imperial. However even if you subjugated more than 1 civ you can only pick one of them to accompany you and you can not change which player play which civ. Player can only be subjugated when they have no subjugated civ, if they have subjugated civ and then lost, the loser would lost 1 subjugated civ and it will be given to the winner. After the 2nd round (the 2v2 part because each winner from 1st round would have subjugated 1 civ) the way the bracket works will change, the admin will decide the seeding and then each non subjugated players will have a turn to pick who they will "invade" (basically pick their opponent) starting from the 1st seed then going down. If it is too long waiting the match 1 by 1, you can add the rule of the lower seeds turn will be removed once they got picked by a higher seed so the next turn will come faster, to make it faster also can limit the game into BO3 for each round in case some players keep going back and forth on the subjugated numbers or limit the numbers that can be subjugated into 4 and if defeating a 5th civ will make the 5th civ player get eliminated.

 

[CrackedyHere]

I would also like to see a hidden cup style tournament. I think players playing against each other without knowing who their opponent might be would lead to a very different playstyle for a lot of them in a vanilla setting.

 

[CrackedyHere]

I would also like to see a hidden cup style tournament. I think players playing against each other without knowing who their opponent might be would lead to a very different playstyle for a lot of them in a vanilla setting.

This would also lead to a big community involvement in viewers being able to guess who might be who. In order to further hide identities we may however need a mod so that players will not be able to tell what server they will be playing on at all. Like a third player/admin that hosts the game on a designated server (all players will need to submit their pings for each server beforehand) and that host deciding on the server without altering the game map and without actually spawning into the game (hope this is possible somehow since it would definetly help in hiding identities when players aren't able to deduct what continent their opponent is playing on based on server).

 

[Admin]

Some feedback so far:

Re @MrMerlin and HC idea. I also like this because it's exciting and vanilla at the same time. The question is one of feasibility. Like in the current game is it possible to pull this off? I'm looking at Crackedy's POV but thinking it would in reality be even more difficult than this. In AOE2 the tournament relies very heavily on replays because then it's super easy to pull off. I'd be very worried doing this that there would simply be such a high chance of a spoiler than would immediately ruin it.

@ZertoN I think we'd broadly do this, but still need an identity. We have done tournament before that had no identity. I feel everything we have done so far has had a quite strong identity (well most have) which is what has helped our success. Genesis was about being first, RtRB was all about the LAN, Golden League is unique. I think this needs something identifiable too.

@Shawn_Flint I think this would play out okay but a couple of issues. First is that I'd be worried the novelty of so many mirrors would very quickly wear off. The second and more significant is the issue of 'audience education'. This is where a lot of TO's go wrong (in my humble opinion). Some formats might be great for players and interesting on a deep level, but concepts have to be easy to communicate very quickly to a mass audience that may be only interested in coming in and out. This would be hard. The best events in AOE (HC, KOTD, GL, NAC) can be explained in a sentence or two.

 

[Justa5]

I would love to see a first all-kill format team tournament in aoe4 where teams of 4 play a series of 1v1s. The team captains would draft the maps first and announce the first player from each team to play on map 1, then the winner stays on while the losing team selects another member to play on map 2 vs winner of map 1. Now for fairness and entertainment quality, it would be best if we could limit 1 top 16 player per team so its not just auto win on team formation. If we do 4 player teams with team captains applying first based on ATR (i.e. captains can form the team after application deadline and submit the roster until next deadline) and limit the tournament to 16 teams, you could cover 4 bo5's per day so all 16 teams could play over 1 weekend for each round (number of rounds would depend on you), and after all the rounds (like 3-5), 8 teams advance to bo7 quater finals, bo7 finals and bo9 grand finals. Since theres only 4 players per team, you would have a reset after last team member is eliminated, with exception that last player eliminated could not play a subsequent map after his elimination.

In this case I am sure we would get the top 16-20 atr players having their own team so neither of the teams would be utterly broken. And since its essential a series of bo1s, upsets would be more likely and fun to watch. In this case a lower overall ranked team could take out a higher rated team.

 

[pm303]

If you plan to do team tournaments again, I think it should be more different from the solo ones.

One way to do help with this is to limit the impact of individual skills (which inevitably come into play) as much as possible.

For example, the smaller the team is, the bigger this influence of an individual will be. So favour 4v4. Please.

Of course, you know my opinion on Jousting Fields which is a wonderful creation, but does not meet the primary objective by design.

I would like to see a smaller tournament (one day?) with only women.

 

[LucifroN7]

Teams of 2 players: 1x bo1 2v2 followed by 4x bo2 1v1 (A1 vs A2, B1 vs B2, B1 vs A2, A1 vs B2). The first team to win 5 maps wins, min number of games being 5 and max 9 per series.

Groupstage into single/double elim bracket.

 

[SNORESSS]

Teams tournament 3's and/or 4's where teams are drafted by captains. Top 8 ATR players are captain and #8 picks first for the first and second draft round but 3rd round it snakes and #1 gets their 3rd pick and first pick of the alternate for 4s.

 

[BigOleGiraffe]

Maybe something simalar to starcraft leauge, but slightly changed. Top 32 draft by top 8 (8 teams of 4) snake draft. bof 9 brackets of 1 v 1 with rotating players from your team. the diffrence is the anchor match is a 4 v 4.

 

[GiveUAnxiety]

I will just put out there that any type of team format will make scheduling and time requirements even harder then they currently are. What happens if your teammate has to miss 1 week? Then your tournament just ends.

Also any type of tournament with only the top 32 I think is a really bad idea for the overall community. A lot if not most good streamers might not qualify for the event. Kaup, Blade, GUA, szalami, etc. If I wouldn't qualify and be able to compete in the tournament scene then I might just quit playing the game. For example if I didn't qualify for GL 2 I'm pretty sure I would of quit the game for some time. I think many players would feel similar and making the tournament scene smaller would just push players away.

 

[BigOleGiraffe]

I think in the past you would have a reserve for that situation.



Yeah I agree that top 32 might be too small and makes sense to have more players qualify. GL seems like a pretty good balance with top 64.

 

[wellington333]

This is not a suggestion for an S tier event, more a fun thing.

2v2
Pro/Am tournament (or similar)
Say, the top 16 players (or 16 top ranked sign ups) get paired with either amateurs from the community or with players from outside the top 100 ATR. They get a month to train together after they get paired, then the tourney starts.
Vanilla rules, format could be league style then single elimination playoffs, or just regular single/double elimination.
The obvious problem would be commitment level - how would you be sure that the amateur players were going to show up. As a potential solution - perhaps an entry fee for those amateurs who want to participate. They would be getting training/coaching from the best in exchange.
It would be exciting for viewers because it wouldn't just be the top 3 or 4 1v1 players with a chance of winning. Success would depend on how well teams worked together in the run up to the tournament - both in terms of teaching/learning ability and commitment level.