Here’s an idea for a fun tournament that could also help us get preliminary character tiers: An online invitational round robin.
We gather 100 or so of the best online players, and put them in a round robin tournament. Each player enters with their one character (you must stay with that character the entire tournament). Each player plays each other player (they are given like 1 month to do this). We fill in the results in a grid. So sample entrants might be:
damdai: akuma
kuroppi: honda
etc…
Ideally we get a couple of representatives for each character. We have the top players playing their respective characters. They play each other best of 3 matches, 3/5 games, no character switching allowed.
It could be an easy and factual way to get character rankings at this stage of the game. Plus it’s easy to self organize – it’s round robin so no brackets or anything like that to keep track of.
Also, you might want to let people who play more than one character well to enter twice. (although i guess having them play themselves could hurt their execution).
I like it - but it’s kinda difficult to just challenge someone out of the blue. You have to add each other to friends, get it accepted, create a game and invite. It’s not too huge a deal, but it makes me think 100 is way too many.
brian: good point, I was actually thinking about that too. We could certainly have damdai-cammy and damdai-akuma enter.
sikyo: sure, 100 was just a number I threw out. It can be whatever people want. We could start with something smaller like 20.
Organizing it won’t be the hard part, getting people to actually play their matches will be. The best idea would probably be to make a 360 metatag. (if you don’t know what a metatag is: it’s a dummy XBL account that everyone adds, then you can browse the metatag’s friend list and see who all is online at that moment)
100 is definitely way too many, something like two people playing each character would be more manageable.
Also, who’s going to decide who gets in? I can think of two really good players of each character off the top of my head, but I’m sure everyone else has their own list of people they’d like to see in.
Should be very interesting if it ever gets off the ground. It may also make a good case for the ban Akuma arguement.
It’s called an invitational for a reason, there are many other Hawks I could think of who deserve a spot (no offense to you, I have no idea of your skill level)
If this round robin thing really happens, it’ll probably take a mighty long time to complete, especially with all the different time zones and schedules people have… East coast vs west coast is already kind of iffy, when you factor in the Euros and the Asians / Australians, ouch.
Still, the idea of having this big grid sounds cool.
Gridman has the best (coughonly) tournament record for any hawk in the US in the last couple years. He’s cool Axel. I haven’t seen him play but I think DSP would vouch.
BUT you should sort this out in pms, xbox chat, irc or something instead – this thread is going to turn into a mess.
I’m not sure how seriously people will take the data gathered from an online tourney, but I think it sounds like a fun idea either way.
Also, the metatag idea is a good one. I know a lot of people friends lists are either full or nearly full. So, even adding a medium number of people would be problematic. The metatag only requires having one free slot though, so that’s cool.
I didn’t mean to say he was a bad player, I just didn’t want this thread to get messy as you said.
I hope this actually happens, it should be fun to see the outcome. Zass, why don’t you take the initiative and get things rolling? It’s your thread after all
I could do it, but I don’t want to be the one deciding who plays. If I do the rest, will you deal with that side of things (however you should choose to do it)?
and metatags can be silver accounts, they’re just for keeping a friend list together, that’s all
I don’t know, is there really any one person who can look at every character and know two or more top players deserving of entering? Duplicates would also be hard to deal with.
I would not mind handling the organization and communication regarding reporting, etc - but I also could not choose the players.
Maybe if this got a little more elaborate, it could split - have something like
everoyne who wants enters up to 2 characters (open to public)
once there are enough people, each player of a certian character has a round robin fight. That is, if 5 t-hawks enter, all 5 face each of the other four. All but top 2 are eliminated. This gives us the top two players of each character
All players now fight a round robin series. Duplicates (damdai akuma vs damdai fei long) are awarded 0 / 0, otherwize its +1 / -1.
Then we have some general numbers we can look at and interpret however. Obviously not a clear ranking of characters, nor a clear ranking of players, but its not a like a tournament will ever provide an absolute measurement.
