Suggestions for improving Triad Tournaments

[SireRyins]

I am excited that Triple Triad has come to the game. I didn’t really play it in FF8, but I’ve played a ton of card games (including 20 years of MTG, more than half of it organizing events.) Collecting the cards looked was fun and so was playing.

The only really missing piece for me is organized play. I like playing against other players casually, but I’d like to see something a bit more competitive.

The tournament, as it is, has several flaws. (Others have mentioned them, so I’m just going to summarize, and then provide ideas on how to fix it.)

1. Matchmaking – This is actually the biggest problem in my mind. If I have to work hard to find someone to play, that’s not quite my idea of fun. I like that I can challenge my friends. I don’t like that it’s generally not in my interest to do so. I’ll also add that choosing your opponent’s isn’t something I’d be happy to call a “tournament.” That’s more like a league. (And far more open to cheating.)

[SireRyins]

2. “Cheating” – While not against the Terms of Service, buying wins is not what I expect any of us want to see.

3. Rankings – Having awards based on place is really awkward when you can choose who to play against. It makes sense in long-term league play, but for a single event, it’s not really optimal.

Suggestions:

I assume that there’s not a lot of development time to dedicate to a total overhaul of the system. So, my suggestions here are intended to require little development time (from what I can guess at least).

[SireRyins]

1. Improve transparency – There are some legitimate players who won Lightning cards. Not many, but there’s at least one on Midgardsormr. But there’s no way to “prove” it. There’s no transparency on how points are awarded. So, we don’t know for sure how many people cheated. We suspect many, and some are obvious cheats. But it’s silly that we can’t even tell! I get that SE likes to obfuscate this kind of stuff, but with this system it just doesn’t help. Legitimate players generally don’t know how best to increase their points. Let people know exactly how much they are going to get for a match, if the system must remain the same.

2. “Cheating” – There’s no real way to tell if a game was played legitimately. SE could spend GM time trying to investigate games. They’d have to have replay tools, and spend a lot of time to pin down cheaters. Given that there are only 3 cards given per server, this isn’t infeasible. It would depend entirely on SE having those tools and time available.

[SireRyins]

If this isn't an option, my suggestion here is to just remove the incentive to cheat. Some people will always aim to cheat the system. The reward structure can be flattened. I am fine with the Lightning card going to tournament winners, but this isn’t a tournament in my mind :-D So just make the reward between 1st and 20th be a smaller difference. And make sure legitimate players have a strong chance to beat out cheaters.

3. Increase tools for legitimate players to find each other – Make it easy to play it straight. I think it makes sense to want your undefeated players to play other undefeated players and earn more points for it. But, there is no support to help them find each other. I’d love to see a way to search up player that are close to your match record. You don’t need a separate place for it, just give the bunny girl an option to “Look for players with a similar match record.” Have it display if they are online, and make it easy to send them a /tell.

[SireRyins]

4. Reward players for playing people with similar records – The second piece of the above, is to reward people for playing similar match records. Currently, you can get a lot of points just by players who haven’t played at all, and then beating them. This clearly encourages people to bribe people into joining the event just to lose to them. (This isn’t the best way to get top 3. That requires more setup, but most plans start this way at least). What we really want to see is someone who is 5-0 play someone at 5-0 or 4-1. So reward them for it. 10-20% point bonus for playing at your own level. This also helps out the “loser’s bracket.” And 0-1 playing against an 0-1 should reward similar amounts to them playing a brand new player. And starting out with a loss shouldn’t mean no one will play with you!

[SireRyins]

I think the above, with some testing, could provide a notably better organized play experience. If more development time is available, some other options open up that make it feel like a higher stakes competitive event (and worthy of being called a tournament!).

You could for example, make GATE Tournaments. Throw everyone on the event stage, when someone loses they get blown off. Make it last just 10 minutes or so, and that makes it much harder to cheat. If you prohibit trading during the event, it makes it much harder to bribe unknown players. And single-elimination means that legitimate players just have to play well to win. There are still ways to rig that system, but letting non-cheaters win the event by just playing well is a good start!

I’d love to see Triple Triad competitive events become successful, and I think SE wants to as well!

[Lilianne]

You can edit your original post to get around the character limit instead of making a ton of posts back to back.