Open Tournament Feedback

[Flay_wind]

So, all in all it's a pretty nice addition to the game.

The Good.
Everyone builds a deck containing a card of each rarity, which is really good. 4* cards are finally useful (still not in normal matches, tho). You see the cards you're offered and you try to build a strategy that has the most likely outcome of winning. Your opponents naturally try to do the same.
It's a pretty good way for a TT novice to build a collection, since you're not required to have a good collection to participate and you're offered a variety of packs as rewards, so you do not have to spend MGP to get them.
The match rules are somewhat random and combined with ever shifting decks it creates a nice variety to the games.
Same and/or Plus rules are great, since you can try to create a situation where you could flip cards you couldn't flip otherwise and it creates some nice possibilities.

The Bad.
Swap Rule. It has no place in the tournament enviroment. Here's a situation, the game swaps 5* card of player 1 for 1* or 2* card of player 2. So, the player 2 immediately gains a fairly significant advantage and is very likely to win that match, because the game decided that. It cheapens the feeling of accomplishment if you win this way, or the other way around it feels like the game robbed you of the potential win, because the game gave you such a huge handicap.
So either remove the Swap rule alltogether, or change it, so it only swaps the cards of the same * rank. That way it would offer a bit of strategic element i.e. you would know one card your opponent has and you can try to adjust your plays accordingly.

[ICountFrom0]

Swap puts in some RNG so even bad players have a chance at winning. The more RNG the more low skill players have a chance to win. It's punishment for high skill people, but it dosen't come up often enough to seem like much of a problem to me.

Here's the bad though. The NPC's.

The highest skill NPC always faces the lowest skill NPC in the first round unless there's 7 players. The highest skill NPC always wins against that lowest skill NPC, it's always a win, and it's almost always 3 captures. I've seen 4 capture first round wins. This gives the highest skill NPC a lead that just can't be toppled.

Either the highest skill NPC has to be lowered in power a little, or the weakest powered NPC needs to be increased in skill a little.

(I'm at 15 wins, and halfway to the parasol before I stopped binging the open tournaments, a VERY good way to kill time, I think I got 100k MGP from them so far)

[Mirvana]

Swap doesn't bother me that much since the Tournament NPC lists all the upcoming rule sets, so you can just skip any registrations for rules you dislike. That said a "always swap cards of equal rank" would make it less annoying and I'd welcome that.

Honestly my biggest issue with Opens is that you only get 30mins every 2hours. I'd like it if they were open at least 1 hour, or had a DF option so you could choose to wait however long it takes to have 8 human players (though if that ends up anything like Mahjong queues...blech...) without basically being forced to play pre-built, no-stakes Invitations.

As for NPC pairing, almost all tournament seeding pits the #1 against the #8 in the first round, so I wouldn't expect any change to ever occur there. Also if you win all 3 rounds, it doesn't matter how many captures they get, since those only factor in on tie-breakers. It pairs rounds 2 and 3 based on points, so only one player can ever get the full 6 points.

I do kinda wish the drafts worked a little more like how most IRL card game drafts do (picking one card at a time then passing the pool to the next player), but I know that'd make the deckbuilding take 2-3+x= times longer, so I get way they went with this faster option.

[ICountFrom0]

Yes, you need a perfect run to take first place.
That makes champion quite a bit harder then I think it should be. If they make the weakest NPC a little stronger, it'll reduce the gap while making tournament play overall a little harder. If they make the strongest NPC a little weaker, it'll make tournaments overall a little easier. Either would be fine, but right now the lead is quite ridiculous.

I should also say that in my 15 tournament championships, I only got one platinum pack ever. Most championship gave 3 or 2 packs. I'm not sure if that's something that would change if I played better, or if it's purely random chance.

[Mirvana]

You don't *NEED* a 6 point game to get a win, it just guarantees one. If you tie with an NPC (points and captures), you still get 1st place prizes and achievement progress (I tie-won my first Open victory). Also it may be some background balancing for NPCs, but of the times I've seen any of them have +3/4 Captures in their first round, I often see them Lose/Draw Round2 so that my Round3 opponent usually only has +2 Captures on average.

I'm pretty sure packs are tied to your points. I've gotten a couple platinum packs, but only from 6pt games. Seems you always get gold at 5-4, and I even got silvers for 3pts.
I'm pretty sure the prize table is something like:
(Updating this as I go with rewards I've consistently seen at these point totals)
All "Gold" tiers appear to have a slim chance to award 1 Platinum instead.
6 - 2-3 Gold
5 - 2-3 Gold
4 - 1-2 Gold
3 - 2 Silver or 1 Gold
2 - 1-2 Silver or 2 Bronze
1 - 1-2 Bronze
0 - 1 Bronze

A few general Triad tips that may up folks' win-rate (**This is mostly for playing against NPCs since they have a common pattern in their AI, and humans can always play better/worse**).
#1 - If you're going second, always try to capture the first card your opponent plays. This immediately puts them behind, which they'll have to trade captures to get back to just a Draw. If you're trading and they ever miss/can't get a capture, you can easily hit the 6:4 minimum for a win. It's also good to always try to capture like-with-like or with weaker cards if able on earlier turns (ex. Capture Opponent's 2* with your 1*).
#2 - If you go first, play defensively and lead with a strong card if you have to (You wanna avoid the NPC doing #1 to you). And even if they do drop a big card, they'll likely have to expose a weak side which you can hopefully safely capture to be right back at parity or even get a double capture.
#3 - If a capture requires exposing weaker sides of a card, try to use a card you can expose two weaker sides. If the opponent captures the card, you can recapture it on its 2nd weak side.
#4 - 99.9% of the time, if you can capture two cards at once, do it. That .1% you shouldn't is if doing so sets up your opponent to potentially also capture two or more (ie, dont capture say a 7/6 corner if it leaves a 4/3 corner behind).
#5 - Remember in Plus/Same, those rules apply even if only 1 card you touch sides with isn't currently your color. Don't miss out on free captures/Combos because you already "have" some of the cards you play next to.
#6 - Try to cover all four sides with your picks. For each of the four directions, try to have at least 2 cards with a 6/7+ side so you have more options to capture/block with. Also try to pick cards that can re-capture your own cards if Opponent takes them. Cards with three 8+ sides (ex Odin, Ardbert, Shiva, Onion Knight) are often stronger picks than cards with two A sides because they can capture/block more angles.
#7 - A draft deck ALWAYS contains exactly a 1*, 2*, 3*, 4*, and 5* card. Even without the All/Three Open rule in effect, you can can get an idea of what cards your opponent still has left by just looking at what they've already played. This can let you know if a specific play is actually safe or not based on what sides you'll be leaving open. No 1* or 2* has any side higher than 7 (and very few 1* have that 7-side), no 3* has any side higher than 8, and only 5* have A-sides. So if Opponent still has their 5*, you may have to burn your 5* to safely block. But if they only have their weaker cards left, you can more safely leave medium-strength sides exposed (They may not actually be able to beat that 5 with their 2*).

[Flay_wind]

Honestly my biggest issue with Opens is that you only get 30mins every 2hours. I'd like it if they were open at least 1 hour, or had a DF option so you could choose to wait however long it takes to have 8 human players (though if that ends up anything like Mahjong queues...blech...) without basically being forced to play pre-built, no-stakes Invitations.

If you are there the moment registration for the tournament opens, usually you can participate in 3 tournaments. That's still not an insignificant amount of time.
But yea, you can't quite play Opent TT Tournaments the whole day if you wanted.

I'm pretty sure packs are tied to your points. I've gotten a couple platinum packs, but only from 6pt games. Seems you always get gold at 5-4, and I even got silvers for 3pts.

I haven't won a platinum pack yet, the highest i got is 3 golden packs and that was 6 points with 4 or 5 captures.

Edit: As an aside, seeing the highest skill NPC with final score of something like 6:4 is always hilarious.

[Mirvana]

I'm already doing 3 tourneys per window when I decide to do them over queueing other things.
Wanting a longer window and/or a true Duty Finder option is more about wanting more human opponents than more tournaments in general.
As is I've gotten a single 8-human game, and usually "high turnouts" are in the 4-5 ranges, with averages being 0-2 other real people.

As for packs, I updated the list above to reflect what rewards I've consistently seen.
You definitely HAVE to get 6 points to have a shot at a platinum, and it seems to be around 50% if you get one or Gold Packs.
I've gotten 3 Platinums out of the five 6pt wins I've had. 6P6C is my best win and that did give a Platinum, so your captures may skew the ratio towards them.

[Flay_wind]

I'm already doing 3 tourneys per window when I decide to do them over queueing other things.
Wanting a longer window and/or a true Duty Finder option is more about wanting more human opponents than more tournaments in general.
As is I've gotten a single 8-human game, and usually "high turnouts" are in the 4-5 ranges, with averages being 0-2 other real people.

As for packs, I updated the list above to reflect what rewards I've consistently seen.
You definitely HAVE to get 6 points to have a shot at a platinum, and it seems to be around 50% if you get one or Gold Packs.
I've gotten 3 Platinums out of the five 6pt wins I've had. 6P6C is my best win and that did give a Platinum, so your captures may skew the ratio towards them.

I am not quite sure what the system actually is. I've seen sevaral people registering for the tournament at the same time, where half of them go into one bracket and another half to the other.
Like say there's 6 people registered for the tournament and i see some of them go to their tournament, and then the rest of us like 3-4 players are put into our tournament. I am not quite sure why the game does that.

Regarding packs, it seems the rewards are tied to your points, captures and actual finishing place. Like you need 6-6 for a chance for platinum, but 1, 2 or 3 gold packs from different outcomes of 4-x, 5-x, 6-x.

[Mirvana]

Maybe, though I definitely don't think any amount of captures will "guarantee" a Platinum. I got a 6p7c win yesterday and still only received 2 Gold. Without concrete tracking to determine what-if-any effect captures have on the numbers, it very well may be that they don't affect it at all, and its just a hard ???% chance at 6 points.

[Flay_wind]

Okay, what the actual fuck, because i am beyond words over what just happened.
You obtain 1,600 MGP.
You obtain a platinum Triad card.
That was a second place with a final score of 4/2.
Like a got several 6/6 or 6/7 and only got Gold packs. And now i am getting platinum just because?

Edit: Got Cecil out of it even.