Tournament of Divine War Games

Xenia

I want to thank everyone involved in helping make this event. I couldn't have done it without @Kalena @Tetchta @Alela @Bulrok @Rijetta @Nisavi @Valorie and of course all the champions who competed not yet mentioned: @Taj @Kidos @Sryaen @Rasani @Mjoll @Iesid @Dourif @Almol .

It was a ton of fun putting it together and I'd now like to reach out to the community to find out what people liked about it and what they think could be improved upon and if there's a desire to see more player driven things like this.

Teani

It seemed like a really fun idea and it got a lot of people engaged. Even my character who was not part of it all managed to get some rp and combat practice in (huge thanks to those who engaged an outsider. I appreciated it a lot!). I'd be interested in hearing if there was an audience during the events, as I missed all of them due to rl stuff.

Iesid

I enjoyed the Lexadhra games the most, despite my team having some technical difficulties. The duels were fun - it was especially interesting to play Bard in this scenario, I learned a lot.

My only complaint would be scheduling; much like organizing each event, it's something that someone would get better at on a repeat attempt. Initially, a bunch of champions did not understand the rules (who can sub in and when?, how do we do the duels?, etc) and the scheduling was not properly broadcast to at least part of Spirit until I put the games up in EVENTS.

Overall, it was very fun. I enjoyed it - thank you to everyone who organized a game.

Xenia

Yes, the Events was hard to properly advertise on a global scale. It did require working through other characters of every city to make happen. As a result IC reasonings for city leaders can sometimes jeopardize whether or not the EVENTS will make it up in a timely manner.

Elene

I wonder in the future if this is something we can petition/ask for the Pools to add onto their public events system thing so we don't have to go through so many orgs to see it placed. If it's a larger playerbase that will be involved, I would hope they're inclined to help out!

Xenia

It's possible! I never asked for that kind of assistance from the admin or volunteers. My goal had been to try and do something that was in the hands of the players as much as possible. That said we had ready support when it was requested and for that I am thankful! Going through many orgs has its drawbacks like needing to get lots of people to do the THING, but at the same time I kind of like the option for people to RP out the situation and accept the consequences of not everyone choosing to get on board.

Teani

Maybe it's possible for Pools to open up a way to suggest global events to the Events calendar that just have to be approved before they become visible?

Iesid

Just put it in Gaming with a cooldown/cost.

Elene

Oh. We should've opened up betting for who would be the winners for the tournament. Damn, missed opportunity!

Sryaen

It was interesting to see players come together to make an event. Ultimately, I think a lot of the frustration boiled down to player schedules and the way the battlefield system is currently set up. The point system was a little meh, too. Someone could've won their duels against the other 11 Champions and walked away with 33 points without even needing to participate in any of the other events. Even losing all of those duels but winning the other events (1st place ranging 3-5 points) still wouldn't be enough to put someone within the top 3. Even some of the specific events didn't necessarily have their rules fully explained until the very beginning or even midway through the event. Guarding the rules, teams, objectives, etc until the reveal date may have been good to build up some sense of anticipation but I know for me, it would've helped far more to know what I was walking into ahead of time. Especially since we needed to shift the Lexadhra battlefield to 3 different zones before everything was squared away.

I'd like to see some sort of way for the initializer to edit the battlefield, end it prematurely and reset, and/or have a sort of lobby. Because once all parties agree to it, once the battlefield opens, it's open and the timer counts down. So for a time-on-point battlefield, every second quite literally counts - as evidenced by the Nightmare games where it came down to actual seconds between the three people vying for 1st place.

From an IC perspective, and I can only speak for myself, but here's my feedback - The timing of the games felt a little weird and my character had very little reason (read: none whatsoever) to want to engage in friendly competition with his enemies, especially when you take into consideration the recent war and slavery stuff. I felt pressured OOCly to participate in this, despite me not having any desire to do so.

However, I wouldn't be opposed to doing something like this in the future, so long as it was planned out a bit better and didn't feel so rushed so some of the events didn't turn into an absolute clusterfuck of overlapping battlefields, people not knowing the rules, scheduling conflicts, etc.

Xenia

I agree with a lot of what @Sryaen said. The points ended up not being fully balanced. There was a lot of freedom granted to everyone involved in planning out the games including how they would award points to their games and what kind of games they would be organizing. For me it was something I initiated back in March. My thought process was as such:
What can I do that will engage the position of Order champion without necessarily creating a war?

I decided to try and organize a tournament. I wanted to maximize participation and decided the best way to do that was to open it up to be organized and shared with as many orders as possible. I recognized there was a large divide between Spirit and Shadow players and the best way to get a full engagement was to slowly let it build, let go of the reigns and maximize working ICly as much as possible. I sought out a Spirit player who amiably shared the vision. From there it was a divide and conquer, Xenia would focus on maximizing Shadow's participation, the other character would focus on Spirit.

We laid out month long goals that involved April being spent purely on RPing and engaging characters to prepare for when a formal invitation would be made in May for other orders to join us by choosing to host a game first at the start of the month and then enter champions to compete at the middle. In the interim there were large scale events going on that were unforeseen like the Bloodloch story arc with slaves; I knew that the game's storyline wasn't going to stop unfolding just because I was trying to hold a tournament which was why I started planning out so early on to prime and prepare IC reasons for enough characters across the board to have a vested interest in participating.

I saw this first attempt as a proof of concept and recognized it'd be far from perfect. The primary goal was seeing something through and putting as much control as possible in the hands of players. This translated to each order that hosted getting to propose one rule to the tournament and bearing the full responsibility of designing and communicating the rules of their game from how points would be earned to how it was to be played. It was very ad-hoc and last minute. To offer insights on how it was planned, there was complete transparency between all the people designing out their games through the use of a clan. They were given full power to projects and told to create a project for each game. The idea behind this being visibility would allow people to self correct and balance the games they were designing. In the end we were all going in blind, trying to design games for a questionable amount of participants -- I had hoped there'd be a full participation from all the orders but I did not expect that to be the case.

If I was to try and oversee something like this again I'd probably ask for recommendations on how points would be earned but ultimately make changes that would balance fairly across the board of the games. Once everything was underway I found myself faced with a situation where I could have gone in and made changes but it would have been after the fact and I decided shifting goal posts once the tournament began was not a good idea and would instead use this go-around as a learning process for anyone who chose to do something similar again. Honestly my hope is this marks the beginning of some sort of Order Tournament tradition that happens at least once a year and is initiated and organized by different orders.

Rijetta

Duels being weighted more heavily than games makes sense for a tournament of divine champions. To me the games seemed more like fun diversions to make up for a lost duel or two.

I enjoyed bending the battlefield system in strange ways to make it do neat things.

It was really nice to see the sheer level of involvement this prompted and how good it was at getting folks involved. All in all it was really good and I'd love to see more of it.