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Tournament of Divine War Games
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.
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.
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Comments
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.
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.
Tell me how I'm doing!
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.
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.