Buehgler_AS

Jsonedecker, on 06 November 2012 - 10:02 AM, said:

Thanks John, I'm very glad to hear that this continues to be a goal for you and your team. Just let us know if/when you think we can do anything concrete to help.

You know I was just rereading my post and I realized I forgot to mention the most important bit of this type of tournament -- probably because I just take it for granted. Anyway the point is that players/participants only get one chance at a mission, so the first time they see it is when they are playing for a score. They will typically have briefing information for weeks in advance, but there is no chance to "practice" the exact mission. This significantly increases the "pucker factor" for most and forces teams communicate, coordinate, and plan/adapt as the situation unfolds.

I recall one insert we did (it was the fourth mission from the SR2005 tourney -- fatal blow), where we actually had the players play through a ~15 minute very constrained mission that "ended" in failure. This then lead to an "ok we are dropping you in this new place. Here is your briefing, We loaded up the "real" map with briefing and gave them ~15 minutes to plan their insert. The mission was somewhat more linear/simple than most tourney mission, but there was some included time pressure (which in AS tradition, could be made very bad by poor stealth/ROE/fire-control). Sadly, I do not think anyone really did well on that mission, which surprised me. In our testing we had small teams lead by people who had not seen the mission do quite well -- I think the time pressure pushed people to stop reading the brief or in game messages, and instead the rushed into their demise.

I continue to keep my fingers crossed that GB will enable this type of tournament again.

This sounds like a great set of features. I think the critical challenge to making this well accepted and usable will hinge on the mechanics of switching between the stances. Being able to gauge the attention/readiness level of teamates and opponents at this level of fidelity will be a huge plus (IMO).

Hey folks,
I've been away from the BFS forums for a while, but Colin poked us about this thread.

The Alpha Squad (AS) tourneys were all cooperative missions with a (hopefully) fair and objective scoring system built into the mission scripts. The "best" place to look for information about how these were done can be found in our forums, specifically I would suggest you look at the discussion surrounding the SR2005 tournament[/url] -- this was the last time AS ran a full up tournament. The 2006/2007 tournament Colin quoted from was actually a community tournament hosted by AS, SD, and 9MS, with each group contributing a mission.

All of these tournaments were rather large/long (in terms of calendar time). Typical later events had more than 20 teams participating, with the inserts for a single mission stretching over 2-3 weeks. So a 4 mission tournament would easily last 3 months from the first insert to the last. There was a significant burden on the organizers to "pull this off" -- server support, graders, scheduling, score tracking, PR, mission scripting and testing, etc.

In terms of the missions themselves, we always strove for fair missions, that gave teams with different levels of competency and skills opportunities. The goal was not to make missions that had one "trick" solution that people needed to guess/find, but rather make missions that evolved and provided clues and challenges to the players both in the briefing and as they played. If the briefing suggested you should sneak in, but you decided to go guns-blazing that was fine, you may need to kill a LOT more tangos than you would have had to sneak past (reinforcements would come from off map etc.) but that was your choice and the mission would not just "end". Typically the bulk of a teams score was tied to completing objectives with penalties for losing players and sometimes for breaking the suggested ROE. One key point is that there were never any random elements in any of the missions, this was to ensure that all teams had a fair and level playing field to compete on.

In terms of future games (e.g. GB), I do not think supporting this type of event requires any special "game/server mode" but rather just requires a rich enough set of mission building tools to enable the inclusion of things like observers, scoring features (this encompasses a lot of features) , mission script security, etc. If there are any specific questions or concerns I'll be happy to try to help.

I have been playing the Beta for ~6 weeks now on and off.  What small bit of the JTAC stuff I have played with so far has really been impressive.  In fact just about every non-WIP aspect of this simulator has been verrrrrryyy impressive.