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Hi i have some feedback for the latest tournament. I will explain the problem and then suggest a solution. Most of it was already touched upon somewhere in discord but I will summarize. Putting the feedback on a thread ensures ppl can read and refer to it without anything getting lost. Let me know if I missed something or if something doesnt make sense.

There is too much to write so I will write a second post under this one for the second half of my feedback (on this thread).

Feedback
1. Map pool
2. Vetoes and bracketing
3. Reffing
4. Reflecting on the good stuff (:

Map Pool ## ¶

A) Map making long term and general important comments In this tournament, the maps were not rigorously tested enough for mapmakers to make meaningful changes that didn't involve completely redesigning the maps. Let's get something straight: NO MAP IS EVER GOOD WHEN IT IS FIRST RELEASED. Desert Sanct was a public meme. NextGen literally had jump potion spawners. GD3 had 4 wool rooms. The SSB that Nadastorm made 7 years ago is not the SSB that we play now. For some of these maps, the changes took months or EVEN YEARS to fully accumulate into a map that the competitive community began to love to play. It's unfair for the competitive community and players to expect maps to be good or even playable after 1-3 weeks of maptesting. Obviously, this is a two-way street: mapmakers and tournament organizers need to set aside and schedule more time for the competitive community to test their maps and they need to make a greater effort to edit their maps before tournaments begin.

Important solutions: (1) Mapmakers need to make maps during the tournament off-season and readily test them or at least make them viewable before the tournament is even announced. (2) There should be a group of mapmakers and competitive players dedicated to giving feedback and helping maps get to testing stages - A good addition to the Advisor role would be to ask advisors to give serious map feedback in private before maps are announced to the community. The mapdev team should also have multiple experienced tournament mapmakers tasked with fixing and helping competitive mapmakers. (3) Have a set schedule for when tournament maps are expected to be ready, weeks before tournament is even announced and make it clear to community mapmakers.

I think most of the problems with map pools would be solved if these 3 changes were implemented, but I have more criticisms:

B) Mapmaker attitudes Kind of sucks I have to bring this up since I don't think it was a big problem in previous tournaments I played. Its a huge privilege to have your map in a tournament map pool, map makers need to take more responsibility to ensure the maps play to players' expectations. This looks like: contineously implementing changes even after the map is added, or hotfixing bugs as they are discovered. Solution: honestly there is no solution to this, mapmakers need to just admit when their maps are bad and fix/remove them as much as possible.

C) Mapmaker abuse This was a point another player requested me to address. Its totally unacceptable for mapmakers to intentionally hide important broken mechanics in their maps for their own team to abuse. I don't want to call people out, but these mapmakers know who they are. Solution: Actively address this as a problem and create clear ruleset or punishment system that addresses this. Rigorous testing (as explained above) would also help.

D) Maps being changed during the tournament Multiple maps were changed the weekend before the finals. What the fuck? It is completely unacceptable for maps to have significant changes after a meta has developed and teams have created set strats that they are refining. On top of this, there was not even a post that explained, in detail, all of the changes made before the finals. There is no excuse for this, especially since some of these were changes that nerfed very obvious strategies that should have been fixed when the maps were released (ie. icarusing nerfs on Fun Guy) Solution: Do not change maps unless they are completely broken, and make it very clear what is being changed and why.

E) CTW mechanics A fundamental aspect of CTW is that you need to engage with the enemy team as you approach the wool room. Broken and subsequently gimmicky strategies like minecarts, tnt, anvils, elytra, and boats have always been discouraged because they make it impossible for the enemy team to play without actively trying to stop or counter the strat, so I do not understand why shit like TNT and fireballs were implemented into otherwise fine maps. It's important for the quality of life of CTW to not have teams begin to rely on these strategies or prefer maps with these gimmicks in them. Okay, fireballs are actually not that bad on We Sell since you can actively counter a fireball player by having players shooting at the fireball, and you cannot spam multiple charges at once. Imo fireballing was pretty cool. rant: But I've personally been fucked over by stupid broken mechanics in multiple tournaments and I cannot tell you how frustrating and helpless it feels when Recoovery flys in and out of both of your wool rooms on Wallop Too with an elytra. But TNT on Fun Guy was absolutely busted and allowed you to fly past 100 blocks of choke to get into the wool room AND fly back out. rant: I don't know who the fuck decided it was okay to let TNT go through since any dumbass can recognize that teams are able to icarus. Also, teams intentionally figured out these icarus strategies and hid them until the matches mattered, but this could have easily been avoided. Solution: Again, more rigorous testing and do not allow mapmakers to get away with this stuff :100:

F) Greenhouse Is an absolutely god awful map and I hope nobody in this tournament had to play that shit. We, as a community, need to come up with better tiebreaker solutions. I haven't thought about it enough, but bruh Greenhouse wasnt even a ctw map.

G) Dead Heat and game theory Is a classic map that plays like garbage and basically results in a mindless clusterfuck in middle by the wool. I don't think we needed a veto decider in this tournament.

Why? In a small map pool (<= 6 maps) with only 1 veto, giving teams an advantage in vetoes usually does not change the outcome of the match. Here's the game theory to it: Lets say your team is comfortable on 3 maps (very likely). If the enemy team only have 2 good maps and are bad on 3 maps, then you will veto one of their good maps and always win the series 2-1 or 2-0. However, if the enemy team is good at 3+ maps, then it does not matter what you veto, because whether you veto your worst map or their best map, you will always play on a map both teams are good at least once, and a map you are unfavored in at least once. (or two maps you are both good at/two maps you are both bad at). This means that veto order basically does not matter, which is why in this tournament Dead Heat veto decider was completely useless. Its important to know this in the future because:

On the other hand, if we have a large map pool (7+ maps) then veto order matters a lot because you will have to veto multiple times or there are multiple different bo5/bo7 scenarios. This is when veto order and map picks matter a lot, because there are at least 10 different outcomes, and unless you are favored in more maps than your opponent (not likely in high level play) your vetoes will always be able to give you a higher chance to win. Solution: In future tournaments, if the map pool is more than 5 maps, then the veto format and veto decider map needs to be a subject of discussion. We need strategic and interesting veto deciders if vetoes matter. Not dead heat.

Vetoes and Bracketing ## ¶

A) Veto system The veto system in this tournament didnt make any sense but since the map pool was only 5 maps and most matches were a bo3, it didnt matter. Read above for why in future tournaments it will probably matter a lot and we cannot get away with being this lazy with veto protocols and deciders.

B) Finals veto system The finals veto system was not consistent with the rest of the tournament. I don't understand why it could not have been.

C) Losers bracket disadvantages In this tournament, the team coming out of losers had a 1 map disadvantage. This is a RIDICULOUS ADVANTAGE. Coming out of losers bracket, you already have 3 distinct disadvantages. (1) Firstly, you have played more matches and are consequentially more tired. This is more likely in longer tournaments with more rounds and it was not a problem in this tournament because the weeks were split off very effectively. (2) Secondly, you play a very important match where you will most likely be playing your best lineup with your best strats and hold nothing back, so the winners bracket team can sit in twitch chat and have an hour to analyze and come up with counter strats if they haven't done so or if you were holding strats back. (3) Thirdly, the second point is an asymetrical advantage: you also do not have time to come up with counter strats to counter strats. (4) ON TOP OF ALL THIS, winners bracket teams also usually get a veto advantage and a map pick advantage.

Why the fuck is this a thing? It has become a regular part of OCN tournaments for absolutely no reason and it is NOT a thing in most other competitive communities (notably, in the smash community). We have losers brackets to reward teams for consistency and give teams a chance to play more matches. Solution: Remove artificial losers bracket disadvantages. No map pick advantages and map win advantages.

Reffing ## ¶

A) Moderating finals and semifinals Refs are not in the game to first-person spectate a tournament match, they exist to watch fishy players and enforce the rules. It is infinitely more likely that sketchy players appear on better teams, and these sketchy players are a lot better at hiding that they are cheating. If this is true, why is it then that there are literally 20 referee observers in a final rather than 4-5 watching reported players? On top of this, more obs = more lag.

Good stuff ## ¶

A) Matches were run on time Thank you.

B) Requests for screenshares and reports were taken seriously Thank you. (I still think screensharing during tournaments can be more aggressive and less substantiated though)

C) Account change requests were addressed quickly Thank you Picajoluna!!

D) Bracketing and seeding made sense Thank you.

E) Unfortunate situation was handled professionally Thank you.

Overall thanks for a great tournament. Anyone who has played OCN tournaments will know that nothing can compare to this as before matches used to run for 14 hours and servers used to crash and Lifeboat literally shut down in the middle of a tournament haha

Thanks for reading I will add more as I think of more.

Speaking from the map development side, we do have several map developers who are involved and experienced in tournament mapmaking; however, their role isn't public. They also help with the curated list of maps on private servers, and we're also addressing this with Operation Ares (we're splitting up the work for competitive vs. public.)

I do think the expertise can be improved, though, so I'm willing to listen to feedback from the event staff and the community in order to bridge the gap between public and competitive. I think both are equally important, and I'd love to ensure each map developer understands not just how to XML or build a map, but recognizes the fundamental mechanics of how gamemodes are played and possibly some game design so we have more to bring to the table.

There's always room for improvement! If you want to dive into specifics, I'd love some insight (because I haven't played a tournament since RoTLW.)