Author Topic: General Tournament Discussion  (Read 140107 times)

Offline jdg37

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Re: General Tournament Discussion
« Reply #1120 on: October 07, 2017, 10:50:23 AM »
At this point, what is the benefit of running “official” vs display tournaments?

Offline cephalopod

Re: General Tournament Discussion
« Reply #1121 on: October 07, 2017, 12:00:04 PM »
In what sense?
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Offline kill343gs

Re: General Tournament Discussion
« Reply #1122 on: October 07, 2017, 12:35:47 PM »
As currently written, display tournaments are specifically not to accept entrants of any kind. This was written at a point in time where we were essentially the only community involved with RA2. With the recent instances of redditbots, banter wars, etc, we feel as though this deserves a rewrite to accommodate these additional avenues of RA2 content that are not centered around GTM. We are currently in discussions on how best to bring you the best of both worlds.

We run our tournament section the way we do because we want to guarantee to you that your time won't be wasted when a tournament isn't finished or is run improperly or unfairly. We have staff that are specifically dedicated to ensuring that these run smoothly and in a reasonable amount of time.

For a game as old as this, we think it's important that we, in some way, shape or form, offer a platform for people to share and enjoy any content that relates to it. We hope to find a balance between the two sides to this issue.

Please understand that this is an issue that has just now gained our attention. I'm not interested in making sweeping decisions by myself or with minimal input. I don't always have the best answers for everything. I'm dedicated to making sure the staff as a whole gets a chance to be involved with these decisions, so they take a few days sometimes. In the meantime, we ask you to please respect the rules that are currently in place.


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Offline TheOrcCorp

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Re: General Tournament Discussion
« Reply #1123 on: October 07, 2017, 01:42:36 PM »
Okay so I'm gonna come in and play bad cop here.

What you're suggesting is essentially just regular GTM tournaments, but only open to certain people.
If a tournament on GTM grounds is taking entries, it cannot be discriminative of what groups of people or where you're taking entries from. People can't be left out just because they're not in a certain server/group/whatever.
You're of course welcome to host these but they're not GTM-sanctioned tournaments so shouldn't really be in the GTM Tournament section.

My idea for the display tournament section is to remove it entirely and move everything in there to Off-Topic, but that's me.
As currently written, display tournaments are specifically not to accept entrants of any kind. This was written at a point in time where we were essentially the only community involved with RA2. With the recent instances of redditbots, banter wars, etc, we feel as though this deserves a rewrite to accommodate these additional avenues of RA2 content that are not centered around GTM. We are currently in discussions on how best to bring you the best of both worlds.

We run our tournament section the way we do because we want to guarantee to you that your time won't be wasted when a tournament isn't finished or is run improperly or unfairly. We have staff that are specifically dedicated to ensuring that these run smoothly and in a reasonable amount of time.

For a game as old as this, we think it's important that we, in some way, shape or form, offer a platform for people to share and enjoy any content that relates to it. We hope to find a balance between the two sides to this issue.

Please understand that this is an issue that has just now gained our attention. I'm not interested in making sweeping decisions by myself or with minimal input. I don't always have the best answers for everything. I'm dedicated to making sure the staff as a whole gets a chance to be involved with these decisions, so they take a few days sometimes. In the meantime, we ask you to please respect the rules that are currently in place.

If you don't mind me just saying a few words about all of this.

Firstly to Ceph: I don't see where Hoppin suggested tourneys for select/certain people. As far as I can tell, neither Ironbound or Orc's Wars were discriminative with who entered. True that they aren't GTM tourneys per se and it could be better if they have a place on the side. Like Hoppin said, I did Orc's Wars to practice as I didn't want to just jump into an official GTM tourney and bugger things up while showcasing everyone else's robots at the same time. People deserve to know who made certain bots as it gets people to check out showcases for inspiration...for example, Dominotrix by Kurt in DemonOfTomorrow's Annhilation Nation: if it wasn't for that tourney, I wouldn't have known about it OR would I have joined GTM to learn and talk to the people here. I also should thank Banter Wars for that too. In any case, we should be allowed to thank/reveal the people who sent robots to these tourneys, official or not. It's only polite after all! However these side-tourneys shouldn't be classed as off-topic, they are related to RA2, a game we all love and should have a home somewhere if possible.

Kill: That sounds a lot more reasonable. I'll continue posting in the Off-Topic but the fact it was so sudden kinda disheartened me. I don't fully agree with why it was moved but on the flip side, I'm happy this topic is being looked at. I hope this gets sorted soon and I hope tourneys like this don't just get brushed off to the side and forgotten about. Me and Hoppin have spent ages planning these out and while they may not net us host points or whatever, we did them because we wanted to and this is kind of a slap to the face. We want to improve our talents before going off into proper hosting, showcase some great robots and overall have fun!

Thanks for reading guys! :mrgreen:
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Offline kill343gs

Re: General Tournament Discussion
« Reply #1124 on: October 07, 2017, 01:54:42 PM »
Firstly to Ceph:  However these side-tourneys shouldn't be classed as off-topic, they are related to RA2, a game we all love and should have a home somewhere if possible.

Kill: That sounds a lot more reasonable. I'll continue posting in the Off-Topic but the fact it was so sudden kinda disheartened me. I don't fully agree with why it was moved but on the flip side, I'm happy this topic is being looked at.

I totally get where you're coming from. To clarify, I stumbled upon this issue when I hopped on discord briefly before going to sleep last night at 3am, so this was fairly sudden for us as well, and we weren't all around to make final decisions. As previously written, all would have simply been deleted and we would have gone on with our lives, but given the circumstance we felt we could at least let them continue elsewhere for the time being while we get things sorted out.


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Offline cephalopod

Re: General Tournament Discussion
« Reply #1125 on: October 07, 2017, 01:59:51 PM »
Firstly to Ceph: I don't see where Hoppin suggested tourneys for select/certain people. As far as I can tell, neither Ironbound or Orc's Wars were discriminative with who entered. True that they aren't GTM tourneys per se and it could be better if they have a place on the side.

If it's a tournament on GTM, and it's not open to *all* GTM users but only certain circles...

I mean I had no chance to enter either so
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Offline TheOrcCorp

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Re: General Tournament Discussion
« Reply #1126 on: October 07, 2017, 02:06:40 PM »
Firstly to Ceph: I don't see where Hoppin suggested tourneys for select/certain people. As far as I can tell, neither Ironbound or Orc's Wars were discriminative with who entered. True that they aren't GTM tourneys per se and it could be better if they have a place on the side.

If it's a tournament on GTM, and it's not open to *all* GTM users but only certain circles...

I mean I had no chance to enter either so

Wasn't a certain circle for Orc's Wars, I asked others on GTM and outside of it but didn't want everyone involved as it was a test and didn't want to screw loads of people around (which fortunately so far, doesn't seem to be the case). I wouldn't have been able to ask people to join in the Personal Tournament section anyway from what I can gather. Maybe I could, I don't know and the rules aren't exactly clear/modern which is why it's being looked at now thankfully. In any case, you're more than welcome to enter the next tourney I do, IF I do one. :smile:
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Offline Reier

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Re: General Tournament Discussion
« Reply #1127 on: January 18, 2018, 04:19:39 PM »
We've been playing with Parsec, a screen-sharing client that Badnik linked in the thread. Long story short, initial results seem to indicate that it works. I don't want to jump the gun and say it's flawless in every way without more testing, but today I played S_M across the atlantic US-UK and was very competitive with maybe a few hundred ping and the occasional lag spike that lasted a second or so. If you know how awful hamachi was, this will blow your mind how good it seems so far.
In a US-US match I imagine the lag will be low enough to have actual competitive matches. We need to test it a bit more but I'm gonna throw this post out there in the mean time.

I want to do an tournament that has live players instead of AI controlling the bots. If Parsec continues to deliver, this could work.

There are a couple of drawbacks. The way Parsec works is it's basically like a screen-sharing software like teamviewer. Basically one person hosts the match and one or more people connect to the computer. Everyone technically controls the keyboard and mouse at the same time on the host's pc - once he has enabled it.
This might scare some people and is pretty trust-based. Technically a player could screw over another by pressing his controls. Thankfully there seems to be little risk of someone actually hijacking someone else's PC since the host has key commands to enable and disable all inputs but his own. I wouldn't bother enabling inputs until the match has started, then disable them once the match ends if I was the host.
There also is a bit of a trust issue in that the host would have to have all competing robots on his PC and could theoretically tamper with them. There's not really a way around this except for just trusting the host. Then again, AI tournaments are pretty much the same thing.

That said, I am willing to give it a shot. I want to test it with some US players first to see how bad the latency is, but I really want to do a tournament with this. It could open up a huge assortment of building techniques etc once human drivers are common like I posted in the thread.


----------
Basically what I am thinking, subject to change with feedback:
8 bots, 1v1, bo3, double elimination. Let's start small & basic.
Ironforge MW/HW. Standard rules, no RA2CF, BFE, etc. Just for the competitive angle.
Octagon Arena. One of the benefits of human driving is that we aren't stupid and can dodge hazards. I'm going to take advantage of it.
US entrants only. Sorry to the others. Let's keep the lag to a minimum, at least for now.

I will host. Right now I'm located in Arkansas, which actually is a pretty good spot with how central it is in the US- should help latency ideally.
Everyone would send their robots to me, and I would of course check to make sure they're legal. Since both parties need to have controls that could be played on the same keyboard, I would make 2 copies of the robots with one controlled with WASD and one with arrow keys (and maybe one with numpad if people want it). I'd tell each player which control scheme he got before the match.

2 people would join my stream and start the 1v1 while I record the matches. Not everyone necessarily has to do their matches at the same time, a single round taking place over a few days may be the best we can do. We'll have to play it by ear. If one person begins to take an unacceptably long time to join a match, they will forfeit a round.

If I find people screwing with others controls during a match, they will forfeit a round. Once is an accident. Twice gets a forfeit.

Once I got all the bots I would make the standard splashes and brackets and such. Preferably in a PM people would tell me what days & times they would be free along with their timezone.





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Offline Hoppin

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Re: General Tournament Discussion
« Reply #1128 on: January 18, 2018, 04:27:48 PM »
We've been playing with Parsec, a screen-sharing client that Badnik linked in the thread. Long story short, initial results seem to indicate that it works. I don't want to jump the gun and say it's flawless in every way without more testing, but today I played S_M across the atlantic US-UK and was very competitive with maybe a few hundred ping and the occasional lag spike that lasted a second or so. If you know how awful hamachi was, this will blow your mind how good it seems so far.
In a US-US match I imagine the lag will be low enough to have actual competitive matches. We need to test it a bit more but I'm gonna throw this post out there in the mean time.

I want to do an tournament that has live players instead of AI controlling the bots. If Parsec continues to deliver, this could work.

There are a couple of drawbacks. The way Parsec works is it's basically like a screen-sharing software like teamviewer. Basically one person hosts the match and one or more people connect to the computer. Everyone technically controls the keyboard and mouse at the same time on the host's pc - once he has enabled it.
This might scare some people and is pretty trust-based. Technically a player could screw over another by pressing his controls. Thankfully there seems to be little risk of someone actually hijacking someone else's PC since the host has key commands to enable and disable all inputs but his own. I wouldn't bother enabling inputs until the match has started, then disable them once the match ends if I was the host.
There also is a bit of a trust issue in that the host would have to have all competing robots on his PC and could theoretically tamper with them. There's not really a way around this except for just trusting the host. Then again, AI tournaments are pretty much the same thing.

That said, I am willing to give it a shot. I want to test it with some US players first to see how bad the latency is, but I really want to do a tournament with this. It could open up a huge assortment of building techniques etc once human drivers are common like I posted in the thread.


----------
Basically what I am thinking, subject to change with feedback:
8 bots, 1v1, bo3, double elimination. Let's start small & basic.
Ironforge MW/HW. Standard rules, no RA2CF, BFE, etc. Just for the competitive angle.
Octagon Arena. One of the benefits of human driving is that we aren't stupid and can dodge hazards. I'm going to take advantage of it.
US entrants only. Sorry to the others. Let's keep the lag to a minimum, at least for now.

I will host. Right now I'm located in Arkansas, which actually is a pretty good spot with how central it is in the US- should help latency ideally.
Everyone would send their robots to me, and I would of course check to make sure they're legal. Since both parties need to have controls that could be played on the same keyboard, I would make 2 copies of the robots with one controlled with WASD and one with arrow keys (and maybe one with numpad if people want it). I'd tell each player which control scheme he got before the match.

2 people would join my stream and start the 1v1 while I record the matches. Not everyone necessarily has to do their matches at the same time, a single round taking place over a few days may be the best we can do. We'll have to play it by ear. If one person begins to take an unacceptably long time to join a match, they will forfeit a round.

If I find people screwing with others controls during a match, they will forfeit a round. Once is an accident. Twice gets a forfeit.

Once I got all the bots I would make the standard splashes and brackets and such. Preferably in a PM people would tell me what days & times they would be free along with their timezone.





Any major things I missed? Suggestions are welcome. I'm pumped.

I really like the idea of this, but given if parsec takes of I think it'd be great to get a good practice for timezones for bigger tournies that use it. But other than that I really like it
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Offline Badnik96

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Re: General Tournament Discussion
« Reply #1129 on: January 18, 2018, 04:51:16 PM »
count me in for that, reier

Offline Mouldy

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Re: General Tournament Discussion
« Reply #1130 on: January 18, 2018, 05:24:26 PM »
Damn it, lad. You've beaten me to it.

Well, I was going to keep it a secret but me, Yugi, Robo, Georgethejedi, Zarconite and Moully have all been playing using Parsec today. We have actually recorded a Series 10 Robot Wars style heat using 6 robots and house robots. Hopefully, Robo will be able to edit it and show you all soon.

So me and Yugi have been talking about how we'd do a tournement and looking how you've laid it out (Reier), it is similar to how we did it.

Here's my example of the one we did earlier:

Robot Wars RA2 Mod - Choose a HW from the pack.
1 Heat of featuring 6 different robots.
New Robot Wars Arena
Two Designated people are house robots (who aren't competing in the tournament) use Shunt and Matilda.
Series 10 Style heat:
Two 3 Robot rumble - 2 winners from each round (One house robot).
Redemption battles - 2 winners from each (One house robot).
Semi-final fights (One house robot).
Final (Two house robot).
No region lock. From my experience, cross-atlantic has worked without any lag so far. Of course, going further may result in some lag but its yet to be proved.
Anyone found touching controls while not in their battle will be automatically DQ'ed. This is serious stuff. No chances can be taken. Hands NEED to be away from the keyboard if you aren't fighting. This should also be reported to a moderator if it becomes serious.
If found being AFK for 10 minutes when you're down to fight, you'll forfeit the match.

Moreover, a few things to consider if people want to make tournements online.
1. There is a risk to doing this. Your computer is at risk when you do this. You can disable/enable controls for all people using a hotkey which is useful to use if there is an emergency.
2. If you are paranoid, make a new login user, don't make it an administrator and make sure your own login is password protected.
3. The different ways of doing tournements that are possible with this:

4. You need Windows 8 or above to host. If you don't have 8 or above or you're not comfortable with hosting then you could do the following:


That's my two cents on it. Feel free to throw in more.

In addition, I recommend you go, make an account and upvote this as it would be extremely useful. (A feautre to see all user inputs).
https://support.parsecgaming.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360000051212-User-inputs

Offline Dreamcast

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Re: General Tournament Discussion
« Reply #1131 on: January 18, 2018, 05:58:46 PM »
So are these tournaments being attempted in one go? I would assume that for longer or more important events it would a better idea to hold the matches within a timing window (one week, ten days, ect.), in order to make sure people don't have to choose between RA2 or life.

Offline Badnik96

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Re: General Tournament Discussion
« Reply #1132 on: January 18, 2018, 06:04:16 PM »
i agree with that, we should be able to arrange fights when it's feasible for us

that being said, we can usually bang out gmod tournaments on a saturday afternoon so theres no reason why we couldnt on ra2

Offline Mouldy

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Re: General Tournament Discussion
« Reply #1133 on: January 18, 2018, 06:05:04 PM »
So are these tournaments being attempted in one go? I would assume that for longer or more important events it would a better idea to hold the matches within a timing window (one week, ten days, ect.), in order to make sure people don't have to choose between RA2 or life.

No no- we were able to hold ours in one day because of the amount of people. If you've got a larger tournement then yes, you can have matches whenever it is specified (as long as it fits in with the current tournement rules I assume).

Offline Dreamcast

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Re: General Tournament Discussion
« Reply #1134 on: January 18, 2018, 06:13:42 PM »
So are these tournaments being attempted in one go? I would assume that for longer or more important events it would a better idea to hold the matches within a timing window (one week, ten days, ect.), in order to make sure people don't have to choose between RA2 or life.

No no- we were able to hold ours in one day because of the amount of people. If you've got a larger tournement then yes, you can have matches whenever it is specified (as long as it fits in with the current tournement rules I assume).

i agree with that, we should be able to arrange fights when it's feasible for us

that being said, we can usually bang out gmod tournaments on a saturday afternoon so theres no reason why we couldnt on ra2

That is valid. I only asked because I remember the official RA2 tournaments held matches based on the players' timing. Of course, those were a big deal at the time and so I guess casual events can just take place in a day without trouble.

Offline Asbestosstar

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Re: General Tournament Discussion
« Reply #1135 on: January 18, 2018, 06:19:35 PM »
i WANNA play online

Offline yugitom

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Re: General Tournament Discussion
« Reply #1136 on: January 18, 2018, 06:47:11 PM »
One problem with online tournaments is the fact that, if someone outside the fight presses a key, it's untraceable. Even if everyone in a tournament is deemed trustworthy and not a minge, if something goes genuinely wrong in the game or a driver makes a mistake, it's easy to immediately begin pointing fingers. Try up-voting Mouldy's suggestion as much as you can, as it's vital to running fair tournaments.

Not to mention that people won't have freedom of choice when it comes to controls. If two guys, let's even say in the finals, have the exact same control set-up, one of them has to bite the bullet and use something they're not used to. If that person ends up losing, how can we tell if it was because of that or not? That driver can also easily complain that was the reason they lost.

Offline Dreamcast

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Re: General Tournament Discussion
« Reply #1137 on: January 18, 2018, 07:01:35 PM »
One problem with online tournaments is the fact that, if someone outside the fight presses a key, it's untraceable.
Then limit the number of people who can physically press keys

Try up-voting Mouldy's suggestion as much as you can
oof

Not to mention that people won't have freedom of choice when it comes to controls. If two guys, let's even say in the finals, have the exact same control set-up, one of them has to bite the bullet and use something they're not used to. If that person ends up losing, how can we tell if it was because of that or not?
Most robots are versatile with controls. If I'm wrong and it's just my robots that can have multiple schemes, then my controls can be changed by the organizer before others.

Offline yugitom

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Re: General Tournament Discussion
« Reply #1138 on: January 18, 2018, 07:07:20 PM »
Actually, I was under the impression you couldn't be selective when it comes to picking those that can press keys, but I think it was Jason being lazy. Even so, the point stands that, if one guy ****s up, he could blame it on his opponent pressing his buttons or the host rigging it.

Most robots are versatile with controls. If I'm wrong and it's just my robots that can have multiple schemes, then my controls can be changed by the organizer before others.
I don't really get this

Offline Dreamcast

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Re: General Tournament Discussion
« Reply #1139 on: January 18, 2018, 07:12:29 PM »
Actually, I was under the impression you couldn't be selective when it comes to picking those that can press keys, but I think it was Jason being lazy. Even so, the point stands that, if one guy ****s up, he could blame it on his opponent pressing his buttons or the host rigging it.

I just meant that keeping as few people in a server at one time as possible reduces the total numbers of suspects for a button press.

As for blaming the host, you don't see people blame the host (U AID IT WRONG) often, do you?

I don't really get this

If two robots use a similar control scheme, you should probably be able to change one user's scheme without issues appearing.

Edit: It goes without saying, but you should tell someone that's the controls were changed, or let them set up the new bindings.