- Firstly, speed auto tournaments should be listed in a concise menu that is set apart from the casual autos.
- Concerning the available speed tournaments, I suggest that they be offered in a consistent fashion: This could be a system where a new tournament is automatically generated when a current offered tournament fills, providing a constant queue for quick auto tournies for any member at any time.
- As well as this continuous queue for quicker tournies, there should be consistent times that tournaments are generated, especially for signature tournaments that can be joined each (any) day. (1pm CC time each day for a speed assassin tourney, for example. It could be called Afternoon Assassin.) This sort of thing would happen throughout all hours to accommodate a 24 hour world.
Specifics/Details:
- Rolling tournies (one generated after the next) would apply to those that can be filled and finished quickly - probably only 1v1 tournaments.
- Going by the currently offered tournies, perhaps a good rotation would be to offer the Classic Super Speeder, Random Mixup Super Speeder, and Classic Poly Speeder in a rotation; the next tournament in line is generated when the last one fills, to keep it consistently available but also diverse.
- Considering the reduced rewards for auto tournaments and no join fee, I feel this would be an appropriate means of offering a healthy flow of tournaments while not going overboard.
How this will benefit the site and make the world a vastly better place:
- The separate menu for SATs would greatly help organization and increase appeal.
- There could even be a small banner for the currently offered speed auto with a link to the Speed page.
- Ensuring the presence of an auto tournament at any given time would increase joinability.
Concluding thoughts:
- There needs to be consistency with auto tournaments in some fashion. In my opinion, the perfect system would look something like this:
- A couple tournaments are offered in a chain where one is generated after the next in a consistent order, giving users an expectation of what is to come and allowing them to look forward to the next opening (as suggested above).
- The other consistently offered tournaments would be titled with something noteworthy, like "Afternoon Assdoodle Freestyle" for a tournament which is offered every day at 3pm CC time and "Afterdark Assdoodle Freestyle" for the 3am offering. "Midnight Mixup" for a random-settings speed tournament offered every 24 hours, and "Midday Mixup" for the noon mirror version. "Nightly Escalating Showdown" for the 9pm 6-player-games tournament. Maybe offer one of these more involved tournaments every 3/4/6/8/12 hours on a regular schedule.
- I'd also enjoy specialty speed tournaments offered with unique titles, like "Jousting at Dawn" for a 1v1 tournament on the Knights map offered at 6am. Admittedly with the activity in speed autos at the current time this would be difficult, but laying a groundwork for consistency and user expectations would help to build up this activity for more fun events in the future.
Speed Auto Tournaments (or SATs) have gone dead, and I believe this was not necessary given the tools at hand. I'm not holding a grudge, but I had fun with them, and I'd like to see them implemented successfully in the future. I believe this suggestion could give integrity to the system in a fun, interesting and organized way! I've edited the original post to make it clear and hopefully useful going forward. Thanks again.