Third, today I was able to award a General Achievement medal to asimpson23 "For gathering the staggering number of 562 Great War Cannon tokens in the Great War mega-event, more than twice as many as any other player." Cannons don't actually have a point value, so asimpson has now fallen off the bottom of the Great War scoreboard, but I thought that his remarkeable achievement should be commemorated in some way, a GA medal has been issued.
Congratulations asimpson23!!!
Fourth, later tonight, if I manage to finish it, I should have another Great War autotournament, this time marking the Battle of Festubert. If not tonight, maybe tomorrow. Festubert will be a one-time only tournament. In other words, it will not re-iterate (launch multiple copies of itself.) You will have one chance only to join Festubert.
“Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.” ― Voltaire
The battle of Festubert is a single-instance tournament. In other words, it will not re-iterate (make a fresh copy of itself when it fills) like other autotournaments in the Great War event do. Thus, if you want to participate in the Festubert tournament, you must join this one-and-only iteration.
The special thing about this tournament is this: it is essentially a Part 2 to the battle of Artois, which we launched a few days ago. Festubert proceeds from Artois so directly that I wondered if it even should get its own tournament. In the end, I decided it should. Now, as a result of the intimate connection between them, there will be a special reward. If you make it to the final round of both Artois and Festubert, you will get a General Achievement medal in addition to any other prizes that you win as a result. That means, obviously, that you must play in both, so in addition to joining Festubert, make sure you have joined Artois. The latter is a regular re-iterating tournament that will re-iterate until June 24th, so you still have time.
Because of its special status, Festubert costs 4 tokens to enter plus 20 drab stars.
NOTA BENE: This tournament is listed as starting on June 22nd, but it might not launch until tomorrow. I am racing to finish coding it and get it launched before midnight, but I could still fail.
Today is a day we have worked long and hard to reach. Since the beginning of this event, it was our intention that each autotournament commemorating a Great War battle should come out on the 100th anniversary of the battle. Since we are living out the 100th anniversary of the Great War, this is an ongoing process. Almost every day for the last 11 months and for the next 39 months is the 100th anniversary of some event significant in unfolding of World War I, some battle, or treaty, or political upheaval, or technological development.
Still, in the early going we found it was difficult to keep to the schedule. First off, due to the planning uncertainties, we started this event six weeks late. More importantly, though, the first year of the war was just SO INCREDIBLY EVENTFUL! There were just so many battles and significant events that we just couldn't keep up. We kept trying to make up time, but instead of getting ahead we fell further behind. Then, through the winter, I was buried with work in R/L and didn't have the time to keep this event going at the pace that I should have, and starting from 6 weeks behind, by March we were 10 weeks behind.
Then, in April, we finally started to gain ground. With Worldwide Warfare Week, seven new tournaments in seven days, we finally began our grand assault on the backlog of battles. Since Worldwide Warfare Week, we have kept our nose to the grindstone, cranking out two or three new tournaments every week, and finally, we are here. REAL-TIME DAY. It is here. Today, we launched a tournament commemorating the First Battle of Isonzo on the actual 100th anniversary of the First Battle of Isonzo.
The great backlog is behind us now. That wild and crazy first year of the war is over. The War will go on for another 39 months, but from here on in new battles are not so frequent. More of the front remains stable, and the Great Powers gather their strength slowly and methodically for each new challenge. From here on in, all our new autotournaments will come out, as originally planned, on the 100th anniversary of the battle or event they commemorate.
Please raise a glass and help us celebrate this moment!
Now, some thank-you's. First of all, bigWham. Over 200 iterations of 65 unique tournament templates, something close to 6000 total player entries, including something in the neighbourhood of 1000 unique players. And we're not even one full year in yet! This is a logistical task that would be utterly impossible with manual tournaments. It is often-maligned autotournament engine that makes a massive event like this possible. Throughout this event bigWham has been tireless in supporting us, helping with the coding of tournaments, and fixing mistakes in the ones that I screwed up the coding on. Even when I would send a panicky message saying, "I screwed up the code in tournament x and you have to fix it right now!" he would just cheerfully go in and fix it and not demand that I commit seppuku for my stupidity!
The autotournament engine continues to evolve. It is not perfect. Is anything? But bigWham continues to improve it, one little tweak at a time, and with each passing month we find new things that can be done to make autotournaments more interesting despite the inherent limitations. It is still a blunt instrument, but with each pass over the grindstone it gets a little sharper, and one day this cudgel will be a katana! For the autotournament engine and it's continual evolution, thank you BW!
Second, and at the risk of sounding sycophantic, I simply must say it, is bigWham again. I asked him to provide some extra prizes for the Isonzo tournament to help celebrate this moment, and look what he put in! A blue star and 500 creds for the winner, plus yellow stars for 2nd and 3rd. Far more than what I would have dared to suggest! I was stupefied when I saw that! Thank you a second time, BW!
Next, a big thank-you to DoomYoshi, who started this event with me, is the second-most prolific writer of new tournaments, and provides a lot of general guidance and wisdom. DoomYoshi continues to evolve as a tournament writer, and if you take time to read the Angola tournament or especially Dogger Bank, in detail, you'll see what I mean. Thank you Doom for all you do!
I would like to thank the other tournament writers who have contributed tournaments to the collection: JamesKer1, mcShanester29, Gabriel13, takman2k, robellis00 who produced the winning entry in the Bolimov contest, and last but certainly not least the newest member of our team, waauw who may be a recent addition but has already written six tournaments in the Great War series! A special thank-you to sempaispellcheck for proofreading and general commentary. Finally, I need to thank Razorvich, who suggested the ANZAC DAY tournament, and ran the live-chat event marking Anzac Day on the site.
I would like to thank people who have spoken up in this thread, both with compliments and with criticisms, because both are helpful. In this category certainly Shoop76 and Stealth99 are the standouts, but there are many others. Even ConfederateSS, whose stinging criticism helped me push the team along in the beginning when it seemed the preliminary planning would take forever.
Above all, I need to thank the players, who have made this tournament series into the massive success that it is!
A big, massive, STUPENDOUS 'THANK YOU!' to all of you.
This is already the biggest event CC has ever run, and there is much, much more to come!
This Saturday, June 27th, will be the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Nasiriyeh. We will mark this by for the first time attempting to run a group of speed tournaments in this series. Stay tuned for more details, and try to set aside some time on Saturday for some speed games!
Sunday, June 28th, will be the 100th anniversary of the bloodbath in Gallipoli's Gully Ravine. This will be waauw's seventh tournament, and he promised to make it something really special. Stay tuned!
Also on Sunday, I will be making an announcement about some prizes! Oh, yeah, wait for it....
And then, the guns will go strangely quiet for a while. It will be All Quiet on the Western Front, and on the Eastern Front, and on the Mesopotamian Front, and in fact everywhere except Gallipoli and Italy. July 1915 was a really quiet month in World War I, and those of you who have been struggling with a massive game load as a result of trying to keep up with all these tournaments will finally get some relief. There may only be two or three new tournaments in July. In August things will pick up a bit once again, but never again will you see the frenetic pace that we have been keeping up from April to June. We are in Real Time now, well, Real Time +100 Years, anyway, and I am very relieved to finally be here!
I agree, its been a great event and I appreciate all the hard work being put in. I have been critical at times and even threatened to quit, especially when my game count got to 250, but this is one of the best organized events that I have seen on cc in a while.
Stealth, I skipped quite a few of the recent tournaments in order to save my sanity, so there is a chance to do some catch up, though I will gain a very cheap medal here, http://www.conquerclub.com/player.php?mode=autotournament&tourney_id=12351. In the final round the top 2 were paired against each other and I was paired to a deadbeat.
Congratulations to every of the organizers and collaborators for the effort put in these really big challenge. It's been a very top standing series of tournaments! And what is coming is promising! If you just keep at half the level, it would be memorable! And of course, thanks!
Yes. Great War autotournaments are listed at the top of you Central Command page.
Go to Central Command (the old "My Games" page), click on the Great War box at the top, and any current tourneys become visible. Then you click on each one to read the brief description and there is a Join link in the bottom right.
“Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.” ― Voltaire
All rounds of all three tournaments are 2-minute Automatic, Sequential, with random Sun/Fog, No Trench, and a 20-round limit. Spoils and game type are as follows.
Tournament 1: Assassin.
1 round of four X 8-player games, spoils randomly escalating, nuclear, flat 4 players eliminated, score resets 1 round of four X 4-player Assassin games, same settings
Tournament two is an 8-player Poly elimination bracket, Premium only
Rounds 1 and 2 are straight eliminations. Rounds 3 to 5 are cumulative contest between the final two players
All rounds of all tournaments use a random pick from the seven maps we have that depict Mesopotamia: Gilgamesh -- representing the legendary warrior who fought in these lands in ancient times Alexander's Empire -- one of many conquerors whose ruled this area WWI Ottoman -- representing the Ottoman Empire that ruled the land before the Great War Eastern Hemisphere -- representing the British (and French) empires that seized it from the Turks Indian Empire -- the neighbouring great land where the British replenished their power Middle East -- an overview map Battle for Iraq -- the most recent bloodbath fought over the land between the waters
The five-round Assassin games were taking too long to play. Made a change on the fly and changed the Assassin to 2 rounds. This won't have any impact on tourneys already launched, but it will take effect with the next Assassin tourney.
Dukasaur wrote:Today for the first time we will have speed games within the Great War event.
All rounds of all three tournaments are 2-minute Automatic, Sequential, with random Sun/Fog, No Trench, and a 20-round limit. Spoils and game type are as follows.
Tournament 1: Assassin.
1 round of four X 8-player games, spoils randomly escalating, nuclear, flat 4 players eliminated, score resets 1 round of four X 4-player Assassin games, same settings
Tournament two is an 8-player Poly elimination bracket, Premium only
Rounds 1 and 2 are straight eliminations. Rounds 3 to 5 are cumulative contest between the final two players
All rounds of all tournaments use a random pick from the seven maps we have that depict Mesopotamia: Gilgamesh -- representing the legendary warrior who fought in these lands in ancient times Alexander's Empire -- one of many conquerors whose ruled this area WWI Ottoman -- representing the Ottoman Empire that ruled the land before the Great War Eastern Hemisphere -- representing the British (and French) empires that seized it from the Turks Indian Empire -- the neighbouring great land where the British replenished their power Middle East -- an overview map Battle for Iraq -- the most recent bloodbath fought over the land between the waters
So, for some time we have been talking about some major prizes for people on the Great War scoreboard. Today we will commemorate some of our great winners.
Going forward, we will give 1 Green and 1 Blue every quarter.
The Quarterly Green: Will be given to the player at the top of the scoreboard at the end of each quarter. However, the same player can only get it once per year. Thus, if the player on the top of the scoreboard already got one within the last four quarters, it will go to the 2nd place player. If that player already got one in the last four quarters, it will go to the third place player and so on.
The Quarterly Blue: Will be a "most-improved" star. We'll need a snapshot of the scoreboard at the end of each quarter. The player who moves up the most spaces on the scoreboard will win the Blue. If multiple players all jumped the same number of spaces, the one who began at the highest point in the previous quarter will get the star.
Both the Quarterly Green and the Quarterly Blue will come with a GA medal to commemorate the triumph.
We are also going to do a little catching up, because this is the end of the third quarter of the War and we didn't do anything special at the ends of the first two quarters. The retroactive prizes will not follow the exact rules set above, but they are within the spirit of what we want to achieve.
Three players have held the top spot for significant periods. They will get Green stars and a GA meda. Four other players reached the top spot only momentarily or were only tied for top spot. Those will get Blue stars and a GA.
Green Star Level Long-term dominance of the Great War scoreboard:
...and i'm embarassed i did not even send you a mini-picture
Thank you Dukasaur. See you all in 3 years... or inbetween.
Special thx to great-ollie for being the first victim in this conflict. I could not have started that war without his first-quality play as franz ferdinand.
I seem to remember a post saying most of the tourneys would only accept players with less than 5% missed turn rate... Not sure if the number was exactly that, but there is a played in my inital dardnless bombardment tourney named 'koalie' who has apparently missed 85% of his turns on this site. I'm not even sure how its possible to miss 85% of your turns, kinda think its funny. Also I dont mind him in the tourney, he isn't missing turns (although he has been rather mouthy)... I was just trying to rectify my foggy memory of what i read about missed turns, with the shocking stat I found on his page.
mookiemcgee wrote:I seem to remember a post saying most of the tourneys would only accept players with less than 5% missed turn rate... Not sure if the number was exactly that, but there is a played in my inital dardnless bombardment tourney named 'koalie' who has apparently missed 85% of his turns on this site. I'm not even sure how its possible to miss 85% of your turns, kinda think its funny. Also I dont mind him in the tourney, he isn't missing turns (although he has been rather mouthy)... I was just trying to rectify my foggy memory of what i read about missed turns, with the shocking stat I found on his page.
Yeah, Initial Dardanelles was created without an attendance restriction. I don't remember why.
“Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.” ― Voltaire
The first iteration of the Battle of Gully Ravine has taken a long time to fill, despite having a huge list of prizes and being given marquee status. Regretfully, I've had to cancel the second iteration.
A new, smaller tournament coming soon.
“Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.” ― Voltaire
iAmCaffeine wrote:Keep it up mate, it's appreciated.
Thanks, man. Good to hear!
Launching tomorrow, Achi Baba. This will be a full freemium-vacation tourney, which means freemiums can join even if they do not have the requisite slots available.