Hey guys,
Last week you could participate to the second Duelyst Open. This tournament was open to everyone FOR FREE and gave you 3 SPIRIT ORBS just for playing all your match. The prices for the top 3 were respectively 400, 600 and $1000 ! And I am not even counting the cosmetics and DWC points that you get on top of all that. Yet, only 72 people intended the tournament …
I personally find those numbers very low for a tournament that offer so much for free.
First, let’s try to determine roughly the potential population that could be interested in those kind of events. First we have the S-rank players , who play the game actively and competitively. You can add to that all the diamond players that don’t necessarily have the time to grind the ladder but also play the game competitively. Finally there is the more casual players who would play the tourney just for fun and the free orbs. With all those people together, we are roughly looking at 1000 potential players (maybe much more), realistically I think a Duelyst Open should gather around 200 people.
First I want to point out the positive points about the current system:
-The coverage is great, meaning we have very good casters
-If only the tournaments weren’t so long, the time line are really good for both Europe and US (maybe not so much elsewhere but we cannot do the impossible).
-The rewards are amazing.
-The organisation is pretty good (kuddos to Juveyd) just need to enforce the 50 min time limit.
So what’s the problem?
The current tournaments are not accessible enough for the average player. The Duelyst Open was 7 rounds of BO3 with a top 16 in Bo5. Your looking at a 7 hours tournament without counting the top 16, needless to say that for a tournament of 72 players it is WAY TOO LONG. I think you would need at least 500 players to justify so many rounds. For 72 players, a 5 rounds BO3 with a top8 in bo3 is totally enough. I personally believe that making Bo5 for top16 is a mistake, even in GP top8 on MTG you don’t have that (magic GPs are between 1000 and 4000 people).
Having such long tournaments not only is very time consuming but it’s also a PAIN IN THE ASS to go through. Duelyst is a very brain consuming game. Usually I would not play more than 3 hours a day top , I can push it to 5 hours for a tournament since endurance is part of the challenge , but 7 hours… seriously !!!
It would also be better for the organizer, the casters, the viewers, the players … well for everyone ! Excepted the Top players who can handle long session better than regular player and gain an edge from that. And guess from who CP is taking most of its feedback? You guessed it, from the top players, which brings me to my next point: CP is making a mistake by relying exclusively on Top players for tournament feedback.
CP should be asking feedback and suggestions from people who don’t consistently play tournaments. You don’t want the opinion of people who attend every events, you want the opinion of the player who played a tournament but never came back.
We are not at the point where CP just want retention (or at least I hope so), we want to expand the participation. So it implies to adapt your system to the masses rather than the minority.
One other big entry barrier for tournament is the conquest format. This system force you to have 3 competitive decks ready to battle. Most players own only one competitive deck which makes the tournament inaccessible for them. Removing the BO5 for top8 would reduce the need of only 2 decks rather than 3 which is nice . But personally I would prefer the MTG system where you only need to bring one deck with a sideboard.
But of course you can make an very accessible tournaments system if no one knows about it, you won’t expand your player base which brings me to the next point: Communication.
The communication for tournament is awful, I consider myself relatively well informed on Duelyst news and yet I need Juveyd to remind me of every single events that comes up. That’s not normal, CP has access to the best communication platform ever, which will reach every SINGLE POTENTIAL PLAYER : the game itself of course!!!
Why is CP not using the game to communicate with players on upcoming event ? Is it that hard to put a news on the launcher , or even a reminder when you log on the game?
Also I believe that the tournament announcement are not appealing to the average players.
Here is a screenshot of the twitter announcement of the Duelyst Open:
If I read this announcement from left to right like you do in western society I read first “World championship” . This information itself will discourage a lot of players because the average players will think about an elitist events, which is absolutely not the case in reality. To appeal to casual players the announcement should emphasis on what is important to them. Which is probably the 3 orbs you will get no matter what and the fact that the tournament is Free and Open to everyone. This announcement totally miss those points.
Every suggestion that I have made so far can be implemented very easily without having to make any major investment. But of course the best thing would be to have a real In Game tournament system that would be easy to use and accessible to everyone . For a lot of people having to go through battlefly and discord is a big turn off and it would also make the organisation so much simpler.
I am done with my suggestions , but as I said earlier what is more important is YOUR OPINION on the matter:
Did you know about the tournaments scene for Duelyst?
Have you ever play a tournament on Duelyst?
If so ,did you like it?
How would you improve it?
Looking forward for your feedback !
