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TruthScape Special Reports - Dueling Tournaments - Not Ready for Prime Time Dueling Tournaments - Tournament Setup Issues

The general idea behind dueling tournaments is an excellent one: it expands on the existing one-on-one duel concept to allow structured tournaments containing many players. The idea is to replicate the concept of tournaments that take place in sports like tennis or the playoffs in hockey or football, with the better players advancing to face off against each other with one eventual winner.

I’ll start here with a brief overview of the system for the benefit of those who haven’t tried it yet, and also provide a summary of the problems. I’ll get into more detail on both features and issues later in the report.

The tournaments are automatically started and run by the game about every 10 minutes, and only operate on certain worlds; these are tagged in the server list, so you can see which ones are available when you start up RuneScape. There are four different “registrars” that operate simultaneously, starting up tourneys that are meant to be geared to players in four different skill levels. A player’s level in the tournament system is represented by a ranking that goes up when he or she succeeds in tournaments, and down when the player is knocked out early.

The rules are similar to the options available in single player dueling, and vary from one tournament to the next. For example, one tournament might allow all forms of combat, food and potions, but require you to fight without armor; another might be melee only while outlawing food and potions but allowing prayer and special attacks, and so forth. There is also one special rule that determines whether you are healed between rounds or not; this has a big impact on how the tournament plays out.

The options (rules) are selected “pseudo randomly” by the game; what I mean here is that the options aren’t completely random (only certain combos exist) but players have no control over what tournaments are started. The entrance fee (stake) is also randomly chosen; it is generally higher for the higher-ranked tournaments but not always.

Once players enter a tournament they have some time to get themselves prepared, and then they’re be transported into the dueling tournament waiting room. The game will then pair off contestants who fight “to the death” or until a three-minute limit is reached. The losers are healed and transported to the hospital, while winners carry on to the next round. The final victor wins all of the entrants’ stakes (see Figure 53).

This sounds like an awesome system, and it certainly does have its fun aspects. The main thing that I like about the tournaments is that they force people to learn strategies to deal with the different rules that are put into place for various tourneys, unlike the boring “let’s fight with everything turned off so the winner is determined by luck” that always dominated single player dueling. There’s also none of the “rules squabbling” of conventional duels.

Unfortunately, while the tourney system is a great concept, it has been very poorly implemented. The problems with it pervade every aspect of the system, from signup to combat to ending the tournament, and this results in most players finding the minigame far more frustrating than fun. I have broken down most of the problems into the following four areas:

• Tournament Setup: The system for starting tournaments is dysfunctional; you end up wasting ridiculous amounts of time trying to find an open tournament, standing around waiting, and world hopping. Better duelers are often left with nowhere at all to enter a duel.
  
  
• Ranking System: The ranking system is not effective in pitting combatants of roughly equal abilities against each other; low-levels have basically no chance to win, while high-levels can game the system for relatively easy victories. Also, you can have your rank be bumped up so high that you must face more difficult opponents even if you never win a tournament.
  
  
• Rules and Options: Players cannot control the rules and options at all. While this does make the tournaments more multi-dimensional, as I mentioned above, it also means that some players can wait for hours to find a game they have any chance of succeeding at. Some of the rule combinations also make no sense, and the many tourneys with food and potions enabled make it impossible for poorer players to compete.
  
  
• Duel Mechanics: There are several problems with how duels are conducted, starting with a tie-breaker system that is beyond ridiculous.

Overall, this feature was clearly rushed to completion and not thoroughly tested. Many of the problems became blatantly obvious to any experienced player within an hour of starting to play in tournaments. The fact that this minigame was released in its current state tells me that Jagex’s QA people do not play RuneScape very much.

The next four topics will address the four problem areas listed above in more detail.

TruthScape Special Reports - Dueling Tournaments - Not Ready for Prime Time Dueling Tournaments - Tournament Setup Issues