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Dueling Tournaments - Rules and Options Dueling Tournaments - Conclusion and Recommendations

Once you begin a tournament, the actual mechanics of conducting a duel are similar to those in single player dueling. You and your opponent are transported to a dueling ring, either with or without obstacles depending on the rules, along with other pairs of combatants from the same tournament. Your opponent has a flashing yellow arrow overhead so you can spot him or her. You fight until one wins; the victor returns to the waiting room for the next round while the loser ends up in the hospital upstairs.

Here, too, there are some problems, I’m afraid.

One of the chief complaints that many duelers used to have is that the system relied too much on the luck of the combat system. In particular, higher-level players didn’t like the fact that lower-level players could sometimes beat them by getting in lucky hits. As I mentioned earlier in this report, the fact that you must now actually consider strategy more does reduce the influence of luck. So, too, does the need to beat multiple players; you can’t win a tournament just by getting lucky with one kill, because you have others you’ll also have to beat.

Unfortunately, the new system goes too far in the other direction. Because you must beat so many opponents, there is a strong bias in the duels towards those who are very high level and have the very best equipment. This almost entirely negates any ability of those who are even slightly lower in level to win a tournament.

Another luck issue with the tournaments is that your chances of winning your second and subsequent duels are greatly impacted by how lucky you got in your first fight. This is especially the case when there is no healing between rounds, because of the poison issue. If one player gets poisoned and another doesn’t, and there’s no way to heal, the poisoned player has no chance, even though he might have in fact fought better than the one who didn’t get poisoned.

I realize that to some extent this is just how tournaments go. But at the very least, the poison issue should be fixed. It shouldn’t be possible for someone who died in round 1 to kill their original opponent indirectly in round 3.

I believe there is also a potential for abuse here, with clans entering tournaments to try to increase the chances of certain members winning the tourney.

Players’ special bars are not restored between duels, even though they would be after each duel in one on one staking. This reduces the fun of dueling, negates some options for certain types of strategies, and unnecessarily lengthens tournaments.

If you get to the end of a particular duel in a tournament and both players are still alive, then a winner must be chosen by the game. For this, the system uses a tie-breaker: whoever has the highest percentage of their total health remaining is the winner.

Well, this might work in a duel where there is no food allowed and health is restored between duels, but in every other case it is utterly ludicrous, because it doesn’t really reflect how well the two players fought. It’s quite possible to do 500 points of damage on your opponent, while she does only 50 on you, and still lose, because she chose to eat a piece of food at exactly the right time.

Of course, players aren’t stupid, so now they play games to win the tie-breakers. Typically they wait until the last 15 seconds before the duel ends, and then eat food or quaff Sara Brew potions as fast as possible while trying to get in the occasional hit. Sometimes they combine this with a dark bow special at the last second, since its spec does guaranteed damage.

This tie-breaker algorithm is so silly, so dysfunctional, that it is single-handed proof that the developers of this game have completely lost touch with its players. There isn’t a single person I know who didn’t immediately recognize that this tie-breaker could and would be abused, and who didn’t also immediately suggest a far better alternative. It is absolutely baffling that this got past QA when any player could have told the developers immediately why it was a bad idea.

Dueling Tournaments - Rules and Options Dueling Tournaments - Conclusion and Recommendations