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Dueling Tournaments - A Great Idea, Poorly Implemented Dueling Tournaments - Ranking System, Rewards and Fairness Problems

To enter a tournament, you go down the new staircase in the Duel Arena area to an underground area where tournaments begin. There are four registrars who start up duels for players ranked as follows:

• Registrar 1: Rank 0 to 1,700.
  
  
• Registrar 2: Rank 1,650 to 1,850 (note that the RuneScape knowledge base says 1,800 but this is wrong).
  
  
• Registrar 3: Rank 1,750 to 2,000.
  
  
• Registrar 4: Rank 1,900 to 3,500.

To start playing you talk to the registrar running the tournament of the level matching your rank. If your rank is 1,650 to 1,700, 1,750 to 1,850 or 1,900 to 2,000 then you have two options; otherwise you only have one. The registrar will enter you into the tournament and tell you what the rules are, how much the entry fee is and how much time you have to get ready.

In the tournament start area there are four boards that display the rules for upcoming tournaments (after the four currently being set up). There are also three bank chests to let you change armor, get out stakes and so forth.

The many problems with the dueling tournament minigame begin here, before the tournaments even start. Here are some of the biggest ones.

For some inexplicable reason, Jagex implemented this feature so that, unless there are at least some number of players in the waiting area with the appropriate rank for a tournament, the game won’t even start one up. This leads to a common “chicken and egg” problem where people keep hopping from world to world looking for each other—exactly the situation that the world tagging feature was supposed to stop. It all means that in most worlds there are no tournaments running, especially during quieter times (late at night, early in the morning.)

On November 23, Jagex changed the annoying message that the registrars say when they are “closed” to narrow the servers down to a list of four: Worlds 54, 83, 114 and 129. Despite this, 114 and 129 never have enough people, and 83 often doesn’t. Even World 54 sometimes doesn’t have games going; the registrars on World 54 then tell you to try World 54. Duh.

What makes matters worse is that the first two worlds on this short list, 54 and 83, are often busy during peak times in Europe. So sometimes there may be a game going only on World 54 but you can’t get in! Adding insult to injury is the fact that the higher ranked games are the ones that are hardest to find, so if you succeed in dueling this just means you waste more time standing around and world hopping. There were several times this past week when there wasn’t a single rank 4 game running anywhere, even on World 54 (Figure 54).

I’ve seen groups of 10 or more people crowded around a registrar, all upset that it wouldn’t start a game. Jagex advertises in its description of the feature that tournaments of 2 to 64 players are allowed, so why all the hassle starting up a tourney?

So you can’t get into World 54 because it’s full, but you get to World 83 and Registrar 3 sets up a tourney. Okay, it’s all three combat styles, food, prayer, no potions, armor on, 4k entrance fee, 8 minutes until it starts. You go to the bank chest, enter your PIN. Hmm, what gear should you get out.. okay let’s do Veracs, and also take with some ranging gear to deal with mages. Want to save inventory space for food, what food should you take.. don’t forget the entrance fee. Better hurry, only 2 minutes left...

And then.. “The tournament you entered has been cancelled”. Frustration doesn’t begin to describe it.

For the love of Saradomin, why? What possible reason can there be for canceling a tournament unless there is literally only one person left as it begins? Did anyone at Jagex stop for even one minute to think about whether canceling tournaments made any sense or how players would feel about it?

The game waits 10 minutes between tournaments, so you spend a lot of time waiting around, depending on where the cycle is when you log into a server. And of course, you may not necessarily like the rules of the current tournament, so if you want to wait for the next one that’s another 10 minutes. And since, as mentioned above, there is really only one world running tournaments, switching isn’t an option.

For example, suppose I log in to World 54 and try to enter a tournament, but there’s only 3 minutes to go and that’s not enough time for me to get ready. I look on the board and the next tournament is magic only and I’m on Lunars. Well, that means I will be waiting a minimum of 23 minutes before I can enter a duel.

The 10 minute wait between tournaments is simply too long. It doesn’t take most people that long to prepare, and even if it does, nothing is accomplished by making the wait so long. Suppose it were 5 minutes; if I couldn’t get ready in time I could just wait for the next one, and I’d have ended up waiting the same 10 minutes as before. Those who were ready on time, though, could start much faster.

Jagex didn’t disable randoms in the waiting areas. So even after you find a world that’s open, and find a tournament that’s running, and wait for rules you like, and get ready to play, and the registrar doesn’t decide to cancel, you can still get kidnapped 15 seconds before the tournament starts.

When you get back, oh gee, another 10 minute wait, and this time the rules are different, so maybe it’s 20 minutes, and even if not, you have to change all of your gear.

How could a system like this have passed any reasonably competent testing regime, much less a full QA program?

Dueling Tournaments - A Great Idea, Poorly Implemented Dueling Tournaments - Ranking System, Rewards and Fairness Problems