descentchampions.org

Alright, another Observatory season in the books! It was a smaller, cozier season, but it definitely had its moments! Thanks all who joined and made it a success.

With the season as small as it was, there were not a lot of issues that came up, but I did want to highlight some of the things I wanted to talk about post-season.

1) The new season scoring system (3 points per win instead of 1, plus the wins your opponent had)

I thought this was fine. In the end it didn't really matter, though, because everyone who competed got invited to the finals tournament, and even though we had 5 people in that tournament it worked out very well.

This system still has its flaws, namely what happens when you're up against someone who only played once because you're not going to get very many bonus points off them, or what happens if you get poor matchups in a week. However, I feel that the seasons are casual enough that we can live with these flaws.

2) Season-long, three level selection system

Instead of forcing people to play one home level and then letting pilots change that per tournament, we set it up so that you had to pick 3 levels at the beginning of the season, and then you couldn't modify the selection for the rest of the season.

This led to very interesting matchups. ie: Sirius playing Jediluke blind in Junior, Synapse getting considerable play time, etc.

This also led to some interesting situations where a pilot would have a home level that their opponent was exceptionally good in (Jediluke picking Nysa vs Sirius and Sirius picking Flea vs Ferno come to mind). In the case of Jediluke/Sirius, we got our best game of the tournament out of that one, so I'm not too upset with this happening.

What this DID lead into was seeing the same maps for most of the season. On the live game alone, we saw Nysa 3 times, Anarctic 3 times, Synapse twice, Junior twice, Flea a fair number of times, and other repeats. Is this okay with the viewers?

3) Lower participation leading to more lopsided matches

This season saw 5 regulars in the tournament:

Jediluke - Diamond
Sirius - Gold
Phyrex - High Silver
Lee - Low Silver
Ferno - Bronze

(By the way, don't get offended by the classification of high/low, I'm taking that directly from the algorithm's pilot ratings!)

This resulted very often in scores that did not get closer than 20-15. In fact, only 2 games were 20-15 or closer in the regular season: Lee over Ferno 20-15 in Anarctic, and Jediluke over Sirius 20-18 in Nysa. The finals were about as bad, with Lee over Ferno 35-23 being the closest matchup on the card, and with no matchup being within 10 points.

Compare this to Season 1:
- 12 games 20-15 or closer (counting the wildcard)
- 3 finals matches within 10 points, including Cyrus over Melvin 35-33.

Really, the only way to fix this is with more participation, but with this being a tournament that doesn't REQUIRE participation, we can't exactly force people to play, so I'm not sure this can be fixed. We could do more rounds with games to less points to have closer matches (many games were within 3 points when someone hit 10), but then this would 1) eliminate DCL matches from happening (which wouldn't hurt the tournament), and 2) require more participants so the qualifiers don't turn into round robins, which I don't particularly like. Any thoughts on how to better handle this would be more than welcome... but we are also at a low point in Descent competition in general, so I think this will pick up in May and whatever month we do Season 4 in (which I'll know tonight what month that is).

What about you guys? If you were a viewer, what did you think? If you were a participant, even if you did not play in the finals tournament, how did you like Season 2? Any suggestions?

As neither a viewer nor a participant I can't comment on how it went. But I'd be happy to play in Season 3, granted that I can be around for the whole tournament! One step towards solving the activity problem at least.

The nice thing is that it's designed so you don't have to be around for the whole thing. But we always appreciate more pilots!

I plan to participate as soon as my connection is Fiber.

no meaningful feedback beyond love observatory and appreciate the effort.

Sorry I had to miss so much of it. I think the format is much improved from the first season. The problems in the scoring will show more clearly with higher participation, especially among very high skilled pilots. I wouldn't try this system at a big lan. But for the moment, it serves.

I do like the idea of changing the suicide rules in a tournament setting. I don't like the alternative score limits making the games incompatible with ladder matches.

It was great; was really fun to participate in and to watch afterwards with the commentary. I preferred the scoring this season, the multiple choice for home levels was a big p. lus keeping it fresh (considering the number of people playing) and whilst more people would be ideal, for me the lack of numbers didnt detract from the overall experience. I loved it so thank you. I look forward to season 3. Retiring again .

There isn't anything specific I can point to other than, again, we would need more participants to have a better chance of getting interesting games. Trying to even it out in any other way would be dumb. I would also like to see the wildcard game some day.

I am probably going to sub Nysa for something else next time I play though... variety etc.

Right now Season 3 is looking to be a carbon copy of Season 2 when it comes to the rule book. I can't come up with a reason to change anything at this point, as Season 2 seemed to work pretty well.

Saturday May 6th will be the first qualifier for Season 3!