Just change the name of it. Call it the ffg center store championship.

The name " world's " is just shady marketing really.

It's The communities fault for falling for it.

We don' all run out and buy a Ford because Ford has a commercial for their stupid truck calling it the best truck ever.

Don't you people recognise a commercial when you see it?

12 hours ago, Fanfan said:

Everyone who's been at Worlds in the past knows that even if the event is globally very competitive, there is a bit of an awkward 'luck of the draw' at least for the first few rounds.

This is true in any Swiss system where 2 losses is essentially elimination. A more "accurate" tournament would allow for a couple extra rounds so all the X-2's make the cut, and also give the top seeded players from Swiss a bye in the first elimination round. However, this goes against FFG OP's core principles: run the tournament in as few rounds as is mathematically possible while still having an elimination cut. It makes it cheaper to run this way, and they still get to say "we held a World Championship event" as their halo OP product.

17 minutes ago, MajorJuggler said:

It makes it cheaper to run this way, and they still get to say "we held a World Championship event" as their halo OP product.

Exactly.

Which makes the idea of applying the asterisk to this year, and this only, preposterous to me. Worlds has never been structured to determine the best player in the world. The arbitrary exclusion of interested parties has been an issue, IIRC, every single year after the first.

Why is 2018 the very first year that the competitive community has decided to buy into the "we held a world championship event" marketing ploy?

Willful delusion? Regular delusion? Or (IMO, most likely) very understandable hurt feelings.

I love going to competitive events because I get to see people I otherwise wouldn't. I've made friends through this game and I welcome the opportunity to make more. I've never been to worlds but I can sympathize with the frustration of missing out on an event you book every year no matter what.

But if I get excluded because of whatever arbitrary system, my reaction would be to gripe, feel sorry for myself, and I'd certainly ***** about it on my podcast.

What I wouldn't do, is preemptively dismiss the future winner of said event and that seems like exactly what's going on here.

The sentiment seems a lot more akin to "I don't get to go, therefore the whole event is a sham!" Than it is an indictment of trading one poor system of determining the best player in the world for another poor system of determining the best player in the world.

"Well this one is poorer, therefore the asterisk should be applied" is just extremely faulty logic.

18 hours ago, Fippo said:

I have always liked this podcast. But unfortunetly the later episodes is mostly salt and whine, and it is not very interesting to listen to. There is also quite a bit of cohosts talking at the same time, makes it confusing and sometimes sounds rude. This podcast needs a better structure(again) and more direction.

Sorry to complain... You are still one of the better podcasts, just seem to be slippin and sliding a bit

Hey thanks for your feedback. I actually have been thinking about trying to get out of just talking meta all the time. Honest to goodness it's a sad meta with Ghosts so we'll come up with something fun.

16 hours ago, Sunitsa said:

FFG needs to move away from their bloody game center, anything else, while probably being also good improvements, come at a second time

PREACH!

If the demand for this competition is as high as as think it is (and considering a system open can get over 500 players, the demand is probably massive) then there is no reason why they can't rent out a nearby large function room at a hotel and run extra swiss rounds. If they get the pricing right, the extra tickets will cover any additional cost of hiring a second venue and getting staff to cover it.

My ideal worlds:

• large venue, centrally located (Chicago?)
• two tournaments: 1) the "World Open" -- an open tournament where anyone can play 2) "the "Worlds Invitational" -- an invitational tournament with some sort of reasonable merit-based system
• run by the Gold Squadron team (Ron and Andrea TOing, Dion managing the casting)

With the two tournaments you get the "best of both worlds" (as it were): plenty of room, everyone can play, everyone gets to socialize with their X-Wing pals, win win win.

But FFG is (seemingly?) attached to running it in their game store area, so this ain't gonna happen.

19 hours ago, sozin said:

My ideal worlds:

• large venue, centrally located (Chicago?)
• two tournaments: 1) the "World Open" -- an open tournament where anyone can play 2) "the "Worlds Invitational" -- an invitational tournament with some sort of reasonable merit-based system
• run by the Gold Squadron team (Ron and Andrea TOing, Dion managing the casting)

With the two tournaments you get the "best of both worlds" (as it were): plenty of room, everyone can play, everyone gets to socialize with their X-Wing pals, win win win.

But FFG is (seemingly?) attached to running it in their game store area, so this ain't gonna happen.

My version is to merge the two tournaments into one, so the best players from the Open get to play in the Invitational. That way, anyone can theoretically come in off the street and win the whole thing, but it's heavily tilted towards existing players that have performed well this season.

Yeah maybe you merge the top 2 from the open into the invitationals cut, and the rest of the invitational top N proceeds to its own cut?

5 hours ago, sozin said:

Yeah maybe you merge the top 2 from the open into the invitationals cut, and the rest of the invitational top N proceeds to its own cut?

I would make the gateway from Open to Invitational relatively wide; if you make the cut at the Open then you get to play in the Invitational. From top to bottom, here is what I would like to see happen as a mature solution:

1. Establish a points system for Regional level events and higher. The TOs for these events report the number of players at the event, the players who made the cut, and their final standings. The results are sent to FFG's online site and then publicly view able by individual events, and with a seasonal point total for each player as well. I'm not even talking collection of lists, just players and their seasonal running scores. The relative scoring can depend on the event size and how far into the cut each player progressed, what really matters is that it is an open publicly known algorithm, and the calculations are all done server-side. This can and should be 100% automated. You can still enforce a regionals win = auto entry to the Invitational.
2. The Open Tournament is going to be huge, enough to meet demand. Seats should never "sell out", so expect you could have 500+ players at this event. Of those 500, something like 32 will make the cut, play the Open Cut for bragging rights and cool swag, and also play in the Invitational.
3. The Invitational now consists of the 32 players who made the Open cut, plus the players that have pre-registered for the Invitational (96? 128? 192?).
4. For the Invitational, you run it so the top couple of players get a bye in the first elimination round. It takes an extra round-ish to do this, but you can choose the size of the Invitational tournament so it makes a clean cut: ideally all the X-2s make the cut, and all the undefeateds and 1 or 2 X-1s get a first round elimination bye. The idea is that every round in Swiss should matter if you are still in contention.

Specific numbers can be tweaked, this is just for illustration. The idea is that if you make a 32 person cut out of 500 people at the Open, you should probably get let into the Invitational tournament, IMO.

Edit / PS: if you don't want to take the time to play out the 32 person cut at the Open (and risk player burnout), that's also fine. Crown the Open victors based on Swiss results, they are going to play a bunch more rounds in the Invitational anyway.

My rant on the lottery subject.

Multiple podcasts called for lottery. FFG listens to them. Those same podcasts then complain about said lottery.

FFG finally got a system down in May 2017 and I didn’t hear of a single problem trying to register for it. Took them years to figure it out, but they did it. Did anyone really think FFG was going to get this lottery system down right the first couple times? No. They don’t have the manpower to do so. It’s going to take them a couple more tries and by that time more podcasts are going to call for a change and FFG will listen to them and change the system again just as they perfect the previous one.

19 hours ago, Tbetts94 said:

My rant on the lottery subject.

Multiple podcasts called for lottery. FFG listens to them. Those same podcasts then complain about said lottery.

FFG finally got a system down in May 2017 and I didn’t hear of a single problem trying to register for it. Took them years to figure it out, but they did it. Did anyone really think FFG was going to get this lottery system down right the first couple times? No. They don’t have the manpower to do so. It’s going to take them a couple more tries and by that time more podcasts are going to call for a change and FFG will listen to them and change the system again just as they perfect the previous one.

For the record Blair and I liked the lottery. My complaint is with FFG not giving out enough spots.

8 minutes ago, Kelvan said:

For the record Blair and I liked the lottery. My complaint is with FFG not giving out enough spots.

That's way too reasonable for anybody to listen to, KT.

On 3/15/2018 at 1:10 PM, Kelvan said:

I realized we've had Alex Davy on 4 times.

Yah. I really appreciate you guys. Even with all the negative attention heading towards podcasters in this game right now, you guys keep on doing your show and doing it fun, and mostly "right"...

27 minutes ago, Kelvan said:

For the record Blair and I liked the lottery. My complaint is with FFG not giving out enough spots.

Yep, I understand that, however, FFG won’t fix it by the time they move onto a new way to do registration and the cycle will continue.

1 hour ago, Rakky Wistol said:

Yah. I really appreciate you guys. Even with all the negative attention heading towards podcasters in this game right now, you guys keep on doing your show and doing it fun, and mostly "right"...

Rakky I remember I came to the forums for basically you and Sable.

1 hour ago, Kelvan said:

For the record Blair and I liked the lottery. My complaint is with FFG not giving out enough spots.

Didn't they add an additional day based on the demand from previous years?

3 hours ago, Brack Daddy said:

Didn't they add an additional day based on the demand from previous years?

But they didn't add an additional weekend day

3 hours ago, Brack Daddy said:

Didn't they add an additional day based on the demand from previous years?

Part of the issue was the lack of priority which probably significantly bloated demand beyond any spots they added.

On 3/19/2018 at 2:50 PM, Kelvan said:

Rakky I remember I came to the forums for basically you and Sable.

Those were the good ole days... so much hipposhuttlebus! So much Scarlet Cowgirl... so little time.