Tournaments?

By clique84, in Star Wars: The Card Game

Okay, I realize that the game is co-op. I have voiced my...disagreement with that elsewhere. But the reason I game is for competition. So how would tournaments work in a co-op game, if at all? Would there be prizes? Just wondering...

(And before anyone lips off and says, like way too many have, if I want Star Wars vs play the Decipher game: a) it's been out of print for like, 10 years, and is still pretty expensive... and b) I never liked it, I thought it was terrible.)

I've never played in a co-op tournament myself, but...

I think that victory could be time-based. Each player would have to bring an Imperial deck with a pre-determined structure (either using the standard core set composition, or with explicit card-for-card replacements) and a Rebel deck (which could be customized). Random teams of 4 would be generated and they would play a game. There would be a time limit (30 min? 45 min? 1 hr?) and each player on a team would accrue the elapsed time to victory. Defeats would result in the full time limit being applied. Then, for rounds 2 and beyond, the teams would randomly generate again, with no two players being on the same team until they have played with everyone else.

At the end of the tournament, the player with the shortest aggregate time would be the champion, with 2nd, 3rd, etc. following.

This structure has the following weaknesses: (1) Unless there is a judge at each game (unlikely), this structure would rely on the honor system for fair and consistent gameplay, (2) Teams that ran out of time would be penalized just as much as teams that were actually defeated. Adding an additional penalty for defeats, however, would lead to teams sandbagging instead of risking a defeat, (3) While every player would be expected to bring an Imperial deck, only a fraction of those would actually be used. However, it is unreasonable to expect that a store or a tournament coordinator will be able to supply these cards independently, (4) This structure could lead to coordinated manipulation of the standings. For instance, a group of 4 friends could go to a tournament and determine that Player A will win it. Then, Players B, C, and D would purposefully draw-out their games when they are NOT teamed with Player A, thereby manipulating the rankings.

Feel free to point out any additional holes in this argument. I am just throwing this out there based on what I have seen in my PvP tournament experience.

For what I've seen so far, co-ops seem to be very poorly suited to tournament play. As was pointed out, without an opponent, how do you ensure that the winning score was obtained fairly? The manpower needed to keep an eye on every game, if a certain number of people show up, would be quite an issue.

The scoring system is also a question mark. One of the biggest issues that LOTR had when I was playing, was that the proposed tournament scoring system rewarded stalling decks over decks that could smoke the encounter deck quickly. This still would have been an issue even with a time limit because you could stall for a certain amount of time, finish and then still have the better score. The best system would have been one that rewarded the deck that used up the least amount of turns to win, within that set time limit. Then, the amount of time spent could be used as a tie breaker, as needed. I don't know if it would apply to this game, but maybe it would work. But again, someone needs to be watching, I'm not a big believer in the honor system, specially when prizes are at stake.

Yeah my friends and I also had great concern about the LCG tournament play when we learned LOTR, and yeah i agree that the victory points goal is a little too easy for people to stall. FFG needs to rethink that if they plan to give actual prizes and such. But then i also havent had a chance to play in any LCG tournaments so until i do i cant truly complain lol

Why does the prize have to go to the best deck/player?

This is not a competitive game; it's coop!!! Why not a sportmanship prize???

Why do you play this game?? To win or to have fun with friends?? Me I play it to have fun with my friends, that's why I think the prize for this kind of coop LCG (same thing for LOTR) should be different than the one for competitive game play.

In Warhammer/40k tournament, there's 3 different prizes, and 2 of them have nothing to do with how powerful your army is. Paint and sportsmanship.

Why not take a different approch to tournament prizes for a different type of game?

Why should it be tournament suitable at all? I am sure you could come up with ways to judge it if necessary (for example, in LotR you could look at end game threat) but it just creates perverse incentives in the game which have no place in a co-op game (like trying to extend a game to drive down the threat of other players while preserving your own). You could have teams entering, and just sees which team does best against the game, but I don't see that as being very interesting.

I don't quite understand why there is this need for it to be a tournament game anyway. Most people mostly play games for fun with their mates. That is the important crowd to market to.

Why play a game at all, unless you can show people that you are much better at it than they are????

Does... not... compute.......

The problem I think comes from CCGs being traditionally PvP and so they focused on the tournament level to showcase skill and create interest in the game. Tournaments allowed you to showcase your deckbuilding, metagame, and playing skill while also coming together with your fellow players to have fun.

Lack of a Tournament scene for the co-op LCGs will cause many traditional ccg players to wonder why they'd make a trek down to the local game shop to play when they get nothing out of it, and it being a LCG model game the shops have little incentive to push the game for a game night as there is no gobs of product for the consumer to buy. You're not going to build up a community of players without something to draw them all together and you're not going to have the shop agressively push the game without some way to sell more product or at least get fees for tournaments. So most people are going to end up playing solo or not playing at all unless some kind of incentive can be made to gather together.

I've already been seeing this happen with LotR. No Tournaments, no prizes, no way to police the games within reason has lead to little to no interest when I try to get a gathering at the shop going for players, and even less interest to give up valuable play space in the stores when they could be having another Magic or Yu-Gi-Oh tournament and move product.

Pericles said:

Why play a game at all, unless you can show people that you are much better at it than they are????

Does... not... compute.......

Pericles said:

Why play a game at all, unless you can show people that you are much better at it than they are????

Does... not... compute.......

Not everyone is interested in competitive games; particularly after having been burnt by playing against idiots who cannot stand to lose and enjoy nothing more than gloating should they happen to win. That quickly sucks the fun out of it. I prefer cooperative games by far: Either everyone wins or everyone loses. What keeps you playing is that everyone is having fun and trying to improve.

Darksbane said:

Lack of a Tournament scene for the co-op LCGs will cause many traditional ccg players to wonder why they'd make a trek down to the local game shop to play when they get nothing out of it

The only question is: Will casual gamers be willing to buy into every AP, i.e. to fully adopt the LCG idea?

But it's worth a try and a co-op LCG should have a better chance at succeceding than a competitive one.

jhaelen said:

Darksbane said:

Lack of a Tournament scene for the co-op LCGs will cause many traditional ccg players to wonder why they'd make a trek down to the local game shop to play when they get nothing out of it

I consider this to be a good thing. The fewer 'traditional' ccg players play it the better. If a local game shop decides not to carry it, that's their decision. The co-op LCGs target a different audience: It's an attempt to get into a bigger market segment, i.e. casual gamers. If FFG can get a foot in there, they'll make more money than they could ever get from a rabid ccg crowd.

The only question is: Will casual gamers be willing to buy into every AP, i.e. to fully adopt the LCG idea?

But it's worth a try and a co-op LCG should have a better chance at succeceding than a competitive one.

Why would a co-op game appeal to the casual gamer more or have a better chance at succeeding than pvp? I can't think of any casual mass market board/card game which is played co-op (I'm sure there are some but thinking about the games I see in Walmart or Target I can't recall any). Sure there are co-op games in specality shops but they are the minority and I think that once you enter the specialty shops you are already leaving the casual market behind. As far as I'm aware FFG isn't even selling their LCGs outside of specialty shops so at best that the fact that this is co-op is going to just appeal to the normal boardgame/cardgame market.

Now I'm not saying there isn't a market for co-op card games, LotR has been hugely successful and I'm expecting Star Wars to be more successful (IMO star wars is a better designed game), however keeping player interest has been one of the problems I've seen start to crop up with the LotR LCG. I have a few theories as to what contributed to it at my local stores and my game group. The large gap between Hunt for Gollum and Core was the frist problem and the abysmial deck customization options with only having 10 cards of the chapter packs hero cards hurts too. If an organized play/tournament program had been in place I think interest could have been held higher in my area and it would make it easier to grow the game.

Either way my post above wasn't in any way supposed to comment on the game being co-op, although I prefer pvp, I do enjoy a good co-op game (and from my demos this is a very good co-op game). I'm saying there is potentially a problem not having a tournament scene or organized play program for a LCG type of game. If this was simply another box boardgame with occasional expansions ala Dominion or Elder Sign it would be different. The expectation is different for games like that and the $ investment is much less. I think that without organized play they are going to have a hard time keeping traditional card game players interested and casual gamers I think are going to eventually decide that a $200+ investment per year into a game like this isn't worth it to just play a game by themselves considering the other games you could get for that money.