Last knights Forum

We are looking to drop the entire tournament system and rebuild it from the ground up.

The development team will be having an open voice discussion on Discord where players will be able to participate via written comments/questions. Date & time to be decided.

If you have ideas to add to the mix please add them here with as much detail as possible. If you do not want your name attached to the suggestion please PM it to me and I will post it anonymously.

A few things to note:

- There can be no changes to heroes (they stay as they are) * This does not mean you cant suggest a set of tournament items that only gets used for the tournaments. Just skills are not changeable.
- Ideally this will be open to ALL players, we are open to ideas for a "nobility perk" inside the tournament system, either a boost or via entry limits etc.
- Everything else is up for grabs:
- - Tournaments do NOT have to run every 12 ticks as they currently do
- - They do not have to be in different tiers.
- - They should be game wide (not locked to a specific country or region)

This mostly came about as a bit of a mental exercise on how a tourney would look if the heroes were represented by 3d models. For a real battle, the current system somewhat makes sense. But for an actual tournament two participants shooting at each seems unrealistic. With that said, with a few tweaks it could be changed to fit with the current hero points system.

Day 1: Archery Tournament
Heroes take turns shooting at targets set up at various ranges.
Target starts out close, gets further away with each round. Accuracy decreases with range. Higher weight ranged weapons more accurate to a longer range. Racc skill increases accuracy, but because each round the target gets further away, when maxed still isnt a 100% hit chance on all targets. After the first round, start eliminating x of the lowest performing heroes per round.
No hp penalty for losing in this part of the tourney.
Top 3 get x hero points.

Day 2: The Joust
Hero must be mounted to participate.
Pike and pike avoid work similarly to how they do currently - pike increases the chance of a heroes lance hitting, and pike avoid increases the chance he remains seated.
Hero can compete with just a cav melee, but due to reduced reach is much less likely to win if he draws an opponent equipped with a lance.
Top 3 get x hero points.
Defeated heroes are unhorsed and loses hp in next round of the tourney. (Only the 1st place finisher comes out with full hp)

Day 3: The Melee
Takes place on foot. Parry/agility/resilience all work as they currently do. Weapon used is dependent on the melee weapon equipped. A hero equipped with a battleaxe/warhammer would have a serious advantage during this stage of the tournament, but would be unlikely to have participated and scored in The Joust.
Top 3 get x hero points.

Overall tournament rankings based off the conglomerate of the scores on all three days. Top 3 overall performers get x? y? hero points.

Suggestion: Make hero tournament participants pay a certain fee to enter the tournament based on their hero level.

This may close the gap between high lvl heroes and low/med level heroes. E.g. it may be super expensive to join hero tournament with a lvl 23 hero, say 500k gold, while med rank PvPers with a lvl 19/20 hero would only have to pay 150k (which is still quite substantial at lower ranks). High lvl rankers may be discouraged to join the tournament with their OP heroes, as they may rather want to spend their gold on ranking/FH training. Furthermore, Dukes will have the choice to invest gold in something (a sink) that doesn't directly benefit them in battle compared to non-duke players, but they will still be able to win medals that are Duke-only.

Right now hero tourny is kind of a no-brainer. People only need to sign up and swap to tournament gear. However, by requiring players to pay a certain fee, people would think twice about whether or not to join the tournament. Perhaps they don't even have enough gold to join!

For both parties (PvP/rankers) it's a trade off. Rankers may want to focus purely on ranking, and PvPers may want to keep their gold to FH for PvPs. By making the tournament cost money, people may be discouraged to no-brain join the tourny, and they will be encouraged to focus on ranking/PvP over hero tournament. This suggestion also opens up space for people that are specifically focussing on hero tournament and are willing to invest gold.

Additional idea: have players pay for participating in the tourny, but also attach a gold price to winning the tournament (besides a medal). E.g. a price of 1-2M gold for the winner of Kings. Though, this may affect TLK outside of the tournament and may favour Dukes over non-Dukes.

Make tourney a real tournament style.

With seeding into groups double round robing single duels in that group

and then Best of 3's elimination towards final

you could do this with a round each tick

Heres (one of) my ideas:

We cannot change heroes due to the balance of the main game, so lets remove them from tournaments instead.

You enter your commander into the tournament instead.

This now gives us a totally clean slate to start with. It removes the need to swap hero equipment every tournament too.

Commanders can be given a fixed "budget" of points/weight/equipment, irrespective of rank. This levels the playing field without affecting the PVP/PVE balance.

They then duke it out in a system to be decided.

Idea for a system if using commanders:

The tournament is always open.

You click "find opponent" and it will randomly match you.

You win - you go up points. You loose - down points.

The matching will try and match you to people of a similar score, or combined within X positions (so if #1 player is 1000 points ahead, they will still be challenged by #2-#25, irrespective of points).


We could look to have entry open at all times, or be time based - you get some tickets every X ticks. Nobility could get/hold more tickets?

Idea for equipment:

You can buy standard kit as normal.

You can also win better gear based on where you position in the tournament.

You can find equipment by playing the game (SFs, PVP, training etc).

Possible option to monetise this via "lootcrate" type system.

There are only two major issues I see with the current hero tournament format so they are the ones I want to address. These are:

1.) The matchmaking algo is awful. You can get matched to the strongest hero twice in succession at the start of the tournament and be the first one out even if you're the 2nd strongest hero in there.

2.) The points system being solely based on hero levels means the tournaments in the first days doesn't really matter. You can win gold medal by joining in only in the last 1-2 days if you win gold then since you're fighting with higher level heroes, hence higher points.

Solutions
1.) Use a proper double eliminations format with a losers bracket and a winners bracket.eg:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-el ... w-2004.png

2.) Use a modified ELO system for ranking. Important features and modifications I've thought of are:
a.) Every hero gets immediately ranked. They're given the default median score (typically 1500) upon hiring regardless if they're enlisted in a tournament or not.
b.) The score gets deductions for every tournament missed. This means rankers (whose heroes might have a hard time early in the age since they'll prioritize character over fighting skills) cannot just skip the first round of tournaments.
The same goes for your typical support heroes. This would also mean you can't just stop joining tournaments when you think you've achieved a high enough score and want to keep it.
c.) Instead of the typical ELO where the score gained/lost is based solely on the rating difference between you and your opponent, for this purpose we should factor in the enemy hero level and difference in EXP.
Even though we want to stop the first tournaments from being irrelevant, a tournament of level 15s shouldn't be equally weighted to a tournament of full of 23s. So winning against a high level opponent should be more favorable than winning against a low level one.
Then the EXP difference should also be factored in the risk/gain. Since from level 20, there could already be a huge gap in hero skill points within the same level. This would also prevent new heroes from being much high value wins compared to high level supports.
To be even more nuanced, you can factor in how much EXP is spent on fighting skills as well.
d.) The rating should be adjusted after every fight. So within a tournament, the hero rating will be changing multiple times, instead of an aggregated change at the end of the tournament. (This is more a proper application of the scoring system than anything particular to TLK)
e.) The first round of the tournament, the teams with ELO closer to each other should be matched up first. This is to prevent large swings in ELO scores within the tournament. After the 1st round, the matchmaking should depend on what part of the bracket they were in.

Other ideas:
1.) Items that a hero will carry to the tournament should be based on when the hero was enlisted instead of when the tick for the tournament occurred.
This will allow players who will be asleep during the tournaments to have a different setup for the tournament, and the one they want to leave their heores in for PVP/drops during the night.
2.) To give Dukes some form of advantage, you can make dukes to be thrice to beat to lose. They'll have an additional `twice-lost bracket`, the winner of which fights the winner of the loser's bracket for the chance to fight the winner of the winner's bracket.
3.) In case people want to give tourneys impact on the game (I'm neutral on this), you can give ransom penalties to a lost hero. The loser pays some gold to the winner of the fights.

@KingsOwnFool: I like the idea of making it more realistic with several minigames within the tournament. But I do worry for the fact that all heroes become jack-of-all-trades and there will be minimal difference in setups, which makes it even more a RNG-minigame. I do like the different stages and how they impact on eachother though.

@Myst: As long as gold is flawed in the game, and not a value you have to really worry about ingame, as it is right now, the impact of this will be minimal. Basicly everybody can do anything they ever wanted to do with the gold they get by merchant and ransom and what not. Ofcourse, you can spam it unwisely on pvp's that you shouldn't have done, or do that 20 training runs that drains your last gold away, but in general I feel gold barely has an impact on the game, its RNG by merchant and nobody is watching how much they have. It just translates into how many pvps can you do or how long is your training run. I have different ideas about how to make gold way more important, but thats not for this topic.

Paying to tourney, to end up with gold as a price even feels more like a lottery ticket then, I mean, it could happen if tourneys shift more to skill and less to RNG. But with the current system we have with merchant enough RNG on the gold income.

@Fiskerman: The current tourney setup can be viewed as Last Man Standing. It fights till one is left standing and the rest will drop out accordingly. Basicly your option does the same, but then after the poulephase. I don't see an immediat gain into rebuilding that mechanic specifically.

@Ickz: Ive been studying into ELO ranking a lot lately, because it seems like a viable option for scoring. But, it will not be working for tournaments and hero medal. (However, it will work for the pvp-ranking/medal better instead). The reason for that is the fact that you don't choose your own opponent in the tournament. ELO is based on challenging a player that is above you, accepting the risk that your ranking can drop because of it and viceversa goes for your opponent. The Chess ranking is a good example of that. Players battle it out after mutual consent to play. They know the risks of losing against that certain opponent and accept the match anyway. Now, why didn't we implement this for the pvp system: Its exploitable as fuck. Since the pvp system is with one-sided consent, there are enough ways to exploit this.



I can already see the posts of people saying "Oh Tira is back, all our ideas will get shot down again". And eventhough it might seem that way, it's not really to annoy anyone or to stall change or updates. It's just that we are perfectionists afterall, and not conceding for something that is not perfect is what slows us down a lot of times . My personal 2 cents at this point are, that at first we need to adress the joining bug at agestarts on tournaments, but after that all possibilities are open. My criteria would be, that it shifts a bit more to skill, instead of RNG; that pvpers and rankers have equal odds of winning/losing (this might be the hardest one, unless you go with the commander-suggestion of Nuvelle); And that not everybody goes with the same tactic/setup, but there should be something to choose afterall. And no, nothing has been decided on this matter, not by me, not by any other dev, we genuinly seek to good ideas, and don't let me being picky stop you from giving us ideas!

Just to clarify - the plan IS to fix the start age tournament join bug in the short term.

These suggestions are for longer term rebuild.

Tiralan wrote: ↑Fri Jul 31, 2020 3:33 pm
@Fiskerman: The current tourney setup can be viewed as Last Man Standing. It fights till one is left standing and the rest will drop out accordingly. Basicly your option does the same, but then after the poulephase. I don't see an immediat gain into rebuilding that mechanic specifically.

I dont agree on you with that currently you get drafted randomly into a certain matches per round , as soon as you lose 2 of those matches you're out.
This means that if you get randomly matched by a counter of your build your out early even if you would do pretty well against everybody else in the tourney.

Also sometimes the duels are pretty close and doing best of 3 would average out the randomness a little more during the elimination phase of the tourney.

public discussion planned: https://lastknights.com/phpbb/viewtopic ... t=107#p409

Tiralan wrote: ↑Fri Jul 31, 2020 3:33 pm @KingsOwnFool: I like the idea of making it more realistic with several minigames within the tournament. But I do worry for the fact that all heroes become jack-of-all-trades and there will be minimal difference in setups, which makes it even more a RNG-minigame. I do like the different stages and how they impact on eachother though.

Well...I technically posted that several months back, and as stated it was more of a "How would this look if it had to be animated..." but this does exemplify the biggest issue with the hero system: especially if you are ranking, hero builds and points do not really matter, because there is no cap to said points. Eventually, all three heroes will be completely maxed out and therefore jacks of all trades. Capping points somewhere along the lines would actually force you to choose between combat stats and support skills, and if you wanted to enforce certain hero builds restrict the number of points allowed onto combat stats. *shrug*

I think it would be a good idea to have the hero item swaps dissapear.

For example, you select your "duelist" and it takes part in tourneys automaticly every round obligated. You can build a hero setup in the Tourney tab rather then switching gear in your armory.
Also i'd like to have only 1 hero being able to compete, rather then having 3 heroes being able to compete, you wont get 2 medals anyway if you have 2 in top 5..

in short, seperate the duelist gear setup from your normal setup.

instead of the regional, prince, kings tourneys. i'd like to have divisions instead. Having more divisons would make it easier to seperate the higher level hero's from the lower level ones.

Its up for discussion on how to balance that, but 1 rank difference per division seems max to me.
22/23, 21/22, 20/21, 19/20, 19/18, etc etc

Item sets will be based on these sets of levels.. so lvls 20/21 will have the same items to make a setup, only the skill point distribution will make a difference.
Its up for discussion if the higher level tourneys would get higher points or not (either you want lower lvl hero's to be able to win medals, or give the higher lvls (ranker ppl) have more advantage)

also, you could say you award top 3 medals to the top 3 divisions.. so in the end you have to be in the higher divisions to get a medal (wich is pretty doable) but you can still win a hero medal for being in the 3th highest divison.. maybe changing the worth of medal points for gold in lower divisions, highest division gold 10 points 2nd division gold 8 points, 3th division gold 6 points.

I'd like to hear thoughts, and maybe adds on this idea. thank you