The One-day Babo Tournament - Rules and Regulations

Babo Tournament

Shortly

This is a one-day open 3on3 tournament, played best of one map, which will be played by a strict time schedule.

Attention to a common misunderstanding so far: Your teams do not have to be mixed from different clans. For example Old Balls could enter under the name "Old Balls" with players "grend, grend and grend". However, it is also possible to enter teams that are not "formal clans" (although there is no such thing I guess)

Be sure to read the rules, but don't worry if it looks complicated. It's essentially played as normal CMs, with the exception of only playing ONE map, and with the addition of SUDDEN DEATH. Be sure to read the Sudden Death part. Then go ahead and sign up your team!!

Details

If you have any questions about anything below, first read the ”Reflections and Explanations” under the topic you are interested in – it might be answered there.

Format

- All games will be played 3on3.
- The map will be decided in advance and be announced for each stage of the bracket before the tournament begins. The highest seeded team picks the colour before the match begins.
- The tournament does not have a loser brackets. The winner proceeds to the next round, the loser is eliminated.
- The tournament will operate under a strict time schedule that the participants are obliged to adhere to.
- The tournament needs minimum 6 teams registered to start


Rules

Registrations
- Registration will close on saturday the day before the tournament at 12.00 mid-day.
- To register you will have to name the players and the team name. The team lineup cannot be changed after the deadline on saturday, but can be changed before that time in your registration post.
- The same player cannot play in more than one team in the tournament.
- You can register as many players as you want for one team. However, big clans are encouraged to split into several teams. It is also of course possible to form a team with players from different clans, all you have to do is come up with a team name and register your lineup before the deadline.
- Teams with only 3 players are allowed to add one player to their lineup after registration deadline on Saturday if they need/want to. You are however only allowed to do this on Saturday, not on the tournament day (Sunday).
- Smurfing will result in a permanent ban from all future tournaments.

Brackets
- The brackets will be determined by seeding the teams in advance. I will seed all the teams (see reflections for a comment on this) and then I will throw a dice for each seed-pair to determin which team falls on which side. This sounds complicated, let me try to explain:

When you make a bracket based on a ranking, usually team seed 1 and 2 are on the top and the bottom, respectively. They are seeded to only face eachother in the finals, if they don't lose earlier.
To prevent my seeding of the teams being called rigging the tournament matchups, I will random which side each pair of teams fall on. The first pair will be team 1 and 2. I will random wheither team 1 or 2 are placed at the top or bottom. Next will be team 3 and 4, then 5 and 6 and so on. If you don't get it, don't worry, it will be very obvious once you see how the bracket looks how this has been done.
If this goes well and there is a next tournament, the next tournament's seeding will be based on the former tournaments results. If the teams lineups are different, I will base it largely on how the different players did in the last tournament.

Winning:
- The match is won by the first team that scores 7 caps, or has the most caps by the end of 15 minutes (normal match rules, that is to say)
- In case of a tie at the end of 15 minutes, the map moves on to sudden death.

Sudden Death:
- The map will be restarted and each team will move to stand on the enemy's flag platform. It is permitted to take the flag, as long as all 3 players are standing on the flag platform. Then stand still and wait.
- The time will then be set to 1.5 minute at which point the game starts. The team who scores the first cap wins the game.
- If the first sudden death does not result in a cap for any team, sudden death will restart with priority being given to one team.
- Priority will be given randomly through a method that will not be disclosed until this situation occurs (it is super simple anyway). Rest assure, it will be random enough.
- Having priority means that if the second sudden death should not result in any cap either, the team with priority will win the match and proceed to the next round.

Time Schedule
- The tournament will operate under a strict time schedule which all teams are required to follow. The first match is played at 12.00 GMT+1 (I will try to make the timezone as clear as possible in the brackets to avoid misunderstandings)
- The time schedule will be ready by saturday evening, so all teams will know when they play their first match on sunday.
- Every game will have a starting time. The games will be started at the appointed time. If a team lacks one player or even two, they are allowed to start playing and hope that the rest of the teams arrives before it's over. If a team has no player ready to play at the starting time that team forfeits the match. Being on the server but not joined into the game counts as not being there at all.
- There will be no break between a match ending in a tie and the start of a sudden death other than the absolute time required to revote the map and move to the other side of the map (enemy base), and setting the time. Any disobediance from this rule by messing around or taking too much time to move will result first in a warning, and the secondly in a disqualification from the tournament at the discretion of the judge(s). Make sure your team knows what to do when there's a sudden death!!!

Disconnects
- The games will continue to be played without interruptions even if a player disconnects, lags or has any other issue while playing the game.
- If the server should decide to crash or restart (lets hope it doesnt), the time and scores should be set to what they were at the time of the crash and both teams will start in their own bases. The judges will be there to determin what the time was and direct the players on what to do.
- If someone disconnects and you have substitutes ready on msn or somewhere else, you are allowed to tell this person the server password and say in all chat in the game ”X SUBSTITUES Y”, where X is the person joining and Y is the person who lagged out. Y is not allowed to play again in this match if he comes back, and should refrain from joining the server – or leave if he joins and discovers he has been substituted.

Server
- The tournament will be played on a websnooker.de server which will be provided for the tournament (thanks Wilk).
- The server will be closed to everyone but the participants in the match currently being played, and the judge(s). There will be a player limit ( so only the players and the judges can be on the server.
- Don't worry, you will be able to observe the games. All games will be streamed by me on a channel at own3d.tv. The link will be provided later. The stream is delayed by 1.5 minutes to avoid speccheating. I will give full time commentary for the semi finals and the finals, and some general summary comments during the other games. The semis and finals will be recorded on own3d for later viewing.
- One member from each team is required to have me on msn, mkorlinge@hotmail.com , for me to be able to give you the new password to join the server when it is your turn to play.
- The team representative is responsible to give the password only to the two other people who are playing in the match for his team. If anyone shows up on the server uninvited, they will simply be banned and they won't be able to play in the tournament – ever. Don't screw up.

Rule Enforcer
- I have the final judgement on everything. It is an open tournament for everyones enjoyment, but I am eager to make it work so I reserve the right to make any decision I see fit at any time. This includes excluding people from any future participation who do not behave. A fair warning to everyone, I am super strict
- Anette has kindly agreed to help me supervise the tournament. She has also given valuable input on the rules you see here.

Reflections and Explanations

General: I think the babo competetive scene has been stale for far too long. We play cms and sure its fun, but there is no end in view. There have been several attempts at different types of tournaments but most of them have, in my opinion, had the fault of having weird structures or covering too large a period of time. There are several games I've played where they host a weekly one-day tournament, they are very popular, and I see no objection against trying to do it in Babo except possibly the fact that I have to do it myself . We will just have to get used to a few new things like staying on time, playing only one map (to hold down time consumption) and get used to the concept of sudden death. I hope with this to give people a reason to keep improving in Babo, and of course a lot of fun for everyone! I do not promise to host more tournaments, because I want to see how the first one turns out, but I definately would like to have these regularly. If the first attempts are successful and especially if I manage to structure the rules so that there is no way of cheating, I will attempt to get a small sponsorship for a first prize (probably from my employer) that would give further incentive to play, but this requires that it runs smoothly and might not be possible due to so many players being under 18.

Format: I really love 4on4 and wish I could make a 4on4 tourney some time, but for now 3on3 is the most likely to succeed and have several teams participating in. I will distribute the maps somehow randomly. I realise some teams like some maps more than others (I know I'm definately like that), but the best team will win in the end anyway and the maps, should there be another tournament, will distributed differently in the next tournament.

Registration: The registration closes one day earlier so that I will be sure to have the brackets and time schedule ready in the evening on saturday, so teams will know when they play on sunday. I hope to see some of the bigger clans split up and field more than one team, but it is not required of course since you might want more than 3-4 players to be able to play all the matches in a day.

Seeding: This might upset everybody. I had to think of a way to ensure two things. One, that the matchups wouldnt result in the best teams facing eachother in the first rounds and the results thus being way unfair. Two, that there is a randomness to it so that I personally don't get to decide who plays eachother. I think the best way of doing it is the way I have outlined. Please don't be upset by my seedings, I'm sure I will seed some teams way off their real capacity, and I havent played against everyone actively enough for years to truly appreciate what team will perform better than the next. The seeding however has to be done by someone for the first tournament. The second tournament will not have this bias problem because it will be based on the actual results of the former. Instead of being angry with me for placing your team too low, prove me wrong by beating the crap out of everyone instead of crying about it beforehand!

New comment after first tournament on seeding: I think the seedings worked well in the end, because of how random they became anyway. I realise now that most likely (hopefully) there will be new teams in the next tournament so that I will have to make the seedings on my own anyway, and it will probably never be possible to make the seedings based solely on the last tournaments results for even most of the teams. I think it will work out fine anyway. =)

Sudden Death: This concept is introduced to ensure quick matches with no stalling. I hope my explanations of the 3 players standing on the flag platform is clear enough to prevent any misunderstanding at the start. Any attempts to start moving earlier than the time is set will be punished severely, like any rule violations I feel this is a great way to settle a tie in a fair, action-packed and exciting way.

Priority: I expect this will raise some comments. This is, of course, another way of attempting to settle the match, and to encourage an aggressive approach to the first sudden death to avoid any luck of the draw. The concept is taken from fencing, and although it does put a small luck element into the game, when both teams start in enemy bases it is definately very possible for the team without priority to break through and cap in one minute even should the enemy team try to take a defensive approach – the enemy team could of course also just try to cap and win that way.

Time Schedule: These rules ensure that all teams will make damn sure they are on time or they're screwed and there is a certain structure to the play time.

Disconnects: I know, these are fairly harsh rules. We are used to stopping when someone disconnects. However, this always causes arguments and all competetive tournaments I know do not have any rule that involves stopping because someone disconnects – only perhaps games that can be paused like WC3. The fairest way and the way with the least hassle is to do it this way and people will just have to make sure they dont play on sucky internet. If you are one of the perma-laggers, I apologize, but this is necessary. The game will not pause to make substitutions.

Server: The closed server rule is, I'm afraid, necessery to avoid the possibility of spec-cheating altogether. However, I'm well aware that the success for any tournament is due to it's popularity, and people need to be able to observe the games. I have made up for this by providing a stream, which I have tried before in babo and it works fairly flawlessly. All you will have to do is go to the link and press play, and you will see all the action live. I am counting on teams to actually watch this to get news of delays or stuff like that (although I have tried real hard to make sure they don't occur). Hopefully I can also provide some sort of chatroom to read everyones comments and chat with you guys while the games are going, IRC is easily used for this, but I don't want to introduce too many new things that might confuse everyone

Rule Enforcer: This is pretty self explanatory I think.

http://www.own3d.tv/live/28305/Grendel

Edit: Stream is down obv, it will be up again next tournament day.

17/4 : Rules Changes

- Sudden death is now 1.5 minute for each period.
- It is now made clear that the team with the highest seed picks the colour in the games.
- Cleared up some small points in the text, just some stuff that doesnt mean any change in the actual rules.
- Semi finals and final games will be recorded on own3d

Joey has kindly decided to provide a TS3 server for the teams participating in the tournament, in case your team didn't have a voice solution before.

The server is hosted by Simple-Page.pl



If you are playing in the tournament and you want a channel for your team, send Joey a PM with your teamname and password, or join the server on the matchday and ask an admin for one.

The server will be up on the day of the tournament.

IP: 80.82.17.226:9988
PW: same as the NOW OLD rs1 password. Same as on the other passworded servers still though.. I think..

It is of course fine to use other voiceprograms if you want,
Note: I personally will not be involved in administrating or managing this server.

24/4: Rule Changes

- Teams with only 3 players are allowed to add one player to their lineup after registration deadline on Saturday if they need/want to. You are however only allowed to do this on Saturday, not on the tournament day (Sunday). PM me or talk to me or msn or something and I will manage it.
- The tournament needs minimum 6 teams registered to start