Guild Wars: Tournaments Announced

Mr. Gills, ArenaNet's Tournament Coordinator, delivers a lengthy article about what to expect from the automated tournaments and more. As pal Clamatius has already noted, there's a lot to be excited about here.

Let's review.

Okay, the first page is taken up with talk about the 1v1 or Hero Battle Tournaments. I could care less and I'll never quite understand why they're trying to make this big push to legitimize such the format - I'd rather have a 4v4 Team Arena ladder or something but, whatever.

The next page is when we get to the juicy stuff. The highlights:

• Looks like they're shooting to get the tournaments off the ground in April. As in this month. Hopefully, they wouldn't say something like that without having it be a done deal. And Live Testing of the tournaments should begin soon while the first official season start sometime around May. Awesome.
• Depending on how many teams enter - and it's likely they're not going to match the turnout from the CT anytime soon, there's going to be around 5 Swiss rounds follow by 3 elimination rounds between the top eight teams. So, eight rounds or so and they expect each tournament to take around 4 or more hours.
  
• Entry into a tournament will cost tokens which can be bought for 1k Faction. Finally, a way to burn off faction when you're UAX. It's a low barrier to an established team - a win in a rated ladder match will get you at least 1k faction for up to eight players, after all - but it's an important one to keep riffraff and smurfs away. These tokens might even be valuable enough to be worth trading though I doubt it.
  
• Tournaments will be held three times a day, staggered across the week so that they'll be one at every hour so most teams will find at least one to play in. Each month there'll be a monthly tournament where the top teams compete. You'll earn your way in through qualifying in the daily tournaments.
• Those monthly playoffs should be fiercely competitive but not actually all that hard to get into. You only need 20 qualifying points to get an invite. And there's going to be approximately 84 tournaments (21 each week over a 4 week timespan) to play your way in. Each daily tournament gives out up to 36 qualifying points in the elimination rounds. It's not likely that those are all going to be evenly distributed but if they are, that's upwards of 150 teams competing in the playoffs. And, if I were the developers, I'd offer some other ways of qualifying for the tournaments, too, further increasing the field - like automatically extending an invitation to the winner of the last one, for example.
• Only a 14 day waiting period when joining a guild instead of the previously announced 30. That's good and the shuffling of people sick of their CT guilds can now commence. The phrase "thus, the end of smurf and tank guilds" is laughable, however, as long as the most successful guilds are penalized in the information war by being placed on observer mode.
• The k rating for tournament wins is going to be 30. Or what the old ladder value was. So teams that do well in the tournaments are, in fact, going to shoot up the ladder. The k value in the monthly tournaments is going to be 50 so the top teams are going to be even more successful.
• Beyond that, the math to figure out how you're doing in the Swiss rounds looks mighty complicated to me.

There's some other interesting stuff on the next page, including the in-game reward system. Looks ripped straight from WoW but the idea of tiers of PvP-only items (which, of course, don't provide any bonus you can't get through PvE items) is a great one. Continuing the whole Xunlai thing is a good move, too.

The $100k tournament sounds intriguing, of course. Looks like we're getting a Guild Wars: Nightfall Championship (hereafter referred to as GWNC) after all. Although I, for one, am going to be sad that it's not going to take part in some far off exotic local.

So, at first glance some really awesome things. Looking over the time schedule, though, I'm probably not going to get to play in many of these tournaments. About now is really the only time I have to play unless I'm going to a) find another team and b) completely rearrange my life and, you know, starve. But, if I'm doing the time conversions right here's how the schedule looks if you're in America:

	Timezone	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat	Sun
GvG - 1	GMT	6:00	5:00	4:00	3:00	2:00	1:00	24:00
	EST (GMT-4)	2:00 2AM	1:00 1AM	24:00 Midnight	23:00 11PM	22:00 10PM	21:00 9PM	20:00 8PM
	PST (GMT-7)	23:00 11PM	22:00 10PM	21:00 9PM	20:00 8PM	19:00 7PM	18:00 6PM	17:00 5PM
GvG - 2	GMT	14:00	13:00	12:00	11:00	10:00	9:00	8:00
	EST (GMT-4)	10:00AM	9:00	8:00	7:00	6:00	5:00	4:00
	PST (GMT-7)	7:00AM	6:00	5:00	4:00	3:00	2:00	1:00
GvG - 3	GMT	22:00	21:00	20:00	19:00	18:00	17:00	16:00
	EST (GMT-4)	18:00 6PM	17:00 5PM	16:00 4PM	15:00 3PM	14:00 2PM	13:00 1PM	12:00 Noon
	PST (GMT-7)	15:00 3PM	14:00 2PM	13:00 1PM	12:00 Noon	11:00 11AM	10:00 10AM	9:00 9AM

Looks like I'm going to be a weekend Warrior, so to speak. There's just no way I can stay up and start a tournament at, say, 1AM if these things are going to last for 3~4 hours even if you don't place in the top. And anything much earlier than 6~7PM is out, too. So, I'm limited to being able to play from Thursday through Sunday, barring extraordinary circumstances. We'll have to see, though.