Howdy guys, how y'all doing? :)
I'm glad to announce that on this week's update we've officially started releasing our new bundle of PVP Events as previously mentioned in this thread.
The first event being released was the Elite PK Tournament which is pretty much a duplicate of the tournament introduced in the newest patches of the retail game. Alongside with this event we're also working on the upcomming events which will share the same tournament logic with slightly variations mainly regarding the way matches are held and a winner is picked such as: Skill PK Tournament, Team PK Tournament and Skill Team PK Tournament.
We plan on running all of these once a week so that they remain somewhat unique and have good rewards without breaking down the server's economy.
Elite PK Tournament is therefore a tournament based off an elimination match ladder system in which players are paired up with eachother, ie, will be fighting 1 vs 1 until there are only 2 players left that will be fighting for the champion title on this event.
The event itself is gear-based meaning that all skills are allowed to be used during the matches and players will be dealing the regular damage to their opponents. The event is currently being held on Fridays at 17:00 (5 PM) Server Time.
Once it starts, players will get a dialog invitation asking them if they want to take place in the tournament.
The whole logic of the tournament pretty much relies on two stages in which it can be broken down, an initial qualifying stage and prior to that, the finals.
- Qualifying phase: When there are more than 8 players, a required number of matches will be held in order to eliminate some of the players to end up with the final 8 players so that we can move on to the next stage. In this stage, players are randomly paired up with eachother and the loser is automatically kicked out of the event. For example, if there are 15 players signed up for the tournament, 7 matches will be held and one random player will automatically move on to the finals. Once those 7 matches end, we will have the 8 required players to start the finals.
In case there are more than 16 players (required to held 8 matches and chose the winners moving up to the final), the players that are not fighting in any of those 8 matches will be added to a "waiting list" and another round of this qualifying stage will be held until we are down to 8 players.
- Finals: Once there are only 8 players left in the tournament, these will be randomly allocated to one place in the quarterfinals brackets and from there on they will be able to figure out exactly who they'll be fighting until they reach the final match.
After the semi-finals, the losers from both matches will be paired up and fight for the 3rd and 4th place in the tournament and the final match will only be held after the 3rd and 4th place are assigned.
Looking at the image below taken for the very first edition of the tournament we can see that the 8 players that got to the finals were Warrior100, Ziggy, DopamineFB, FireFux, Suits, OuttaControl, a1blaster and Nana.
After the quarterfinals Warrior100, DopamineFB, OuttaControl and a1blaster beat their opponents and went to the semifinals. Here, OuttaControl and DopamineFB beat a1blaster and Warrior100, respectively, and got promoted to the finals. Warrior100 beat a1blaster during the 3rd and 4th place match and then OuttaControl won the event against DopamineFB.
There's also one more thing that's worth to be mentioned, each round has a maximum of 3 minutes duration (initially we thought about making it 10 minutes but figured it didn't make sense to last that long) and so, in case no winner has been found during that timeframe, the player that dealt the most damage against the other will come out as the winner of the match. This prevents players from trying to troll the rest and ruining the event by refusing to fight.
During their match, players will be able to see the time left and the damage each of them has dealt against the other at the top right corner of their client.
The overall feedback we got from the very first edition of the tournament was extremely positive as everyone loved it and some mentioned it was one of the best additions to the server. Elite PK Tournament is a very popular tournament in the retail game and our players loved that we have managed to implement it on a classic server since things like this give classic servers a pleasant breath of fresh air :)
We were happy to count with a considerable amount of players joining the event even if we only released the patch a couple hours before this first edition took place and we were only to advertise it for a couple hours before it started. We're confident that in the upcomming weeks alot more players will be joining this event and it surely will be one of Shannara's most attended PVP Events :)
Feel free to leave us any questions, opinions and/or suggestions about this event and the whole logic behind it. They're very much appreciated and I'm sure they'll contribute to make things even better than what they already are.
Thank you all for your interest, feedback and time spent reading this post :P
Nyo out