Guide to Sports Hosting
With many sporting tournaments being held in the NSverse both NS-wide and region-wide the time for a guide to hosting a NS sport has come. Whether a sport has a real-life counterpart or it is a fictional sport, the same level of detail and dedication to the sport is required to be able to effectively host a tournament.
Some examples of sports that have had tournaments run in NationStates include:
While most of these have real-life counter-parts such as the World Cup for a number of sports and the Tour de France for cycling, there exist sports such as kleptochase that only exist in NationStates.
Contents
Requirements for hosting a sporting tournament
There are a number of things that you need to think of and questions you need to answer before someone should even consider hosting a sport event.
Skills
It is well known that some people are just plain better at certain things compared to others, so how are you going to handle this for your tournament? There are 3 possible ways to handle this:
- Multiple skills
- Generic skill
- No skill
Whatever method of skilling you use for the tournament, your scorinator will have to be able to accomodate the skills and you will require a formula based on the mechanics of the sport to translate the skills into points or times as appropriate for the sport. Please note that in addition to skill, there needs to be a level of randomness involved. You need to determine the balance between the skill(s) and the randomness.
Multiple skills
This occurs when a number of factors combine to determine how well participants perform in a sporting event compared to other competitors. An algorithm is used to combine all these individual skills with a random factor to generate the final result of the match. The skills may be used differently in different stages of the tournament—for example, kleptochase only uses one skill in each event, representing different types of courses. Some tournaments that use multiple skills are:
Generally each competitor in a multi-skilled tournament when they join get to assign various points to each skill. The number of points to assign may be the result of a ranking system and may need to be assigned every tournament or may be continued on from a previous tournament.
Generic skill
This occurs when a tournament uses a system of a single number to represent how good or poor a team is. This is generally fairly easy, as you only have one skill to combine with a random number to generate the final result. Some examples of generic skill–based tournaments include:
- Atlantian Oceania Cup of Association Football
- Cherry Cup (hockey)
- Olympics
- World Cup (of soccer/football)
- Ylompics
A team or competitor is usually assigned a standard skill level when joining, whether that is 0 or something else. A totally new tournament that has no team that has a skill benefit over the other is classified as a Non-Skilled Sporting tournament
No skill
This occurs when there are no pre-existing skill points assigned to any team. This usually happens for a new tournament that is unrelated to any other tournament, whether or not there are already tournaments of the same sport. Only randomness is considered when generating the scores for these types of tournaments.
Many tournaments use no skill in their first edition, then use a single-skill ranking system for the second. It is rare for a repeated tournament to not use skill, but one example is the Baptism of Fire tournament, which only includes nations signing up for the World Cup that are unranked.
Format
There are a number of aspects to format:
- Stages
- Competitors
- Fixtures
These combine to form the overall structure and format of the tournament. The format should be explained to the participants before the tournament begins.
Stages
A stage is a section of a tournament that adheres to a set of rules about how competitors play each other. There are many types of stages, but some of the most common types are:
- Group
- Knockout
- Heats
- Group finals
Group
In a group stage, the participants are drawn into groups, where all of the participants in the group play against each other. Normally, either each participant plays everyone else in their group once at a neutral venue, or they play everyone else in their group twice, once at a home venue and once at an away venue.
After the group stage games are over, a certain number of teams at the top of each group advance to a knockout round. Sometimes, playoff matches are required to ensure that the correct number of teams advance to the next stage.
Each match that a competitor wins, draws and loses gives them an opportunity to build up points. Teams are ranked based on the number of points they get, with teams earning the most points advancing. On occasion, there is the possibility of points being equal between 2 teams, one of which should progress and the other should stop competing. In this case, some sort of tie-breaker is needed, such as the results between the two tied teams, goal difference (for football or similar sports), or anything else that can differentiate the teams.
Knock-out
A knock-out stage may or may not precede a group stage. A match in a knock-out stage always produces a winner—if both competitors score the exact same amount of points/take the same time, then a method of determining a winner has to be decided. This can be done as “extra time,” where a certain number of minutes are added for the team to score. Additional rules like golden goal may be in place at the hosts discretion. Another option is for a re-match, the two competetitors battle it out again to see for a different result.
Heats
Heats are used when multiple (more than 2) competitors can compete at the same time or when only one competitor can compete at a time due to physical restrictions; examples of these are swiming, skiing, marathon, and cycling.
Usually in heats a number of competitors compete against each other and, much like a group stage, the best X number of competitors from each heat goes through to the next stage.
However in events such as cycling tours times from each heat (usually known as stages in cycling jargon) are added together and form the total time for the event. The winner of the tournament is the person with the quickest overall time. Though an individual may win a heat that does not mean they will win upcoming heats or the race.
Group finals
Group finals require heats the best X number of competitors from each Group Final progress to the next level of group finals until enough competitors have been whittled down to end up in one last group final. The winner of this final is the winner of the tournament.
Others
There are many other types of structures that you can use. Will it fit the mechanics of the game? Do you like it? Do you know how it will work in terms of fixtures? If you can answer these questions, then there is no technical reason why you should not be able to use it.
Competitors
There are many aspects to competitors that contribute to the overall structure of a tournament.
First and foremost is the number of competitors. The number of competitors define how many competitors are in each group/heat and how many groups/heats there are. A tournament with 120 would very possible have 15 groups/heats of 8 competitors per group/heat, whereas a tournament of 32 might have 8 groups of 4 or vice versa.
The number of competitors might also require byes as in a competitor does not compete one time but does the next where someone else does not compete.
Fixtures
A fixture is who is competing against who else and where are they doing it at. Usually venues have no bearing on scoring a tournament, but there are instances (e.g., the Vilitan Surf Tour) where venues do have an impact (usually in a multiple-skill tournament). The most important thing is to make sure the competitors know who will be facing who before they do it.
Scorinating
Scorinating is the process of generating scores. There are a number of ways this can be achieved. For instance, back in the early days of the NS World Cup (soccer/football), dice were used to score. However more sophisticated methods of scoring such as programs or spreadsheets are more common nowadays.
Behind every method of scorination is an algorithm, it is the algorithm that is the most important thing that determines how good the scores are. This algorithm needs to take into account the skills and how they affect the final score, it needs to be able to support all the rules for sorting out a final winner should a match end in draw, and it needs to be able to be told who competes against whom.
You may need to create a scorinator or may already have an existing scorinator created by yourself or someone else. If you need to create a scorinator you must have a good understanding of the method to run the algorithm (e.g., write a program to do it, use a spreadsheet, or find some other way). As stated in Skills, randomness is very important. Finally, the scorinator must support the RP bonus used (see next section).
Roleplaying bonus
Usually to encourage activity in a tournament there is something called a roleplaying (RP) bonus. An RP bonus is determined using pre-determined criteria and then added in a way that it improves the chances for the team that RPed against their opponent. Of course both teams can RP and so they can get the same and/or similiar bonuses. There are three main ways to implement an RP bonus:
- Alter the skill
- Scorinator field
- No bonus
Alter the skill
This is the most common method, and is very easy to accomplish as you don’t need to have a scorinator that needs to worry about the RPB as that is your job. This can work with either multiple-skill, generic-skill, or no-skill tournaments. Usually the RP bonus is more of a factor in no-skill tournaments, as that is the only way to get an advantage over an opponent.
While details of your criteria are usually not given out to the public, you need to know exactly how your RP bonus system will work before the tournament so that it is applied consistantly and fairly across the board.
Scorinator fields
Some scorinators use the RP bonus to modify the way the score is created above beyond what is acheived by skills. In this case a scorinator field is required and the most of the work is creating and implementing the algorithm, making this method more complex than altering the skill. However, once the scorinator has been set up there is not much to differentiate the running of a scorinator field RP bonus compared to an alter-the-skill style.
No bonus
While fairly rare, there are tournaments, such as the Cherry Cup, that have no RP bonus at all. This, while being extremely easy, is not in common use in NS.
Signups
You cannot have a tournament without competitors—the signups are a crucial component to running a tournament. Some tournaments already have systems in place but if you are going to run your own, you need to create your own signups.
For no-skill or rank-based tournaments you only have to require intention to compete as you would have the rank values already waiting ready for their use. However, tournaments that require the participants to specify skills must do the following:
- Inform competitors of how many points they can allocate
- Inform competitors of how many skills there are and a basic desrciption of them
- Provide both valid and invalid samples for people to use as a base
Knowing how many people to expect to sign up is an art that I have yet to know how to master. There are always people that you might expect to sign up that don’t and new people will sign up all the time. The real question is how large are you able to go?
The answer is mainly a personal one as well as a bit of a technical one. Can your scorinator support 100 competitors? Can you handle all 100 competitors?
Closing signups is also an art form of itself—do you go for that 33rd player even though that will cause problems or just go to 32 and close up then? The question is really what do you think is best for you and your tournament.
During the tournament
You have all the competitors you need having all the people you need to run the tournament. So what now?
First thing first—create thread(s) for people to post rosters (if applicable) and RPs, as well as one for you to post the scores. For small tournaments it may just be easy enough to have all in one thread, or should rosters also be there to split one of the three off as a seperate thread. The decision is up to you but please consider past precedent, particularily if you are running a long-standing tournament. And don’t forget to link to the new threads from the signup thread.
Post fixtures in an appropriate place—either post the entire fixture list for the tournament on the first page of the RP thread or post the next day’s fixtures in the score thread.
Make sure that people know of the format, particularily if you are using a non-standard format. Should there be 2 or more stages, you should say what the requirements to progress to the next stage are.
Consistency is key, both in dealing with RPs and with regularity of scoring the matches. To help you in aiding the RP counting process, you can use what is known as an RP cut-off. An RP cut-off is a post in the RP thread by you stating that all RPs up to here from the previous cut-off post are included in the scorination of the upcoming matches/competitions. It helps you with counting a large number of RPs as well as keeping your participants informed. You can use your judgement and include an RP after the cut-off but it has to be very close after the RP has been cut-off and before actual scorination has taken place. If you do include a post after the RP cut off make it clear in the cut-off what RPs you have included.
Regular scorinating is important, knowing when to expect some scores keeps your participants happy. Should there be an incident where you will know you won’t be able to score then post a message telling your people why and give an estimate of when scorination will begin. If you cannot know beforehand then tell people what happened when you do score. Communication is very important.
Normally, to allow participants to RP, scores are usually generated ever 24 hours or so. It is good to scorinate about the same time each day, giving the participants enough time to write and consider an RP.
After the tournament
Should this tournament be one of a long series of tournaments, there are a number of things that you need to do after the tournament that will make it easier.
Update ranks, a system like the KPB system or other to improve a person’s base skills depending on their performance in previous tournaments is a good thing for you to do. However there is a chance that you might not have to worry about it. Let’s use the Dragon Invitational created by Andossa Se Mitrin Vega as example. Considering it was a soccer/football tournament and many of the competitors in it were the same as the competitors in the World Cup then it did not seem necessary for Andossa Se Mitrin Vega to have his own ranking system. Instead he used the World Cup system. So the ranking system including skills are very important.
Another thing to consider is to give your competitors at least some breathing space before running another tournament. A week is absolute minimum before you try to run another attempt. But really, as the host, it is your choice unless it is a tournament with some institutional backing like the World Cup and other related events through the World Cup Committee.
