[Complete] BWI - Brutal Wesnoth International - Prize Tournament

[Gambit]

thefish Just read this topic and Noy's post in particular.

Okay, why does that matter?

Well it is rather strange to ask the reasons in response to the posts that state the reasons.

[alpha1]

Wesnoth is not safe against cheating (easiest by eliminating fog of war).

In fact this problem has been dealt with, due to addon everyone has to install in order to participate, each player knows what faction his opponent has from the very beginning, so the main advantage of removing the fog, which is counterrecruiting against specific factions, is eliminated.

[Boldek]

Wesnoth is not safe against cheating (easiest by eliminating fog of war).

Anyone looking to manipulate the client source code to win a prize by cheating in the tournament can also use this hack to cheat for "normal" MP games - so I can understand that the developers don't like this idea.

That said, moving the tournament to a separate tournament server does nothing here (other than creating a little burden for the organizers, and the players/observers):
The fog-cheating there is as easy as cheating on the main server (with the difference that the server's owner could possibly also manipulate the random numbers, so you have to trust another group of peoples that this hard-core cheating doesn't happen).

I don't really see what risk the Wesnoth project would have by permitting third parties on organizing a tournament on the server and distributing money to its winners. Wesnoth would never touch the money, and doesn't have to guarantee anything about the players and the games.
But I also don't know the legal situation in the server's jurisdiction (or, maybe more important, the jurisdiction of the people responsible for the server).

dude, if people go to the official server to play, wesnoth will get involved. You can't just host a game betting tons of money and expect the forums and game to be spam free. This place will go haywire with spammers wailing, screaming, complaining, etc. When you start the game. You see a little link to the forums. What do want the devs to do? add a little note saying: "oh by the way, if you feel that you got cheated at the Brutal wesntoh international, forget telling us about it, because we want to avoid lawsuit and spam" not gonna work.

[The Black Sword]

Hmm, I must say I was rather skeptical of a tournament with prizes from the start, mainly due to the issues regarding cheating, most of which have been mentioned. However, so long as its made very clear that the tournament has no official connection to wesnoth and the wesnoth developers/team have absolutely no obligation to cater for such a tournament I think the majority of these issues are negligible.

I suppose you could argue that "make very clear" includes not allowing any tournament games on the official server, I personally don't think you would need to go so far, but I also don't have any say in the decision.

btw, I think

However even then this year we witnessed the Ladder almost collapse due to rampant cheating

is a massive exxageration .

I hadn't considered legal issues like those mentioned by jb, however, like pauxlo, I find it hard believe this presents a risk to wesnoth when wesnoth never touches the money but then I have very little knowledge about the subject either.

[Cackfiend]

Some of these comments are getting a bit out of hand. I think some clarification is in order.

Wesnoth players are not required to submit any personal information, credit card information, or bank info for this prize tournament
Wesnoth players are not putting up any of their own money for the money prize tournament




My guess is that the players who win would be sent money via some sort of electric payment service like paypal to the email that they registered their account with.




so with all of this in mind I think some of you need to rethink your posts


remember the main goal here is to promote competitive wesnoth and is not to make anyone rich, its not like we're talking about $1000's of dollars here.

------

Sounds about right Noy, not surprised at all there.


I do believe, for example, that the first Starcraft prize tournaments were also hosted on private servers and not Battle.net

You cannot play Starcraft2 without Battle.net connection.

this may be true as I know very little about SC2

I was talking about when the original SC was first played in tournaments on TV in korea for cash

[neki]

Yeah, thank you Cackfiend for the clarifications! Just a sponsor that pays winning players and only winning players cash for viwes on their website. I don't see the legal issues and who should sue anybody for this. We can arrange sue waivers or whatever necessary documentation with the sponsor/with the organizers in order to make sure Wesnoth doesn't get affected at all.

I think a compromise solution can be achieved, if there is minimal good will from one or two voluntary/designated of the developers to get out of their comfort zone and make some minimal sacrifices for this to happen. I can think of at least one developer who's willing to help us/supervise our activity and be willing to take some responsibility.

What do you say, if he offers to take the heat of this thing degenerating according to the sci-fi scenarios presented here so far, will you let us play our games on the official server ? Just this one first test time ?

[Noy]

What do you say, if he offers to take the heat of this thing degenerating according to the sci-fi scenarios presented here so far, will you let us play our games on the official server ? Just this one first test time ?

My post is basically the final position. We have already discussed this with you, and this is not a public negotiation.

[neki]

Just for the record, you did not have time to discuss this with me, as far as I remember.

[Noy]

Just for the record, you did not have time to discuss this with me, as far as I remember.

In one instance, you're right. However in other instances I asked if you wanted to discuss this (actually in one case an hour after I told you I was busy). In that instance you did not respond (Though you received my message) and in another you simply wanted to speak to Dave instead.

Furthermore a part of my refusal was due to your insistence to talk over skype. I refused because I do value my privacy and I did not feel that it would add anything to the conversation. If you can't express it via IRC then I would question how you would be able to run an tournament altogether.

[Dauntless]

Noy: Spoken word in a dialogue is almost always more effective and definitely many times faster than exchanging messages / instant messages. Imho there is no need to acccuse neki of inability based on his preference of spoken word.
Even if it were true, it does not merit the discussion is any way. As a mod, you should know that best...

[Pentarctagon]

IMHO, this thread has gone way off topic, mostly due to useless comments/debates:

a) Spamming the same message, even as an act of support, is still spam and should not be encouraged by anyone for whatever reason.
b) This tournament is not going to be hosted on wesnoth's servers. Noy has stated that this is the position of the Developers, and has given good legal reasons why this won't happen. You can argue/whatever about it with the Developers if you really want to, but this thread is not the place to do so
c) Regardless of who refused to communicate with whom for whatever reason, this thread is not the place to argue about it.


I suggest that everyone take a deep breath, refer to my avatar, and then think about if whatever they were about to post actually contributes to this thread.

[neki]

The sponsor requested the official developer position on the tournament. We offered them this thread. After reading, they told us they will never want to have anything to do with Battle for Wesnoth again, but they will continue to sponsor other games they are currently sponsoring. So, the developers can be happy as in my opinion no sponsor will ever disturb Wesnoth tournaments with prizes again. For those interested in more details of the sponsor reaction, you can contact Darkkey.

I have officially lost all my enthusiasm regarding this tournament and huge amounts of voluntary work for Wesnoth, therefore I say we give people a chance to send me an email and unregister from the tournament, now that there is no prize-pool involved. If there are some of the participants left who are interested, we can continue the tournament without prizes after the ongoing tournaments finish. If you have any ideas, like using brutalwesnoth.com as neat platform for any future prizeless tournament, send your ideas to me or to Noy, because I honestly don't care anymore.

When I will have the heart and time I will also send you all an email with this and will also update the website, but I don't expect this to happen anytime soon, as I am behind with school because of the huge amounts of work I have invested in this.

As a vision, I expect this to be the beginning of the end of competitive Wesnoth. In one year from now, the active players ladder table will probably have no more than 50 participants.

[Gambit]

What an incredibly childish reaction. Things didn't go 100% your way so you're going to give up and tell everyone to harass Noy.
And how arrogant to say that — because your tournament could not go 100% as planned — competitive Wesnoth must be doomed.


For those who support competitive Wesnoth as you all said you did, I suggest you ignore neki's prophecy. Competitive Wesnoth is not tied to neki in any way. We've had competitive Wesnoth before now. We have it going on right this moment. And there will be more of it in the future. Join those tournaments. Organize others. If neki wants to give up, fine. We can keep going regardless.


At any rate, I guess we don't need this thread anymore.



edit: Good news everyone! I just received a PM from neki. He has decided to continue the tournament even without prizes. "The show must go on"!
Thread reopened.

[neki]

This is not certain yet, Gambit, depends on the crowd. At the moment the tournament is frozen. I will give you guys a week to send me unregister emails to nekiwesnoth at gmail. com now that the prize situation change and we will decide from then. If there is still interest, we can pick up with the tournament where we left from after the tournaments in progress finish since now there is no sponsor pressure. Just post your thoughts in here, no matter if you want the tournament to continue or stop.

[csarmi]

Wesnoth is not safe against cheating (easiest by eliminating fog of war).

In fact this problem has been dealt with, due to addon everyone has to install in order to participate, each player knows what faction his opponent has from the very beginning, so the main advantage of removing the fog, which is counterrecruiting against specific factions, is eliminated.

You need no addon for that. The players enter the game and when turn 1 starts, each state their faction. No fancy addon