Formats and Tournament Structures

Formats in general have always stirred a lot of discussion, and unfortunately I feel like those discussions have not been very fruitful in general due to the quick and quippy form of discussion within the community. 

“Kill points bad!”

“Benjyfishy format is the best”

“I miss the old format!”

Where nobody is expressing any form of actual reasoning, and everything is black and white… even though formats have a lot of nuance. Fortunately, we’ve already gone through quite a bit of testing and variation, and formats and general community consensus has come a long way.

This is a longer form attempt at explaining some of my thoughts regarding the current issues and solutions when it comes to formats and tournament structures. I’ve broken the writing up between different tournament types and stages, because I think each has a very unique issue set to deal with. We’ll talk about open stages, fncs type seasons/series, and then ultimately grand finals. I’ll also briefly touch on point formats, though I think we’ve pretty much gotten to where we need to go with them, and not much more experimentation must be done.

I’d hope that you read the sections that interest you in FULL, rather than making decisions and quoting based on out of context snippets. I hope some of these ideas and descriptions of the issues helps to create a better discourse within the community, and also actual attempts at formats that solve the matters the community cares about. I may be doing more long-form writings on issues within the community and game here, specifically thinking about writing one on the viewing experience in general… But for now, let’s talk formats.

A few notes about point formats

This blog in general is NOT about point formats, but I know a lot of people are interested in what I have to say about point formats. My priorities when grading point formats are simple:

1. Surviving (placement) should be worth – in a manner that makes sense and isn’t inconsistent or random. This is why placement thresholds overall were frustrating… in general I think that those are bad, 99th should not be worth the same as 26th, in a point in time where getting 26th means you survived till 6th or 7th zone. 

Dreamhack and ESL succeeded at breaking this pattern. I’m really not sure why FNCS solos and recent Epic formats have gone half-way instead of fully… my guess is it has to do with the amount of pop-ups that “every placement matters” would have on the screen. I think with the amount of medal pop-ups that happen with way worse sound, we shouldn’t care about it. You can also condense descriptions to be much more obvious and easy rather than taking a whole screen.

2. Victory Royales should matter a LOT. Getting wins is the most rewarding thing and I don’t think that people should be sacrificing the win for any other type of points. It’s the most exciting moment in the game and what EVERYTHING builds up to.

I think that most formats have failed at rewarding VRs enough, but obviously there’s a balance that has to be struck… even ESL and Dreamhack had wins feeling meaningless.

3. The elim to placement ratio should be balanced well. Yes eliminations should be worth points, that’s not debatable –  but if you overvalue them it hinders VRs and placement points relative worth.

I do want to address the sentiment that “elims being worth more makes it so people don’t sit in boxes, which is boring”. This isn’t actually true (analytics have shown that the # of players alive doesn’t change much – though that does NOT tell the whole story), I’d argue that w-keying causes randomness and volatility/griefing which is more boring than anything.

There’s a reason pros don’t fight unless it’s a completely imbalanced fight. It’s because fighting almost ALWAYS reduces your chance of surviving longer and WINNING, even if you beat your opponent in that one fight. If we want to encourage fighting, GAME MECHANICS need to be changed. Things like elimination rewards, such as siphon and extra mat drops need to be experimented with and pushed further, for example, guaranteed mobility and/or weapon upgrades when you get kills. The game would need to change to make kills 100% increase your chance of surviving and winning the game.

One thing is for sure though – either extreme is bad. Elims not being worth enough makes it so that certain playstyles are completely irrelevant. Elims being worth too much make it so that people make decisions that don’t actually work with the rest of the game.

Final note that I really don’t think “multipliers” or “placements by zones” or anything is super worth messing around with at this stage. I think that confuses people more than anything – and sticking with the trend makes sense at this point. The issues that point formats bring are fixable with point formats themselves. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to see a “zone-progressive elim point system” tried – but if it requires development, I think there are much more pressing ideas.

Cash Cups and Open Stages w/ Matchmaking

Now to the meat of the blog post, as I really don’t think that point formats matter ALL that much. The incentive and structure of the tournament in general matters MUCH more. This section will be about the “matchmaking” or “cash cup” style tournaments and those stages where you qualify to a future stage. This would include opens/semis of FNCS. For me, these are the biggest issues, but are by no means the only issues….

Issue #1: Meaningless w-key games as everybody starts to get matched, causing a NEED to w-key

Early matchmaking will never be perfect, BUT the amount of luck involved week after week is insane. Sometimes you get a first lobby with a few pros, sometimes you don’t… sometimes it’s all players who cannot even build. Regardless – SOMEONE is going to get an easy lobby which requires EVERYBODY to w-key. Instantly bringing down the quality of ALL first few games. This is bad for viewers and bad for players, and for those making their entryway into comp fortnite – completely reinforcing the wrong habits that they need going forward. 

Solutions:

• Make Arena and Hype points an actual MMR system, that finds your skill, and match first games based on this – and THEN match based on tournament scores as time goes on. Have tournaments affect that MMR in a meaningful way. You might think this would punish high MMR players, but as the tournament goes on, it would actually create a fairer experience for everyone, as no one can get lucky with their lobbies.
• You can help this issue with a point format change – by making eliminations worth less like with the Benjyfishy cup, or by simply having a second stage like we did during World Cup qualifiers, but no matter what, this will always be a thing in the current PBMM system, point format changes will simply LESSEN the impact, which is not enough, IMO.

Issue #2: For cash cups specifically, there is a heavy reliance on $$ to make these work at all

In my opinion, this is unsustainable and actually bad for the entire ecosystem of the scene. Open scrims in general suffer because everybody is used to the incentive of $ during cash cups. When there is no cash on the line (hype nites), nobody cares to play and those who do aren’t good enough to make stacked games against those who are just mindlessly w-keying for fun. Daily duo cups were fun with little cash incentive just because they were something to do. Pop-up cups were fun because they were an actual tournament. I don’t want $ to go away for cash cups, as obviously a certain influx of cash is healthy, but I would want the focus to be on major events.

Solutions:

• The arena changes mentioned above would work nicely to create an overall healthier ecosystem – and allow for things like “contenders pop-up cup” and “div 7 and below hype nite”. I think non-reward tournaments should be run often, daily if not multiple times a day. This would be the best way to get the overall community who is interested in comp, an outlet to play comp outside of SCHEDULED events. Different skill groups would allow tests of skill all over the place, which would be awesome. Then you could have your “cash cups” once a week or once a month that everybody looks forward to. 

Even smaller rewards such as titles, badges or sprays would be massive. They aren’t cash, but a way to show off that you are the current title holder for the “monthly contenders cup” that displays in the kill feed for competitive modes would be amazing.

• Condense the cash into more important, more rare interesting tournaments – such as Winter Royale.  I do commend the new 3rd party player/community tournaments that are popping up such as Benjyfishy Cup, Amar Cup etc – but I think setting the precedent that some of these need to be run with pretty large prize purses is rough for the future for creators who would want to run tournaments. 

• Promote and create content around the recurring tournaments. They might not be premiere series, but people play them, and people need to know they are happening to play them. Doesn’t have to be high quality, doesn’t have to be serious – but just a way to show the community, “hey, you will be noticed playing these”.

Issue 3: Catch up mechanics in these are way too big (starting an hour late)

This has been a hot topic for a long time, but especially in season 2 when the cash cups became 2-stage. It makes no sense that a player can play 2 games (albeit very successfully) and qualify over a player who plays VERY consistently over 6 games. There are a lot of things that feed into this issue, but I think overall there is a simple solution that I’ve talked about before.

Solutions:

• Create a kill cap that makes it so there is a MAXIMUM amount of points per game. This kill cap should not be applied towards later stages where games are always stacked and this entire thing is not an issue, and especially NOT grand finals. The point cap for eliminations should be around what a common “really good game” should be for the mode. In solos, this is 10-12 elims, higher in duos and much higher in trios/squads. 

What’s important to note about an elim cap is that you shift the balance of competition from winning in your first 2 games, to winning in your last few (which are harder and more meaningful anyways). Pros will have to focus on maximizing every game by getting MAX POINTS rather than having 2 huge first games. This will be more exciting in the long run.

Also I’ll re-iterate. Elimination point cap should not be used in custom like stages. Grand finals should be uncapped. It does not serve a purpose in grand finals.

• The above solution about making the start of the tournament match based on an arena MMR that actually matches your skill (is not hype). 

• In chess tournaments that have similar structure to open matchmaking, there is a concept called “Berserking” where you put yourself at a handicap for a chance at higher points if you do well. I think ideas like this would be a cool concept for these tournaments, BUT i have no actual idea here… maybe some smart people can come up with some interesting and fair handicaps. I do think the idea of Aspect dropping 2 back to back 20 bombs to win cash cups because he played poorly in the middle of the tournament is AWESOME, so I don’t want to FULLY get rid of that.

I don’t believe that just not letting people start late is a solution, as accessibility has always been a goal for epic. Players all have different schedules. Whether they should be able to qualify while starting late is a different story, but the biggest thing is that they should not get an ADVANTAGE by starting late (being disadvantaged is totally fine, IMO).

Issue 4: Funneling and Narrowing down a LARGE player pool

The open matchmaking style tournament has actually been an incredible system. In my view, it’s the ONLY real way to have this many play a rewarding tournament to eventually find a smaller deeper pool. 

However – when it comes to getting down to the TINY amounts of players (in context to the multiple tens of thousands in open stages), I don’t believe it is the best. The splits that we had during WC were OK, but to qualify 1/2/6 etc from 1000 or 3000 is too much.

Solution:

• A “customs-like” stage that operates similar to how scrims work, that has much more OBVIOUS matchmaking, and creates matches every 30 minutes similar to a finals stage. However, the key thing here is that there are 500-3000 players, a scale of semi finals or smaller.

In this case, the matchmaking works as follows, a linear pairing of players from top to bottom, top 100 plays their game, top 101-200 plays their game, etc. There should also be a dynamic amount of players PER GAME based on the amount of people that ready up, to have an even amount of players across all games. So if there are 578 that queue, it should create 6 lobbies of 96 players based on that linear matchmaking.

• Leave cash cups and open matchmaking style tournaments as they are, one stage, customs do not fit this environment at all, IMO. I’m writing this now as the new season 3 cash cup rules and format have been released and it’s wonderful.

While yes I like the IDEA of a stage 2 in a cash cup. I don’t actually think its feasible. I’d rather see more of these tournaments with possibly less reward as stated above, then really try to use them as a way to “find the best”, cause that’s clearly not what they are. Though I did really enjoy how useful they were in preparation for FNCS casts – cause they painted a bit more of a story than one stage cash cups.

FNCS Structure and other “Seasonal”/”Series” Tournaments

This section will be primarily about FNCS, but some of the ideas can be applied to anything else that is similar to FNCS such as leagues or long form tournament qualifiers. The idea is some way to have the community play in a recurring event that eventually qualifies them for a “regional/seasonal final” or in a sense… playoffs. This entire process must be open to everyone. I think this has been a great initiative and Epic has improved the process significantly over time (starting with 3 stages, moving into sunday finals that are customs, etc…) However, I still think there are some key issues with FNCS competitions as they stand.

Issue 1: Each week has decreasing levels of importance/interest, rather than INCREASING

This leads to an insane amount of griefing, lower viewership over time, etc. Think about an NBA season or NFL season, everything leads up to the playoffs, and interest rises and rises over the season up until the final moments of the season. Those games are the most important, they either gain you access to the playoffs, or they don’t, and that delineation is VERY clear. In Fortnite, it’s not so obvious because of a number of reasons, mainly due to the sheer number of players participating.

Solution: 

• There should be carryover week to week, based on placements LAST WEEK, you should automatically qualify for the later stages of the next week, that way, there’s no chance we have a situation where the literal WINNERS of week 1 are not qualified for the sunday finals of week 2… which would happen often for the top teams. There would be weeks where I had no interest at all because most of the best teams (who had already qualified) were not even playing.

• A 3 Stage Playoffs/Heats (example: 4 heats -> 2 heats -> grand finals) rather than a 2-stage playoff (4 heats -> grand finals). One of the reasons I lose interest in later weeks, is because I know that HEATS are going to be way worse quality in terms of the teams that are there ANYWAYS. Essentially, the stakes are so low for teams to care in later weeks. 

I don't think you realize that not a single good player quald through consistency

— charge shotty god calc (@yungcalc) April 19, 2020

There is some serious truth to calc’s tweet. Made me wonder why we had so many players qualifying in the first place. Another solution, is just lower the amount of heats. I think this would be fine too, though I’d love seeing more customs than less customs, just in general – so I’d prefer a three stage, modified sunday final instead.

Issue 2: Seeding means absolutely NOTHING.

Granted, I’m pretty sure nobody actually knows how the heats are drawn besides Epic, and there could be a method to it… however, trying to think about seeding heats in an actual meaningful way, I only come up with one answer… they may be doing that… IDK. I still don’t think that’s enough for people to CARE about seeding…. Though maybe if they knew, they might.

I think that seeding should matter a lot more, because then players who have already clinched qualification will play harder week after week rather than grief to try to hold others out who are at their spot. 

Solution:

• Revamp FNCS series points completely to be… understandable? Make them based on actual points rather than random arbitrary numbers. The idea I have would be each tier of qualification you earn points for that tier. If you have points in sunday finals, you rank higher than players who have only points in semis.

• Actually create a series point leaderboard that is updated live or at LEAST directly after the tournament. People don’t care about seeding for two reasons. One, it appears to do nothing… Two, they have no idea how to check their seed, so why would they care?

• Higher seeds should qualify for LATER stages of the playoff. In a 2 stage format, maybe top 10 should automatically qualify for GRAND FINALS. In a 3 stage format, maybe you have the top 100 automatically qualify for the 2nd stage, and the top 10 automatically qualify for grand finals.

This alleviates so much! Helps make seeding meaningful, and then also makes it so that there is no chance that the BEST teams over the season are missing from later stages. They drive interest, they drive hype.

Grand Finals

I’ve thought a lot about grand finals, and how to improve them through format. In general, grand finals have always produced really great and competitive Fortnite… with very few exceptions (NA Winter Royale 2018). We’ve also made a LOT of improvements in grand finals formats with the advent of ESL tournaments and Dreamhack tournaments.

They will ALWAYS be the pinnacle of high level competitive fortnite. Obviously. I would not watch Fortnite if it weren’t for the potential of grand finals.

Before I get into the main issues, I think I do want to say one more thing about the lead up to grand finals. Grand Finals means ONE LOBBY, playing multiple games in a row. It’s a custom. Quite often, this will feel COMPLETELY different than any cash cup or matchmaking format… it’s almost a different game entirely.

Grand finals should never be played by qualifying players from NON-CUSTOM like matches. It results in sub-par finals where people have not figured out. World cup was saved by incredible high stakes, but those were NOT the highest tier lobby we could have created at that stage… due to the fact that we qualified players from an incredibly top-wide funnel. There were a lot of players who were unfortunately, completely out of their element…

FNCS solos invitational had the same issue to a smaller extent, because the funnel was so much smaller at the top, creating a better pool – still, players did not play customs leading into the finals. 

Yes those who qualified were the best at the style they played… no they are not the best at the style of fortnite being played in the finals. 

Dreamhack was the same thing as the FNCS solo invitational – though, similarly to WC finals, stakes were high simply because it was on LAN.

I’ll repeat something I said on twitter during solo invitational:

We should not qualify people to a grand finals stage, without playing customs. Ever.

— Ballatw (@Ballatw) May 17, 2020

We should not qualify people to a grand finals stage, without playing customs. Ever.

Issue #1: Griefing in Grand Finals

This is obviously on the minds of a lot of people, especially pros, who get all sorts of threats from people who know they have no chance at performing well in grand finals. This is a big issue for competitive integrity.

Solutions have been tried, and many have worked to some extent, but more incentive to play as hard as you can in grand finals (including deterrents like bans/punishments) should be added.

Tried Solutions: 

• The best solution that is currently implemented in MOST tournaments is a deep prize split. This is something that works greatly, as long as players are AWARE. A deep prize split is one where no matter what you can get an increase in reward based on essentially ONE GOOD GAME (making it into the top 20 in solos)… rather than a prize pot where only the top 3 get rewarded (which requires MANY good games).

It works because the main reason people grief is a loss of hope or a desperation to do SOMETHING drastically different than playing to win. Players who are playing who have no chance who are being given access to continue playing results in griefing. 

• There was an idea of $/win that the community still hangs onto. This USED to work significantly. I don’t think this is a realistic solution anymore, and I never liked it in the first place, but it DID work. It also might work when you CANT have deep prize pools. However in almost all situations I think adding that money to deeper prize pools is BETTER. Reason being is that players who have no HOPE, are NOT WINNING GAMES. It used to be that this was different back in the skirmish days, it felt like anybody could win a game… now? No. Games are too stacked these days. 

I also don’t like the idea of split win conditions in general, thankfully winning is inline with the normal win condition for tournaments, so it’s not the worst thing. 

• Longer grand finals, or having more games. Dreamhack did this, ESL did this. In some senses this increases griefing occurences, but in some senses it MITIGATES it as well. Why? It’s less impactful WHEN it happens. There is much more time to recover and adjust to things happening. I don’t think that this is a direct solution, but I have seen it be useful. Regardless – I think there are MUCH more benefits to having more games overall in grand finals.

I can't explain how insanely disgusting day 2 was.
I thought it was going to be really nice to have 20 games to play but this was NOT the case at all.
People with low amount of points literally started W keying instantly in my first game.
Games were dogshit and just low quality

— MOTOR (@FNATIC_MOTOR) May 10, 2020

Solutions:

• Eliminate players from grand finals over time. This was an idea I had after casting Ninja Battles and only 60 players in those lobbies. The early game plays out much more consistently and predictably which I think is healthy for a grand finals.

Say a finals is 8 games… after 2 games, eliminate the players in the bottom 5. After 2 more, eliminate 5 more, etc… They are done, gone from the tournament. Removed from the stage, etc…

Directly, players that have no HOPE would be gone from the tournament and UNABLE to grief. Either unlocking drop spots for those who have kept them at the bottom, or opening space up for others to come into.

Issue #2 – No Winning Moments

I think this is an issue that has plagued every heavily produced/broadcasted grand finals in fortnite history. The fact that the end of the tournament is not the players who win doing anything special at all. The only time we have EVER had that occur is MrSavage at Dreamhack anaheim, where he won the tournament by WINNING in the last game. Unfortunately, it wasn’t even broadcast, and even if it was… it would be left with a bunch of “BUT WAIT, lets wait for the standings to update and MAKE SURE so we can do the math”… for 3 minutes before ACTUALLY announcing the winner.

To me – this sucks. It’s not like any other esport – and no we don’t have to be like other esports, but this makes those moments way worse than they could be.

Solution: 

• Apex legends tried a REALLY awesome format that solved this, at their poland invitational. They had a format where in grand finals, in order to win, you had to win a game AFTER reaching a certain amount of points. This worked great, with some downfalls…. They played 15 games, which lasted something over 7 hours.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/esports/2019/10/16/can-apex-legends-match-point-format-up-adrenaline-battle-royale-esports/

It was INTENSE though, as so many teams eventually made it to the threshold. It certainly reached the goal of creating that “winning moment” i’m looking for. 

I would make adjustments though… by making a game cap and also a secondary point threshold that simply ends the tournament with standings as they are. So, to sum it up…  say you want to run around an 8 game grand finals. We would set some threshhold to be met around game 4 or 5 games, based on what a good score in all of those games would be. 

Once a team reaches that threshold and THEN win a game, the tournament ends. You set the game cap around 10-12 games, and if nobody has WON the tournament yet by that cap, the team in the lead wins. Additionally, if any team reaches double the threshold at the end of any game, the tournament ends as well. These are all very clear winning moments no matter what.

One of my most memorable tournaments in fornite EVER – was week 3 of summer skirmish. Why? Because there was a winning moment. That format required you to reach 10 points and first team to reach that would win. Zayt and Saf had an epic heal off, after Bizzle and iHesi had reached the threshhold and thought they won. The tournament ended because the threshhold had been reached, and Zayt and Saf with the win overtook them to win. That is a winning moment – granted… we still didn’t have the tools to create it without waiting for results, but NOWADAYS it would be pretty instantaneous.

• A LIVE LEADERBOARD. For players. At least some information that shows what place they are in currently. If we had a literal live leaderboard, we would ALWAYS know who is winning at the end of tournament. This would also stay in line with how we currently do it, but just get a bit more involved.

At the same time, players would be able to make decisions based on it. I always bring back up a summer skirmish week, where Poach and Vivid were dueling for the top spot. Poach was in 2nd place, Vivid in 1st. Both were alive in endgame. Poach needed to wipe the entire lobby and win once in top 5, to overtake Vivid. Vivid needed to stop him.

Poach did not know that, and chose to play passive for the VR, optimizing his risk/reward… but unknowingly doing that, he played for 2nd place… and the tension in the tournament was completely REMOVED. If he just knew he was 3 points behind Vivid….

I hope you guys enjoyed reading this. It was a long time coming. I’ve been wanting to start a blog on these topics for quite some time. This was a long one, and next ones will hopefully be more condensed and detailed on a specific topic. Happy debating! Feel free to share whatever, I don’t care!