Player Created Tournaments

One thing that I've noticed during my time in Illy is that all the tournaments (player or dev run) are based around alliances. This excludes those who either choose not to join an alliance or are new to the game and still trying to decide which one to join. It also means that if an alliance wants to run an 'inhouse' tournament that they need somebody who has the time and ability to record all the results and all the other stuff that goes along with it.

For player run tourneys such as the excellent ones done by Koda there is also a need to share API keys which some players (rightly or wrongly) are not willing to do.

I decided to have a look and see if I could create something that would allow non-IT-experts to create and run combat based tournaments without the need to share API keys.

The first thing I looked at was how to share the combat reports without the need to share an API key. This is fairly simple as each combat report has an xML button at the bottom. This allows the viewing (and processing) of the underlying data that makes up the combat report. This XML data DOES NOT contain any API key. Rather it has a key to access that specific report. So a player can share only those combat reports that are relevant and they are happy don't contain info they would rather not potentially make public.

Creating a tournament is the more complex part and I'm working on that at the moment. Currently the creator can set start and end dates, restrict to particular regions and define which (if any) alliances can take part. They can even make it so only those not in an alliance can enter.

To try and give as many options to the organisers as possible when it comes to deciding the 'winners' I include the MDQ rating of any NPCs involved in the combat as well as the population of the town that sent the troops. Hopefully this will allow the grouping of the combats by individual town, by player, by alliance, by # of kills, by population, by NPC, by MDQ rating... the list goes on

At present the system is only for hunting style tournaments (these are the easiest to set up) but perhaps in the future I may be able to expand it to include other styles of tournaments.

I'll post some screenshots of the system later. As always comments and suggestions (positive or negative) are warmly welcomed.

Tens

All the comments are much appreciated folks.

Been working on the Tourney management side of things and have got the parts done to create and edit a tourney. Still got some way to go on the editing side though. If the restrictions of a tournament (regions or alliances) are changed that may affect any reports already submitted for it so I need to write some code to handle that - probably going to be a nightmare as usual

After that I need to create a method for the tourney creator to be able to download the details of all reports submitted to their tournaments. Same query as for showing the tournament standings coupled with the same code that I used for the download in the price grabber tool.

Few other things bubbling away in the braincell but a bit early to say if any of them will work or not.

Tens

Below is a screenshot summarizing the calculations done by the system at present.