Red’s Corner is a bi-weekly column by Paul "ReDeYe" Chaloner released every other Thursday across both Tek-9 & Cadred.

Paul's last three columns can be read by clicking the following links:

Farewell COD4	27th August
Positive. For A Change	16th July
Independence Day	2nd July

Earlier this week, Dr.Gonzo put up a tongue in cheek look at Counter Strike Source and how to make it more TV friendly. Obviously as a satirical piece, it made some outrageous suggestions, most which just wouldn’t work. Coincidentally I had been working on a column about the very same thing, but in a more serious light, not that there is anything wrong with having fun with it.

My main thrust came from spending time with Corin discussing a Heaven Media event for next year. I can’t go in to any depth right now as its right at the early stages of planning, but the first order of the day was to decide how many teams we could handle and to do that. We had to work out how much time we had in the venue, how many PC’s and what games we were going to run. This got me thinking about leagues and cups that are held all over the place, not just for source, but for any game and ultimately lead to me looking at things a little differently.

You, as the hardcore, probably wouldn’t want to see any changes to the rule set for CS:S and that’s fair enough. Why would you? You play, you watch, you understand the complexities of it all and your attention span is kept by the deep interest you have in the players, the teams and/or the game. So I’ll put this out there right from the start; this column is simply about improving the show for the spectator and what might help make the game more dynamic and interesting to the more casual of viewers. I am not talking TV or CGS style butchering, simply, what might help improve the spectacle and entice a few more people in to watching matches, downloading demos and participating in this game and its community.

First up, is the format of tournaments. Who bloody said we had to use double elimination? Well, Angel Munoz pretty much did. When he first started CPL all those years ago, he adopted something from Baseball as a way of moving players and teams through a bracket. Now first off, it’s a very American way of doing things (not everything America does is bad, but this is one of them) and secondly, it wasn’t just from Baseball, but from the college version (NCAA). Other notable (or not so noteworthy) sports that use or have used double elimination are Table football (is that even a sport??!!?), amateur wrestling (borderline sport if ever there was one), curling (where they sometimes use triple elimination too!) and Judo.

What has Judo and CS:S got in common?

Now why on earth would you adopt something so infrequently used when making a gaming tournament? Well, it could be argued, it guarantees at least 2 games for all players and that’s perfectly true, but then other formats can guarantee more games. It could also be for simplification purposes, making it easier to administrate and again, this is true, but other formats are even easier.

It is a wonder that more popular formats weren’t and aren’t used for gaming tournaments, especially in Europe where nothing in popular sport uses this format. Take any sport that’s popular and do the test. Removing leagues from the equation for now, let’s just take a look at cups. The most popular club competition in the world is the English FA Cup and that is single elimination all the way through. It also happens to be un-seeded and frequently we get two big clubs facing off in the early stages, thus opening the door to a smaller club to come through to the later rounds and who can forget the inevitable giant killings that occur each year.

What about the World Cup? Well same theory, slight variation. Single elimination in the knock out stages, but based on seeded position from the first round, which is a group stage of 8 groups and 4 teams in each. Again, hugely popular, easy to understand and produces some incredible matches (usually outside of the group stages admittedly).

The World Cup format produces one of the most exciting sporting tournaments in the world

It’s no different in Cricket, Darts, Rugby or even most Athletics, yet we simply haven’t adopted any of the reasonable, exciting, simplistic formats for gaming. Rarely does a league organiser or LAN run with anything other than the norm of double elimination. Are they scared of making a change? Is it simple laziness and following of what worked before? Is it a fear of failure of the tournament or not being recognised as a “proper” tournament because of the format? Could it be that the organisers don’t want to upset the players or teams?

I’m not sure why really; I am just asking the questions. Whilst running every tournament on the format of the FA Cup seems a little extreme (mainly because teams wont fly anywhere for the chance of 1 game and then have to go home, gaming just hasn’t got to that point of financial support yet) the possibilities of using a World Cup format do exist and make a lot of sense.

The common issue being lack of games in a single elimination format goes away under World Cup format as you actually have more games than in double elimination (three minimum as opposed to two). When the top 2 advance, they are effectively seeded for the next round, so whilst it is single elimination from there on in, at least its seeded properly, based on form at the actual event and not picked from views of others before hand second guessing who might play well and who did last time.

You also get far more exciting matches throughout the draw as all of the players know, there can be no mistakes unlike the group stages, which in theory you can have a bad day and a top team will still come through. Its do or die once you hit the knock out stage and I’m not a betting man, but I’d stake Corin’s life on the fact you would produce much better games under the World Cup format. I do recognise however that we have seen some epic lower bracket comebacks down the years, but compare those to the amount of incredible games held in single elimination brackets in other sports and they pale away.

I am not saying that we will run something like this for an event, but I would like to test this out on esportsheaven.net at some point this year. 32 teams, World Cup format, 8 groups of 4, top 2 go through to single elimination. It could be fun at least and its worth trying in amongst the double elimination tournaments that are two a penny.

There are also lots of ways of changing the rules but not without alienating lots of players and/or fans so whilst I know there are a lot of different ways you could spice things up, I don’t want to be too radical. Instead, I simply want to look at the round amount. Currently, the majority of tournaments run with MR15. Again, why do we use this? Who said it was to be so? Those are fairly complicated and boring questions to answer, but the key point is, why do tournament organisers continue to use the format without questioning if there is a better way?

The round time is fine in my opinion, could be a little lower, but certainly no less than 1 minute 30. The game is already interesting and dynamic enough to see different strats play out and for teams to change strats and fakes throughout a round and that part of the game needs to stay. It would be stupidly boring if we said 1 minute round times and the teams pick a site and go for it and if it fails they have no chance of mounting an attack on the other, it would be shit or bust and that’s not really skill, it’s just luck.

The CGS tried to take CS:S in a bold new direction with mixed results

The CGS made a rather interesting decision of MR9 with overtime if tied, but that was for TV and was never meant to be copied online or in other leagues where the time constraints of a live TV show didn’t come in to play, despite being used by CEVO for a while. I still feel MR15 is too long however and statistics back me up. Of those we recently studied who watch COD and CSS on our video streams, we found that most will stay tuned in for an average of 20 minutes and if you watch the stream stats as they happen, the peak is always at the start (unless its an epic comeback, which sees new people coming to the stream as word spreads) and it slowly drops off there after. Pretty natural I am sure you would agree, however after 30 minutes 80% remain watching, but the figure dips below 50% after 40 minutes.

In its simplistic form this shows viewers (casual ones mainly) switch off as the game takes too long to complete. The figures are very different for COD, which by contrast runs for MR12.

Now I am not saying we should just all switch to MR12, but the Germans might be on to something here as they seem to be in the minority, certainly when mixing who choose to play MR12. Maybe I am missing something, but does MR15 really offer that much of an advantage over MR12? Sure, there’s a few more gun rounds if you are getting rolled thanks to the money system, but it doesn’t take away from the pure essence of the game. You still get great pistol rounds, eco’s, gun rounds and so on. Three less rounds each half might just make it a little more even and give us spectators some closer games although the players may argue it does make it a little more random. Again though, this was mainly about improving the show and making the game a little more friendly to watch and MR12 would certainly do that.

So next time we run something on esportsheaven, you may well find something new, something that rarely happens in gaming and a chance to play in something different for a change. I am not saying it’s the answers to everything or will solve the current rot in the community as the game gets older, but it offers a fresh approach and one we aren’t scared to take. If it doesn’t work, then nothing really lost and we all go back to MR15 and double elimination until the end of time, but what if it works and we get some of the most amazing games we have ever seen and the players enjoy it as much as the spectators undoubtedly would?

Discuss ;)