Operation Failed? Thats how many are feeling today with the announcement that the ESL partnered speedrun competition, Operation Victory, has been cancelled. While many were waiting with anticipation for the official rules of the competition, slated to start tomorrow, Eric made the following posts this afternoon taking most of the community by surprise. Post 1.0Hey folks, I will cut right to the chase, we are cancelling our ESL Operation Victory competition. Our reason revolves around the Coratanni encounter. I know many of you raised concerns about the issues related to the encounter, and we agree. We spent a lot of time this week testing bug fixes to see how viable the fixed version would be in a speed running environment. We have applied improvements to the Coratanni encounter as of tomorrow’s patch but there are still situations that could impact players focused on a timed run. We thank you for your feedback around the contest and should we decide to do something like this in the future, we will let you know. Also, let us know your feedback on the concept of doing a speedrun contest. As we explore options like this in the future it would be great to know your thoughts. -eric The only word to really sum up how I feel is disappointed. While I do agree that Coratanni’s bugginess could have raised serious problems, that’s really nothing new. She’s been a Bitch for the Devs since day 1 of SoR, and was the real villain this expansion. First it was the whole loot exploit, a complete train wreck. Now the “bug”, which has been present since launch and is often reported. It seems like flawed logic to plan a whole event around something you know is broken. And why the quotations around bug you may ask? Because there are many players who believe the bug is avoidable with a certain strat. I've personally only encountered the “bug” once, and after changing our strat I never saw it again. Would the bug even have mattered in the top level of the competition? Post 2.0I know you guys will have a lot of questions so let me hit some of what has come up so far. Why not play Temple of Sacrifice? Two reasons for this. First, it was a numbers game. Only a fraction of the players who are in Ops at 60 are in ToS and so we wanted to make sure the first round was accessible to as many people as possible. Second, our plan was that the finals (the second round) would be played in ToS so that the Revan encounter was a part of the tournament finale. Why not announce the rules sooner? We wanted to make sure we knew exactly what we would be playing and how we would be playing it. While we were working on the Coratanni changes, we were hesitant to post any rules. Why announce the cancellation so late? We were exhausting everything we could to get the competition in place, to start on time. We didn't want to pull the plug unless we really felt we had too. -eric I don’t follow the logic of why the Devs didn’t simply change the venue of the competition. The first point of accessibility is confusing to me. I don’t honestly think guilds who haven’t cleared both Operations on SM would have entered in the first place. And even if they had, Eric’s second point would have knocked them out of the running then and there. Besides, lets not lie to ourselves. The player ability and gear advantage of most of the players entering this competition to COMPETE would mean none of those with only Ravagers experience would have made it to Round Two anyways. As far as the second point in concerned, they could have just done ToS twice. Sure it would have been a little boring, but it also would have been WAY more competitive. With the time bar set, everyone would have to beat their own best, as well as their competitors, to win.
Here’s What Scares Me Even though concerns were raised over the sparseness of the Roadmap, the Devs have consistently insisted that 2015 is going to be "big" for them...and us too. Yet nearing the end of our first quarter all we've seen are cancellations. A Cantina event, this tournament, and Shadowrealms. A lot of people were really excited for this event, and its hard to keep swallowing letdowns. We also don’t know why this event was cancelled and not simply postponed. Couldn’t they have given it another week to fix or figure out what to do instead? It would be really disappointing if in the future ESL chose not to co-sponsor an event because of how this one fell apart so quickly. Who Needs ‘Em? Behold though, the awesome SWTOR Community making up for the Devs. Like much of the competitive aspect of SWTOR, the community simply handles matters itself. Progression Rankings have always been done by Players, and PvP tournaments are the same. In this case Death_by_smiley decided to simply organize the Speed Run competition himself (which can be found here). While some of the rules are still being hashed out, it looks to be a Leaderboard type competition with different Operations being competed on in 2 week cycles. So, how do you feel about the cancellation? Do you think it was a smart move on the Devs part? Do you think they should have moved it to ToS? And I think most importantly, will you be participating in the community competition?
2 Comments
Ohnoto
3/2/2015 11:10:33 pm
The issue I have with this was that they announced the event, knowing the bugs exist. The big thing with this was that many in the community expected that since they were announcing this, that meant bugs would be fixed.
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I don't know what the urgency surrounding the tournament was. Why was it announced with only one weeks noticed, why were they trying to fix bugs at the last minute? You'd think they would have fixed the bugs, then held the tournament in an ideal world.
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