TRONICv1.3

TRON International Competition: TRONICv1.3

=idealistic objective= 1,000,000 players in a year's time self-organising a tournament of Fortress to be held in one day, the champion team winning THE CUP and £16,000 per player, with post-dated funding of server admin, programming-developers, and game-designers.

=meta: contributor's guidelines= Since all pages on the wiki are editable, all contributions must be constructive and additive: alternative solutions are explored like the growing branches of a tree. Visitors are invited to contribute to to the expansion of any idea, comparing different branches of solutions. Arguments, contention, are conducted in forum, chatroom, or informally through PM's, emails, or telephoney eg skype. Alternative steps to arriving at the idealistic objective are presented as alternatives on this page below. Clicking on any item or heading opens up a page which allows further elaboration, more precise definition, and more practical eventualities.

=timeline= 1 year: THE CUP 1,000,000 players, entry fee £1, primary problem: money-distribution 6 months: THE BOWL 1,000 players, primary problems: credit-distribution, round-timing 3 months: THE LADLE 100 players competition, primary problems: team registration, standardised fortress settings, team-pairing (1 month: THE SPOON existing players self-organise with the current situation, primary problem: team registration -- DONE)

There isn't much point in working out all the solutions for the final 1,000,000 player competition for obvious reasons. Players are encouraged to provide solutions for the current objective with a sense of the idealistic objective to make their solutions future-proof. That is, instead of merely producing a solution which can only work for 100 players, it is built to be able to deal with 100 players now, with the potential for the system to be extendable up to the final target. That is, the developmental process is organic.

=THE LADLE=

We are having to do more than one Ladle. Although the evenings are fun, games are good, skills amazing, and we end up with finalists and winners, the self-organising continues to present problems... team-captains don't have enough commitment from their team-mates, and team-captains don't register their team and make decisions together... and players seem to have difficulty keeping up to date

This has improved. We've had four so far... we may have one on the first Sunday of every month until we develop a working system which is future-proof, exandable in terms of numbers, so we can progress onto the next level... The last one was on 1st October 2006 Ladle-4.

=THE SPOON=

The Tronic Spoon was a success, with a lot of fun, high level of play, enabling players to self-organise and highlighting some of the most common logistical problems of running such an event. It was run in two sections, a seeded round where 8 teams played amoungst themselves for a total of 14 matches played over two weeks which finished on the 15th April. The play-offs were a little slower with the 8 teams playing a total of 2 matches played over five weeks with most rounds being won by default. The prestigious Tronic Spoon trophy is still to be decided... between MBC, AW and ??. There are many useful lessons to be learned from the experience, with difficulties of arranging matches due to time-zones being paramount, and the eventual fizzling after a very enthusiastic start. Players learned to stick together in their teams, trust team-captains, and even the developers took a hand in evolving team mechanics. Let's take the next step and make the next competition better, with a sure-fire conclusion to top it off!

ruminations
Ideas, philosophy, personal and social; share your thoughts here. If we encourage players to leave their thoughts here, ego may be left out of the self-organising required to achieve the idealistic objective We may be familiar with jargon such as rubber, grind, grid, etc, and we can take this a step further by encouraging players to share their own favourite phrases or terms, eg woot, pwned, hold the line. If you are an Armagetron addict, have you wondered why, why you keep on playing game after game? How deep does this game go...?

previous versions
The original idea (TRONICv1) was presented to Wolverine, Ghableska, and Mazuffer through Skype in order encourage immediate feedback. Initial responses included disbelief, practical considerations, and enthusiasm. A week later, the same group met to discuss more details (TRONICv1.1). Responses included the formation of a network of developers, and the inherent importance of enabling uninterrupted playy. The group disbanded after serving its purpose, to initially receive the idea, and to open up the idea to the community in general. The original format of TRONICv1.2 was designed to encase any formulation and alternative branches, but it was subsequently changed to accomodate the working solution for the spoon competition. This version (TRONICv1.3) has so far not been condoned by the developers; it is purely player-led.