Hello, welcome to the Salt Mines X-Wing Blog! You may remember this blog from a long time ago. I've unpublished all the old articles, I'll go back through them at some point and see if they're worth salvaging but for now let's just consider this the start of a new blog for all intents and purposes.
With that business out of the way, I'd like to talk about running online events, since that's probably the most relevant X-Wing topic for at least the remainder of 2020 and probably much longer. Some background for "why the heck am I writing this" - I have been running online events for about 2 years on and off over at the Salt Mines Tournament Discord Server, and over the years I've found out various things about what is and is not popular with the community.
Recently, to help write this article, I conducted a poll that many of you may have seen or answered. There was only one question: "There is an online tournament being held, with each of these following features/rules. What is your opinion on this tournament?" There were then three options for each feature/rule: "I prefer this", "I dislike this but would still play", and "I refuse to play this." At the time of writing, I have over 250 responses to the poll, so I consider it relatively representative of the online X-Wing community. In this article, I'm going to discuss various facets of a tournament, and then use my findings in the poll to back up what I'm saying about it.
1. Format
Format ultimately matters less than you think it does. Make the format compelling and the majority of people will still play. The majority of players said they prefer extended, which is kind of natural for more casual players. I say this without malice and desire to cause offense, over the last two years I have noticed that online play is much more casual on average than in-person play. This is changing recently now that most players are having to chose between playing online and not playing at all, but the community still seems relatively casual.
This being said, extended is actually probably a trap. The number to watch on these polls isn't the number of people who prefer something, but rather the people who wouldn't play because of something, and although it was only a couple percent of respondents, there were noticeably more players who said that they wouldn't play an extended event than a hyperspace event. In other words, if you run a hyperspace event, more people might complain about the format, but also more people overall will play. Generally, players who prefer extended complain about hyperspace because they have some specific thing they like to fly that isn't in it, but they'll generally adapt to it, but players who prefer hyperspace dislike extended for a number of reasons that they have no agency in adapting to and therefore will just refuse to play.
The third option was custom/objective/other, which, unsurprisingly, was by far the least popular of the formats, and 26% of respondents said they'd refuse to play it. That being said, in my experience a custom format is more popular if you have a "hook", which this poll couldn't do - I think if you want to do a custom format, go for it, but you need to have very clear rules that anyone can find and read. Custom formats seem, in my experience, to attract a lot of players, so I wouldn't read too far into these numbers.
To summarize the format data:
58% of players prefer Hyperspace, and 2% refuse to play it.
75% of players prefer Extended, and 3% refuse to play it.
29% of players prefer custom/objective/other, and 26% refuse to play it.
Ultimately, my recommendation if you don't have a definite idea/plan otherwise is to chose Hyperspace to maximize your number of players.
A note on community: Respondents who use primarily Reddit or Slack were highly biased towards Extended and skewed the data a lot in terms of preference, so if you're running an event aimed at Facebook, the forums, or Discord, you should definitely chose Hyperspace. If you are running an event aimed specifically at Reddit or Slack players, even then Hyperspace is not necessarily a poor choice, but an Extended event would likely be as well if not better received.
A note on software: VASSAL players skew towards Hyperspace, and TTS players skew towards Extended. Likely this is just an effect of the current VASSAL League being hyperspace and the Space Jam and Galaxies events being TTS - again, players are pretty flexible about formats in general so not too much should be read into this.
2. Software
TTS is definitely more popular than VASSAL.
71% of players prefer to use TTS, and 13% refuse to play it.
36% of players prefer to use VASSAL, and 26% refuse to play it.
It's worth noting that the number of players who refuse to play one or the other is still pretty low. In my experience both work fine, and have their own advantages and disadvantages. I still have to say that TTS is probably your best option right now, but I've heard from a lot of players that they cannot play TTS because their computer can't run it, whereas the players who refuse to play VASSAL seem to just be picky. So I guess if you're good at strong-arming people you may as well do VASSAL so everyone technically can play.
3. Timeline
Not to toot my own horn but this may in fact be a problem I invented, I think the Salt Mines Tournaments was the first place to start running tournaments all in one day like a regular IRL tournament, and since that lots of organizers, including Gold Squadron (with Space Jams and Galaxies) started doing it. That being said it's pretty objectively a wrong decision.
34% of players prefer an event to be run all in one day, and 17% of players refuse to play in such an event.
72% of players prefer an event to be run over many days (games scheduled in the players' own time), and 3% of players refuse to play in such an event.
This disparity is huge, even before considering how many people might be ok with a one-day tournament in theory but then not be able to play when they find out what time it is. So even if I did in fact pioneer this kind of event (mine ran pretty smoothly, by the way), I think it's still definitely a wrong choice.
4. Prizes/Cost
Someone's always going to be unhappy with this apparently, but unsurprisingly, cheaper is better.
65% of players prefer a free event with no prize support, and 5% of players refuse to play such an event.
61% of players prefer a store-champ comparable cost/prize support, and 6% of players refuse to play such an event.
48% of players prefer a system open comparable cost/prize support, and 13% of players refuse to play in such an event.
Another factor is the non-linear cost of online prizes. If you allow people from other countries to compete, the costs are going to go way up for shipping physical prizes. As a citizen of the USA, at the time of writing it costs me $0.55 USD to mail a cards in an envelope to anywhere in the United States, or $1.20 USD to mail it to anywhere else in the world. The price goes up to several dollars to mail anything bigger.
My recommendation is to make your event free or have a very low entry fee (less than $5 USD), and if you have an entry fee, make all prizes be things you can sleeve and wrap up in a regular letter and mail for the cost of a stamp. Check your postal regulations, but where I live it needs to weigh a couple of ounces and be less than a quarter inch thick so this is pretty much only cards, plastic cards, and/or a couple tokens.
5. Conclusion and Additional Notes
In conclusion, online events can probably be whatever you want, but from experience and the poll, I would recommend using Tabletop Simulator, Hyperspace Format, no entry fee, little to no prize support, and not doing it all in one day to maximize your player turnout.
Some last minute notes that I can't quantify but want to add:
Leagues are much easier to run if you let people find and report their own games (rather than assigning pairings with someone who might be busy). Infinite games allowed can work but if you want it to be competitive you need to cap how many games can be used per week, and keep an eye out for collusion. I've got an example of an excel spreadsheet linked to a match report google form for a league that only saves the best two games per week right here, feel free to copy it. I'm usually online on Discord so feel free to join the server I linked at the start of the article and @ me (Kyle Ren#7802) if you want help.
When new points come out, people lean towards standard (Extended or Hyperspace) formats, but once the points start to get stale, people swing even more towards Hyperspace, and also are more in favor of custom formats.
The new objectives from Never Tell me the Odds and Fully Loaded are actually interesting, balanced, and fun. I've played with all of them and played in a number of successful tournaments and leagues that used them.
Leagues allow for you to allow either/or software (VASSAL or TTS). Even in tournaments, you can say something like "run using VASSAL but if both players agree, you can use TTS instead".
When Fly Casual X-Wing Simulator worked with online play it was extremely popular. I'm assuming once that happens again, tournaments with it will be in high demand and I'll be running several on my Discord server.
VASSAL works with a number of ways of timing games. Older players remember a strict round counter, but the game has streamlined to the point where it works fine if you just time 75 minutes, or if you play 60 minutes plus two rounds (the hybrid method).
Let me know on the Second Edition Discord Server if you'd like advertising for your event! There's a #tournaments channel where you can post it but I'm also happy to set the server banner to advertise it.
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