WDS Tiller Operational Campaigns Tournament News

[Outlaw Josey Wales]

First and foremost, you're doing great Patric and you should continue doing what you're doing and don't worry too much.  In my days of running forums and Tournaments here I can tell you with complete confidence that silence is approval at The Blitz.  If your players don't like what you're doing chances are there will be some grousing about it.  Lack of it speaks volumes.

While I personally think the ELO rankings are a better indicator of a players skill level than is their winning percentage on the Ladder, it is far from perfect too.  We developed the ELO rankings to mimic a chess players rankings, however Panzer Campaigns has infinitely more variables than a game of chess and therefore even the ELO rankings aren't perfect by any means.  All of which is to say that I think anything you choose to do will be fine, but if you always rely on ELO you will find Tournaments featuring many rematches.  You can have just as much success with a completely random draw system, or a random seeding followed by bracketed play, or a seeding based on ELO followed by bracketed play.  As others have pointed out, there's always a bit of that in warfare anyway.  I'm sure Lee would have preferred to keep fighting Hooker and Burnside and not Grant, but sometimes you just draw a bad hand.  For me personally I like the tournaments because they force me out of bad habits I develop when I play my "regular opponents" whose tendencies I've learned.

You're doing a bang up job, and the number of sign up for the latest Tourney is a testament to it.

For the record, in Tournament No 4, I am picking the pairings randomly, and an entrant only plays another entrant once.

This only has to be the first round.  After that, you just keep the Allied player in place and rotate the Axis player down one spot and the Axis player in the bottom slot rotates up to the top slot.  That way, there is nothing to work out.  When the first Axis player rotates back up to the top to face the first Allied player again, End of tourney.  That also works with odd number of pairings and players.  Odd number of pairings works the same as even number of pairings and team with one more player can rotate to a bye slot, but, only one player gets a bye and only once.