question

Hi all! I'm a Twitch affiliate and one of the frequent broadcasters for Overload, which is one of the original games to support the GameOn Tournament Organizer.

The community has found an exploitable flaw in the Tournament Organizer that may persist in other games -- the organizer is map/mode/difficulty-agnostic (I'm not a developer by any means but think that's probably the right word for it). In Overload's case, this means three things occur when establishing tournaments:

1) Level is randomly selected.
2) Difficulty is randomly selected.
3) Mode/ruleset is randomly selected.

Numbers 1 and 2 aren't a huge deal for non-competitive tournaments, but if a broadcaster is looking to make a tournament for specific maps or difficulties out of large sets, they'll have to remake tournaments many times just to get what they want. Overload currently has 12 levels to be competed on, and six difficulties (of which three can be chosen by organizer system), which comes to either 36 or 72 combinations.

Number three is -- speaking from experience -- tournament-breaking. The first stream I'd organized a tournament for, participants quickly noticed that their client's tournament rulesets were inherited from the game's menuing system, so all score submissions for either the time-limited Countdown mode or pseudo-endless Infinite mode were valid for the tournament. Among competitive players, Countdown scores will always lose out to Infinites, no matter what!

Again, I'm not a developer in any sense, but I glanced at the API documentation for the Tournament Organizer and there didn't appear to be any way to identify or control the level being played, the difficulty being played on, or the ruleset being used to submit the score. Please consider supporting rule designations by broadcasters/organizers -- many games have complex controls that can drastically change a player's experience and determine outcomes!