GL Goals: 1st Unofficial Beta Tournament

Hi everybody,

If you are familiar with the game and the project, you may be surprised to hear the title, and for those who are not, I recommend the following links. In short: it's a rapid football (soccer) NFT game in Beta development phase based on MLS (USA) football league.

Genesis League Goals - Official Site
Whitepaper Some information is not updated (e.g. paypal), but it is still useful.
GLG - Hive Blog
GLS - Discord

So here's our little competition.

How did it start?

If you're active on their Discord channel, you may have heard that a few weeks ago the possibility of Beta tournaments was mentioned. We chatted with @knotenbart partly about this, when it came up that while we are waiting for this and the full p2e launch, we might as well try it out with some players. Simply for fun and gaining experience.

@michiel87 és @royaleagle created a tournament thread where we can discuss the matches to be played and chat with our opponents. Also, a separate one for teams and results, for the sake of transparency and we kept that clear from chat.

Shortly after the start, @michiel87 offered 3 Gold Foil Coach cards as prizes to the first 3 places. The value of these cards is currently $8-10 !!! See below.

Asking the Discord members, 10 participants came together relatively quickly. The players:

@knotenbart
@ikeee
@drzoom
@tomathellama
@splinterbin
@royaleagle
@sorryismurf
@nickelbunker
@globalwarming
@pokermaria

The GLS team was represented by @royaleagle.

Thank you all for the participating! We've all become a little part of Genesis League Goals history.😀

A rule to make it more interesting.

We decided in favor of the league system even earlier because of the fun, the gathering of experience and better comparison of teams, as well as the fair competition itself. Everyone plays against everyone twice. Since the competition would have been very long if divided into rounds, it was possible to play the 2 matches against a specific opponent at any time. (This was especially necessary since there were players from America, Europe and Asia.)

Since only the 'casual' pvp match option is currently available, there were sometimes problems with pairing, but it went relatively smoothly.

When putting together the teams, the only rule was that everyone had 1-1-1-1 GK, DF, MF, FW substitutes. And of course, play all the matches with the same team.

I assume that there will be some readers who would be curious about the teams.

Teams:

@knotenbart

@ikeee

@drzoom

@tomathellama

@splinterbin

@royaleagle

@sorryismurf

@nickelbunker

@globalwarming

@pokermaria

As you can see, most players focused on defensive stats, even for midfielders and sometimes forwards. I will write more about this under the final result.

Expectations

Personally, I didn't have high expectations. A little fun, let's try how it works without the 'match-making' option and don't finish last!

Of course, I tried to put together a team that I plan to use later. There was a small mistake in this, as I forgot to change the coach. Also, due to the 4 substitutions required, I used other forwards. (I think, atm it was a good thing to do, I mean the 4 subs, so not only the best players were in all teams.)

It was nice to see that almost everyone chose a different coach. Not many of the field players were present in several teams either.

After playing a few games, I already wanted to finish in the first half of the field.😀

Tournament progress

The matches went quickly in the beginning. On the first day, we played 60 out of 90 matches. We posted the results of the matches on Discord, and the other player confirmed it. In the meantime, the current standing was sometimes shared in the form below.

On the second day, 22 matches were played. There are 8 games left for the third.

Final result

The competition ended yesterday. Here is the final result and the results of all matches in a table:

Congratulations @globalwarming! First ever GLG champion! Also, congrats to @splinterbin and @nickelbunker for 2nd and 3rd place and prizes, as well as to all other players!

Big thanks to @michiel87 for offering the prizes! It was a nice surprise!

Personal opinion, few general thoughts

Unfortunately, I missed the podium by a little bit. Even so, I am satisfied with the result. Since I was only able to win 1 of the 6 matches (and lost 2) against those who finished ahead of me, this is also realistic. However, I proved to be the best in 2 things. The most goals scored (40) and the biggest victory (5:0)!

It was good to see that I could be effective with quite different tactics and composition from the others. Unlike most players, I prefer attacking players in midfield. After all, football is played for goals.

I partially understand the logic of focusing on defensive stats, but if they were too prominent (especially MF, FW case), it would only spoil the gameplay, there would be a lot of 0:0, 1-2 goal games. That wouldn't be good for anyone. So I rejected this kind of team building from the beginning. Not to mention, my team was also cheaper.

I was lucky in some matches, unlucky in some. Unlike other NFT games, here the RNG variance is an important factor and it will not even out over 18 matches. So it is unnecessary to form a serious opinion. I suppose hundreds of matches have to be played before I can draw any valid conclusions about this.

Perhaps the best example of this was the case of @tomathellama who had 1 point in the first 8 games and then 14 in the next 8 games!!! (I could beat him twice, both 3:2 with some luck, scoring couple of times with less than 30% chance. Probably it was balanced back a bit for him, too, how it happened with me in the other direction.) @ikeee has followed a similar path.

So everyone had a chance against everyone. What makes the difference? It's still hard to say at the moment, as there are so many possible combinations in team formations. Also, there is the RNG.

However, I can say that finding the best coach for the team is very important. In addition, I personally find midfielders to be key, although 1-2 teams performed very well without the top tier ones.

In any case, it can be seen that even small differences can mean a lot in the final result.

My goalkeeper could have done maybe a little better. (Block 9 stat GK and I conceded 30 goals, while some 5-7 blocking stat
GKs case, this number is much lower.) However, I am on the principle of 'scoring more goals than the opponent'. So even this is acceptable and it doesn't seem unrealistic, impossible. Just surprised me a bit.

I can say about the matches in general that it is important who scores the first goal, just like in real football, but it is not impossible to reverse the result. (I managed 2 times during the 18 matches, although once I lost from an advantage.) The matches are usually rich in goals, only 1 of the 90 matches ended 0:0. However, no one could score more than 5 goals. So this is no longer the 'practice' mode category.

The clear surprise was the appearance of @nickelbunker, I think not only for me. Honestly, I didn't think he could finish in the top 5 with that team. Especially looking at his offensive line. He lost his last 2 matches against @ikeee, his final win depended on it.

If I can state something clearly, it is that any pvp competition makes the game much more interesting even in current Beta phase!

Unfortunately, I didn't record any matches, not even taking a screenshot. (Earlier I didn't plan to post about it.) I have only this picture from the very 1st match (and goal) against @knotenbart :

If you are interested in the gameplay, here is a video of 10 matches:
Genesis League Goals - Open Beta - 10 Matches
(Since then, there was a small change, the game was expanded to 40 turns instead of 30.)

Some final thoughts

Generally, I can only say good things about the competition itself, the players, and how the manual match-making happened.

Obviously, it can always be better, but at first it went very smoothly, and in my opinion, it's a more or less usable way to run a Beta competition of any format up to a certain maximum number of participants without the match-making function.

It was nice to see the sudden increase in activity on the game's Discord page.

Hopefully, in the near future, while the Beta phase lasts, more similar competitions will be held, even official ones, organized by the game developers. I look forward to these in any form, preferably involving more players. I only see an advantage in organizing similar ones.

If you are interested in taking part in the next possible competition or just looking for up to date information, at the moment the game's GLG Discord page is the best place.

Have a nice day!

Images are owned by Genesis League Goals.