Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 10: Live Tournaments Part II

Last week we released lots of information regarding our new Live Tournaments feature. Seems like everywhere you turned there was a story, video or blog to be taken in. Live Tournaments is such a large feature that it was hard to sum up in a couple days of media announcements. There are so many nooks and crannies in this mode that I thought I would spend some time focusing on a few of the areas I have received the most questions about regarding Live Tournaments.

Round Submissions and Restarts

These two things are handled uniquely in Live Tournaments. Each tournament can be set to a limited number of allowable round submissions. For example the Beginner Level Daily Tournament might be set to unlimited round submissions, allowing competitors to play and submit rounds all day long. On the other hand, the TOUR Pro Daily Tournament may have a limit of only one round submission per day. Once you've reached the maximum number of round submissions allowed for a particular tournament you will then have to start using the Live Tournament Earnings you've accrued to purchase additional submissions. We also have the ability to hard cap submissions after you have reached the maximum number of rounds, so in some tournaments we may decide to not allow players to purchase additional round submissions.

As in years past, the player is able to restart their tournament round at any time prior to submitting a round score to the leaderboard. This is a luxury that the boys on the PGA TOUR do not get offered, but this is a video game after all and we wanted to make sure that players had the ability to truly post their best possible score.

The Skill Rating

The player's Live Tournament Skill Rating will help determine the tournaments they can enter. This rating is not related to the online skill points system used in head to head online matches. All of the ratings, money, leaderboards, etc. in Live Tournaments are unique to this mode. The Live Tournament Skill Rating system will primarily be used to match player's to a tournament difficulty that best suits their individual skill. This will help make sure that beginner level players are participating in beginner tournaments and TOUR Pro level players are in those tourneys. Currently the system is designed to prevent the higher skilled players from entering the lower tiered tournaments by establishing a maximum allowable Skill Rating for entry. However, the system can also be set up to create tournaments that require a minimum Skill Rating for entry.

Live Tournaments Tunable Settings

One of the cool things about Live Tournaments is its tune-ability post launch. Since we announced this there have been many questions relating to just how tuneable the tournaments are. So I'll use the rest of the blog to dive into the tune-ability of this feature.

On a surface level we can control things like:
• The Tournament Type (Daily, Weekly, Play the Pros).
• The number of ROUNDS the tournament has.
• The COURSE the tournament is held at.
• The PURSE for that tournament.
• The START and END time of the tournament.
• The overall DIFFICULTY (Beginner, Amateur, Pro, TOUR Pro) of that tournament.
• A maximum SKILL RATING for that tournament.
• Global WEATHER settings (preset or Live).
• The number of round submissions allowed per tournament.
• Rough Length, Green Speed, Green Hardness, Pin Difficulty, Tee Difficulty and other general difficulty settings.

Digging a little deeper, we can start to tweak things like:
• Purse Distribution: We can establish unique purse distributions per tournaments. Right now the game will ship with tournaments distributing the purse amongst the top 70 players on the leaderboard for each tournament. However, we can tune this based on feedback or create custom purse distributions for individual tournaments.
• Tie Breaker Score: We can tune the tiebreaker scoring system to adjust the importance of certain stats as they relate to your overall tiebreaker value. For example, we may get feedback that a particular stat is weighted too much or too little in the tiebreaking system.
• Skill Rating: As discussed before, we have the ability to tune the skill rating entry requirements for each tournament. So if we find out that they need to be raised or lowered we can do so. The system also allows us to set maximum rating levels and minimum rating levels allowed for entry into a tournament.
• Round Submission Cost: We can set the amount required to purchase additional submissions above and beyond the submission limit. We can also hard cap the submission limit which would not allow additional round submissions to be purchased at all.
• Precision or Classic Putting: We can set tournaments that require the player to only use the New Precision Putting system.

Digging even deeper, we can control the following:
• Custom Courses: We can create custom courses for any tournament. These can be a combination of any holes from the courses in our game. Once the game ships we will be asking you all to help us create these custom courses by letting us know the suggested holes that you'd like to see used.
• Tiebreaker Scores per Difficulty: We have the ability to tune the tiebreaking score in the manner described above per tournament difficulty level. So for example if on TOUR Pro tournaments the stats need to be weighted a little differently to take into account the added challenge, then we can do so.
• Max Attribute Cap: Even though we reduced the overall club distances in this year's game, we understand that there are some who still look for an even greater challenge in our game. In Live Tournaments we have the ability to set a cap for the players attribute ratings. So for example if you have a max stats suit...if the tournament has an attribute rating cap of 5 applied, then your golfer will be capped at level 5 across his range of attributes.
• Unique Golfers: The tournaments can be created to allow all golfers (created and licensed) into a tournament, or we can set the tournaments to only allow a created golfer or certain individual licensed golfers. For example we could make a tournament in which all players have to play as Tiger.
• Unique Per-Hole Settings: We can adjust many of the settings listed in this blog on a per hole basis, per individual round, day or tournament.

I used the word "WE" a lot in this blog and I think it's important to note that "WE" includes, not only the people here at Tiburon, but everyone that plays our game. This level of tune-ability was added to Live Tournaments so the feature could continue to improve after the game launches based on everyone's feedback and ideas.

I hope this helps to shed a little more light on some of details in Live Tournaments. I'll be on the forums as always to try and answer any other questions you all might have.

- Mike D.

To read this original blog post and make comments, visit the Inside EA SPORTS Blog.