When you were rolling out the customization feature, I remember someone complained that it would be unfair (more experienced users would get more upgrades and hence perform that much better). I can't remember your exact response - but I remember you did have one.

there is the possibility to create tournies with limitations to levels. official ones and perhaps more often in future private ones.
that's what i have in mind.

The customization upgrades you can do are quite minor so I don't feel like it will make a much of a difference. Keep in mind that it takes longer to go from level 30 to 31 than it does to go from 10 to 11. So lower level people will gain levels faster than the higher level players.

You can also turn these upgrades off in any tournaments you make if you don't want to allow them.

The results of the last Saturday Tournament (I was at Level 16 then; and Kamikaze at Level 13 then, I think) show that strategy (this include maze planning) can still trump what advantage you get from customization.

http://www.beatthegeek.com/games/TowerDefence/tournamentResults.asp?tournid=1120

Honestly, apart from Faster Towers and Extra Damage (and maybe Extra Time, but not a lot), the others aren't all that appealing to me.

Now if only Sparticus could add Faster Sell... :-)

"...it takes longer to go from level 30 to 31 than it does to go from 10 to 11."

So let me get this straight. The amount of experience points needed to move up 1 level isn't the same across the spectrum?

In other words, a level up from 10 to 11 for a Saturday Tournament winner is considerably less in experience points than a level up from 30 to 31?

If you're at Level 30, winning the Sat Tour might be the same as winning 10 regular tournaments (I'm just picking a random number here). But if you're at Level 10, winning (and beating more experienced users at Level 25+) is the same as winning 3 regular tournaments.

Does this sound fair?

Or are my estimates not even close to the ballpark?

thats why we have to beat the geek. that means at the moment beating you, cheaty, oddestr, phae carlnini and all the others winning all the time, so they don't fly away ;P

winning all the time? me? i can only remember have win 3 or 4 tournament,

Here is the exp scale for the first 15 levels. lets assuming in this example winning a tournament in first place gives you 100 experience points. As you can see, a level one player will almost level twice, where as a level 14 would need to win about 7 or so tournaments to level up once.

Does that answer the question?

EXPERIENCE LEVEL
0 1
26 2
138 3
272 4
432 5
624 6
854 7
1130 8
1461 9
1858 10
2294 11
2773 12
3299 13
3877 14
4512 15

My question was prompted by what is admittedly a pretty unique tournament - 1218, the fixed-cash no-maze game by DraganBlack. It was actually quite fun trying to tweak the details to get a high score. And nothing but kudos to oddsdestroyer for his score - so please no one get me wrong at all, I'm not complaining.

But with the nature of that particular game (basically you have to trigger all the waves at the end), I think even a few percentage points' extra umph can have a big impact on your score in at least a few unique situations such as this.

Don't under estimate the power of extra time between waves - especially for Volcanoes and tight budgets where you need time to upgrade towers

Power level boost also very powerful as you can use the add extra time for the same reasons.

Believe me, that score has nothing to do with level points, well maybe 1% percent dues to extra time bonus. I believe I could probably beat it without any level points spent.

the thing is, as you level, up need more points, meaning levs take longer, so new players shoud, although not catch all the way, slowly catch up others as far as levels go, providing they can do well in tourny's

I guess your proviso is part of what nags at me - even my own level 14 upgrades give me an edge over a newby, making it less likely that they'll beat me (or even equal me) with exactly identical play. Basically, they need to play better than a higher-level player just to equal that higher-level player.

If that's the intended playing field then so be it; every game has idiosyncratic rules, and being a 'winner' partly means knowing and working within those rules. It just strikes me as a little odd, is all.

People are assuming that these upgrades you can do make a big difference to the game. They really don't. Lets say a level 10 places all the points into extra damage. Therefore, instead of his level 5 pellet towers doing 400 damage, they do 440. That's not a huge increase.

If a level 1 designs a better maze and places their towers is better spots, they will easily beat the level 10. A tiny bit of extra damage doesn't mean all the creeps will die... if your maze isn't good or if you upgraded the wrong towers, you'll still lose.

"...even my own level 14 upgrades give me an edge over a newby"

A noob might be a noob to BTG but not entirely to TD games. I myself have played plenty of TDs before joining this site.

Also, a real noob doesn't have to win tournaments to level (and thus gain those bonuses) because of the experience level scale. They could place 10th in the tournament that only Level 1-10s can join, and what little experience points they win might be enough to move up one level. (See the experience level scale posted by Sparticus in this thread.)

In other words, the way I see it, that scale prevents the gap between higher and lower levels from getting wider and wider.

If the gap does indeed get wider, it's probably due to higher level geeks having a lot of time (and/or the will) to play many tournaments everyday.