Rock Paper Azure Grand Tournament Completed and Winners Announced
On July 13, 2011, the Rock Paper Azure Grand Tournament came to a close. It was a great time helping to organize the contest with my US Cloud Connection peers, Brian Hitney & Jim O’Neil. As part of the tournament, we gave out $8500 USD in prizes. The first prize winner took $5000USD. Second place took $1000USD. And places 3-12 took $250USD each.
Brian posted a wrap up post over on his blog with the list of winners and some interesting statistics about load on the game server in the final days. I’m re-sharing here, but please visit Brian’s blog, Structure Too Big. He has a lot of great in-depth posts that provide a behind the curtains look at the Rock Paper Azure Challenge.
From Brian’s blog…
We had a GREAT time running the RockPaperAzure Grand Tournament Wednesday. We had a total of 302 players from around the world, and the top players in the finals were:
We saw some amazing strategies, and learned a lot along the way. We intend to keep the site running with more contests along the way – if you have any interest in running a competition for a user group, conference, or other activity, we’d be happy to create a round for you on the site. Contact us for info.
Server Load
Nothing exposes bugs faster than a system under load! And load it had. Here’s an example of the load on the game engine in terms of the number of bots submitted during the competition:
Now, that’s just a linear look at submissions. With over 3000 bots flooding in (mostly during the afternoon), we kept our game engine farm quite busy. As you may have seen in our webcasts, as the number of players increases, the number of player matches goes up significantly:
The above graph illustrates the number of matches to players – and this only goes up to 50 players. Expand this to 300 players, and the load is tremendous. (That’s one of the excellent points about Azure – we’re able to hit a button and handle the load.)
We’re going to continue some experimental open rounds so stay tuned!
