Announcing the 2018 GvI and FvA Showdowns

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captainmeme
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Re: Announcing the 2018 GvI and FvA Showdowns

#321 Post by captainmeme » Sun Jun 09, 2019 3:40 pm

I don't necessarily have a problem with reducing the prize pool if the moderators now think this is excessive, but I do resent the implication that this was something I 'snuck by' them in the application.

This was my application form. The winnings doubling is very clearly stated under section 13, I deliberately separated it out because it was something different from the previous tournament and it was something I wanted specific approval for to encourage signups for GvI.

In any case, massive congratulations to Xorxes for placing first in both tournaments! That's one hell of an achievement.

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Re: Announcing the 2018 GvI and FvA Showdowns

#322 Post by bozotheclown » Sun Jun 09, 2019 3:43 pm

jmo1121109 wrote:
Sun Jun 09, 2019 5:28 am
bozotheclown wrote:
Sun Jun 09, 2019 4:32 am
After all the work xorxes did, are you really going to renege on giving him his 6000 points?
4,500 is still the most points ever given to a tournament winner by a large margin. 6,000 was an amount that was snuck into the mod approval process in a way that wasn't caught and never should have been allowed. And we're just not willing to give more then 5,000 points for anything. The max cap going forward is 3,000 but it doesn't seem fair to go that low considering the expectation of 6,000.
This means that if you place 16th in FvA and 1st in GvI, you will win (1500+50) * 2 = 3100 points. If you come first place in both tournaments, you'll hit the jackpot of (1500+1500)*2=6000 points. There's a huge amount to play for here!
It seems unfair to wait 1 1/2 years to mention that you are not going to follow through on this commitment. Also, what is your justification for cutting the points to a player like cspieker, who finished second and fourth, which should be worth 1800 points? That is below the theoretical 5000 point limit.
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Re: Announcing the 2018 GvI and FvA Showdowns

#323 Post by MadMarx » Sun Jun 09, 2019 5:25 pm

I don’t care one way or the other, largely because I’ve learned that the webDip team will do what they will do (to put it politely), but to suggest the FvA tournament and the GvI tournament are somehow only a single tournament seems absurd, they are two separate tournaments with separate signups/participants, etc. Yes, the two tournaments got linked by this double points advertising scheme (which worked on me, initially I only signed up for FvA), but each individual tournament took a hell of a lot of time to pull off all on their own, so 3,000 points for each individual tournament does seem reasonable this time around given that is what was advertised...
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Re: Announcing the 2018 GvI and FvA Showdowns

#324 Post by Durga » Sun Jun 09, 2019 9:24 pm

just give the man 6000 points. lord knows he deserves it.

congrats xorx!!!!!!

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Re: Announcing the 2018 GvI and FvA Showdowns

#325 Post by zultar » Sun Jun 09, 2019 9:39 pm

Hi all,

I wanted to remind folks that you can always appeal to me if you think you need to appeal over the admins' decisions. I've been made aware of the situation and I've talked with the mod team. In this case, I don't think it's fair to say that captainmeme snuck in the points clause. We, the mod team, did not read closely enough at the time of approving that particular clause and that's our fault, not captain's. Since we agreed to this tournament, we will follow it through. I will direct the mods to give xorxes his 6000 points accordingly. Moving forward, we will limit the max award to make it more reasonable and comparable across tournies.

Xorxes, congrats. Huge congrats on beating the hell out of the best 1v1 players on the site and if I may be so bold, of the world (since we are really the only ones who have many players play 1v1). Skynet awaits you to challenge it, good sir.

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Re: Announcing the 2018 GvI and FvA Showdowns

#326 Post by jmo1121109 » Sun Jun 09, 2019 9:42 pm

@capt shoot us an email when you have the point totals figured out and someone will distribute those.

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Re: Announcing the 2018 GvI and FvA Showdowns

#327 Post by SpaceDip » Sun Jun 09, 2019 9:46 pm

It seems more than fair that Xorxes get the expected 6k points.
But, for a start, i quite don't see what the problem is!
As far as i know, webdip points can´t buy anything but tourney tickets. So what the problem in giving the man the points? Come on, let the man play more than 5900 ((23727 + 6000)/5) simultaneously.

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Re: Announcing the 2018 GvI and FvA Showdowns

#328 Post by goldfinger0303 » Sun Jun 09, 2019 10:04 pm

Congrats xorxes on the win! And to MM for putting up a hell of a finale fight to watch! Really though, slugging it through the lower brackets is tough work so I want to give extra props to MM here.

Also I'd like to thank CptMike, and all the rest who kinda took over setting up the games and informing me as the tournament entered its later stages. The true heros of the story :)
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Re: Announcing the 2018 GvI and FvA Showdowns

#329 Post by jmo1121109 » Sun Jun 09, 2019 10:12 pm

That's a good question as to why we have the concern around point.

Back in the day tournaments had buy ins where every player had points docked at the start of the tournament to feed a prize pool and that was used for point payouts. And the reason for that was that some people take points fairly seriously, as they're one of the indicators on the site to your overall skill and accomplishments here. So for players who have earned points by winning tournaments over the years, suddenly paying out 4 times the normal amount of points is a massive inflation and devalues what everyone else who has won a similar tournament got.

The recent gunboat tournament was the worst offender recently with absolutely absurd point payouts and then this was missed as well from a payout perspective. When mods go through to approve a tournament they look for the key points, ie the answers to the questionnaire that is provided to everyone looking to start a tournament. So in the 13 pages provided the mod who approved this found the point payouts and saw they matched the 1,500 standard and cleared it. The doubling is clearly distinct from that section and was therefore ignored. What you need to keep in mind is reading through 13 pages of setup trying to make sure that a tournament that is going to be going on for months, and determining if it is perfect is not a fun task for mods. It takes a ton of time from volunteers and having clauses that have never been done before that completely alter point payouts without attention being called to them makes it even worse.

That said, I fully support Zultar's choice to have the payouts remain the same here because at the end of the day the team collectively missed this at a time when the team was short staffed. To solve this going forward TD's will no longer be allowed to set point payouts, the mod team will determine those to ensure no future gotcha's are missed and to keep the value of points steady across the years.

Anyway, the long answer to why the concern and why it was missed aside, congratulations to the winners of these two tournaments. Xorxes continues proving himself one of the best the site's ever seen.

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Re: Announcing the 2018 GvI and FvA Showdowns

#330 Post by CptMike » Mon Jun 10, 2019 5:25 pm

1v1 - new rule proposal in case of tie

Most players are conviced that :
- in FvA : A is a little bit stronger than F
- in GvI : G is quite stronger than I.

That's an issue because in case of tie, the player who get A (resp. G) is advantaged.

I suggest the following new principle in case of tie.

---
In case of each side wins a game, the winner is the player with the highest number of centers controlled by the country he has lost with.
---

- That's fully equilibrated.
- Another advantage is that tournaments will run faster...
- An option could be that the centers of both countries played are combined but that may make the games longer. The winner's interest is to go as fast as possible.

What is your mind ?
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Re: Announcing the 2018 GvI and FvA Showdowns

#331 Post by breaca » Mon Jun 10, 2019 6:23 pm

CptMike wrote:
Mon Jun 10, 2019 5:25 pm
1v1 - new rule proposal in case of tie

Most players are conviced that :
- in FvA : A is a little bit stronger than F
- in GvI : G is quite stronger than I.

That's an issue because in case of tie, the player who get A (resp. G) is advantaged.

I suggest the following new principle in case of tie.

---
In case of each side wins a game, the winner is the player with the highest number of centers controlled by the country he has lost with.
---

- That's fully equilibrated.
- Another advantage is that tournaments will run faster...
- An option could be that the centers of both countries played are combined but that may make the games longer. The winner's interest is to go as fast as possible.

What is your mind ?
I like it. This seems fairer than the (practically a coin toss) of the current rule (particularly for GvI)

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Re: Announcing the 2018 GvI and FvA Showdowns

#332 Post by MadMarx » Mon Jun 10, 2019 6:44 pm

I had a similar thought, after losing that GvI coin toss to xorxes in the GvI Finals tie-breaker, but it has some pitfalls for sure... Would we see a German play to 1920 in an attempt to literally eliminate Italy, to insure the German’s performance as Italy would be better? How much would play be stifled by not wanting to risk a 1920 elimination?

Seems like there should be a solution... Maybe rather than a single tie-breaker game, do two tie-breaker games with this approach (after having one chance to just risk everything whenever you want)? Won’t shorten the tournament (May lengthen it), but the higher goal should be that winning the tie-breaker (and tournament) is much less correlated to luck of the draw...

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Re: Announcing the 2018 GvI and FvA Showdowns

#333 Post by goldfinger0303 » Tue Jun 11, 2019 1:09 am

I have a second thought.

Don't do GvI because it's not balanced.

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Re: Announcing the 2018 GvI and FvA Showdowns

#334 Post by CptMike » Tue Jun 11, 2019 1:14 am

MadMarx wrote:
Mon Jun 10, 2019 6:44 pm
Would we see a German play to 1920 in an attempt to literally eliminate Italy, to insure the German’s performance as Italy would be better? How much would play be stifled by not wanting to risk a 1920 elimination?
I don't think it is easily feasible, if feasible because:
- the game still stops when Germany reaches 18 (or more);
- the advantage of Germany over Italy (Austria over France) is not that huge ; Germany (and Austria) often "take" the win but would not hold the 18 (eg. in the final) if they had to.

And in any case both players can try this strategy with "equal chances".

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Re: Announcing the 2018 GvI and FvA Showdowns

#335 Post by MadMarx » Tue Jun 11, 2019 5:59 am

CptMike wrote:
Tue Jun 11, 2019 1:14 am
I don't think it is easily feasible
I was exaggerating regarding eliminating Italy (even if I didn’t realize the extent at the time!), your points are valid, but the new idea still changes the basic nature of the game... I think that’s fine for GvI since that variant is more unbalanced, but again I’d only vote to do it as a two game tiebreaker after the initially two games result in a tie, and I wouldn’t do it for AvF...

Would like to hear other ideas, and thanks to CptMike for initiating the discussion!

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Re: Announcing the 2018 GvI and FvA Showdowns

#336 Post by RoganJosh » Tue Jun 11, 2019 6:56 am

I think it would be more fair to compare what year the game ended, than the number of centers at the end of the game. Either way, it doesn't really fix the problem, as ties are still possible.

Actually, in FvA I don't think there is a problem. I find the powers to be more or less equal. In GvI it is different.

There is also this questions which I asked a while ago, but never got an answer:
RoganJosh wrote:
Wed Jun 20, 2018 11:41 pm
I stumbled across this topic on github:
https://github.com/kestasjk/webDiplomacy/issues/326

Is this "fully deterministic" algorithm used also for the FvA and IvG variants? That might be a problem for tournament tiebreakers, which usually are supposed to be random. I tried to look through the old forum thread but couldn't see any relevant comments.

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Re: Announcing the 2018 GvI and FvA Showdowns

#337 Post by CptMike » Tue Jun 11, 2019 9:50 am

RoganJosh wrote:
Tue Jun 11, 2019 6:56 am
I think it would be more fair to compare what year the game ended, than the number of centers at the end of the game. Either way, it doesn't really fix the problem, as ties are still possible.
The risk of tie is higher but I agree with you it is more efficient and much harder to trick.

We could have different criteria's and use them with a given priority :
1. year at which it ended (the faster a victory, the higher the rank of the victory)
2. counting centers won on the lost games
3. counting centers won on the won games
4. An answer to your point : in case of 'tie', the player with the lower ELO wins. That's fair enough. And we need to increase the difficulty for xorxes ;-)

But I think we must do this for both GvI and FvA. -> Another big issue is the time these tournaments lasted... 18 months here + 2 months preparation!! So when do we play the 2019 Showdown ? It will end in 2021 ! That's not motivating for those who were eliminated very soon. They may well not participate any more... :?
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Re: Announcing the 2018 GvI and FvA Showdowns

#338 Post by MadMarx » Wed Jun 12, 2019 2:32 am

I really like the criteria above, especially the last, if still tied then the lesser ranked player has performed better than expected relative to the higher ranked player and thus earns the right to advance because of a more impressive performance relative to ranking/skill.

As far as the length of the tournament, the average GvI games are longer than the AvF games, so I’m still less concerned about using this criteria for AvF. That said, since AvF is pretty balanced, when the tie-breaker gives the win to France in case of a tie, then France is favored a bit in tie-breaker games, so there is some logic in using this criteria even for AvF.

Finally, perhaps this tournament should be capped at 64 participants, mainly to ease the burden of getting the games/tournament started, as well as to avoid first round byes so everyone (especially the highest ranked players) in the tournament can start at the same time and perhaps feed off the excitement when play first starts. The Champions League only has 32 participants and is not double elimination, so even 64 participants is a ton of work, but keeps it somewhat manageable and thus might take place more regularly consistently.

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Re: Announcing the 2018 GvI and FvA Showdowns

#339 Post by jmo1121109 » Wed Jun 12, 2019 3:03 am

I don't suppose anyone has a master list of all the games in these tournaments available? Or a common naming convention that would differ from previous versions of this tournament?

edit captainmeme does and is adding this tournament to the finished tournaments page with the new tournament tools. You can see the last 10 rounds there already as well as the winners.

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Re: Announcing the 2018 GvI and FvA Showdowns

#340 Post by CptMike » Wed Jun 12, 2019 5:58 am

The final results are here:

For FvA showdown
For GvI showdown

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