freakshot3 Posted January 11, 2018 Share Posted January 11, 2018 I've been preparing for the Shadespire Grand Clash at Adepticon this year. Since pretty much the time Shadespire released, and Adepticon announced that they would be holding a GC. It appears they have updated the event description to detail how the tournament will be run, and its ridiculous. They outline that the event will be 4 Rounds (Assuming Swiss pairings), and after 4 Rounds the top 2 players will play a 5th for the Grand Prize. Coming from a competitive card game background, this tournament structure devalues any intended "competitive nature" that GW insists exists in Shadespire. With the current event cap at 128 players, basic tournament math shows that after 4 rounds, you're going to end up with 8 undefeated players. Then it will cut straight to Top 2, based on breakers (Glory) to play a final round. That 5th round winner is the champion. This structure is absurd, and leaves 6 other players out of contention. They will be undefeated, which is all you can do in those 4 rounds, and still have no chance at actually winning. Hopefully in the future GW looks at the tournament models that are in place across other games. Then arrives at something more fair, and better decides a champion. For now it seems this is what we have to deal with, but it doesn't feel great going into the tournament anymore. Maybe I'm applying too harsh of competitive standard, but that's the claim that was made by GW. That Shadespire would walk a more competitive line. inb4: Score more Glory for better breakers! -- Glory is very poor way to decide tournament tie breakers. It's serviceable for a tiebreaker inside of a match to avoid it going to a draw. However, on a tournament level it's far too abusable to separate the difference between the quality of players in a tournament. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Requizen Posted January 11, 2018 Share Posted January 11, 2018 That's assuming all 8 are completely undefeated. If you read the packet, it goes: Number of wins Lowest number of losses Glory So a 2-1 victory is worse than a 2-0 victory. I suppose you could end up with 8 people who are 8-0 at the end of the day, but that seems very unlikely. I agree there should be a way to get more granular, but for a first year event I think what's in place will work. If it ends up being really problematic, I'm sure they'll change it for 2019. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
freakshot3 Posted January 11, 2018 Author Share Posted January 11, 2018 Which packet are you referring to? From what I can tell Adepticon hasn't released their Shadespire packet. I have been talking with other previous GC attendees, and event organizers about the scoring and ranking systems. As well as reading through the in-store activity packet, where it outlines Glory being a tiebreaker, and then subsequently "roll-off" if there is another tie, as ridiculous as it sounds. All while waiting for Adepticons official rules and structure to be released. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Requizen Posted January 11, 2018 Share Posted January 11, 2018 The LVO has a Grand Clash packet, which is the one given to them by GW. I'm assuming it'll be the same format for Adepticon since GW is running both. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
freakshot3 Posted January 11, 2018 Author Share Posted January 11, 2018 Just looked at it. It's a slight improvement over the just glory tiebreaker, so I'll take it. It doesn't really solve the problem with shipping 6/8 People with 4-0 records out, but it's a certainly less abusable tiebreaker. Its going to lead to some brutal disappointment. Especially in a dice game with inherent randomness built directly in. Losing to a bad string of rolls inside of a game, basically can lead to you no longer being live for Top 2. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sleboda Posted January 12, 2018 Share Posted January 12, 2018 7 hours ago, freakshot3 said: This structure is absurd, and leaves 6 other players out of contention. They, like all players, will be "in contention" for the whole event. Knowing the conditions, they should have scored more Glory. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CodFather Posted January 12, 2018 Share Posted January 12, 2018 Another issue with their tiebreakers is that tie's grant you 1 point. So you are more rewarded if you tie (going lets say W-T-W) instead of just stomping them twice in a row. I agree that there needs to be as man rounds to come up with a single undefeated player, but I also think the tie breaks need looking at. 'Margin of Victory', ie. glory differential, begin a major tiebreaker, allows for a lot of playing of system. This style allows strong players to 'submarine'. Lose the first round by a very small glory differential, and then tear it in the losers bracket, making them likely the strongest x-1 in the tournament (although this doesn't work when there are going to be 8 undefeated before the cut to top 2). Margin of victory greater allows for collusion between players that know each other if one player is willing to take a massive dive, they can allow their opponent to score maximum glory. Players can also collude to take advantage of the tie giving a point if one player is willing to take the hit. I know a lot of people dislike SoS as a main tiebreaker, and for good reason, but there is a good way to implement it. One of the main criticisms of it is if your opponent drops (which is somewhat common in large tournaments, that their SoS tanks. A way around this is to have SoS based on win percentage and have a minimum win percentage per opponent. In guildball this minimum percentage is 33.33%. So if your opponent loses all their games, or drops, you still get at least 0.333 pts from them towards your SoS. For drops you might even get their win percentage when they drop, so if they play 2 games, win the first, lose the second and drop, you still get 0.5pts from them. A strong secondary tie break in this system is opponents SoS. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
freakshot3 Posted January 12, 2018 Author Share Posted January 12, 2018 9 hours ago, Sleboda said: They, like all players, will be "in contention" for the whole event. Knowing the conditions, they should have scored more Glory. That's where the abusable nature of gaining glory comes up. Am I doing myself a disservice, in terms of trying to win the GC, by not "throwing game 2" if I believe that I can push my glory differential even higher in a game 3. Fortunately, it seems that in the LVO packet, they describe the breaker order as; Match Wins/Least Game Losses/Glory. Which helps in this scenario, although since the tournament is 4 rounds I still anticipate the need to use Glory to differentiate positions. Edit: Also, the standard rule for having the "bye", or an opponent no showing on you is a Match result of a Win by a differential of +7. This +7 glory might not be enough to keep you inline with other players who do get to play all of their matches, and score their own glory. Leaving you out of contention, having done nothing wrong yourself. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
freakshot3 Posted January 12, 2018 Author Share Posted January 12, 2018 5 hours ago, CodFather said: Another issue with their tiebreakers is that tie's grant you 1 point. So you are more rewarded if you tie (going lets say W-T-W) instead of just stomping them twice in a row. I agree that there needs to be as man rounds to come up with a single undefeated player, but I also think the tie breaks need looking at. I think you may be misinterpreting the 3pt for win, 1pt for tie system. You are awarded 3pts for winning your Match, and 1pt if it goes to a tie. Not 3pts/1pt for each Game result inside of 1 match. Also for the record, I don't think there needs to be enough rounds to determine a single undefeated winner. I just believe there needs to be a top 8, at the minimum a top 4 to determine the winner. So that in this specific scenario we are talking (128 players, 4 Rounds), you can have the expected undefeated players all have a shot at winning. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CodFather Posted January 14, 2018 Share Posted January 14, 2018 On 1/12/2018 at 4:46 AM, freakshot3 said: I think you may be misinterpreting the 3pt for win, 1pt for tie system. You are awarded 3pts for winning your Match, and 1pt if it goes to a tie. Not 3pts/1pt for each Game result inside of 1 match. Also for the record, I don't think there needs to be enough rounds to determine a single undefeated winner. I just believe there needs to be a top 8, at the minimum a top 4 to determine the winner. So that in this specific scenario we are talking (128 players, 4 Rounds), you can have the expected undefeated players all have a shot at winning. Ok good, that does make more sense. Tiebreaks aside, personally I love playing tournaments, and if a tournament can get 128 players, I'd love for it to have 7 rounds over 2 days. Most other big game systems play until there is a single undefeated opponent, why not the same for this one? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
freakshot3 Posted January 15, 2018 Author Share Posted January 15, 2018 On 1/14/2018 at 3:14 AM, CodFather said: Tiebreaks aside, personally I love playing tournaments, and if a tournament can get 128 players, I'd love for it to have 7 rounds over 2 days. Most other big game systems play until there is a single undefeated opponent, why not the same for this one? I'm not familiar with a system that plays down to a single undefeated. (That's not to say they don't exists, just none I'm familiar with.) I think there are problems with running down to a single undefeated as well, losing 1 round in a tournament and no longer being live to win is going to cause a lot of drops after a single loss, and people disliking the tournament structure itself. So i'm not sure it's a great solution. Allowing a random loss in a 7 round tournament, in a game so influenced by randomness is a tough pill to swallow, knowing you cant win the tournament any more. Tournament sizes typically grow with player pool, and in my experience, a 128 person event would typically result in a 7 round event. With a cut to Top 8. I realize the game is in its early development, and the round time is longer than other games, but I imagine they will expand this out, based on the popularity of large tournaments. I believe 90 min is quite a bit of time for each round, I've found in playing Shadespire that if you get down to business on set up, etc. you can hammer a match out in 45-60 no problem. So maybe they'll move to a more compressed schedule, that doesn't include 1/2 hour breaks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CodFather Posted January 15, 2018 Share Posted January 15, 2018 6 hours ago, freakshot3 said: I'm not familiar with a system that plays down to a single undefeated. (That's not to say they don't exists, just none I'm familiar with.) I think there are problems with running down to a single undefeated as well, losing 1 round in a tournament and no longer being live to win is going to cause a lot of drops after a single loss, and people disliking the tournament structure itself. So i'm not sure it's a great solution. Allowing a random loss in a 7 round tournament, in a game so influenced by randomness is a tough pill to swallow, knowing you cant win the tournament any more. Warmachine and Guildball were my past 2 games, and these would all play down to a single undefeated, second place was determined by tiebreaks as there would be a fair amount of x-1's. In larger tournaments (64-128 players), the tournament would often cut to top 4, 8, or sometimes 16 for day 2, so that all players aren't meant to continue playing the second day even if they have no chance at winning. This method works very well when there are 64+ players and the tournament cuts to top 16 after 4 rounds for day 2. The day 2 tournament often functions as its own tournament so that tie breaks from the day before don't matter, just that you made it into the top 16. It also means that up to half the players are not undefeated going into day two, but instead the top x-1's. Gives you hope if you lost a game. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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