tie breaker rules in auto tournaments?

[betiko]

I was just wondering how they go... and in the particular case of the conquer cup.
we start with 256 players and 196 move on. Since tehre won't be 196 winners, some losers could have a second chance... but what is the tie breaking rule in those cases?
when you win, they pick the guy that won in the fewest rounds but when you lose...?

[Butters1919]

https://www.conquerclub.com/public.php? ... urnaments5

Scroll down to "Scoring".

[Donelladan]

The order in which the player joined the tournament (first player to join wins)

There was some deadbeats in the Conquer Cup. Any chance it can be avoided that those player go through the 2nd round even if they should according to this tie breaker rule??

[WingCmdr Ginkapo]

Surely deadbeats will lose 3 out of 3 games, and thus lose out to the active players who lose whilst winning 1 out of 3 games?

[Donelladan]

Yes deadbeats lost all their games.
But 60 players will be eliminated.
There is more than 60 players with a 0 win. We had 3 games, 4 players each game. In some case 1 players won the 3 games, so 3 players have a score of 0. In many case one player won 2, 1 player won 2, and 2 players won 0.

Therefore, with more than 60 players with a score of 0, the 3rd tie breaker rule will be used, being, who join first the tournament among those with a score of 0 will go to the next round.

The deadbeats players are obviously players that joined long times ago and are no more in the site. Therefore there is a relatively high probablity than one deabeat joined the tournament before an active player. So a deabeat could go through. That would be rather sad.

[bigWham]

Yes deadbeats lost all their games.
But 60 players will be eliminated.
There is more than 60 players with a 0 win. We had 3 games, 4 players each game. In some case 1 players won the 3 games, so 3 players have a score of 0. In many case one player won 2, 1 player won 2, and 2 players won 0.

Therefore, with more than 60 players with a score of 0, the 3rd tie breaker rule will be used, being, who join first the tournament among those with a score of 0 will go to the next round.

The deadbeats players are obviously players that joined long times ago and are no more in the site. Therefore there is a relatively high probablity than one deabeat joined the tournament before an active player. So a deabeat could go through. That would be rather sad.

The tournament will follow the rules in place. The deadbeat issue is not likely to play a role beyond round 1, and intervening would only likely cause more problems, and involve changing the rules after the fact.

[betiko]

humm it doesn't affect me directly, but being qualified because you "joined" first an autojoin tournament doesn't seem really fair. This was something that was pretty obvious we'd see happen, the tournament structure is extremely odd.

are you "joining" first if you registered first? in that case there is some kind of fairness.... and also an incentive to join asap a tournament.

[Dukasaur]

humm it doesn't affect me directly, but being qualified because you "joined" first an autojoin tournament doesn't seem really fair. This was something that was pretty obvious we'd see happen, the tournament structure is extremely odd.

are you "joining" first if you registered first? in that case there is some kind of fairness.... and also an incentive to join asap a tournament.

It would be a poor 1st tiebreaking criterium, but once obvious 1st criteria are used up (like total wins) then you start getting into things that are slightly more arbitrary. I've used precendence as a 3rd or 4th level tiebreaker in many of my tournaments.

And yes, as you point out, it helps the organiser as an incentive to hurry up and join, and thereby get the tourney filled a little faster.

[betiko]

humm it doesn't affect me directly, but being qualified because you "joined" first an autojoin tournament doesn't seem really fair. This was something that was pretty obvious we'd see happen, the tournament structure is extremely odd.

are you "joining" first if you registered first? in that case there is some kind of fairness.... and also an incentive to join asap a tournament.

It would be a poor 1st tiebreaking criterium, but once obvious 1st criteria are used up (like total wins) then you start getting into things that are slightly more arbitrary. I've used precendence as a 3rd or 4th level tiebreaker in many of my tournaments.

And yes, as you point out, it helps the organiser as an incentive to hurry up and join, and thereby get the tourney filled a little faster.

well I think tournaments, mostly this one that is a pay to play, shouldn't be handled like that it's ridiculous. It was obvious the structure would lead to that... 256 entries 196 move on... come on, it was obvious there would be less than 196 winners... and supposing there would be more than that... even worse.

[Metsfanmax]

Yes deadbeats lost all their games.
But 60 players will be eliminated.
There is more than 60 players with a 0 win. We had 3 games, 4 players each game. In some case 1 players won the 3 games, so 3 players have a score of 0. In many case one player won 2, 1 player won 2, and 2 players won 0.

Therefore, with more than 60 players with a score of 0, the 3rd tie breaker rule will be used, being, who join first the tournament among those with a score of 0 will go to the next round.

The deadbeats players are obviously players that joined long times ago and are no more in the site. Therefore there is a relatively high probablity than one deabeat joined the tournament before an active player. So a deabeat could go through. That would be rather sad.

The tournament will follow the rules in place. The deadbeat issue is not likely to play a role beyond round 1, and intervening would only likely cause more problems, and involve changing the rules after the fact.

It might make the case for instituting a different third tiebreaker for the future. I know it's hard to find one that is less arbitrary though.

[Dukasaur]

humm it doesn't affect me directly, but being qualified because you "joined" first an autojoin tournament doesn't seem really fair. This was something that was pretty obvious we'd see happen, the tournament structure is extremely odd.

are you "joining" first if you registered first? in that case there is some kind of fairness.... and also an incentive to join asap a tournament.

It would be a poor 1st tiebreaking criterium, but once obvious 1st criteria are used up (like total wins) then you start getting into things that are slightly more arbitrary. I've used precendence as a 3rd or 4th level tiebreaker in many of my tournaments.

And yes, as you point out, it helps the organiser as an incentive to hurry up and join, and thereby get the tourney filled a little faster.

well I think tournaments, mostly this one that is a pay to play, shouldn't be handled like that it's ridiculous. It was obvious the structure would lead to that... 256 entries 196 move on... come on, it was obvious there would be less than 196 winners... and supposing there would be more than that... even worse.

Why do you see this as a problem? Of course some non-winners get a second chance and advance: so what? I could give you dozens of examples of tournaments with second-chance rounds, wild-card berths, etc., both on CC and in the world at large, but I won't even waste my time. It's a non-problem to begin with. If you win, you advance for sure. If you don't win, you might get lucky and advance anyway. Yeah, so?

[betiko]

humm it doesn't affect me directly, but being qualified because you "joined" first an autojoin tournament doesn't seem really fair. This was something that was pretty obvious we'd see happen, the tournament structure is extremely odd.

are you "joining" first if you registered first? in that case there is some kind of fairness.... and also an incentive to join asap a tournament.

It would be a poor 1st tiebreaking criterium, but once obvious 1st criteria are used up (like total wins) then you start getting into things that are slightly more arbitrary. I've used precendence as a 3rd or 4th level tiebreaker in many of my tournaments.

And yes, as you point out, it helps the organiser as an incentive to hurry up and join, and thereby get the tourney filled a little faster.

well I think tournaments, mostly this one that is a pay to play, shouldn't be handled like that it's ridiculous. It was obvious the structure would lead to that... 256 entries 196 move on... come on, it was obvious there would be less than 196 winners... and supposing there would be more than that... even worse.

Why do you see this as a problem? Of course some non-winners get a second chance and advance: so what? I could give you dozens of examples of tournaments with second-chance rounds, wild-card berths, etc., both on CC and in the world at large, but I won't even waste my time. It's a non-problem to begin with. If you win, you advance for sure. If you don't win, you might get lucky and advance anyway. Yeah, so?

well to put it simply, look at the structure of any other conquer cup (other than the conquer cup 5 that el jefe decided to stupidly start when it was 3/4 full and lead to games unfilled).
In other conquer cups,losers would have a second chance, yes. But ALL losers were given the same second chance, not random losers. Of course I have no problem with that, I earned an ipad with that rule! (I lost my first try then won all my games till the title of the CC4). It's just dumb to create a structure that will create unfair situations for some.

Stop being such a "yes man" all the time duka, it's tiresome. You are the only mod defending every single decision taken, and I will not believe you if you think this year's structure is fair. Some decisions are bad and there is nothing wrong with pointing them out so that it doesn't happen in the future, as mets just said.

[Dukasaur]

humm it doesn't affect me directly, but being qualified because you "joined" first an autojoin tournament doesn't seem really fair. This was something that was pretty obvious we'd see happen, the tournament structure is extremely odd.

are you "joining" first if you registered first? in that case there is some kind of fairness.... and also an incentive to join asap a tournament.

It would be a poor 1st tiebreaking criterium, but once obvious 1st criteria are used up (like total wins) then you start getting into things that are slightly more arbitrary. I've used precendence as a 3rd or 4th level tiebreaker in many of my tournaments.

And yes, as you point out, it helps the organiser as an incentive to hurry up and join, and thereby get the tourney filled a little faster.

well I think tournaments, mostly this one that is a pay to play, shouldn't be handled like that it's ridiculous. It was obvious the structure would lead to that... 256 entries 196 move on... come on, it was obvious there would be less than 196 winners... and supposing there would be more than that... even worse.

Why do you see this as a problem? Of course some non-winners get a second chance and advance: so what? I could give you dozens of examples of tournaments with second-chance rounds, wild-card berths, etc., both on CC and in the world at large, but I won't even waste my time. It's a non-problem to begin with. If you win, you advance for sure. If you don't win, you might get lucky and advance anyway. Yeah, so?

well to put it simply, look at the structure of any other conquer cup (other than the conquer cup 5 that el jefe decided to stupidly start when it was 3/4 full and lead to games unfilled).
In other conquer cups,losers would have a second chance, yes. But ALL losers were given the same second chance, not random losers. Of course I have no problem with that, I earned an ipad with that rule! (I lost my first try then won all my games till the title of the CC4). It's just dumb to create a structure that will create unfair situations for some.

Stop being such a "yes man" all the time duka, it's tiresome. You are the only mod defending every single decision taken, and I will not believe you if you think this year's structure is fair. Some decisions are bad and there is nothing wrong with pointing them out so that it doesn't happen in the future, as mets just said.

There's nothing unfair about it. Every autotournament has the same rules. First tiebreaker, which handles the majority of cases, is total winning percentage in the tournament, which is about as fair as it gets. Second tiebreaker is speed of your wins, which gets kind of unfair in tournaments with different-sized maps, but in a case like this C-Cup with all the maps being the same it actually is pretty fair. Third tiebreaker is precedence, which creates an incentive for people to check the tournament listings regularly and join newly-posted tournaments promptly, and is actually a very good tertiary tiebreaker, which I myself use in tournaments where a tiebreak may become necessary, like this one for instance.

... and I don't agree with every decision made on this site, but I happen to agree with this one.

[Metsfanmax]

Second tiebreaker is speed of your wins, which gets kind of unfair in tournaments with different-sized maps, but in a case like this C-Cup with all the maps being the same it actually is pretty fair.

This so very far from being clear. Speed of win could be due to a number of factors outside of one's control, like the initial luck of the drop, dice, or all three of your opponents deadbeating out. None of those would strike me as demonstrating a player's skill, quite the opposite in fact. If anything I would lean towards taking more rounds as being demonstrative of skill, because you had to defeat players who put up far more of a fight. Even if you don't agree with that, it's pretty hard to make a clear conclusion from something like length of the game, when determining who the better players are. Speed might make sense in a deterministic game like chess; not in Risk.

[Dukasaur]

Second tiebreaker is speed of your wins, which gets kind of unfair in tournaments with different-sized maps, but in a case like this C-Cup with all the maps being the same it actually is pretty fair.

This so very far from being clear. Speed of win could be due to a number of factors outside of one's control, like the initial luck of the drop, dice, or all three of your opponents deadbeating out. None of those would strike me as demonstrating a player's skill, quite the opposite in fact. If anything I would lean towards taking more rounds as being demonstrative of skill, because you had to defeat players who put up far more of a fight. Even if you don't agree with that, it's pretty hard to make a clear conclusion from something like length of the game, when determining who the better players are. Speed might make sense in a deterministic game like chess; not in Risk.

Any tiebreaker you care to name is going to be subject to all the effects of luck. Let's just accept at the outset that CC is a very luck-dependent game. Dice, drops, cards, and turn order are all random influences that at any given moment can drown out skill. Nonetheless, skill exists, and over a large number of games will show itself, and whether it's worth 10% or 30% of the outcome is something we can debate forever with no resolution.

If you want to examine the question of whether the speed of winning measures skill, set up the following as a thought experiment. You and I will sit down for a game, in which the dice are totally rigged. I have rigged dice that are all 6s, and you have rigged dice that are all 1s, and no matter what, I will eventually win. Still, no matter how rigged the dice, I can only deploy the reinforcements the rules call for, and attack in places the map allows. If I carefully examine the board, the places I can get a bonus, the shortest paths to your terts, etc., on a medium-sized board like Classic I might be able to wipe you out by turn 3, and for sure by turn 6. On the other hand, if I drop carelessly, attack in stupid places, advance in the wrong direction, etc., we might be playing for hundreds of turns before I stumble into your last tert.

You're not going to change the fact that in CC luck is a huge factor, but whether the skill factor is 10% or 30%, speed of winning is a valid measure of it.

[Metsfanmax]

Second tiebreaker is speed of your wins, which gets kind of unfair in tournaments with different-sized maps, but in a case like this C-Cup with all the maps being the same it actually is pretty fair.

This so very far from being clear. Speed of win could be due to a number of factors outside of one's control, like the initial luck of the drop, dice, or all three of your opponents deadbeating out. None of those would strike me as demonstrating a player's skill, quite the opposite in fact. If anything I would lean towards taking more rounds as being demonstrative of skill, because you had to defeat players who put up far more of a fight. Even if you don't agree with that, it's pretty hard to make a clear conclusion from something like length of the game, when determining who the better players are. Speed might make sense in a deterministic game like chess; not in Risk.

If you want to examine the question of whether the speed of winning measures skill, set up the following as a thought experiment. You and I will sit down for a game, in which the dice are totally rigged. I have rigged dice that are all 6s, and you have rigged dice that are all 1s, and no matter what, I will eventually win. Still, no matter how rigged the dice, I can only deploy the reinforcements the rules call for, and attack in places the map allows. If I carefully examine the board, the places I can get a bonus, the shortest paths to your terts, etc., on a medium-sized board like Classic I might be able to wipe you out by turn 3, and for sure by turn 6. On the other hand, if I drop carelessly, attack in stupid places, advance in the wrong direction, etc., we might be playing for hundreds of turns before I stumble into your last tert.

You're not going to change the fact that in CC luck is a huge factor, but whether the skill factor is 10% or 30%, speed of winning is a valid measure of it.

Your thought experiment bears no resemblance to the reality of the game and therefore doesn't help us. In the real game, luck matters, and even if I play the optimal strategy, it might take me longer to win just because I didn't win as many rolls. Let's consider two alternate thought experiments. In experiment 1, I always roll sixes and my opponent has a 10% chance of rolling 6's and a 90% chance of rolling 1's. In experiment 2, same for me but now the odds are 25-75 in favor of sixes for my opponent. I should still pretty much always win the game in either experiment, unless something pathological happens, because my opponent can never kill my troops but I can kill theirs at least some of the time. So we can still determine that 'correct' strategy you propose in either of my experiments. Yet clearly, it is much more likely that the player in experiment 1 wins faster than the player in experiment 2, despite the second having to work no harder to come up with optimal play. The only difference is the luck the opponent has, since the opponent in experiment 2 has sixes come up in defense slightly more often. In this case, there is no basis for rewarding the player in experiment 1. And we don't even need to make it that complicated! We can imagine two games on experiment 2, one where I go first, and one where I go second. It is entirely plausible that the game where I go second will take me one or two more turns to win due to the opponent's first turn bonus, yet in your analysis I should be kicked out of the tournament because of my turn order!

Thus if we consider the limiting case of a perfect logician who has solved Risk and can come up with optimal play for any problem, that logician would be disfavored in a tournament if his opponent got better die rolls than if his opponent got worse die rolls, despite that having no reflection on his skill. Your response to this is to offer a counter-interpretation, that sometimes length of game can be attributed to poorer play. The problem is that there's no way for our algorithm to determine which was the contributing factor in a real tournament setting*. My guess is that luck is actually more dominant in determining game length than how close you are to optimal play, but I can't prove it without a data set. You could only even start to justify the claim that speed of victory is a proxy for skill some of the time (in two player games, with no spoils, and equal starting deployments, and no first turn bias) with a data set that clearly indicates as much, with those other factors held constant. I suspect that even in that case, the luck of the die rolls itself will overwhelm that signal. I'm sure as hell not going to be convinced it exists by an unrealistic thought experiment. Luck is always a factor in this game. Fine. That doesn't mean we get to throw it out just because it makes our analysis harder.

*You might want to try to get cute and do something like monitor the dice rolls of each player and use some algorithm that weights the speed of victory against each player's average dice, but this would essentially be impossible. In a real game, what matters in this context isn't going to be your average dice, it's going to be those few key rolls where you tried and failed to break your opponent's South America bonus. There's just no realistic way for our program to account for such subtleties.

And that's not even addressing the complications that enter for multiplayer games. Or games with spoils. Or round limits. Or fog. All of these add complications that make waiting longer to go for a victory a perfectly valid -- possibly even better, on average -- strategy, such that whoever wins fastest might actually be the opposite of the criterion you want.

Speed of victory is such a colossally bad criterion that I actually like the tournament join order precedence more than the speed of victory criterion.

[Dukasaur]

Second tiebreaker is speed of your wins, which gets kind of unfair in tournaments with different-sized maps, but in a case like this C-Cup with all the maps being the same it actually is pretty fair.

This so very far from being clear. Speed of win could be due to a number of factors outside of one's control, like the initial luck of the drop, dice, or all three of your opponents deadbeating out. None of those would strike me as demonstrating a player's skill, quite the opposite in fact. If anything I would lean towards taking more rounds as being demonstrative of skill, because you had to defeat players who put up far more of a fight. Even if you don't agree with that, it's pretty hard to make a clear conclusion from something like length of the game, when determining who the better players are. Speed might make sense in a deterministic game like chess; not in Risk.

If you want to examine the question of whether the speed of winning measures skill, set up the following as a thought experiment. You and I will sit down for a game, in which the dice are totally rigged. I have rigged dice that are all 6s, and you have rigged dice that are all 1s, and no matter what, I will eventually win. Still, no matter how rigged the dice, I can only deploy the reinforcements the rules call for, and attack in places the map allows. If I carefully examine the board, the places I can get a bonus, the shortest paths to your terts, etc., on a medium-sized board like Classic I might be able to wipe you out by turn 3, and for sure by turn 6. On the other hand, if I drop carelessly, attack in stupid places, advance in the wrong direction, etc., we might be playing for hundreds of turns before I stumble into your last tert.

You're not going to change the fact that in CC luck is a huge factor, but whether the skill factor is 10% or 30%, speed of winning is a valid measure of it.

Your thought experiment bears no resemblance to the reality of the game and therefore doesn't help us. In the real game, luck matters, and even if I play the optimal strategy, it might take me longer to win just because I didn't win as many rolls. Let's consider two alternate thought experiments. In experiment 1, I always roll sixes and my opponent has a 10% chance of rolling 6's and a 90% chance of rolling 1's. In experiment 2, same for me but now the odds are 25-75 in favor of sixes for my opponent. I should still pretty much always win the game in either experiment, unless something pathological happens, because my opponent can never kill my troops but I can kill theirs at least some of the time. So we can still determine that 'correct' strategy you propose in either of my experiments. Yet clearly, it is much more likely that the player in experiment 1 wins faster than the player in experiment 2, despite the second having to work no harder to come up with optimal play. The only difference is the luck the opponent has, since the opponent in experiment 2 has sixes come up in defense slightly more often. In this case, there is no basis for rewarding the player in experiment 1. And we don't even need to make it that complicated! We can imagine two games on experiment 2, one where I go first, and one where I go second. It is entirely plausible that the game where I go second will take me one or two more turns to win due to the opponent's first turn bonus, yet in your analysis I should be kicked out of the tournament because of my turn order!

Thus if we consider the limiting case of a perfect logician who has solved Risk and can come up with optimal play for any problem, that logician would be disfavored in a tournament if his opponent got better die rolls than if his opponent got worse die rolls, despite that having no reflection on his skill. Your response to this is to offer a counter-interpretation, that sometimes length of game can be attributed to poorer play. The problem is that there's no way for our algorithm to determine which was the contributing factor in a real tournament setting*. My guess is that luck is actually more dominant in determining game length than how close you are to optimal play, but I can't prove it without a data set. You could only even start to justify the claim that speed of victory is a proxy for skill some of the time (in two player games, with no spoils, and equal starting deployments, and no first turn bias) with a data set that clearly indicates as much, with those other factors held constant. I suspect that even in that case, the luck of the die rolls itself will overwhelm that signal. I'm sure as hell not going to be convinced it exists by an unrealistic thought experiment. Luck is always a factor in this game. Fine. That doesn't mean we get to throw it out just because it makes our analysis harder.

*You might want to try to get cute and do something like monitor the dice rolls of each player and use some algorithm that weights the speed of victory against each player's average dice, but this would essentially be impossible. In a real game, what matters in this context isn't going to be your average dice, it's going to be those few key rolls where you tried and failed to break your opponent's South America bonus. There's just no realistic way for our program to account for such subtleties.

And that's not even addressing the complications that enter for multiplayer games. Or games with spoils. Or round limits. Or fog. All of these add complications that make waiting longer to go for a victory a perfectly valid -- possibly even better, on average -- strategy, such that whoever wins fastest might actually be the opposite of the criterion you want.

Speed of victory is such a colossally bad criterion that I actually like the tournament join order precedence more than the speed of victory criterion.

Mets, all you've really done is restate with much effort that there's a huge element of luck on CC. That was never in dispute. I clearly stipulated that I know there's a huge element of luck on CC. No sane person has ever denied that there's a huge element of luck on CC.

That being said, skill still matters. Luck will tend to balance out in the long run, so more skillful players will still win more. Even if the skill component is only 10% or whatever, still against the random noise of the various luck inputs that skill element will still show.

For Christ's sakes, Mets, you're a physicist. You of all people should know that it's possible to measure a variable despite background noise of larger variables. Your entire career depends on that possibility.

For any given set of luck inputs -- card set x, dice rolls y, turn order ABC -- a player who deploys and attacks according to the theoretically optimum pattern will tend to win more often and more decisively that a player who makes non-optimum moves.

If you've ever played with one of the masters of the game, you will note that even when the dice have already given them the game, they will continue to drop carefully and distribute their deploy in such a way as to continue to maximize their odds on every single turn. An average player like me, once it's obvious that the game is over, will get lazy and start ballparking how many troops to advance here or there. A josko or an uckuki continues scientifically dropping exactly the right number on each stack to optimize the chances that the maximum number of attacks will succeed on each turn.

[Metsfanmax]

Mets, all you've really done is restate with much effort that there's a huge element of luck on CC. That was never in dispute. I clearly stipulated that I know there's a huge element of luck on CC. No sane person has ever denied that there's a huge element of luck on CC.

I understood your point originally. I took the time to clearly explain how the luck works because the way it works in detail is precisely why your original argument is incorrect. The luck is not noise in the sense that you think it is, and the arguments above illustrate why. I will explain more precisely why at the end of the post in case it was not clear from the above.

That being said, skill still matters. Luck will tend to balance out in the long run, so more skillful players will still win more. Even if the skill component is only 10% or whatever, still against the random noise of the various luck inputs that skill element will still show.

However, even if I agree that skill plays some discrete role that is just associated with a lot of noise, the argument is still an embarrassing one to defend. It is essentially a concession that something which only explains 10% of a person's odds of victory is enough to determine who remains in a tournament and who does not. There are so many other tiebreakers that can be easily defended without going to such trouble, like the combined winning records of all your opponents. Why would you therefore actively defend the one that we should pretty much all be able to agree is the worst at measuring skill? Can you even imagine something which does a worse job while actually still being relevant to the game? I'm having a hard time with that. "My formula gets it right 10% of the time guys" is just not a very convincing argument.

For Christ's sakes, Mets, you're a physicist. You of all people should know that it's possible to measure a variable despite background noise of larger variables. Your entire career depends on that possibility.

If the background noise is larger than the signal, which it will be for any given tournament, then the only thing you can do to beat down the noise is measure this over many tournaments and get some average estimate of this signal. It can and will be highly variable for any given tournament, and at any rate the average will only make sense if you hold basically every variable (map type, number of players, fog, trench, spoils) constant. Now, your point could at least be defended on your own ground if the noise were small enough that there was no chance of the signal going negative in any given tournament. But it's quite likely that this is untrue. It is quite likely that in any given game, luck will play a much more dominant role than skill. Therefore your tiebreaker disqualifies people who may very well have done a better job than the people who won in fewer rounds, given the actual conditions they faced in your game. For all we know the people who won in fewer rounds did so because of deadbeats. And yet the people who had actual competition are kicked out of the autotournament by your formula. Why? Because on average, in some hypothetical games they didn't actually play in this tournament, you insist that they wouldn't have done as well. You have actually determined that they are less skilled players because they made the poor choice of being randomly assigned to a game where their opponents actually showed up. This is all kinds of fucked. Your "signal" requires us to ignore most or all of the knowledge of the actual performance of the player in the actual tournament, which is not the hallmark of a tiebreaker; it's a skidmark. Tiebreakers only make sense if they are clearly and uniquely tied to the performance of the players in the tournament, but yours requires outside data to validate, which is immediately unfair to the people who actually competed.

For any given set of luck inputs -- card set x, dice rolls y, turn order ABC -- a player who deploys and attacks according to the theoretically optimum pattern will tend to win more often and more decisively that a player who makes non-optimum moves.

Yes, and this is the point that I did not dispute, because it is only tangentially relevant to the conversation. The problem is how you determine who played closer to the theoretical optimum, not the fact that this concept exists. Your argument is that because an optimum exists, and we can meaningfully imagine play that is closer to or farther from that optimum, that therefore skill matters in Conquer Club. But the crux of the matter is not whether skill matters in Risk. The crux is whether time to victory is a proxy for skill. Only if we can infer skill (even a small amount of skill) from time to victory, can we actually use it as a tiebreaker. You have essentially taken it as a starting assumption that the optimal play pattern will always win you the game in the fewest number of moves compared to sub-optimal play patterns. But this is not true, and I cannot emphasize plainly enough how starkly incorrect it is. The only place it might have been true was in your fictional board game of the previous post, that was closer to Diplomacy than Risk. It is simply false in the game we actually play. Because in the game we actually play, if the optimum tells you how many turns you should expect to win, your tiebreaker favors recklessly disobeying that optimum on the hope that you'll get lucky and win faster, even if it was suboptimal play. And even if the person who tries that is penalized by ultimately losing the game, the opponent that wins that game will have won because their opponent played sub-optimally, not because they themselves played optimally. The optimum is exactly that: a unique, optimal strategy in a given number of turns. Anything that favors a distortion of that optimal play is by construction not measuring skill but something else entirely. That is the fundamental flaw in your approach: we cannot infer more from a player's victory than the fact that they won. If they played perfectly, then they could only have won in the number of turns it took them to win. Encouraging them to deviate from that path and move faster because of a silly tiebreaker is not what I would call a measurement of good skill. You're trying to extract information from the victory that has to be meaningless, and therefore you're going to fail. Your argument only makes sense in a world where the optimal solution is the one that always takes the fewest number of turns, but that is not guaranteed to be true in any real Conquer Club situation.

Your problem here, the reason you're making poor arguments, is that you're forgetting that optimization under uncertainty is substantially different than optimization without uncertainty. The nature of the optimum is fundamentally different with uncertainties attached. With uncertainties attached, there is a spectrum of possible winning strategies, and if we like we can arrange this spectrum in terms of aggressiveness or time to victory. The perfect logician always picks the one with the highest likelihood of winning, which will in general be somewhere between the extremes. Your tiebreaker distorts this by providing an incentive to select a winning strategy that is slightly faster/more aggressive but slightly less likely to win in absolute terms. We should not be encouraging suboptimal play.

I also provided concrete examples of game types where time to victory provides a clear negative proxy for skill to help illustrate this point. Some of them apply directly to our AutoTournaments. For example, consider Round Limits. In the Conquer Cup VIII games I recently played, there were 30 round limits on the games. If we get to round 25 of the game, our perfect logician might realize that optimal play is to turtle up and just win on troop count, rather than risk a faster but less certain victory through combat. In an escalating spoils game, it might be possible to win faster by taking a risk on eliminating someone early, but conventional wisdom is that you should wait until the spoils are just large enough to offset the cost in troops you will pay by trying to take someone out. Certain maps (like Das Schloss) might favor taking many turns of simple stacking before busting out.

I cannot emphasize strongly enough, in case it is still not clear, that these problems are not noise that perturbs your signal. They are fundamental problems with the nature of the tiebreaker itself. The tiebreaker does not measure what you think it measures.


For all of the above reasons, I therefore submit that this tiebreaker actively does harm to our tournament structure, and encourage Conquer Club to use a more conventional system used by any number of professional tournaments worldwide.

[betiko]

Shit... Too much text since the last time i came in here. I think mets wins though

[betiko]

I see that in my round 2 games I have at least 1 guy who is again deadbeating and who has passed round 1 deadbeating all his games... he never logged back since sept 2014.
I guess there are a lot of other round 1 losers+deadbeats who passed the round with this "great" tie breaker rule.

really, really brilliant. Definitely a fantastic tournament setting combined with a fantastic tie breaker rule...

[betiko]

Yes deadbeats lost all their games.
But 60 players will be eliminated.
There is more than 60 players with a 0 win. We had 3 games, 4 players each game. In some case 1 players won the 3 games, so 3 players have a score of 0. In many case one player won 2, 1 player won 2, and 2 players won 0.

Therefore, with more than 60 players with a score of 0, the 3rd tie breaker rule will be used, being, who join first the tournament among those with a score of 0 will go to the next round.

The deadbeats players are obviously players that joined long times ago and are no more in the site. Therefore there is a relatively high probablity than one deabeat joined the tournament before an active player. So a deabeat could go through. That would be rather sad.

The tournament will follow the rules in place. The deadbeat issue is not likely to play a role beyond round 1, and intervening would only likely cause more problems, and involve changing the rules after the fact.

how on earth was it not likely to play a role beyond round 1? you couldn't've made something giving more chances of that happening. We will definitely not see that after round 2.... but really, change the structure next time. This tournament gives such uneven chances to people who paid to entered this...

[dario2099]

So if I understand correctly, since I was one of the last persons to join the CC8 tournament, if I lose my 3 games in round 2 i'll be eliminated. Had I known that I would never had joined. With 7 players there's a good chance I'll lose the 3. I guess I have to win at least one game. And it will be even worst if I advance to round 3 where the games will have 8 players

[Dukasaur]

So if I understand correctly, since I was one of the last persons to join the CC8 tournament, if I lose my 3 games in round 2 i'll be eliminated. Had I known that I would never had joined. With 7 players there's a good chance I'll lose the 3. I guess I have to win at least one game. And it will be even worst if I advance to round 3 where the games will have 8 players

You already won two games in Round 1, and there's no Score Reset in Round 2, so you're quite likely to advance even if you lose all three Round 2 games. Your 2 wins from Round 1 should be enough to carry you through.

Of course, winning one more game this round would make advancement even more likely, probably 100%, but 2 is quite likely enough.

[betiko]

So if I understand correctly, since I was one of the last persons to join the CC8 tournament, if I lose my 3 games in round 2 i'll be eliminated. Had I known that I would never had joined. With 7 players there's a good chance I'll lose the 3. I guess I have to win at least one game. And it will be even worst if I advance to round 3 where the games will have 8 players

look at the rules it's pretty self explanatory... score resets after round 2. I'm in the same situation as yourself, I won 2/3 of my round 1 games, it's almost certain that with 2 wins we are already qualified for round 3 even losing all our round 2 games... Maybe a few will get screwed with 2 wins in 6 games, but I highly doubt it. 0 or 1 wins in 6 games shall kick you out of the tournament though.. maybe a few lucky guys can qualify on tie breaker rules with just one win.

Round Details
Round 1: Random Draw, 3 Games, 196 Move On, Games: 4 Players, Standard, Escalating, Classic More
Round 2: 196 Start, Random Draw, 3 Games, 128 Move On, Games: 7 Players, Standard, Escalating, Classic More
Round 3: 128 Start, Score Resets, Random Draw, Best Of 3, 96 Move On, Games: 8 Players, Standard, Escalating, Classic More
Round 4: 96 Start, Random Draw, 3 Games, 65 Move On, Games: 6 Players, Standard, Escalating, Classic More
Round 5: 65 Start, Random Draw, 3 Games, 48 Move On, Games: 5 Players, Standard, Escalating, Classic More
Round 6: 48 Start, Random Draw, 3 Games, 24 Move On, Games: 8 Players, Standard, Escalating, Classic More
Round 7: 24 Start, Random Draw, 3 Games, 12 Move On, Games: 6 Players, Standard, Escalating, Classic More
Round 8: 12 Start, Score Resets, Random Draw, 4 Move On, Games: 3 Players, Standard, Escalating, Classic More
Round 9: 4 Start, Random Draw, Games: 4 Players, Standard, Escalating, Classic More

[dario2099]

So if I understand correctly, since I was one of the last persons to join the CC8 tournament, if I lose my 3 games in round 2 i'll be eliminated. Had I known that I would never had joined. With 7 players there's a good chance I'll lose the 3. I guess I have to win at least one game. And it will be even worst if I advance to round 3 where the games will have 8 players

look at the rules it's pretty self explanatory... score resets after round 2. I'm in the same situation as yourself, I won 2/3 of my round 1 games, it's almost certain that with 2 wins we are already qualified for round 3 even losing all our round 2 games... Maybe a few will get screwed with 2 wins in 6 games, but I highly doubt it. 0 or 1 wins in 6 games shall kick you out of the tournament though.. maybe a few lucky guys can qualify on tie breaker rules with just one win.

Round Details
Round 1: Random Draw, 3 Games, 196 Move On, Games: 4 Players, Standard, Escalating, Classic More
Round 2: 196 Start, Random Draw, 3 Games, 128 Move On, Games: 7 Players, Standard, Escalating, Classic More
Round 3: 128 Start, Score Resets, Random Draw, Best Of 3, 96 Move On, Games: 8 Players, Standard, Escalating, Classic More
Round 4: 96 Start, Random Draw, 3 Games, 65 Move On, Games: 6 Players, Standard, Escalating, Classic More
Round 5: 65 Start, Random Draw, 3 Games, 48 Move On, Games: 5 Players, Standard, Escalating, Classic More
Round 6: 48 Start, Random Draw, 3 Games, 24 Move On, Games: 8 Players, Standard, Escalating, Classic More
Round 7: 24 Start, Random Draw, 3 Games, 12 Move On, Games: 6 Players, Standard, Escalating, Classic More
Round 8: 12 Start, Score Resets, Random Draw, 4 Move On, Games: 3 Players, Standard, Escalating, Classic More
Round 9: 4 Start, Random Draw, Games: 4 Players, Standard, Escalating, Classic More

That's even worse. I'll advance to round 3, but what for? I was like the 250th player to join the tournament, so if there's a tie, with the score reset, it's over for me. And I paid to join

Come on, 8 players and only 3 games, I'll have to win one, yeah well easier said that done. I'll play the games but what are my chances? Close to O. What a stupid rule.