Chris Allen, THE Zack Mathews, and I once again gather to discuss the question "How does tournament structure and scoring affect game design, squad building, and in-game strategy?" in Part Three of the Carolina KRAYTS Listener Series™:

• http://carolinakrayts.libsyn.com/listener-3-a-tournament-meta-story-nope-still-not-your-dice

Show notes can be found here (Listener 3 Show Notes), and the Final Salvo Odds Table discussed in the podcast can be found here.

The Rest of the Listener Series™ can be found below:

1. Listener 1: A Carolina KRAYTS Story - How does making big erratas/banning affect a game’s meta, and what are the consequences of taking such big actions “mid-season”?
2. Listener 2: A Paul Heaver Story - We sit down with Three-Time World Champion Paul Heaver to discuss his view on the game balance
3. Listener 2.5: Well Paul Said Bombs Are Fine, So I Guess Bombs Are Fine - How much does a current card or pilot impact a designers’ ability to create interesting effects in the future without unbalancing the game?

I messaged the Facebook, but this is a good place to ask. In a graduated cut, I don't get how you can expect to add only one round.

For example, if we had just a few less people at worlds and didn't have a clean top 32, and the 7-2 players stopped at 31. Wouldn't you have 15 players trying to get in two spots? That would either take three or so rounds or you still need some sort of tie breaker. Otherwise you could make some of the 8-1 players play down, but you have to pick which of them have to play.

I still like graduated cut better than what we have, but I think it can add way more rounds than just the one and there is no good way to tell how many rounds it adds until after registration at best.

Unless I am just dumb.

Just now, AEIllingworth said:

I messaged the Facebook, but this is a good place to ask. In a graduated cut, I don't get how you can expect to add only one round.

For example, if we had just a few less people at worlds and didn't have a clean top 32, and the 7-2 players stopped at 31. Wouldn't you have 15 players trying to get in two spots? That would either take three or so rounds or you still need some sort of tie breaker. Otherwise you could make some of the 8-1 players play down, but you have to pick which of them have to play.

I still like graduated cut better than what we have, but I think it can add way more rounds than just the one and there is no good way to tell how many rounds it adds until after registration at best.

Unless I am just dumb.

Sure.

So in that example, you would basically give the necessary number of top-seeded players a "bye" while the rest duke it out to give you a "clean" top 16 bracket again. It basically would look very similar to how the NFL playoff brackets look with during the wild card rounds.

Taking a quick example from an actual NFL bracket:

So you only added the extra round beyond top 16 necessary to cut back to a 16-person bracket, and continue on like normal.

On a scale of Rookie Pilot to pre-nerf Dengaroo, how much does Paul regret talking to you guys abput bombs?

I'm going to confuse you all with so many edits. I ran a Swiss rank calculator for 85 players and got:

Results:
1 players at 7-0
5 players at 6-1
14 players at 5-2
23 players at 4-3
23 players at 3-4
14 players at 2-5
5 players at 1-6
0 players at 0-7

Normally this would be an 8 player cut, and top two of the 14 5-2 make it, or top 16 and 10 of the 14 make it. But instead with a graduated cut, you have 20 total. Eight have to play so four lose and you get to sixteen. How do you pick which 8 play without another tie breaker like MoV?

33 minutes ago, AEIllingworth said:

I'm going to confuse you all with so many edits. I ran a Swiss rank calculator for 85 players and got:

Results:
1 players at 7-0
5 players at 6-1
14 players at 5-2
23 players at 4-3
23 players at 3-4
14 players at 2-5
5 players at 1-6
0 players at 0-7

Normally this would be an 8 player cut, and top two of the 14 5-2 make it, or top 16 and 10 of the 14 make it. But instead with a graduated cut, you have 20 total. Eight have to play so four lose and you get to sixteen. How do you pick which 8 play without another tie breaker like MoV?

I think you're right there has to be another tie breaker (default choice is still MOV), but at least this allows everyone to get in, and the tie-breaker simply determines a bye/"break", rather than no chance at the title at all.

Also, we could probably devise a non-MOV tie-breaker if they were to adopt this format (but even if FFG did go graduated, you know they'd never listen to us).

I feel bad for filling this thread with posts, but y'all have such reasoned arguments that I really want to chime in. When THE Zack Mathews Kraytvented "points destroyed" instead of MoV, it got mentioned that having games worth different amounts is a bad thing. I agree that wins and losses should be zero sum (unlike the modified win system) but do tie breakers also need to be zero sum?

I feel and have no data to support that it would benefit the players that get in the drawn out slug fests and penalize games that end with the ships still on the board not engaging, while still leaving a win at full value.

Was that the the sort of thing you meant by changing the structure to incentivize the things the developers might want?

9 hours ago, AEIllingworth said:

I feel bad for filling this thread with posts, but y'all have such reasoned arguments that I really want to chime in. When THE Zack Mathews Kraytvented "points destroyed" instead of MoV, it got mentioned that having games worth different amounts is a bad thing. I agree that wins and losses should be zero sum (unlike the modified win system) but do tie breakers also need to be zero sum?

I feel and have no data to support that it would benefit the players that get in the drawn out slug fests and penalize games that end with the ships still on the board not engaging, while still leaving a win at full value.

Was that the the sort of thing you meant by changing the structure to incentivize the things the developers might want?

That's... A really good question. Let me think about it for a bit, haha.

2 hours ago, Brunas said:

That's... A really good question. Let me think about it for a bit, haha.

Biggest downside I can come up with would be if you had a super good matchup in a late round, easy table. You'd fly all but one ship off the board before ending it to try to push that easy matchup into a cut by driving up their tiebreaker.

You don't have an incentive to keep ships on the board outside of winning the game, so you get weird corner cases where you are acting in self interest to drive up your opponents score because it doesn't hurt yours.

I think that this is a problem in a few scoring systems, but it is a bit exaggerated here compared to other things.

If MOV is the tie breaker for getting the "break" in the wildcard round that might be enough. Getting a bye would be far more important that letting a good matchup into the cut and hoping you'd get paired with them eventually.

Well I thought about it for a bit - I'm not sure I have a good answer. Dropping the system being zero sum is scary, because you can create some perverse incentives like those listed above, but realistically I don't think it would be a major issue.

Honestly, for the purposes of tiebreaker on the cut round for byes/no byes, SoS might just be the easiest thing - hard to manipulate, and more or less fair.

24 minutes ago, Brunas said:

Well I thought about it for a bit - I'm not sure I have a good answer. Dropping the system being zero sum is scary, because you can create some perverse incentives like those listed above, but realistically I don't think it would be a major issue.

Honestly, for the purposes of tiebreaker on the cut round for byes/no byes, SoS might just be the easiest thing - hard to manipulate, and more or less fair.

In this case, SoS would at least partially correlate to a player having a tougher schedule at the high-end for the purposes of giving a bye in the elimination rounds, rather than screwing a marginal player *out* of the elimination rounds all together.

I have long been a proponent of granting the best players in Swiss a first-round bye in elimination rounds, like in most mainstream competitive sports tournaments. But FFG's philosophy is to run tournaments in as few rounds as is mathematically possible, and still have a cut. If you grant elimination byes then it adds at least one round, if not two to implement properly. It would also be great if the cut was more "intelligent" so it would be a cleaner cut... but again this increases the number of rounds required, and would require FFG to do some math. The only math that I feel confident FFG can do is "financial engineering" at the corporate level.

Incidentally, related to the discussion of it potentially having been a 'clean cut' out to #32 at Worlds, back in 2015 (the only year I went to Worlds), I was #20 in a Top 16 cut. I got no FFG swag from being 6-2. Even Wade Piche was lamenting about the prize support only extending to Top 16. Top 32 would have been a 'clean' cut, in that #32 had 30 tournament points, and #33 had 29 tournament points.

Related to this entire discussion, getting less than full tournament points for a win back in the day was a really bad idea. At least that got fixed. So here's another story of mine, try and peel away how many things are wrong with the scoring system in this example! Store kit tournament, 20-something or 30-something people. I go undefeated on the day, 5 games, but I don't make the cut. 3 games I had full wins. OK great. But one game I had a modified win (3 points). And another game, ended in a tie so I only got one point. The kicker is that in the draw game, it was my full health stresshog vs his 1 hull stresshog. And, the 'game state' for scoring purposes can't know this, but my stresshog was unstressed, and his had a ton of stress, and was going to fly off the board next turn. Game ended at time, naturally. So, I ended up with 19 tournament points. I think I beat two of the 4-1s, but I can't remember now. In any event, there ended up being four 4-1s, which all had 20 tournament points. The eventual tournament winner lost his game in round 5; if he had won then it would have bumped one of the 4-1s down to 3-2, and I would have made the cut.

My other pet peeve is how MoV is calculated in a game that goes to time. The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing, and in X-wing tournament play the main thing is to figure out who actually won the game. MoV is important, but secondary. Because point fortresses give up zero points until they're totally off the board, the "wrong" player is frequently awarded the win. Most people understand that this has a distortion effect on the meta as a whole (Miranda everywhere, yay!). But it also impacts the tactics within a particular game. If you know you have a temporary points advantage, you can slow play to force the other player into having to make a bad engagement, because otherwise they lose by default. It can still happen even with half points on large base ships. It happened to me in my 2nd loss at Worlds - it wasn't necessarily the reason I lost, but as soon as the other player gained an advantage his play sped WAAAY up.

I totally get where you are coming from with the playing slowly when you are ahead, but as a devil's advocate here I'm going to say when I do the math in my head and the game just swung my way, I get excited and probably speed up (I've never asked someone if they noticed, but it is plausible).

The problem here is that it matters. Just like floor rules, we can't worry about intent. Swings in the pace of play are bad, no matter what. In my last store champs I had a 41 point Norra against a 39 point Miranda. He was playing super quickly (which is okay) but I felt so much pressure to keep up with his pace that I missed more R2-D2 triggers than I remembered. I ended up winning, but the game left me not feeling super good about it.

Shoutout Big Vic, no hard feelings I hope?

I guess I don't really understand why changes in tactics due to time limits are automatically bad. (It's easy to create thematic justifications: "If you can hold this sector for a little over an hour, our supplies will make it through!")

Slow-playing is bad -- I've had in done to me in some pretty high-profile games -- but that's just a truism. It isn't the time-limit that makes people slow-play, it's just basic douchedom. Like Jeff Goldblum's famous quote: "Douchiness ... finds a way."

6 hours ago, MajorJuggler said:

I have long been a proponent of granting the best players in Swiss a first-round bye in elimination rounds, like in most mainstream competitive sports tournaments. But FFG's philosophy is to run tournaments in as few rounds as is mathematically possible, and still have a cut. If you grant elimination byes then it adds at least one round, if not two to implement properly. It would also be great if the cut was more "intelligent" so it would be a cleaner cut... but again this increases the number of rounds required, and would require FFG to do some math. The only math that I feel confident FFG can do is "financial engineering" at the corporate level.

Incidentally, related to the discussion of it potentially having been a 'clean cut' out to #32 at Worlds, back in 2015 (the only year I went to Worlds), I was #20 in a Top 16 cut. I got no FFG swag from being 6-2. Even Wade Piche was lamenting about the prize support only extending to Top 16. Top 32 would have been a 'clean' cut, in that #32 had 30 tournament points, and #33 had 29 tournament points.

Related to this entire discussion, getting less than full tournament points for a win back in the day was a really bad idea. At least that got fixed. So here's another story of mine, try and peel away how many things are wrong with the scoring system in this example! Store kit tournament, 20-something or 30-something people. I go undefeated on the day, 5 games, but I don't make the cut. 3 games I had full wins. OK great. But one game I had a modified win (3 points). And another game, ended in a tie so I only got one point. The kicker is that in the draw game, it was my full health stresshog vs his 1 hull stresshog. And, the 'game state' for scoring purposes can't know this, but my stresshog was unstressed, and his had a ton of stress, and was going to fly off the board next turn. Game ended at time, naturally. So, I ended up with 19 tournament points. I think I beat two of the 4-1s, but I can't remember now. In any event, there ended up being four 4-1s, which all had 20 tournament points. The eventual tournament winner lost his game in round 5; if he had won then it would have bumped one of the 4-1s down to 3-2, and I would have made the cut.

My other pet peeve is how MoV is calculated in a game that goes to time. The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing, and in X-wing tournament play the main thing is to figure out who actually won the game. MoV is important, but secondary. Because point fortresses give up zero points until they're totally off the board, the "wrong" player is frequently awarded the win. Most people understand that this has a distortion effect on the meta as a whole (Miranda everywhere, yay!). But it also impacts the tactics within a particular game. If you know you have a temporary points advantage, you can slow play to force the other player into having to make a bad engagement, because otherwise they lose by default. It can still happen even with half points on large base ships. It happened to me in my 2nd loss at Worlds - it wasn't necessarily the reason I lost, but as soon as the other player gained an advantage his play sped WAAAY up.

Well, naturally, but you might be a Pats fan, so...

54 minutes ago, Scopes said:

Well, naturally, but you might be a Pats fan, so...

Season tickets since 1990!

They were terrible then - really really terrible. But yes, I have been able to see a lot of home playoff games since the Brady/Belichick era. It still seems surreal.

9 hours ago, MajorJuggler said:

Season tickets since 1990!

They were terrible then - really really terrible. But yes, I have been able to see a lot of home playoff games since the Brady/Belichick era. It still seems surreal.

I still have my Steve Grogan jersey. And it still fits...kinda.

I used to go to their football camps they'd put on at Kearney Gym on the campus of URI when I was a kid. Alas, though, I've never been to a game. Alabama is a bit too far away to make it to Foxboro, although I have hopes to get over to Jacksonville or Atlanta at some point.

17 hours ago, MajorJuggler said:

I have long been a proponent of granting the best players in Swiss a first-round bye in elimination rounds, like in most mainstream competitive sports tournaments. But FFG's philosophy is to run tournaments in as few rounds as is mathematically possible, and still have a cut. If you grant elimination byes then it adds at least one round, if not two to implement properly. It would also be great if the cut was more "intelligent" so it would be a cleaner cut... but again this increases the number of rounds required, and would require FFG to do some math. The only math that I feel confident FFG can do is "financial engineering" at the corporate level.

Incidentally, related to the discussion of it potentially having been a 'clean cut' out to #32 at Worlds, back in 2015 (the only year I went to Worlds), I was #20 in a Top 16 cut. I got no FFG swag from being 6-2. Even Wade Piche was lamenting about the prize support only extending to Top 16. Top 32 would have been a 'clean' cut, in that #32 had 30 tournament points, and #33 had 29 tournament points.

Related to this entire discussion, getting less than full tournament points for a win back in the day was a really bad idea. At least that got fixed. So here's another story of mine, try and peel away how many things are wrong with the scoring system in this example! Store kit tournament, 20-something or 30-something people. I go undefeated on the day, 5 games, but I don't make the cut. 3 games I had full wins. OK great. But one game I had a modified win (3 points). And another game, ended in a tie so I only got one point. The kicker is that in the draw game, it was my full health stresshog vs his 1 hull stresshog. And, the 'game state' for scoring purposes can't know this, but my stresshog was unstressed, and his had a ton of stress, and was going to fly off the board next turn. Game ended at time, naturally. So, I ended up with 19 tournament points. I think I beat two of the 4-1s, but I can't remember now. In any event, there ended up being four 4-1s, which all had 20 tournament points. The eventual tournament winner lost his game in round 5; if he had won then it would have bumped one of the 4-1s down to 3-2, and I would have made the cut.

My other pet peeve is how MoV is calculated in a game that goes to time. The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing, and in X-wing tournament play the main thing is to figure out who actually won the game. MoV is important, but secondary. Because point fortresses give up zero points until they're totally off the board, the "wrong" player is frequently awarded the win. Most people understand that this has a distortion effect on the meta as a whole (Miranda everywhere, yay!). But it also impacts the tactics within a particular game. If you know you have a temporary points advantage, you can slow play to force the other player into having to make a bad engagement, because otherwise they lose by default. It can still happen even with half points on large base ships. It happened to me in my 2nd loss at Worlds - it wasn't necessarily the reason I lost, but as soon as the other player gained an advantage his play sped WAAAY up.

The tournament scoring is so frustrating. It used to be even worse of course, but it feels like more things are being done wrong than correctly, and many of them are pretty trivial to fix. At least we aren't stuck with mod wins for no reason anymore?

16 hours ago, Jeff Wilder said:

I guess I don't really understand why changes in tactics due to time limits are automatically bad. (It's easy to create thematic justifications: "If you can hold this sector for a little over an hour, our supplies will make it through!")

Slow-playing is bad -- I've had in done to me in some pretty high-profile games -- but that's just a truism. It isn't the time-limit that makes people slow-play, it's just basic douchedom. Like Jeff Goldblum's famous quote: "Douchiness ... finds a way."

Well, the main problem is the current tournament structure encourages "douchey" play, where like Juggler said you can force an opponent to make poor tactical decisions because you can limit the total number of turns played, because the scoring measurement is such low resolution.

2 hours ago, Brunas said:

Well, the main problem is the current tournament structure encourages "douchey" play, where like Juggler said you can force an opponent to make poor tactical decisions because you can limit the total number of turns played, because the scoring measurement is such low resolution.

But they're not "poor tactical decisions," give the time-limit (which is not a surprise to either player), are they? They're correct tactical decisions, arising out of earlier tactical decisions (such as not engaging aggressively enough, perhaps).

It's like saying that having to stay on the 3x3 mat poor "forces an opponent to make poor tactical decisions." It's a game parameter that is necessary and agreed to, so tactics need to be adjusted to conform, by all players.

I get that (maybe? for some players' preferences?) it would be ideal to play all games to completion, but X-Wing simply wasn't designed as a competition-level game, so there have to be compromises. 75 minutes seems like an okay one to me.

39 minutes ago, Jeff Wilder said:

But they're not "poor tactical decisions," give the time-limit (which is not a surprise to either player), are they? They're correct tactical decisions, arising out of earlier tactical decisions (such as not engaging aggressively enough, perhaps).

It's not the time limit that's forcing the poor tactical decisions, as you say that's a known constant. Rather it's the sometimes drastic and abrupt change in the number of expected turns that will fit into that remaining time that leads to poor decisions. If we're playing at a rate of 1 turn every 6 minutes for the majority of the game and there are 20 minutes left I may feel pretty confident that I'll have 3-4 turns to disengage group up and come in at a more advantageous angle. But then suddenly after turning away my opponent starts taking much longer to waffle about his dials and tokens and activation etc and now I've only got 2 turns of actual play which means my ships are out of position and the game is a likely loss.

27 minutes ago, Makaze said:

If we're playing at a rate of 1 turn every 6 minutes for the majority of the game and there are 20 minutes left I may feel pretty confident that I'll have 3-4 turns to disengage group up and come in at a more advantageous angle. But then suddenly after turning away my opponent starts taking much longer to waffle about his dials and tokens and activation etc and now I've only got 2 turns of actual play which means my ships are out of position and the game is a likely loss.

I get that, but that's not a function of the time limit, that's a function of slow-play. I agree that needs to be addressed, and no, I don't really know how. This is one of those areas where there can't really be a workable bright-line solution, so you need competent TOs, exercising good discretion. (The below is not an example of that, BTW.)

A couple of weeks ago, I heard this story, from someone I trust to be objective, about a recent Store Championship:

Hero is behind, needs to kill a ship to take the lead. There are three minutes left, since the last turn ended. Both players are into the Planning Phase. The villain's ship has 1 HP left. There is, roughly, a 95% chance it dies in the final(?) round. I can't remember if this is to make the cut, or if it's in the cut, but it's late in the tournament.

The villain literally says, "What happens if I just don't place dials?" And then, to the horror of the Hero, the Villain just doesn't place dials. Time is called. The Hero calls for the TO. Remember, this is a Store Championship event. The TO says, "Time has been called. The round hasn't started. Score things as they are now and report it." The Hero objected, and although I wasn't there, my knowledge of the Hero would be that he objected calmly and rationally. Because of course the round started as soon as the End Phase ended on the previous turn. He was overruled.

Douchiness. Finds. A way.)

EDIT: Mis-remembered. Was a SC; corrected.

1 hour ago, Jeff Wilder said:

I get that, but that's not a function of the time limit, that's a function of slow-play. I agree that needs to be addressed, and no, I don't really know how. This is one of those areas where there can't really be a workable bright-line solution, so you need competent TOs, exercising good discretion. (The below is not an example of that, BTW.)

A couple of weeks ago, I heard this story, from someone I trust to be objective, about a recent Store Championship:

Hero is behind, needs to kill a ship to take the lead. There are three minutes left, since the last turn ended. Both players are into the Planning Phase. The villain's ship has 1 HP left. There is, roughly, a 95% chance it dies in the final(?) round. I can't remember if this is to make the cut, or if it's in the cut, but it's late in the tournament.

The villain literally says, "What happens if I just don't place dials?" And then, to the horror of the Hero, the Villain just doesn't place dials. Time is called. The Hero calls for the TO. Remember, this is a Store Championship event. The TO says, "Time has been called. The round hasn't started. Score things as they are now and report it." The Hero objected, and although I wasn't there, my knowledge of the Hero would be that he objected calmly and rationally. Because of course the round started as soon as the End Phase ended on the previous turn. He was overruled.

Douchiness. Finds. A way.)

EDIT: Mis-remembered. Was a SC; corrected.

This is neither here nor there in regards to this threads original discussions, but in regards to your story, iI do want to point out...

It sounds like the logical explanation of:

"Per the rules, the Planning Phase is the start of a round. We have been in the planning phase for 3 minutes."

Would have cleared that up.

Sounds like the TO just didn't understand what constitutes the start of a round

And/or, the Hero should have explained that same thing to the Villain.

"Since the last round has ended and we are in the Planning Phase we technically have already started a new round and we will have to complete it."

It's the same argument people use for citing missed End Phase oppurtunities.

"You've already started placing dials, we are passed the End Phase and have started the Planning Phase of the next round."

29 minutes ago, phild0 said:

It sounds like the logical explanation of: "Per the rules, the Planning Phase is the start of a round. We have been in the planning phase for 3 minutes." Would have cleared that up.

You'd think. Yet it didn't.

Quote

And/or, the Hero should have explained that same thing to the Villain. "Since the last round has ended and we are in the Planning Phase we technically have already started a new round and we will have to complete it."

... The same guy who actually said, out loud, "What if I don't place my dials?" and then didn't?

Douchiness always finds a way.

That was entirely a wrong call on the TOs part.