56 minutes ago, Khift said:

I'm sorry man, but you need to give it up. It's over. The claim has been tested. The distributions are identical to distributions derived from the same grand population. There's really nothing left to argue, short of you digging up more tournament data and doing further analysis yourself. You're welcome to do so, but I doubt it'll change anything. At this point you're just tilting at windmills.

Ok, THIS is laughable. I can prove to you that the populations are not the same.

Look at the distribution of clans from Day 1.

Now look at the distribution of clans from Day 2.

*Drops mike*.

2 minutes ago, Bazleebub said:

My argument is that you've completed an ANOVA to show that the number of Apples doesn't differ from the number of Oranges. You are correct that the numbers in each group are the same, but you need to be aware that the units in each group count different things. I'm not saying FFG have done a good job and I'm not making any suggestion on how best to proceed. I actually believe your core point, that the current system is flawed, is correct but your admittedly excellent stats are based on a flawed assumption.

Sure, but the assumption of equal skill has already been made. It's already inherent in how this tournament is being run. We can challenge that, fine, and maybe it even should be challenged - but doing so leaves us even worse off than before because there are only two rounds in day 2 and that's insufficient to do any kind of sorting.

The ANOVA was very specifically to counter the claim that SOS would be higher, lower, or somehow vaguely 'different' in one flight as opposed to another. That claim, if true, would actually be a reason to wipe SOS but keep tournament points. But it wasn't true, and that's what was shown. Unfortunately I didn't make that entirely clear as honestly I thought I'd shown quite cleanly that an argument based on skill difference doesn't have any weight as a reason to support FFG's decisions.

8 minutes ago, Casanunda said:

Ok, THIS is laughable. I can prove to you that the populations are not the same.

Look at the distribution of clans from Day 1.

Now look at the distribution of clans from Day 2.

*Drops mike*.

That doesn't prove nearly as much as you think it would. If you take a random sampling of L5R players out of the general population you're still going to get a different distribution of clans each sample. In fact, that's almost exactly what happened to create these distributions, if you ignore Hatamotos who make up a pretty small chunk of the total players.

1 minute ago, Khift said:

That doesn't prove nearly as much as you think it would. If you take a random sampling of L5R players out of the general population you're still going to get a different distribution of clans each sample.

Ok, let me ask you this; do you believe that a clan has a better or poorer matchup versus certain clans? Is it possible for winning percentage to be a function of opposing clan, even assuming equal skill level?

Just now, Casanunda said:

Ok, let me ask you this; do you believe that a clan has a better or poorer matchup versus certain clans? Is it possible for winning percentage to be a function of opposing clan, even assuming equal skill level?

Your leading question does not change the fact that 94ish percent of the field is actually seeded randomly from the same population.

And it even more woefully fails to create an argument that SOS should be wiped but tournament points should be kept.

I miss the good old days when we argued about whether katana are straight or curved.

I think the only way to settle this fairly is for us to gather up in a circle and all put our feet in the middle......

Eenie meanie miney moe catch a tiger by the toe........

2 minutes ago, Ishi Tonu said:

I miss the good old days when we argued about whether katana are straight or curved.

I think the only way to settle this fairly is for us to gather up in a circle and all put our feet in the middle......

Eenie meanie miney now catch a tiger by the toe........

We're not even on topic any more, honestly. We went so far down the rabbit hole that we lost ourselves.

The topic at hand is what's the fairest way to handle a tournament with three flights of 6 rounds each with a graduated cut into a 2 round flight which cuts into a Top 16 (+7) single elimination bracket. And on that topic I have not seen an argument against keeping SOS that doesn't fall down. Everything else put forward involves either changing the schedule of the tournament to allow more rounds in day 2 or can be shown to not be accurate. In a perfect world, sure, it'd be better to have Saturday be 6 rounds of swiss starting from scratch, leading into a 25+7 single elimination bracket on Sunday, but that's not what happened. Maybe next year will be better.

If someone has a better way, I'd like to hear it, and hear why.

I lol at semantics thread. Agree on definitions across esoteric disciplines or no one gets anywhere.

Wittgenstein rolls his eyes in his grave.

In other news, they should keep all standings and SOS or reset everything. Halvesies just seems silly.

Having a tournament that includes players who have no possibility of winning is moronic, plain and simple.

If they wanted to support story, clan, and other additional elements FFG could have run a secondary tournament for that. NCAA March madness, for all it's flaws, is a much better model. You have your main bracket and then an NIT secondary bracket for the next tier. Moving on the the final 16, they also have a much better methodology for reducing the field (top 16 + other clans) to a number divisible by 4 (16 in this case) with an elimination round for those on the bubble.

I know it is a bitter pill to think sports people have it over gamers but FFG needs to deal with it.

3 minutes ago, Khift said:

or can be shown to not be accurate

Well, SoS is never really going to be "accurate" anyways; when you're only playing 8 games, luck plays a pretty major factor in your results. It's hard to say that one person deserves to make the cut as opposed to another just because they *supposedly* played the better players. I mean, how do we know that a person who had a lower SoS couldn't have beaten the same players as a person with higher SoS? It's just luck of the draw, really. I'm not sure what else could be used as a tiebreaker, but in a short tournament like this, your placing does not necessarily represent how good you are. SoS is fairer than randomly determining the draw, but not by much.

The point being, tournaments are occasionally unfair. You just have to deal with it.

4 minutes ago, Casanunda said:

Well, SoS is never really going to be "accurate" anyways; when you're only playing 8 games, luck plays a pretty major factor in your results. It's hard to say that one person deserves to make the cut as opposed to another just because they *supposedly* played the better players. I mean, how do we know that a person who had a lower SoS couldn't have beaten the same players as a person with higher SoS? It's just luck of the draw, really. I'm not sure what else could be used as a tiebreaker, but in a short tournament like this, your placing does not necessarily represent how good you are. SoS is fairer than randomly determining the draw, but not by much.

The point being, tournaments are occasionally unfair. You just have to deal with it.

Of course, no tiebreaker is ever going to accurately rank people, it's all approximation once you get to evaluating the better of two people who never played. But, I also have a hard time accepting that 2 rounds of SOS is going to be more accurate than 8 rounds would be on average. So, barring some yet unspoken argument that sinks the ability to inherit SOS across days but doesn't sink the ability to inherit tournament points across days, would 8 rounds of SOS not be better than 2?

26 minutes ago, Khift said:

Sure, but the assumption of equal skill has already been made. It's already inherent in how this tournament is being run. We can challenge that, fine, and maybe it even should be challenged - but doing so leaves us even worse off than before because there are only two rounds in day 2 and that's insufficient to do any kind of sorting.

The ANOVA was very specifically to counter the claim that SOS would be higher, lower, or somehow vaguely 'different' in one flight as opposed to another. That claim, if true, would actually be a reason to wipe SOS but keep tournament points. But it wasn't true, and that's what was shown. Unfortunately I didn't make that entirely clear as honestly I thought I'd shown quite cleanly that an argument based on skill difference doesn't have any weight as a reason to support FFG's decisions.

This is a problem.

• First we're assuming the groups are of equal skill.
• Based on that assumption we use an ANOVA that proves that groups are not different.
• We then conclude that the groups are of equal skill?

It isn't just skill either, SOS essentially is a measure of how difficult your opponents were. So clans ratios, deck quality, player skill, room noise, number of rounds, time of rounds, etc. can all influence SOS. Lots of those can you can pretty certain aren't going to vary. You can make all sorts of assumptions and draw conclusions from the data, but when you make an assumption to prove that assumption you're proving nothing.

If FFG decided that there may have been a difference between the groups that is a valid decision. You certainly can make an argument that there was a random selection, but the late addition of the Day 1Z made a mess of that as it would have included less Hatamoto and more players with less interest in the L5R tournament compared to other games.

You've been treating this like posting some statistics is a slam dunk, that's pretty intimidating for someone who doesn't understand whats happening but even statistical analysis can be misused. I'm not sure how much clearer I can be on this, so I'm going to drop out of this conversation. As I said before, I agree with your core argument that there are issues with the current approach, but not the reasoning to get there.

15 minutes ago, Khift said:

We're not even on topic any more, honestly. We went so far down the rabbit hole that we lost ourselves.

The topic at hand is what's the fairest way to handle a tournament with three flights of 6 rounds each with a graduated cut into a 2 round flight which cuts into a Top 16 (+7) single elimination bracket. And on that topic I have not seen an argument against keeping SOS that doesn't fall down. Everything else put forward involves either changing the schedule of the tournament to allow more rounds in day 2 or can be shown to not be accurate. In a perfect world, sure, it'd be better to have Saturday be 6 rounds of swiss starting from scratch, leading into a 25+7 single elimination bracket on Sunday, but that's not what happened. Maybe next year will be better.

If someone has a better way, I'd like to hear it, and hear why.

If I'm reading your OP correctly, the complaint is that 4-2 competitors have no chance of winning top prize - yet still get to compete?

So what? And I don't mean that in a mean-spirited way. If I'm told those who won more games than me are the ones fighting for top spot, I can accept that. If I'm told I still get to play for other prizes, I'm happy with that too. I've competed in tournaments with "winners" and "losers" brackets. I'll still compete hard in the "loser" bracket even though I can't win 1st place. Pride, other prizes, being a part of the experience, actually gaining more experience, etc.

4 minutes ago, Bazleebub said:

This is a problem.

• First we're assuming the groups are of equal skill.
• Based on that assumption we use an ANOVA that proves that groups are not different.
• We then conclude that the groups are of equal skill?

It isn't just skill either, SOS essentially is a measure of how difficult your opponents were. So clans ratios, deck quality, player skill, room noise, number of rounds, time of rounds, etc. can all influence SOS. Lots of those can you can pretty certain aren't going to vary. You can make all sorts of assumptions and draw conclusions from the data, but when you make an assumption to prove that assumption you're proving nothing.

If FFG decided that there may have been a difference between the groups that is a valid decision. You certainly can make an argument that there was a random selection, but the late addition of the Day 1Z made a mess of that as it would have included less Hatamoto and more players with less interest in the L5R tournament compared to other games.

You've been treating this like posting some statistics is a slam dunk, that's pretty intimidating for someone who doesn't understand whats happening but even statistical analysis can be misused. I'm not sure how much clearer I can be on this, so I'm going to drop out of this conversation. As I said before, I agree with your core argument that there are issues with the current approach, but not the reasoning to get there.

The ANOVA was never to show that groups are not different in skill or different in challenge. The ANOVA was to show that SOS itself does not change in shape or distribution based on player count, which is a claim that was actually made and if true would be very relevant. All the ANOVA was used to show is that SOS across the groups are interchangeable assuming everything it is calculated by remains the same, which must be true in order to inherit tournament points fairly as well.

You didn't even read the second paragraph of my post, which is really quite disappointing.

2 minutes ago, Shu2jack said:

If I'm reading your OP correctly, the complaint is that 4-2 competitors have no chance of winning top prize - yet still get to compete?

So what? And I don't mean that in a mean-spirited way. If I'm told those who won more games than me are the ones fighting for top spot, I can accept that. If I'm told I still get to play for other prizes, I'm happy with that too. I've competed in tournaments with "winners" and "losers" brackets. I'll still compete hard in the "loser" bracket even though I can't win 1st place. Pride, other prizes, being a part of the experience, actually gaining more experience, etc.

The issue is that the people who are 4-2 don't know this. It's not an apparent outcome, in fact the opposite is the default assumption. I've spoken to several people who are themselves 4-2 and they've all been really let down by me informing them this. I guarantee you there are more who don't know this result and are going in with false hope. And I do think that there's an element of cruelty in that, to imply that someone can achieve something (by letting them in the cut), but have it actually be effectively impossible.

It's also not the only issue with the situation, either. The 5-1 players who go 6-2 are going to make or miss the cut entirely off of a coin flip. Like, that's not a tie breaker, that's just randomly determining who gets in and who doesn't. It only pretends to be a tiebreaker.

1 minute ago, Khift said:

The issue is that the people who are 4-2 don't know this. It's not an apparent outcome, in fact the opposite is the default assumption. I've spoken to several people who are themselves 4-2 and they've all been really let down by me informing them this. I guarantee you there are more who don't know this result and are going in with false hope. And I do think that there's an element of cruelty in that, to imply that someone can achieve something (by letting them in the cut), but have it actually be effectively impossible.

It's also not the only issue with the situation, either. The 5-1 players who go 6-2 are going to make or miss the cut entirely off of a coin flip. Like, that's not a tie breaker, that's just randomly determining who gets in and who doesn't. It only pretends to be a tiebreaker.

Well that is easily fixed - better communication about how the system works.

I don't know about other sports, but in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and other grappling tournaments a Referee Decision as a tiebreaker can feel sucky. Especially when you don't agree with the Referee's perception or logic. I'll tell any competitor in any sport - if you want to win, then win. Don't leave it chance (tie-breaker, judge's decision, or otherwise).

TL;DR Have the condiments been mentioned yet?

14 hours ago, Khift said:

Two rounds only sorts to the top 25 players, though, which is greater than the Top16 cut, which is what leads to these issues.

Huh, almost as if... they could add in 7 clan challengers... and get a cut to 32.

@Khift

I'm not sure I understood everything, but the way I read this whole debate could be broken down like this:

Preliminary Observation: Going into the latest two rounds with a 4-2 record and a blank SoS gives you almost no chances of making the cut. => Proved mathemathically by Khift in the OP.

Khift's Thesis: Blanking SoS is not the correct course of action. A correct choice would be either resetting the score for Day 2 (which is unfeasible for obvious reasons) or carrying SoS over from the first 6 rounds.

Reasoning:

1) Points awarded for win/loss are dependant upon your results and the population they've been obtained into.

2) Strenght of schedule is dependant upon your results, the population and the results of the people you've played against (thus you do not have complete control over it, but that's another concern).

3) Strenght of schedule aims to reflect the fact that some players had a rougher schedule than others, thus adjusting the value of the points gained during the tournament to *hopefully* reflect each player's performance more accurately. Thus, SoS is an integral part of the score.

4) Either the scoring holds its value for the final 2 rounds or it doesn't. We are assuming it does.

Conclusion:

There is not a solid reason to disregard during the final 2 rounds the merit a given player has accured by having a very rough schedule for their previous games. Even worse, there is no reason to do it when it means having people playing in a competition when they know that they don't have any hope of winning - which is cruel towards them.

To counter an objection which I think has been raised in a previous post: The fact that the population was different for each of the three days (and that the skill levels might have been different amongst the three) might constitute a solid basis to criticise the structure of the tournament. However, this criticism cannot be aimed solely at one of the two elements (SoS in this case) since they were both (score and SoS) obtained in the same environment, thus they are both skewed by the difference in the population or neither is.

15 hours ago, Eu8L1ch said:

To counter an objection which I think has been raised in a previous post: The fact that the population was different for each of the three days (and that the skill levels might have been different amongst the three) might constitute a solid basis to criticise the structure of the tournament. However, this criticism cannot be aimed solely at one of the two elements (SoS in this case) since they were both (score and SoS) obtained in the same environment, thus they are both skewed by the difference in the population or neither is.

To further this, I'll bring up the AGoT tournament, which used a similar structure: 6 rounds in multiple qualifiers on day 1, with a qualifying threshold of 4-2, followed by 2 more rounds on day 2, with a cut to top 16 (no additional challengers). The main difference between the 2 games was attendance. With fewer qualified players, at the end of day 2, only 2 players with 6-2 were out of the top 16. So my conclusion is that L5R needed more rounds, regardless of what was done with the SoS.

However, note that the final day 2 rankings relied heavily upon ESoS, because SoS wasn't discriminating enough (see below). This is an additional point in favor of keeping the SoS.

I think what FFG is missing is a true "play-in" round to trim to the desired number of players that will make up a playoff bracket. Instead of just continuing Swiss rounds by mashing everyone up from the three pools and pairing like records they should do something similar to what AEG did with the X-2 cut.

Anyone that got the required w-l record, or in this case, points total is in. Then you take all the players that made the cut and pair them off by seeding best scores vs worst scores. If you have a number of players that cannot be bracketed to immediately start the playoffs you award byes to the top seeded players until you balance out the brackets.

For example:

Let's say 38 people make the cut. You would trim to a 32 person bracket. The bottom 12 players would battle for the last 6 spots. Once you have a definitive 32 player pool you bracket them up like you would see in a sports playoff.

@Ishi Tonu That doesn't work so well when you have 113 qualified players, which would result in a top 64 after the play-in round (with 98 players battling for 49 spots), for a total of 13 rounds (6 qualifying, play-in, and 6 more). You'd need more rounds before the play-in to get a more reasonably-sized cut.

47 minutes ago, Khudzlin said:

@Ishi Tonu That doesn't work so well when you have 113 qualified players, which would result in a top 64 after the play-in round (with 98 players battling for 49 spots), for a total of 13 rounds (6 qualifying, play-in, and 6 more). You'd need more rounds before the play-in to get a more reasonably-sized cut.

That's when you move up to a round with 128 to start and give the top 15 players a bye

That makes 7 elimination rounds vs 6 swiss rounds. The ratio is way out of whack.

10 minutes ago, Khudzlin said:

That makes 7 elimination rounds vs 6 swiss rounds. The ratio is way out of whack.

Sorry I was being snarky while tired.

By pairing down to 64 you're still at the same number of rounds as you would have had if you played 2 additional Swiss rounds. 2 rounds of Swiss and cut to the top 16 is same as a bracket where it's single elim and keeps getting halved.

Only difference is players with a 4-2 record in day one actually have a chance.

Again apologies for the snark. I'm desperate need of a nap.