Aliveif i had a choice i would prefer to play in the main event or have a chance to play there than the silver league
WC2020 Questions & Feedback
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robo
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InfluenzaThese "group stage" settings are ridiculous. How did you guys devise a setting where a team can proceed from the group stage without ever having played vs the top team of that group? Who even comes up with this ****?
So what is your suggestion? To keep using the godawful Round Robin, where in the final round to qualify a team must play a team which has already qualified or is already eliminated?
If a team can beat the third and fourth best team aren't they the second best team in the group? Why would they need to play against the best team in the group to qualify as second seed?
Probably just dissonance with people thinking standings are treated like RL WC group stage w/ minor modification ie: round robin best total W/L goes thru. Don't really understand why it's something to rage about.
To make that work theoretically could add some sort of playoff BO3 if there is a tie end of standings since no ties like in futbol/soccer.
I think the current modified choice/method is smoother for scheduling/eliminates ambiguities so it's what they went with instead.
To make that work theoretically could add some sort of playoff BO3 if there is a tie end of standings since no ties like in futbol/soccer.
I think the current modified choice/method is smoother for scheduling/eliminates ambiguities so it's what they went with instead.
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These settings prioritize "viewer hype" over competitive fairness which I consider to be awful. Consider this very possible hypothetical situation:
Two closely matched teams, team B and team C in a group fighting for the 2nd spot, with the top team being significantly better than both, and a 4th team being significantly worse.
They play in round 1 and B beats C 3-0. They lose/win the next rounds respectively and meet again in round 3 and team B loses 2-3. The overall score between the two teams is 5-3 in favor of team B, yet team C will move on to the next round. How the hell is this ok? It's not, never put this garbage in a tournament ever again.
Did I misunderstand something in the settings? Is that really how it is? Jeez it sounds even worse when I typed it all out
One thing I'd love if it'd get adressed is the match results being shown on aoe2.net even before they are casted. I frankly didn't expect that it'd be the case for some sets and accidentaly spoiled myself the results of one set when I wanted to check one participant's ELO.
Just looking through aoe2.net it seems like a solid chunk of sets are displayed there alongside all recs. I guess it depends on some lobby setting or something?
Just looking through aoe2.net it seems like a solid chunk of sets are displayed there alongside all recs. I guess it depends on some lobby setting or something?
I heard you were talking smack about the clearly superior GSL format!
And now seriously for a change:
This format really isn't hard to grasp it's just a tiny double elim bracket without the finals - win two matches and you are through, lose two matches and you are out.
Now for the example you gave:
1. "Two closely matched teams" and "They play in round 1 and B beats C 3-0" don't go together
2. Adapting to one team's strategy and analyzing the games is a thing you know and it's also a skill in itself. Now you are more than free to like that or hate that but statements like "never put this garbage in a tournament ever again" aren't okay imo. Please realize that a tournament format can't simply produce upsets and bs on it's own (unless we are literally talking bo1s) unless a team overperforms or underperforms. At the end of the day you still have at least two bo5s to play out.
Now for the advantages of the GSL format:
- it saves one match over a round robin and tbh that's good both for players and for the viewers. In case of WC2020 it would add a whole another week to the length ot the tournament
- every single match matters - opening matches matter because you need to win those to advance from the first place, in the other three matches it's obvious what you are fighting for. That makes GSL style better than round robin in terms of viewer experience by A LOT. "Oh yeah there is a 6th match happening but the result doesn't matter" - let's not have that, shall we?
And if you want someone to blame for popularizing the GSL itself, blame me and Ornlu because we've introduced it during OBNC. Now OBNC wasn't popular at all but the TOs (namely Robo) have eyes everywhere (namely - he played in the tournament XD).
...come to think of it, you were playing in the OBNC as well and I don't remember you bringing up the points you are making now. If you were really a warrior of competitive integrity, wouldn't you bring that up no matter the size of the tournament?
If B loses to C they wont advance even if they won more games in total in the other series. It makes sense when you think about it. You also not gonna say: oh Viper lost to Lierrey in the grand final of the tournament but Viper won more games in the earlier rounds so lets declare Viper the better player and give him the win.
Just want to say that this can easily go together, as the total score doesn't say anything about how close the matches themself were. They could have had 3 matches that were incredibly close but team B were just able to edge out team C in the end due to any number of reasons. The final score looks like a complete stomp while in reality all games could be very close.
Other than that, I really like this format, please keep it for future tournaments. Keeps most matches interesting, which is less so the case in a RR format, while still providing quite a large amount of games to cast.
Regardless of the format, Flu will find a way to complain like it's the worst thing ever as if his life had been ruined by it.
I agree that competitiveness takes priority over viewer hype, but GSL is way more competitive than Round Robin. In Round Robin you have ties or situations where a team that has nothing to play for decides which team qualifies, what's competitive about that?
So now you bring up a totally different argument? What does this have to do with Team C not having played against Team A?
Regarding this argument, I'd say that in a lot of cases a similar thing happens. If you had a group stage and two teams meet again in the quarterfinals or semifinals, the team that wins that will go on, even if they have overall lost more games against that team. The same also happened in BoA1 Swiss Stage, where SY had to win against LoS twice to qualify for the playoffs, but where only the second result would've counted. It's also common in Double Elimination Stages, and once again, only the last result counted.
Having said that, I somewhat agree with you though, it still feels a bit weird that a team wins once and loses once against an opponent will get through, while the other team will go out. Maybe an idea to make it a bit more fair is to have the final series as a best of 7 instead of a best of 5, so that hopefully it's a bit more clear that the team that wins that set was indeed the better team. You could also extend the bo5 to a bo7 in case the team from the winners match is losing the bo5.
I don't think a whole week will be saved. In a round robin, you would have 3 weeks of 16 series, while in GSL you have two weeks of 16 series and 1 week of 8 series, but it will still be 3 weeks total.
As the GSL groups are becoming more popular (KotD and here and I think BOA2?), I made an account to post my thoughts.
I understand the benefits of using a GSL system (less games needed, no "worthless" games means more exciting to the viewers), but in the situation that Influenza mentions does it not seem extremely competitively unfair that B gets an "automatic" (I use quotes because while they always have a chance, in the extreme situation he has posted it should be near automatic) loss against A and C gets an "automatic" win against D, while they split against each other. Yet C goes through because they won the second match?
Would not a "fair" solution be that in the case of rematch decider games to utilize the overall score between the teams to decide who advances as the teams are essentially playing a best of (up to) 10 (two best of 5s).? And in the case of a tie there (i.e. B wins 3-2 in the first match and C wins 3-2 in the second match), use either:
- The second match as the tiebreaker. Therefore more importance is still applied to the later of the two matches, but the overall score between the two players/teams is most important. Which, to me, seems more fair as we are comparing two group stage matchups and not comparing a group stage to a knockout stage match.
- Or play an extra game to make it a best of 11 between the 2 teams?
The drawback of this, of course, would be that you could have B win 3-0 and then only need to win 1 game in the decider to advance 1-3 (4-3). But we get these situations all the time in soccer with the home and home fixtures, where one team can win big in the first game and only need to keep it close in the second to advance, which is competitively still fair as they won the overall fixture between the two teams.
The big benefit being that all matches are still relevant but you don't get the extreme disadvantage of having to play the best team while you opponent gets to play the worst team and at most you are adding one extra game to each group as opposed to an extra series that a competitively fair (i.e. all strength of schedules are equal), but possibly less interesting round robin would provide.
Or as you mentioned making rematches a best of 7 instead of best of 5 would therefore fix the problem of the rematch being way more important than the first match as it should be with a longer series. This would of course be up to two extra games over what we have now, which would be closer to timeframe of a round robin that GSL is meant to help shorten.
Obviously if there is no rematch, then this is were the GSL really shines as the teams in the decider would have played equal opponents and therefore the winner there should move on.
Again, just trying to add my thoughts. Overall, I still enjoy all the tournaments, and am enjoying the World Cup so far, even if some fringe cases do seem unfair to me.
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Of course they do. Just because the result is one sided doesn't mean the games were as well.
Two bo5s that play out, the first of which does not even matter in the least in the example I mentioned. Why is the 2nd bo5 so much more important than the first? The better team can be kicked out of the tournament with a better record. Apparently the better team getting kicked out is OK because the viewers think it's cool.
How does the one match saved save a whole week? Why can't the the other two teams also play during the 3rd week? Maybe give the "team with nothing to fight for" something to fight for in terms of seeding in the silver league, or prizes or whatever. Not sure why introducing a blatantly unfair system is the solution here.
I hardly even paid attention to the rules of that tournament. My time was occupied with just trying to get the matches played. I was relegated to the noob league cuz my team didnt show up to the main league qualifiers and I had to start begging the other noob teams just to play vs us and get stomped.
By the way, thanks for mentioning this tournament, really good job on your part! You offered a prize for winning the tiny league, but refused to give it after my team won, all because the other teams were too afraid to continue playing ours after being behind 1-0 and 2-0. Clearly your amazing admin skills in OBNC landed you this job in WC2v2, eh?
It doesn't make any sense at all when I think about it, and I'm confused with how it makes sense to anyone. Why are you comparing the 2nd bo5 with the same exact settings as the first bo5 during the same exact stage of the tournament with a grand final vs an earlier qualifier round. It's a nonsensical comparison.
At least mitigate the disparity in importance of the two rounds by making the first a bo3 and the second a bo5... or something? It would still be unfair but at least somewhat better than this current system
If they have a second series between the same two teams, the winning team from the first set should get an extra home map.
Then maybe the admins should come up with something that encourages the teams to perform well. Apparently representing your country with the matches being streamed to an audience of thousands is not enough. Give better prizes or seedings in the silver league based on the main league group stage performance? something?
Surely there is a better solution than "the third best team in a group can beat the second best team in a group 5-3 and still be the third best team in the group"
It's not a different argument. I explained how the system is blatantly unfair. The obvious solution is to have every team in a group play every other team in a group, like a normal RR group stage
There is clearly more at stake if the same team meets again later in the tournament... if it's at a later stage in the tournament with more matches played to reflect the increased stakes. Which is clearly not what is going on in WC2v2.
In a double elimination it's about avoiding losing twice during the whole event. The team who lost twice during the event first is the one that is first eliminated. Doesn't matter if you beat a team earlier in the double elimination if you still lost twice before they did. Maybe not perfect, but definitely a far more competitively fair system than what I'm criticizing here..
I don't remember enough about the swiss format but sounds like I wouldn't be defending it very heartily based on what you said.
Well, nice to hear that you agree with me about the problems with this format. The settings must reflect the decidedly greater stakes to determine which team deserves to go forward. It's still not perfect, as a team can go through with a 5-6 record, but it is by far the lesser evil.
Te first match matters in the following ways:
- winning it is your only shot at placing 1st
- losing it means you need to win every single match from now on
As for importance, can you easily define the importance of each match in round robin? Because from my point of view it's not that clear. Why does a certain match in a round robin group matters more than another.
It's one additional match per group so two additional days of casting alone + scheduling.
Also you clearly misunderstand my part in all of this. I'm neither an admin for WC2020 nor was I in charge of any prizepool related decisions for OBNC.
The "mini" part is what makes it so unfair. Elimination tournaments typically have longer settings the further the teams go in the competition. i.e. the earlier rounds might be bo3, but later on there will be bo5, bo7, etc. and typically there will be many matches taking place before the same teams play each other again.
This GSL group does not increase the stakes whatsoever. I don't even know what is the purpose of having groups as there is no true point system with no difference between winning 3-0 and 3-2.
In some cases, like in the example i mentioned previously, because of how these groups are devised, the only close matches in the group might be the ones between the 2nd and 3rd place teams. It is complete nonsense to have a team win 5-3 and then be sent to the silver league.
BoA2 used Round Robin, but yeah KotD3, OBNC and this tournament have now used the GSL system, so yeah it's getting a bit more use fortunately.
I don't think this would be a fair solution, I don't think it should matter if you win a series 3-2 or if you win 3-0, a win is a win. Winning a single game could be determined by luck, that's why we play a longer series to make sure that the winner is most likely determined by skill, not luck. Also with homemaps and civ (dis)advantages, a map win shouldn't matter imo.
It would also change the dynamic of the civ draft quite a bit if Team B knows that they only need to win 1 game out of a set of 5. They would just draw the best civs for a single map, making that a near impossible loss instead of carefully drafting civs so you have a shot at each map. Not only would it be incredibly boring for the viewers, it also reduces the competitiveness.
I don't think reducing the timeframe is a problem that GSL solves compared to Round Robin, as only the best and worst team have to play one less series, while the other two teams still have to play the same amount.
Totally agree here and I think this is why GSL worked better in KotD3, where the players in the group were all relatively close, whereas with this tournament some teams are just clear favourites or underdogs, making the scenario where you get rematches in the last round way more likely.
For example in KotD3, only 2/4 series were rematches, but I think we're likely getting a lot more rematches in this tournament due to the larger skill discrepancies.
MaSmOrRaThis actually sounds like a very good idea!
And I seem to remember that’s exactly how most CS:GO tournaments utilize the GSL system.
Definitely something to consider improving in the future.
Just to further show how you are comparing apples and oranges, here is an actual double elimination tournament played a couple years ago:
Notice how the two rematches that occurred in the tournament took place in the Loser Bracket finals and in the Grand Finals, where the settings reflected the higher stakes, bo5 vs bo7 and bo7 vs bo9.
Now compare that with this GSL system, which is designed to have rematches most of the time in the first stage of the tournament, where both matches are a bo5. It's really obvious which system is more competitively fair
This just doesn't work, even if there is some monetary incentive, do you really think the teams will play at the same level if they know they are eliminated or qualified already? For example, why wouldn't Viper and MbL let Gluttony or another third player play if they've already won two series and are assured of getting first place?
As I said in my post above, I don't think it really matters how many games you've won, more about if you won the series, so it would be 1-1. Certainly not ideal, which is why I partially agree with you, but not as bad as you make it seem.
You do realize that GSL IS a double elimination system, just for 4 teams. In a larger double elimination system teams can match twice as well, but you don't care about that? Your argument when it happens in other systems is that it's different because it's a larger series, but you still think it's unfair when it would happen in a GSL Style:
Also I totally disagree with you that GSL is just added for viewer hype and is totally unfair. In Round Robin, if there is a three-way tie the winner can be decided by the performance against the fourth team, who most likely had nothing to play for in the last round, how is that competitive?
Another likely scenario is that the first placed team after two rounds can determine who they want to go through as second place. So how is that competitive?
If you're complaining about GSL that's fine, but at least give an alternative that's more competitive, not one that's the least competitive out of all possible systems.
Just to further show how you are comparing apples and oranges, here is an actual double elimination tournament played a couple years ago:
Notice how the two rematches that occurred in the tournament took place in the Loser Bracket finals and in the Grand Finals, where the settings reflected the higher stakes, bo5 vs bo7 and bo7 vs bo9.
Now compare that with this GSL system, which is designed to have rematches most of the time in the first stage of the tournament, where both matches are a bo5. It's really obvious which system is more competitively fair
Oh I don't believe I was comparing apples to oranges, I was just defending the GSL format itself as you have stigmatized is as "blatantly unfair" and "never put this garbage in a tournament ever again". If you wanna argue specifics then I'll happily do that:
- I think GSL groups aren't suited for the seeding process done in WC2020 simply because ladder RM is so far away from the tournament settings. That's why it worked way better in KotD.
- I think the teams advancing from the first place should have a clear advantage, which is why I think this tournament format's biggest flaw is the way it resolves team per country balance
- More often than not you can't just slap a GSL group into a tournament and call it a day which I believe is what happened here probably because "we want to save on having one more match"
Having said all of the above it's still a better solution than 4 team round robin. It also produces matches that are exctiting to watch, at least from the opening matches onwards. As for what actually would be a better format for WC2020 and how do you go about making a nation based AoE2 event both competitve and fun to watch - that's a complex matter that should be discussed BEFORE events like this one happen and by that I mean weeks or even months in advance. Tournament theory both isn't as simple as it seems and also isn't appreciated by the TOs. Also we have a new format each tournament which really makes it matter even more.
I think an easy to implement improvement in my mind would be to change the seeding that the first-round matches are 1-3 and 2-4. This makes re-matches much less likely and puts the two most likely contender for second place against each other in the decider like it should be. I think the price to pay (a slightly easier path to first place in the group for 2 compared to 1 is worth it, especially when there are eight groups and therefore the differences in skill get larger)
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