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Make Tournament Brackets Flexible


Aard

Question

It doesn't make sense that a tournament is preset to a number of entrants.  Today, 70 people joined a tournament within the first two seconds of it opening and more than half were not allowed to play because it had a 32 cap.  The tournament should go with the highest possible power of 2 that gives the most players possible a chance.  If 70 people join, 64 slots should be assigned.  If 127 people join, still 64 slots, but if 128 join it should bump up the bracket to include 128 players.  Having to play roulette on if your internet and fingers are fast enough in a skill-based game is not fun. 

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Brackets are meant to be static, not dynamic, the prices are usually also according to this, 128 man tours having the best prizes.

So no, as long the rewards are defined way before the tournament even goes into sign ups, like 1 or 2 weeks previous to it, this would not be a possibility.

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8 minutes ago, redspawn said:

Brackets are meant to be static, not dynamic, the prices are usually also according to this, 128 man tours having the best prizes.

So no, as long the rewards are defined way before the tournament even goes into sign ups, like 1 or 2 weeks previous to it, this would not be a possibility.

Shouldn't the prize itself dictate how hard the tournament is to win and not the other way around?  If its a better prize more people will join naturally.  Why does it have to be set in reverse?  As is, the consequence is that some tournaments with lower play caps are actually significantly harder to win than tournaments with higher caps because the barrier to joining gives a higher percent chance of being eliminated than any individual battle would.   

 

Also, how are tournaments handled when less than the predetermined power of 2 number of people join?  Are some people randomly given byes?  If that's the case then the fairness of the tournament comes into question. 

Edited by Aard
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Just now, Aard said:

Shouldn't the prize itself dictate how hard the tournament is to win and not the other way around? 

And what makes a tournament harder to win? 

 

Just now, Aard said:

  If its a better prize more people will join naturally

Well this one is a no brainer.


Also this has never been a problem, I've entered probably 90% of the tours I wanted. All it takes is you to pay attention and just join the second it starts. There's people you see in every tournament aswell, and as you can see, this isn't much of a problem to them either.

And there's also the fact that, they don't want to give rare/uncommon shinies to everyone so the 128 bracket tournaments with good shinies usually don't show up frequently.

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3 minutes ago, redspawn said:

And what makes a tournament harder to win? 

 

Well this one is a no brainer.


Also this has never been a problem, I've entered probably 90% of the tours I wanted. All it takes is you to pay attention and just join the second it starts. There's people you see in every tournament aswell, and as you can see, this isn't much of a problem to them either.

And there's also the fact that, they don't want to give rare/uncommon shinies to everyone so the 128 bracket tournaments with good shinies usually don't show up frequently.

Clicked the second it started today on the lucario tourney and was unable to join.  70 people wanted that lucario, I really can't see a good reason for only letting 32 compete for it.  The market dictated that the lucario was harder to get.  It was still a higher selection bias than expected, just the tournament creators forced it to be a random one rather than an added 64 player round.

 

There was still basically an extra round.  It was just a round decided by  complete luck rather than skill.  I don't think that's in the spirit of the game.

Edited by Aard
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40 minutes ago, redspawn said:

Also this has never been a problem, I've entered probably 90% of the tours I wanted. All it takes is you to pay attention 

“I’ve never had a problem therefore there is no problem”

 

32 man OU tournaments objectively, albeit scarce, are a problem (unless there is a prerequisite to joining e.g. a buy in). 

 

It doesn’t make sense to make a tournament with the smallest bracket size which is a) based in the game’s most popular tier, and b) offers quite a desirable non-shiny prize. 

52 minutes ago, Aard said:

Also, how are tournaments handled when less than the predetermined power of 2 number of people join?  Are some people randomly given byes?  If that's the case then the fairness of the tournament comes into question. 

That’s right. If =<50% of the bracket capacity joins the tournament then it is canceled. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a few tournaments that have only had one R1 battle, with the rest of the contestants receiving a bye

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3 minutes ago, Zymogen said:

32 man OU tournaments objectively, albeit scarce, are a problem (unless there is a prerequisite to joining e.g. a buy in)

Yeah on 32 man tour I can see this being a problem, I honestly didn't even consider them when talking, but yeah, I got to agree on this. Although isn't the CM responsibly for this? I mean, it's not like having an automated system would make things better, better management from the CM side will help, but I guess, that's something they learn with experience(?).

 

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16 minutes ago, redspawn said:

Yeah on 32 man tour I can see this being a problem, I honestly didn't even consider them when talking, but yeah, I got to agree on this. Although isn't the CM responsibly for this? I mean, it's not like having an automated system would make things better, better management from the CM side will help, but I guess, that's something they learn with experience(?).

 

Having an automated bracket would literally makes things better.  The difficulty of getting the prize would equal player demand and the tournament organizers wouldn't have to worry about having to estimate how many people will join a week in advance.  The only two realistic arguments I can see against it are:

 

1) Too hard to code

 

2) People should know how many rounds a tournament will last before joining so they can plan their day better.

 

For #1, I don't know how pokemmo is coded, I do know anywhere else I've seen with tournaments hasn't had a problem.  For #2, I'd argue you can't really know how long each round will last anyway or how far you'll get when you join.  I could see wanting an absolute max hour time, I'd just argue to cap all tournaments at 128 players for constant max of 7 hours.  If you're willing to spend 5 (32 bracket, you're probably willing to spend 7 (128 bracket) or hope it doesn't approach the max.

Edited by Aard
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The prizes for tournaments have been designed according to their bracket size. If the bracket size could be anything I doubt the staff would be ready to give high tier prizes and that would essentially harm everyone. On the flipside, giving a ridiculously bad prize for winning a 256 man bracket doesn't make sense either.

 

Edit: I understand that you could make the brackets flexible in the way of allowing unlimited amount of players and therefor allowing high tier prizes but having some people with a bye is a situation that should be avoided, if possible. And as you stated, uncertainty how long tournament will last (but that is also affected by other things as well).

 

Edited by OrangeManiac
Elaborated.
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55 minutes ago, OrangeManiac said:

The prizes for tournaments have been designed according to their bracket size. If the bracket size could be anything I doubt the staff would be ready to give high tier prizes and that would essentially harm everyone. On the flipside, giving a ridiculously bad prize for winning a 256 man bracket doesn't make sense either.

 

Edit: I understand that you could make the brackets flexible in the way of allowing unlimited amount of players and therefor allowing high tier prizes but having some people with a bye is a situation that should be avoided, if possible. And as you stated, uncertainty how long tournament will last (but that is also affected by other things as well).

 

I guess where I'm confused is why do you think if a tournament had a really good prize too few people would join or if a tournament had a really bad prize too many people would join?  Why wouldn't the amount of people joining be directly proportional to how much the community values the prize? If people think its a good prize they get excited and want to play.  If people think its a bad prize they don't enter.  All market values are just a collection of what people think something is worth.

 

I don't see why prizes have to be designed for bracket size when a flexible bracket naturally grows or shrinks toward whatever the prize is worth.  The organizers could just come up with any prize and not even have to worry at all about the bracket size since the community would take care of that for them.

 

Also, an inflexible bracket has to either allow byes or cancel the tournament if fewer people join than expected.  In contrast, a flexible bracket has the option of cutting the tournament in half whenever too few people join and can eliminate the existence of byes entirely.   

Edited by Aard
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1 hour ago, Aard said:

I guess where I'm confused is why do you think if a tournament had a really good prize too few people would join or if a tournament had a really bad prize too many people would join?  Why wouldn't the amount of people joining be directly proportional to how much the community values the prize? If people think its a good prize they get excited and want to play.  If people think its a bad prize they don't enter.  All market values are just a collection of what people think something is worth.

 

I don't see why prizes have to be designed for bracket size when a flexible bracket naturally grows or shrinks toward whatever the prize is worth.  The organizers could just come up with any prize and not even have to worry at all about the bracket size since the community would take care of that for them.

 

Also, an inflexible bracket has to either allow byes or cancel the tournament if fewer people join than expected.  In contrast, a flexible bracket has the option of cutting the tournament in half whenever too few people join and can eliminate the existence of byes entirely.   

People don't join tournaments only because of the prizes. You can clearly see this by seeing that 64 man Community Combats often get full in OU tier, despite the prizes for winning such a deep bracket is quite garbage. Like, you could farm 1/4th of the winning player's prize during that time easily. Just because people would join tournaments with lower tier prizes doesn't mean that it is exactly fair for the winning player to get such a ridiculous prize for such a difficult achievement. The higher staff has declared that they are very careful for having a too high influx of high tier prizes and that resulted Community Combats being a good solution for not having a too high influx of high tier prizes but also give competitive players something to do during the week.

 

Another factor (which I already slightly referred) to the sizes of brackets is that which format are the tournaments played. There's numerous cases where 128 man Shiny Tentacool tournaments got full because they were OU tournaments and some crazy good shiny NU prizes couldn't get a full 64 man bracket. The sizes of the brackets simply don't go 1 to 1 for how good is the prize. Oh, and one is the time of the day but that one is pretty obvious. My concern simply is that staff wouldn't allow high tier prizes for tournaments that aren't guaranteed to have at least certain number of rounds so that the tournament will happen. Currently the bracket needs to fill at least 50% of its maximum size for the tournament to begin and if there isn't such a requirement, I don't expect staff to make any risks for giving good prizes for tournaments with questionable participation. I'll admit that this is all just speculation and I can't speak behalf of staff themselves so I guess it's up to them to say if this is a true concern but I'd be highly surprised if it wasn't based on their previous behavior.

 

Edit: But yeah, to my previous comment, the current trends are going more fair that for 32 man random tournament there's just a Gift Lucario while 128 man OUs actually have high tier prizes such as rare shinies so seems that currently the staff wants the prize to reflect the bracket size and not the kind of memery that is used to be.

 

Edited by OrangeManiac
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59 minutes ago, OrangeManiac said:

People don't join tournaments only because of the prizes. You can clearly see this by seeing that 64 man Community Combats often get full in OU tier, despite the prizes for winning such a deep bracket is quite garbage. .

 

Edit: But yeah, to my previous comment, the current trends are going more fair that for 32 man random tournament there's just a Gift Lucario while 128 man OUs actually have high tier prizes such as rare shinies so seems that currently the staff wants the prize to reflect the bracket size and not the kind of memery that is used to be.

 

That's true but isn't really a problem related to bracket size.  More people play ou than nu and 1 mil is quite a bit harder to get in ou than it is in nu as a result.  If the organizers cared about fixing that they would make the cash prize higher in ou than it is in lower tiers.

 

As far as pokemon prizes, ou pokemon tend to be more expensive because more people want them on their team.  So, the prizes are still proportional unless you are just talking strictly about raw cash.  An ou shiny is worth more than a nu shiny and an ou comp is worth more than a nu comp both in time and difficulty. 

 

And as far as the bracket size reducing the number of rounds, it really didn't do that.  70 people still signed up to get the lucario.  Its just instead of half being eliminated in a first round of battling, half were eliminated for clicking a button a fraction of a second too late. 

Edited by Aard
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1 minute ago, Aard said:

That's true but isn't really a problem related to bracket size.  More people play ou than nu and 1 mil is quite a bit harder to get in ou than it is in nu as a result.  However, ou pokemon tend to be more expensive because more people want them on their team.  So, the prizes are still proportional unless you are just talking strictly about raw cash.  An ou shiny is worth more than a nu shiny and an ou comp is worth more than a nu comp both in time and difficulty. 

 

And as far as the bracket size reducing the number of rounds, it really didn't do that.  70 people still signed up to get the lucario.  Its just instead of half being eliminated in a first round of battling, half were eliminated for clicking a button a fraction of a second too late. 

Yeah, I'll definitely agree that having 32 man bracket for OU at any time ever is a huge mistake. I just think having bigger bracket size for OU is the solution here.

 

About the "OU shiny worth > NU shiny worth" - shiny values in PokeMMO are weird. The value of shinies are fairly independent from their competitive viability and it's more about on aesthetics and rarity. Even if they were gifts, the value of a Shiny Mamoswine is tenfold smaller than the value of a Shiny Pinsir. First one is one of the best OUs and latter isn't even usable in NU but looks so damn nice. I'll admit it's really weird that the desired prizes even for competitive players are something that are merely about aesthetics but the shiny values are there and the prizes are given accordingly. Pokemon that are considered the highest tier of shinies (Metagross, Salamence, shiny starters) are barely distributed ever no matter of the tier because it is acknowledged by the administrations that these Pokemon are the most valuable individual commodity this game has and I guess they don't want to artificially lower their value.

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18 hours ago, redspawn said:

Brackets are meant to be static, not dynamic, the prices are usually also according to this, 128 man tours having the best prizes.

So no, as long the rewards are defined way before the tournament even goes into sign ups, like 1 or 2 weeks previous to it, this would not be a possibility.

This is false.

 

Have seen plenty of 128 tourneys with a regular comp prize in stead of a shiny one. 128 man tourneys are barely better then 64 man bracket. 

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