Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
This forum is in permanent archive mode. Our new active community can be found here.
GeekNights Tuesday - Tournaments
Tonight on GeekNights, Rym is back from Brazil, and we consider tournaments in a general sense in light of the 2012 Olympic Badminton scandal. Rym also has some thoughts on Guns of Icarus Online after playing a bunch of it this past weekend. In the news, we consider EA's patently ludicrous copyright lawsuit against (an admittedly deserving) Zynga. Also, don't forget that we'll be at PAX Prime and PAX Dev, talking about ethics of game design (among other things)!
Download MP3Source Link
Comments
For example, knowing other players' scores can change the extent to which you take risks to get higher scores.
One thing I wanted to bring up is that professional tennis majors are probably the fairest and best tournament there is. Tennis has one official and well kept world ranking. If you go play tennis at your local tennis club, you will get a ranking after so many matches. You will be on the same ranking ladder as Nadal, Federer, Murray, and Djokovic (if you're a dude). If you're not, you'll be ranked with the Williams sisters and Sharapova. That's pretty awesome.
They seed the tournaments based upon these world rankings, so you can't really game the system for seeding since any individual match has only a small effect on your ranking. Then when you actually play a match, it's separated into multiple sets, and games which averages out any luck factor. It's single elimination, so you have no incentive to ever lose. Also, once a match is over, you stop playing immediately. There is never a case where a person is playing who can not possibly win, so you can't do anything to spoil things for anyone.
Most other sports have a lot to learn from Tennis.
Knowledge of scores influencing strategy isn't a problem in and of itself. The issue is designing a system in which no player has a non-negligible advantage over the others because of this type of information. Sometimes having these rankings beforehand isn't so much an option, especially if it's a team sport.
Even the mighty PAX used to do this (they've since changed to only reward first place). In the 2010 PAX Prime Small World tournament I was clearly in second place, and first place was starting to run away with the game. I could have thrown my units at the first place player, hoped everyone else did the same, and been left with a wide-open field and few turns to go. Instead, I kicked the third place player in the teeth and made sure I got one of those shiny pieces of metal.
Now imagine a situation where you have a very low percentage chance of first place. You can increase that percentage slightly by attacking the first place player, and that is your best option because they are way ahead of you. Normally, you do this move.
Now take the same scenario with an F1 style tournament where second place still gets some points. You are going to make a different decision. Rather than slightly increase your chance of first place, you will be smarter to make an alternative move that vastly increases your percentage chance of second place even at the expense of first place.
Ideally you want people to play each individual game as they would play that game if it were a stand-alone match. If the tournament modifies the incentive structure for decisions made within an individual game instance, then that is a flaw.
If the goal is to make a fun tournament for the players, then rewards for further places can encourage additional players to participate.
You can use additional prizes to influence player behavior. For example; In a Warhammer tournament it's not uncommon to have a "best sportsman" prize to discourage crappy behavior.
To take it a step further, many tournaments will have a "best generalship" prize as well. This acknowledges that being the best player may not all-ways equate to winning first place.
1) What is meant by "problem"?
I would guess that it would be any divergence from what Scott puts forth:Consequently, if having second place rewards induces different play as compared to not having any, this is a problem, right?
2) What is meant by "harming others"?
This one needs clarification.
Still, I guess you mean specifically with respect to the in-game score - i.e. harming other players = having a detrimental effect on their score, yes? A slightly loose and arbitrary definition, but workable.
A real game is one in which the decisions of one player must be changed due to the decisions of another player. I say real game, because that's what qualifies you as a game in game theory.
Amongst the real games are subsets of games in which players can hurt each other.
In poker you have to change your decision based on my decision. But there is no way I can change the card in your hand, or attack you directly or indirectly.
In Puerto Rico I can indirectly hurt other players. I may choose captain when I know it will cause another player to dump many barrels of goods into the ocean.
In Dominion I can play Witch and directly give curse cards to the other players.
In Battletech I can choose which opponent at which to aim and fire my gauss rifle.
Hard to draw really specific lines between those.
Regardless, consider the following hypothetical:
VP standings:
A: 110
B: 105
You: 100
It's your turn, and it's the last turn of the game. You have a choice between two moves:
1) Roll two dice. +12 points if you roll two 6s; no points otherwise.
2) +7 points.
After this move, the player with the most VPs will win, the player with the second most is second, etc.
Normally you would pick move 1), but in the presence of rewards for second place, you might well pick move 2). Furthermore, by your criteria this is a game where you cannot harm others.
Team Combat: group stages where each team plays every other twice, top two in each group go into a single elimination tournament. With just 8 teams, the entire tournament takes about 2 hours, and is entirely for those taking part (no audience).
Fight Night (solo combat): round-robin where each of the 30 entries plays at least half the others (though not in groups), top 4 go direct to quarter finals, next 8 play single elimination matches to fill out other quarter final spots, then single elimination to the final. With Fight Night, the qualification rounds are for anyone to enter, and there's no audience, it's just a fun event. The finals are on a stage as a full show, lasts about an hour, and has an audience of maybe 700 people. I ran this competition this year, and I fudged the seedings between the qualification and the finals to make it a more interesting and fair event.
Volleyclub: double elimination tournament, which lasts FUCKING HOURS but is probably the most fair. It has many issues in terms of audience enjoyment too, because the eight games before the final didn't have the not-lost-yet team playing, and the eventual other finalist team had to play 4 games in a row, so were very tired. The final match had already been played once before, and there was no change in result the second time these two teams met each other. Boring!
Funnily enough, the finalists in both Team Combat and Volleyclub were the same, with the same winner and the same team in second place.
There's also a form of combat where any number of people can join in, and the last person juggling wins. At the EJC literally hundreds of people can be fighting at once in the same arena. It might seem chaotic and random, but in the usual four rounds, Berlin jugglers (ei. the best combat players in the world) have made up three of the four the last two years, and two of the four the three years previously.
However, after four rounds, the winner is decided between just the four round winners. Four players instead of 200 tests totally different skills, of course, so the strengths of players changes comparatively throughout the competition. Thankfully it's more about audience and participant enjoyment than deciding who is really the best (because we all know Jochen is the best, as he wins everything he enters, and I win when he doesn't enter).
Anyway, I can't remember my point in talking about these things, except that when the aim is a fun show (Fight Night and open Combat), fairness is compromised. When it's all about seeing who is best, and treating it like a proper sporting event, almost no thought is given to the audience, if there even is an audience.
Or, to put it another way, when the event is organized by German jugglers, it's super strict and fair, and when it's organized by non-Germans, it's far more entertaining for non-hardcore fans.
- The number one pick goes to the team that wins the highest percentage of their games after being eliminated from playoff contention. That way teams play hard to the end of the season.
- The number one pick goes to the team that wins the most games after being eliminated. That way the really bad teams have more time to rack up draft-eligible wins. This would still encourage winning after you're eliminated, but is closer to the current scenario.
The second one maybe has the side effect of teams tanking until they're mathematically eliminated instead of trying to hang on with a magic number in the single digits. The first is more drastic, but I like it more.