I made pretty much the worst rack 5 misplay you can imagine in the DC yesterday.

Ok, so I made the request to Zac for a Tourney News tab and Google doc page and also for us all to have FFA creation ability.

Here is where I have us for a draft of a year's worth of events. Some need flushing out. Cycle would just repeat itself. It seems like there is something every month.

Also, there used to be an annual timed tourney with a gold trophy for winner. Something to think about.

Let me know if I have any errors...


Draft Schedule for the 7 Major Tournaments

Touney	Format	Trophy	Run by	Timeframe
TripleChain Open	Guillotine Tourney	Red	waffles/warped	Oct of 2020
Winter Classic	1 week of qualifying in DCs. top 8 qualify for a 10 game FFA. some sort of reward from the qualifying (such as winner starting with 3 wins, 2nd starting with 2 wins, 3rd and 4th starting with 1 win)	White	Arjun	Nov of 2020
Holiday FFA	changes to FFA tourney style. groups of 4, winner moves on.	Dark Blue	Arjun	Dec 2020/ Jan 2021
Masters	19gm H2H ( we can work out seeded or random)	Green	Arctic	Feb of 2021
Battle Royale VII	100 Game FFA	Purple	Arctic	Mar/April of 2021
World Cup	league format, played in DC	Baby Blue	Arjun	May/June of 2021
Summer Match Play	H2H Matches of 50 games. Need to decide random or seeded	Yellow	Arctic	July/Aug of 2021
Note: There used to be a Gold Trophy for annual Timed Tourney??	Timed H2H matches of X number of games.	Gold	?	?

Thanks nails, sub! I didn't think I would ever be disappointed with a 10 win month, but here we are.

Re: tournaments, it all looks good, except I can't commit to running them. I was just writing down ideas that I thought would be fun.

I am sure they wont mind waiting at all. People will just be pumped about something new.

Zac got back to me and said he was going to work on the requests I sent him (Tourney News tab, etc). I had mentioned Guillotine specifically and he said that was one he always thought would be awesome for TC, and if it becomes popular he would like to support it directly. That sounds like a lot of programming work to me but it was neat he had it in mind as a great fit for TC.

I'll leave the draft up as is for a bit in case someone commits to running one of your suggested formats or something similar.

So, I did not really want to take on anything new myself in TC, but we need some new games/formats (and people to run them) and I had an idea.. So, I think for the 1st gap we have (The Winter Classic) I am going to commit to run the following.

Winter Classic (Chaos) Tourney

I am proposing that the new format for the Winter Classic be a combination of the results from specific placings in the Daily Challenges from every day in November, plus the results of two bonus point tourneys. I am going to call the game Chaos. There is enough variance, good/bad fortune, and bonus points involved to keep everyone in the game for a long time. Anyone could win this, I think. At least that is my hope.

To win Chaos you need to score the most points in November. So, how do you get points? There are three ways.

Part 1.
Points awarded for 1st, 5th, 10th, 15th and 20th each day in the Daily Challenge in November.
1st (and ties) = 5 points
5th (and ties) = 3 points
10th (and ties) = 2 points
15th (and ties) = 4 points (yup, 4 points!!) I mean you can try to be 1st, or try to be last, but how do your try to get 15th? It just happens or it doesn’t, but it is a nice bonus for a so-so game.
20th (and ties) = 1 point

NOTE: only the exact places and ties above earn points each day. 2nd is great, but it gets you zero points in this format.

Part 2
Would you like to earn bonus points? Earn bonus points by playing in The November Monthly Championship. (starting about Nov 4th or 5th)

Bonus points as follows
1st place = 10 points
2nd place = 7.5 points
Tie 3rd place = 5 points each
All other players get 3 points each. That is right, 3 points just for playing.
If you don’t play you get 0 bonus points.
If you sign up and you play less than 7 of your 13 games in any round, you get 0 points.

Part 3

Would you like to earn even more bonus points? Of course you would.
Then play in the Winter Classic Bonus Points Tourney (starting about November 15th or 16th)

I will set up the above tourney and it will be the same format as the monthly Championship, only there will be 9 game matches instead of 13 for more variance.

Bonus points as follows
1st place = 15 points
2nd place = 10 points
Tie 3rd place = 7.5 points each
All other players get 5 points each (the same value as a DC win!!)
If you don’t play you get 0 bonus points.
If you sign up and you play less than 5 of your 9 games in any round, you get 0 points.


The Winner of the Winter Classic (White Trophy) will be the player with the most points at the end of the month.


I will announce the tourney in chatroll and post daily updates on points in the “Tourney Tab” (the one Zac will be making).

How to enter.


1. For the DC part, do nothing. I am considering everyone who plays a DC as in the tournament.

2. For a chance at the bonus points. Make sure you join the November Monthly Championship and the Winter Classic Bonus Points Tourney.

It is all that easy!!!

--------------------------------------

This should not be much work for me. I already wrote up the format and rules above. The two bonus tourneys will take a minute each to set up and announce. The daily points updates will take me like 2 minutes a day.

I am going to look closer at the weighting of the bonus points. I don’t want them to be meaningless but also don’t want them to determine the winner. Looking for a good balance.

Any feedback on this is welcome.


With October having waffles’ Guillotine game for the Triplechain Open, and November having the Chaos game for the Winter Classic, there should be two months of some fun and variety.

Looks great to me, AK. Should be fun!

I can probably take on one of those DC-related ones, like the World Cup, when it rolls around next year. I'm already doing the DC stats anyway, so it shouldn't be hard to keep track. Either the league format or the qualifying-and-knockout format seem good; I'll propose something when we get closer to the timeframe.

Awesome. The World Cup would be great. The Holiday FFA might just stay as is, or tweaked a bit. I thought about arjun's idea of groups of 4 in FFAs with the winners moving on, but we can't set the FFA ending for anything other than 30 days.

We could ask people to all play in 5 days (for example), and almost all will, but if even one person disappears the whole tourney is froze as we can even see the scores in that persons game to figure out who won.

I'll figure something out..

thx nails..

Most of it looks great sub, except I don't like part 1 at all. Variance is great and I've been all for increasing it for a while, but I don't like a scenario where you reward someone who comes in 15th place instead of 2nd. I think you've gone from one extreme to the other.

Little variance - 100 game matchplay
Lots of variance - 1 game matchplay
Pure luck - rewarding worse placements than better

If you want to increase variance, while still not making it pure luck, here are a few alternatives to part 1

- Bonus points in DC only on certain days (1st, 5th, 10th, 15th, etc)
- Points only for winning DCs (large variance in this, just look at battle royales)
- Something totallly different that I quite like - 1 point for a score between 10000-19999, 4 points for a score between 20000 and 29999, 9 for 30000-39999, 16 for 40000-49999, etc. High scores are worth exponentially more and that should increase variance while still rewarding good play. It also fits with your chaos theme.

I generally agree with Arjun on this and I'm really not a big fan of awarding points based on random things like what position you came in (or even picking certain days of the month) as to me you're just introducing so much luck into the system that you can't play around since.

I wouldn't mind Arjun's last suggestion of awarding points based on score, people might be inclined to alter their play to go for bigger scores and this would introduce variance that still requires skill/player choice.

One thing I haven't seen mentioned at all in this discussion of mixing things up is using the reverse game mode at all. I know it is somewhat popular and although I'm not a big fan of it myself it would certainly introduce a lot more variance if used as a trophy event. This could be as a standard format, a FFA or whatever people want and would provide something a bit different for people to play.

If you really wanted to push the "chaos" theme you could also use have a major if the games were H2H/small groups where you it could be either reverse/normal and you just had to run with it, this would definitely mix things up without resorting to who happened to get lucky and place 15th 6 times in the month.

Arjun and Bandwagon. Thanks for the feedback. I will address/respond to your feedback this weekend.

Reverse score actually sounds kinda cool - like a daily challenge but who can get the lowest score possible

I could clean up without having to alter my strategy whatsoever

If you want to try it out Kokirixx always has a tournie open called "gooseshoot" it's kind of fun to try and get the lowest score possible and trying to kill off every bonus and not have any chains is takes a lot of planning.

One of the reason it would be interesting to introduce more variance into one major without increasing the luck.

Arjun, I read your comments about “pure luck,” and thinking that I have gone from one extreme to another. I am guessing you mean “too much luck,” and not “pure luck,” but regardless, this does not play out like you think it does.

Before I created this irregular scoring for part 1 I did have a look at some past months to see how it would play out. I did not make detailed tables, but from what I saw I got the sense that the part 1 chaos points structure would give me the level of randomness/luck that I was looking for, without going overboard.

Anyway, the good thing is we don’t have to wonder or guess how this might play out, we can simply look at past months and see what happens with my “irregular” part 1 scoring system. Does it, as you state, create a pure luck situation? In the tables below I used the part one scoring system (5 points for 1st, 3 points for 5th, 2 points for 10th and 4 points for 15th). I skipped 1 point for 20th because it is only 1 point and it was extra work for me to check on that.

Below are the findings for July 2020, June, May and April, and also a note about August.

July

As the table below shows, Dogfloss was the dominant player in July. 311 DC points and 5 wins. The table also shows that under the Part 1 scoring system Dogfloss has the most points (43). If the part 1 system is pure luck, then this is an odd coincidence.

	Player	DC points	DC wins	Part 1 Points
1	doglfoss	311	5	43
2	Bandwagon	274	2	22
3	Kokirixx	194	4	34
4	SubArcticK	194	1	25

June 2020

Looking at the table below Bandwagon had the best month if you value DC points, or wafflesobv had the best month if you value wins. So, what does the part 1 scoring system say? It says waffles and Bandwagon are 1 / 2 in points. Waffles had a lucky month with four 15th place finishes, but Bandwagon had two 15th place finishes himself. Anyway, waffles prevailed in part 1 mostly on his 7 wins at 5 points each. Again, I am not seeing too much luck at play here, and am little disappointed that there is not much chaos. Maybe May will have some.

	Player	DC points	DC wins	Part 1 Points
1	Bandwagon	251	4	32
2	velourgfog	220	4	23
3	Anton	218	4	29
4	SubArctic	212	1	14
5	wafflesobv	205	7	49

May 2020

I probably had the best month here, but now we are getting a little chaos. I had no 15th place finishes and waffles and arjun had 3 each. That cut my lead but there are two bonus tourneys left. I like how tight things are for points. The bonus tourneys will matter. This is the degree of chaos/luck thing I was hoping for.

	Player	DC points	DC wins	Part 1 Points
1	SunArcticK	304	5	44
2	wafflesobv	255	5	46
3	arjun	248	4	47

April 2020

Arjun looks like the leader here and he is tied with Bandwagon. Nails had three 15th place finishes and arjun and Bandwagon each had two. SubArctic and wafflesobv had none.

	Player	DC points	DC wins	Part 1 Points
1	arjun	250	5	44
2	Derwi	231	4	28
3	wafflesobv	226	5	31
4	Bandwagon	224	5	44
5	SubArcticK	211	4	31
6	nails	194	3	35

If you want another month then look at August. Arjun has 10 wins (50 points there) and nobody has enough 1st or 5th or 15th place finishes to even come close to touching arjun.


So, in my opinion what comes out of this is that “pure luck” is not at play, but there is some randomness/luck in play, but that was the intention of part 1. That is what I wanted to happen. I was hoping for more chaos, though, so I am not totally happy with the findings here. Looking at these findings I considered tweaking things to inject more luck, but I think I will leave it. But, we can put to bed the “pure luck” argument. It is simply is not correct and not supported by a month’s worth of stats.

I think it might be easy to look at the "irregular" scoring system and say there is two much luck, but the following are important.

-The value of finishing first (5 points) and the fact that the best players tend to finish 1st more often. This weighs large and is a key reason why luck is lower than one might think.
-The smoothing effect on the points that you get with 30 or 31 days of points. Sure, the no points for 2nd, 3rd or 4th seems penal, but the results above are not showing this as overly punishing.
-The distribution of 15th place finishes tending to be random lessens their impact on the results. Though we could get an “outlier” month, and that would be fine with me. Chaos would be great!
-the two bonus point tourneys will favour better players.

I hope this puts the pure luck or even too much luck question to bed. There is some intentional built in luck/randomness, but I could live with more based on the findings.

I think this will be fun, and interesting each day to see who (if anyone) lucked out with a 15th place finish.

We have variance in all our tourneys and games. Certainly we can have one tourney a year with a small amount of planned and mostly random luck injected, and still embrace it as fun!

I typed out something and deleted it by mistake.

Sub, you're completely missing the point and strawmanning what I said. I did not say your entire format was pure luck, just a part of it. I don't think any major should ever have a component that rewards doing worse than someone else.

Like you pointed out, your format does not even seem to increase variance. The winners of the points race seem to do well. Then you add in 2 more tournaments. That only reduces variance. Think about it. If you have a single best of 1 knockout tournament - lots of variance. If you have 3 best of 1 knockout tournaments - reduces variance. If you have 20 of them - even less variance.

What you have ended up with is a format that is different and fun, but will not increase variance by much, and also has a pure luck component to it. I don't like it much.

I really like bandwagon's idea of a goose major. It's sort of like tennis, with the French Open and a format that is pretty different. We should just add it and it becomes a major. No work required for it.

I haven't commented yet because tbh I don't really care about formats. If you want to increase variance by reducing games or doing random seeding go ahead.
But yeah increasing variance by rewarding a bad game more than a good game is not the way to go.

After reading your through your post and looking at the data I have some thoughts on this idea of "chaos". I think as Arjun said it's not actually increasing variance that much and just introducing a pure luck element into part 1 that sometimes dramatically changes the score and sometimes dosen't. That combined with parts 2/3 which follow a more regular tournie format that then reduce the variance (it is likely the same problem of the few top people winning these) will then results of part 1 even out and someone who happened to get lucky in part 1 will have their lead overtaken.

It also produces some weird months where people open up such tremendous leads in the part 1 that the rest of event becomes meaningless. Take for example this month, Arjun can't be caught even if you win both of the other events which seems counterproductive to me. I will admit Arjun has had a stand out month but I don't think this is really achieving the desired effect.

To provide a solution to this problem, I think what needs to happen is rather than do a "who is the best in november with some rng thrown in and clal it chaos" you need to split them into two trophies.

I would propose keep parts 2 and 3 but change part one to award points in the same way that the yearly DC is calculated. 25/18/15/12 etc... Then no one player would have a lead so significant that it can't be overcome by decent placings in the tournies and has a higher chance to produce a winner that isn't one of us 3. Unlike the majors we often float around placements in the top 10 and the top 3 in the monthly championship has a lot more variety. I haven't done the math (happy to do it if you'd like to see the outcome) but I'm pretty confident just combining DC points with the championship points would yield a greater variety of winners. You could call this major something like the "Monthly best" or whatever as they are champion of the month.

Now if you want to have the chaos theme, have a separate event where you introduce tons of variance, as Arjun said, have a best of 1 tournie, have a tournie where everybody plays everybody in as a best of 1, have a tournie where it is random whether the rounds are normal/reverse. Decide the winner on highest score rather than number of wins. I'm sure there are more things we could do.

I think you would truly see some different winners with these two distinct events where people would be happy and there is no "pure luck" introduced. I personally like to feel I've earned the trophies I've got by beating people and I'm not sure how I'd feel if I placed first in the monthly DC, won both tournies and lost a trophy to someone who placed 15th 12 times, that wouldn't feel like chaos to me, it would just suck.

These are just my personal feelings on the matter though as I really am not a fan of awarding points based on random placements as a way to increase variance within the game.

Arjun, I was not making a strawman of your position. I knew your luck concern was with only part 1, and only that some placements got no reward and that worse placements got more reward than better placements. My point was that built-in “luck” in there only had a small impact. So, in presenting the data I focussed on the impact of your specific concern. Quite fairly, I think.

I don’t think you and Bandwagon (and Derwi) disagree on the impact of this “luck”, it seems you folks hold more of a principled position of not seeing worse positions rewarded more than bad ones, and not some seeing some good placements go without any reward, especially in a major. When I look at big picture of all three parts of the tourney combined, I don’t see an issue with the luck component. But, I respect that you folks do.

Also, there is lots of comments about variance. That if I wanted more variance I could do this or that. The chaos part was luck, really. It was not variance or intended to be viewed as variance. We had/have variance already in the format. Variance is built into DCs, and the two bonus point tourneys are going to be random (adding variance).

A big part of my goal here was about more variety/fun/interest and max participation and maximum involvement. I wanted [redacted] to get a couple of 15th spots and say or feel, hey, I have a shot here. Maybe razz the traditional leaders. I wanted everyone who plays a DC to feel part of this. I wanted people checking the stats every few days to see how they are doing. But at the same time I wanted to have a format in which a little but of luck could only get you so far. That you would also have to play well to finish the job.


But, based on the feedback, what I am going to do is this.

Winter Classic

Part 1. Use the November DC points for stats. There will be no lucky spots with extra points, or no lower spots for earning more points than higher spots. I will just use nails stats.

Part 2. Still have a Winter Classic Bonus Points tourney. I will tweak the point values due to the higher DC point values. (for example, a win might be 50 points). Note, this will occur before the Nov monthly Championship. I think we will get more entries that way because if I run it in early Nov then everyone knows they are still in play. If I run it later people having a bad month on DC points might skip it.


Part 3. Still have the November Monthly Championship as a bonus point tourney, but I will tweak the points awarded because of the higher point values in the DC stats. (for example, a win might be 35 points). This runs each month anyway, and people will play regardless of the bonus points.

The winner will be the player with the highest point total of Nov DC stats + bonus points Nov Championship + Bonus points Winter Classic Bonus Points Tourney.

I would have liked to keep the goofy scoring of part 1 in, but I am ok with this. The above may look like a lot of activity for one tourney, but keep in mind that people are playing DCs anyway, so no added play there. And people play the monthly tourney anyway, so no added play there either. The extra is the Winter Classic Bonus Point tourney. All things combined though should make for an active month.

Thanks Arjun, Bandwagon, nails and Derwi for comments/feedback.. I don’t mind that it is not what I want to hear.

And Bandwagon, you have some good options in your comments. I think what I have gone to in part 1 aligns with one of them.

I would have probably agreed with you in the past. Just seeing the same people winning lately, I just want more fun and more people to do well.

If the above happened to me right now I would laugh. So if it happened to you I would heckle you relentlessly....

Just an FYI, in all the 15th place stats I did, nobody had more than 4 in one month.

Kampi77 had 4 in May
Waffles had 4 in June
Consul had 4 in July


In 4 months of data (April to July) waffles had the most 15th placings, with a total of 9.
You had 6.

Average seems to be around 1 to 1.5 per month. There were times where multiple players had 15th on the same day, but I was surprised how often there were none at 15th. In May for example, I think only 20 days had someone recording a 15th place.

Apparently I suck at getting 15th, as I had only 1 in 4 months

My guess is I lead the TC field in 17th.. Seems to be my default landing spot when things don't go as planned.

NOTE: I may be off by one here and there, as I was just using a tick sheet for the 15ths

To emphasis this point in your post, I think this is the ultimate goal of any changes that are being made to the way majors run and as you said to increase participation and interest in trying to get a trophy.

The only problem I see with your changes to part is using the total DC score rather than the yearly race points. Although it is often a mix of players in the top 5/10 it is nearly always you or Arjun that achieve monster months where you score 50-100 points more than other people.

It sort of makes it so anyone who is 2nd-4th would need to win both tournies to topple those points and anyone below has no chance. I think by using the yearly points 25/18/15/12 etc you and adjusting the tournie points accordingly, you can create a more balanced system.

You want to the potential for players who did average in the monthly DC but do well in both tournies do have a chance to claim the trophy as well.

For example, looking at the month of March, Arjun was 80 points clear of 2nd (dogfloss) and 112 points clear of third (derwi). It wouldn't seem a good system where derwi went on to win both tournies and still not be crowned the winner.

With the 25/18/15 system derwi would only be 10 behind Arjun and awarding 15/10 points respectively in your old system would mean Arjun needed third in both of those to still come out on top. I'm not saying the balance is perfect but the points could be adjusted it seems a lot closer to creating a balanced system where everyone still has a good chance to win.

I just worry that by using DC points you have the potential to have an event where one person can get so far ahead in the month that everyone will lose interest.

Just wanted to say that I appreciate all the hard work you put into triplechain events and I'm not trying to trash your ideas with the counter points.

Hey Bandwagon

Feel comfortable giving feedback!!! Everyone here has been respectful during the back and forth. It is all good, Bandwagon.

I am going to use the yearly race points....

On the bold, I plan to carefully look at the point values in the two bonus point tournies to make sure they can have an enough impact to actually make a difference. These points won't be token. We might see a 75 point win and a 50 point win. I will mess around with the numbers and look at past months for typical gaps between the DC points leader and 6th, 7th place (for example). It wont be a perfect science, but I will try....

I think there is a misunderstanding in what I'm trying to say.

You simply award 25 points to whoever finished 1st, 8 points to whoever finished 6th, 6 points to whoever finished 7th. Aka using the points you score for the cumulative yearly race points rather than using the actual monthly points.

This removes the need to look at the average gaps between 1st and all of the places and should be much easier to balance. You'd know the gap is always going to be 17 points so you want both tournies to award somewhere between 25-40.

I'll commit to looking at both, but my initial impression is that I can get a better balance with actual points. But, I will consider both when I look.

Every method has a problem

for example

Player 1 229 points = 25 points
Player 2 218 points = 18 points
Player 3 212 points = 15 points

Your method not so great here.... when you transfer points to placing values the relative value of the original points get lost.

Yes that is the obvious problem with reducing the points, the benefit of it just makes it far easier to balance the value of part 2 and 3 of the event as the standings are known.

Using those points as an example, if the tournaments were worth 75 points (to account for the fact there might be a run away month) suddenly the placings in the tournie become much the important factor in the month.

As you said both have their own problems and it's tricky to balance having all 3 parts of the event be meaningful.

However, I think whatever you end up going with it's likely to give everyone a much higher chance of competing for the trophy which is what the goal, so all good.