Cronus League - Single Ship Teams

[Thomas]

https://docs.google.com/document/d/19_Zpqhe3qrwz1t5Rmxe4depJl8a0VBsP4A2eNMB98HA/edit?usp=sharing

Current rule document above and is subject to change. It will be finalized by the time sign ups roll around. Teams will be made of only 4 players, making it much easier to get involved in. These teams will be paired up for matches. The complete overview is below as well as in the document.

By far the biggest concern is the length of the event (10 weeks, 2 bye weeks). This is necessary for a good league, as teams need time to jockey for position on the leaderboard. A shorter length would make it difficult to find the very best teams, as a single bad week would make it much more difficult to recover from.

In this thread:
https://gunsoficarus.com/community/forum/index.php/topic,6823.msg117357.html#msg117357

We can see the general math used. It takes a number of weeks for the teams that are the best to work their way to the top. In a real event, things aren't nearly as clear cut such as team skill, which is why a long run time is needed. To alleviate the stress on participants, we want to cut down on the length of each day as much as possible. We'll only run for 2 hours maximum, and our goal is to be much shorter than that. This of course depends on the number of refs, casters, and teams. So if you're interested in casting or reffing, we'd love to have the help, just shoot me a PM or send an email to BoCA or just reply in the thread.

If something isn't clear, just ask and we'll respond and clarify it in the document. If you have any concerns, we encourage you to respond in the thread or comment in the document.


Overview:



   [Group of 4 players = Team, Two combined teams = Pair]
   The League will last 10 weeks starting Jan 9, 2016 with the final week on March 12, 2016. Matches will start at 2pm EDT/ 6pm UTC. Teams will composed of four players (not eight). Sign ups will end on January 6, 2016. For simplicity, the number of teams will be limited to a division of 4 (So: 4 teams, 8 teams, 12 teams, 16 teams, etc etc). If there are extra teams when sign up ends, teams will be allowed to sign up late until the end 2nd week. Teams that join the league late will have points deducted from the starting total for each match they have missed. Matches will be 2v2 Deathmatch and 2v2 Capture Point.
   
   Teams begin the season with 1000 points and compete for points through matches. The losing pair will have 10% of each of their points taken. These points will be pooled and then split evenly to the winning pair. To avoid fractional points we will round down when taking points, and round up when distributing points.

Example:
C: 1001 pts, D: 990 pts

   Pair AB beats pair CD. Team C will have 100 points taken (rounded down from 100.1) and team D will have 99 points taken. This is pooled into 199 points. Split evenly between teams A and B, they each get 100 points (rounded up from 99.5)

   In weeks 2-9, teams will be paired in a high-low system based upon their points values. The team with the highest points will be paired with the team with the lowest points, second highest with second lowest, third highest with third lowest, etc etc. In the event of tied point values, teams that signed up first will be considered as ranking lower in regards to arranging paired teams. Weeks 4 and 5 will be bye weeks, with only half the teams playing each week. Pairs will be together for the duration of the matches that day and compete against other random pairs.
   
   Week 1 pairs will be chosen by the teams themselves (if they so choose) for the first match of the day. Teams that sign up first get first pick of their partner teams. Teams that do not choose partners and are not chosen will be randomly paired. The remaining matches will have teams paired with another team randomly.

Week 10 (Finals week) will have the top 4 teams compete in a double round robin. In the event that teams are tied for first place, the tie will be broken by whichever team came into the finals with more points.

[Squidslinger Gilder]

I've always liked the idea of a longer event time frame because it lessens the pressure of having to win at all cost. Specially when things go wrong...crashes, bugs, or anything else that might cause a team that should perform much better, to instead look like scrubs. But participation and actually doing it are another thing. Burn out was always an issue with events even under 5 weeks. Good to see you take this into account with bye weeks.

Keep in mind you could also potentially do bye weeks without doing a bye week if you rotate the teams around but this might be a management nightmare. Especially because you don't have set teams well in advance.

If time frame is a problem then there is another way you could accomplish a large number of matches within a shorter span. Simply put run the event like baseball. When they travel to cities they usually play about 3 matches. Now traditionally when we've had more than 1 match a day we've had it in "best of" formats. However if you just baseball it and run it as a series. Then say limit it to 5 weeks. So 4 weeks of regular play and 1 week of finals play. Save the best of matches for the finals. So in normal season play you'd have teams running a total of about 12 matches.

The trick comes in with reffing and casting. You'd have to run dual streams and have a schedule of 4 matchups a day if you go with a 2hr time slot. If you needed more than that, then perhaps you might have to tweak the time slot. If you shortened match time to 15 minutes then you'd be looking at 90min run time vs 120min. A 15 minute slot would free up 30 minutes, which wouldn't be enough. So you'd have to play for a 2:15 minute time frame to fit in 3 matchups a day. Course that doesn't account for time between. So you'd have to allow about 2:30 for problems/etc.

[Thomas]

Right now we're looking at a minimum of 2 streams with teams playing 2-3 matches a day, but not in a best of 3 format. Similar to the Blood and Brass where they're just set up against other teams, and win or lose you'll play against a different team next. B&B has 6 teams, 2 streamers, and each team plays a whopping five matches a day. It usually takes a bit under 3 hours for the whole thing. Assuming we have 16 teams (8 pairs), 2 streamers, and each team plays 3 matches which take 25 minutes (lobby, game time, set up, etc); we're looking at 12 matches with each streamer doing 6 matches. Comes out to 2 1/2 hours. In practice it might just make the 2 hour mark, since a lot of matches only take about 10 minutes or so on the smaller maps. But if we toss in a third streamer or cut it down to 2 matches a day, it'd easily be within the 2 hour mark. Cutting down the match time to 15 minutes would work as well.

It really comes down to how many teams and how many casters we have.


For the bye weeks, we'll have two weeks around the mid-point where only half the teams will play one week and half will play the other. So every team will get one full week off.





Just as a preview to keep everyone entertained during November/December, we're looking a quick bracket-style tournament based off of Zancs idea (same thread linked to above). This should only take a day or two and give everyone a taste of what to expect during a full season of league play.

[Squidslinger Gilder]

Right looks good. Be sure to plan for best case and worst case situations in terms of activity of both players and casters. Aero planning was started with best case in initial stages and then altered a bit as planning for worst case started to happen. Bigger the event, the more complicated it can get. Which in turn means finding the balance.

Along with the event itself, even if something is extremely unlikely, best to have it at least addressed because knowing folks around here, they'll find a way. Which then puts you on the spot.

[ZnC]

Hooray! 4-player, semi-competitive league! 

[nanoduckling]

Had a look through this, how useful my comments are depend on what you are going for with the tournament. First thing I'd note is that the point system is somewhat similar to Elo (the rating system, not the band), more complex in some ways and simpler in others and achieving slightly different goals.

The reason rating systems aren't used for tournaments is that they weight recent success or failure more highly than distant success or failure to estimate how good a team is. This makes them different from a standard league where early victories count just as much as later ones. They aren't as extreme as a knockout tournament though where early failure gets you, well, knocked out. The virtue of this point system being like a rating system is that it implements a hidden catch up mechanic, where a team with less points is risking less when it competes, and gets more rewards when it succeeds.

It isn't as extreme as Elo in that regard; typical ratings changes in Elo are on the order of about 16-32 per game on a score of 1500 and typical changes here are 100 on a score of 1000. Points totals will change faster. One thing Elo does that might be worth considering is bigger points changes in the early stages. We know that a points total of 1000 is very wrong for many of the teams likely to compete, so it might be worth making say weeks 1 and 2 have higher points changes, this could also be used to shorten the tournament a little.

I think the score system is good as is and probably wont benefit from substantial changes.

Team pairing is a different issue. Pairing teams this way could have some nasty consequences. Say team A is amazing, team Z sucks, team B is decent, and team C is decent but not as good as B, league is currently in order and these are the only teams. A+Z gets beaten by B+C and now B is top, A is next, C is next, Z is bottom. Next match B+Z is beaten by A+C and we swap right back round again. Who comes top is likely going to be determined by if there are an even or odd number of weeks in the tournament.

Problem is most of the methods I can come up with have scenarios comparable to above. Say we have completely random matches each week (not just opposition), well if the dice land poorly in the last week then we can end up with a team getting points by being paired with better teams at random. The best I can come up with is to vary who you are paired with within a week. So first match is say A+Z vs B+C, second is A+C vs B+Z in the example above. This has the disadvantage that practice is a bit of a pig since you will have multiple teams to work with, but it removes some loops in score like the above (not all of them though).

Another option is to just have a computer run every possible pairing and play those sets of matches with the smallest differences in total points scores (the idea being to make it so teams are risking roughly the same amount of points). There might be enough variability in there to avoid these kinds of issues.

In any case looking forward to seeing how this develops, good work all involved.

[Thomas]

Some great comments, but could you clarify the 'We know that a points total of 1000 is very wrong for many teams likely to compete..'? I'm not sure what you mean there. The point value is pretty arbitrary, as is the % of points lost/gained for each match. Something we can change pretty easily. One of the reasons the tournament is kind of long is to prevent a single week or two from determining the total outcome of the league. In a shorter tournament, if you have a single bad week or so, you might never catch up.


I'm not as sure about making the early matches worth more, particularly the first week matches. This is mostly because we have the early sign up bonus of being allowed to pick your ally in week 1 for the first match or so. This will likely lead to some pretty imbalanced matches, which is one of the reasons we want some random pairs as well. Week 1 is going to be an odd week.

What's kind of neat about the points in this system is that we're pairing two teams together. So a team with a lot of points and a team with a lot less points. At the end of the day, each of the pairs will be roughly around the same amount of points, so all teams have the potential to earn about the same number of points. We're trying to reward teamwork. So we'll have a team with 1750 with a partner who's at 400 going up against a pair that has 1200 and 900. Right now the different pairs for the matches will be random, but we could look into setting them up in a way so that pairs don't always fight the same people over and over or so that they go against pairs with closer point values.

[MightyKeb]

I think the idea of a different ally each week in a 10 week tournament sounds distressful, atleast to me personally, unless I've read it wrong. What I would suggest is somewhere halfway the tournament (week 5-6) each ship has their amount of points counted and placed into similiar tiers as those that exist in Blood and Brass. From here on, you can either randomly assign ships to other ships based on this tier or have them pick their allies themselves, or something between both. However, at the end of this, each ship stays with their paired ally from week 5-6 up until week 10. What this allows is for two teams to build relations, familiarize themselves with eachother's playstyles and build/practice on it to become even deadlier, thus elevate the skill level of a team itself and make for much more competitive matches.

[nanoduckling]

Oh what I mean by 1000 points being 'wrong' is in the sense of if it is viewed as a rating system, which it sort of is. Give me nothing but the scores of the teams going into say week 8 and I can probably predict a decent number of the results of week 9. In week 1 the numbers are meaningless (since they are all 1000), so between week 8 and week 1 the matches add information to the ratings. The absolute value is completely arbitrary as you say (the starting value is just a number after all), but those numbers will mean something in the later weeks. So what I mean is if you want them to contain more information earlier then you can adjust them more aggressively early on since you know that initially the scores are a better reflection of team skills than the rating are. Later on this wont be the case so more conservative adjustments would be appropriate.

On the other hand it might be disheartening to have a massive chunk of points taken in the first couple of weeks so statistical purity should probably give way to competitor psychology, and the first week is a little odd and should almost certainly be an exception in any case as you say.

The virtues of the point system proposed are as you suggest, but I don't think I've made my concern with the pairings clear. It isn't just who you fight that is the problem, it is who your partner is. The bad scenarios I think it is worth avoiding are 1. A terrible team get paired with the same team every week, crippling them 2. A terrible team gets swapped back and forth between two other teams, whoever is holding the hot potato in the last week loses 3. Chance plays a major role in the last week where a team gets an objectively tough draw due to randomization.

[Thomas]

The reason we change partners every week is so that we keep things fresh. We could just put teams together and keep them that way, but that feels like it ruins the point of having a 4 person team. You might as well have a regular tournament with a pairing system tossed in. One of the fun things of new teams is also being able to find out which 4 person teams play well with others. It's not just about being the best team, to get there you have to be able to work well with a variety of other teams.



One thing we can do is make week 1 just for ranking purposes and have no points exchanged.

Yeah, partners are a big concern. With the teams earning points together or losing points together, they tend to move up or down the board together, and makes it less likely for them to be paired repeatedly. It's not impossible, and if it becomes a big concern we can add a clause to prevent this from happening, as well as preventing/reducing the flip flopping.

We do have the top 4 teams moving into the final rounds, which should mitigate some of the random factor in the final weeks. The team with the most points might not necessarily be the best, so we get the top group to find out who's actually the top dog. We could up the final group to 6 or 8 to mitigate it even more. It would take a little longer, but it might actually work out better, with less chance of ties.

 

[Squidslinger Gilder]

What you could do is lock in partners by a certain week. So do half an event with randoms and then the 2nd half goes with locked in partners.

However, the trouble is getting teams to do that on their own. Aero 3 I tried that and it was a pain relying on teams to talk to each other. In the end the final was terrible because one team was out or forgot or whatever, so mercs had to be brought in to fill a final, which was stupid. So perhaps, organizer based locking in would be best. But then you have to address the possibility of teams dropping out after the locking in or if there is an odd team out situation.

[Zormac]

I've been thinking about a pairing system for a cup that could probably be used here, and could still benefit from any sort of score system you'd like, but I recommend a different point system.

Mechanics:

- The games/lobbies are tiered, filled from the top down in order of subscription;
- Whenever a game ends, the two winners go up one tier, the other two go down one tier;
- Upon changing tiers, the teams scramble - so your ally in one match is your rival in the following;
- The winners of the top tier and the losers of the the bottom tier don't move up/down, they just scramble;
- There can't be draws. In case of a draw after 30 minutes, winner will be chosen by first kill, or coin toss if 0-0.

Suggested scoring system:

- Ships are awarded points upon winning a match;
- Additional points per kill.

The reasoning behind this is to give everyone a chance of a fair fight:

- By going up/down a tier, a winner will be paired with someone who lost, which can either help weaker teams go up, and might hold back stronger teams;
- Scrambling will force winners to fight against each other in the following match, which will make advancing increasingly more difficult;
- A simple scoring system that is easy to keep track of, and based on each ship's individual performance.
- Awarding additional points per kill will force people to avoid full-disable builds all the time.
- The tiers are only used for pairing the teams, rather than for score.

Extra suggestion:

- Ships and loadouts chosen prior to the match. However, referees would have to verify this, so it can be more troublesome. This is absolutely not necessary, just an extra idea.

[Thomas]

I really want to stick with new team mates every week at least. I don't want teams to pair up on their own and form a super team or a super awful team. Then of course for the ships who don't want to partner up, we end up sticking them with a partner they potentially hate for a long period of time. By shifting to having us just put ships together, we might as well be doing a normal 8v8 tournament.



I like the idea Zormac, but I think it would turn out better to run that as it's own thing and not do a combination of the current idea and your own idea. It sounds like a very neat system and I'd love to see how it turns out. One of the things I don't like would be tracking individual ship performance. This would likely lead to ships not working together and end up competing for kills. Although that might be neat in itself to watch.



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A separate tournament with a much shorter time frame (1-2 Saturdays) is being considered in addition to the Cronus League. This would likely take place before the League sometime in mid-late November, Early December. It's largely based on Zanc's concept proposed in the thread linked above. There's a document that's still in the early stages of development I can like people who are interested, just shoot me a PM.

How it would work is a bracketed tournament with single ship teams. Four teams would enter each block/bracket and compete in a round robin. This would consist of 3 matches in each block, with each combination of teams fighting every other combination of teams (of only those four teams in the block). The top two teams would move ahead, and the losing two teams would be eliminated. In the finals, it would be the same structure but a double round robin, and only the top team wins.

The problem we run into right off the bat is how to deal with ties. Since we're counting wins and moving two teams ahead, there's a lot of tie scenarios. The first method to break the ties is to count wins from each pair of teams and count those towards the teams (not individual ships, but team efforts. So if team AB got 3 kills in round 1, both ships get counted for 3 kills, regardless of which ship got the actual kill). This is to promote teamwork. However, if there's still a tie, we're considering using a rule stating that the teams which signed up early get the advantage and move ahead. It's not great, but it's a quick and easy way to break a tie, and it encourages teams to sign up earlier, allowing us to do some better planning.

However, another member mentioned counting individual ship kills (and Zormacs post reminded me of this) and even getting points for killing their own ally. This would lead to quite the mine-fest and backstabbing tournament as teams scramble to get ahead. It potentially makes it easier to break ties but definitely diminishes teamwork. But it would be more of a fun event than a truly competitive event. Right now I'm leaning towards combined scores for teams and using the early sign up for a tie breaker. Is there people who would prefer the backstab mine-fest? Or does anyone have an idea for a better tie breaker?

[Zormac]

I like the idea Zormac, but I think it would turn out better to run that as it's own thing and not do a combination of the current idea and your own idea. It sounds like a very neat system and I'd love to see how it turns out. One of the things I don't like would be tracking individual ship performance. This would likely lead to ships not working together and end up competing for kills. Although that might be neat in itself to watch.

I'd love to see this going at least once. I could write a neat little program that will generate the lobbies and calculate the tier changes based on match result.

As for the point system, tracking individual kills was just an idea - it would work just as nicely with just points for victory, or even based on the team points, for instance: match ends 5-3, team A goes up with 5 points and team B goes down with 3 points. I just think that this would make people abuse disable-oriented builds, or leech points off their allies without contributing much. Kills could mean a small bonus, because it would add up over several matches. Regardless, it's just an option, but not entirely necessary.

Anyway, what can I do to make this official? :p

[Thomas]

You should reach out to Competitive@musegames.com , which is the BoCA team. They'll help you find a good time period for the event (since they know when other events are going on), they can help set up prizes and graphics as well if  needed. They have a list of casters and referees too you can pull from. Basically they'll help with anything you need, and you still get final say on how the event is going to run.