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For example, if player 1 and 2 both go 5-0, but player 1 has an average VP differential of +20 and player 2 has a +10, Player 1 wins.
I feel like this is a more accurate way to measure who the better player is.

Is this the wrong place to post this thread?

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2022/08/02 00:52:09


 
   
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Au'taal

Tiebreaking based on VP should not be used at all as it rewards seal clubbing more than anything else.

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Some version of Strength of Schedule should be used. VPs are a terrible metric for tie breakers because they reward people for playing easier games.
   
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Just don't worry about score. This isn't the NFL, and the more people insist on treating it as if it matters, the less fun the game becomes. Just look at the mess the competitive players have made of the game since GW started listening to them for rules and gameplay feedback.

9th Ed 40K is literally unenjoyable and borderline unplayable.
   
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 Togusa wrote:
Just don't worry about score. This isn't the NFL, and the more people insist on treating it as if it matters, the less fun the game becomes. Just look at the mess the competitive players have made of the game since GW started listening to them for rules and gameplay feedback.

9th Ed 40K is literally unenjoyable and borderline unplayable.


GW doesn't make the tournament formats.
Individual organizers do that.

I would be super happy if GW did an official tournament for the release of 10th edition, though, but that would require them to release all the codices at the same time (which I would also love).
   
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Au'taal

 Togusa wrote:
Just don't worry about score.


So you show up in the tournament forum with a suggestion that people just not play tournaments? How constructive.

One of their light walkers carried a weapon of lethal effect. It fired a form of ultra-high velocity projectile. I saw one of our tanks after having been hit by it. There was a small hole punched in either flank - one the projectile's entry point, the other its exit. The tiny munition had passed through the vehicle with such speed that everything within the hull not welded down had been sucked out through the exit hole. Including the crew. We never identified their bodies, for all that remained of them was a red stain upon the ground, extending some twenty metres from the wreck.

Bow before the Greater Good, gue'la. 
   
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 Shas'O Ky'husa wrote:
 Togusa wrote:
Just don't worry about score.


So you show up in the tournament forum with a suggestion that people just not play tournaments? How constructive.


That's not what was said at all. Tiebreakers are just kind of bogus. If you went 5-1, you went 5-1. Demanding to know if you were the "best" 5-1 or the 4th "best" 5-1 when you didn't directly compete against many of the other players in that bracket? There's no fair way of doing that and someone is always going to come up short regardless of system. Like I've run events where I have 4 players whose only loss was against the champion and you want me to pick one of them to be better than the others? There's just no version of that answer that has any real meaning, but the person who gets labeled 4th always wants to change the system so they can be on the podium. X-1 is a great showing. Be proud of it.
   
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 Shas'O Ky'husa wrote:
Tiebreaking based on VP should not be used at all as it rewards seal clubbing more than anything else.


Agreed. It should be Strength of Schedule.
   
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 LunarSol wrote:
 Shas'O Ky'husa wrote:
 Togusa wrote:
Just don't worry about score.


So you show up in the tournament forum with a suggestion that people just not play tournaments? How constructive.


That's not what was said at all. Tiebreakers are just kind of bogus. If you went 5-1, you went 5-1. Demanding to know if you were the "best" 5-1 or the 4th "best" 5-1 when you didn't directly compete against many of the other players in that bracket? There's no fair way of doing that and someone is always going to come up short regardless of system. Like I've run events where I have 4 players whose only loss was against the champion and you want me to pick one of them to be better than the others? There's just no version of that answer that has any real meaning, but the person who gets labeled 4th always wants to change the system so they can be on the podium. X-1 is a great showing. Be proud of it.

That's how it should be, ideally. The problem is 40k takes so long to play you rarely have the opportunity to play enough games to arrive at a proper spread across the field. X-Wing used to use a graduated cut, where everyone who had a certain record (say, 4-2 or better) made the single-elimination rounds. There was then a round of games with some byes to generate a top-X (8, 16, 32, depending on the size of the tournament). That meant your tiebreakers only meant for seeding in the cut, which is a fairly minor advantage, and everyone is rewarded for game wins, not the margin of those victories. That only really worked because an X-Wing game takes less than 90 minutes so you get many more in the same time as it takes to play a 40k tournament.

No tiebreaker system is perfect. Some are better than others, but if your tournament format is such that it requires tiebreakers to sort the final standings, you're never going to please everyone all the time. LunarSol's suggestion is a good compromise too, but it falls flat when people are chasing those sweet ITC points so need to know whether their 4-1 result is actually 4 places better than someone else's.
   
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There are flaws with every system for tie breakers. Ideally, there should be enough rounds to play out the tie breakers, but that is not realistic.

I think strength of schedule is the best tie breaker. Vp tie breakers punishes player who played good opponents and scored less points and rewards those who got lucky with their pairings.

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 jaredb wrote:
There are flaws with every system for tie breakers. Ideally, there should be enough rounds to play out the tie breakers, but that is not realistic.

I think strength of schedule is the best tie breaker. Vp tie breakers punishes player who played good opponents and scored less points and rewards those who got lucky with their pairings.


How does someone determine strength of schedule or strength of opponent?
   
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 Just_Breathe wrote:
 jaredb wrote:
There are flaws with every system for tie breakers. Ideally, there should be enough rounds to play out the tie breakers, but that is not realistic.

I think strength of schedule is the best tie breaker. Vp tie breakers punishes player who played good opponents and scored less points and rewards those who got lucky with their pairings.


How does someone determine strength of schedule or strength of opponent?


Basically the total wins of all your opponents. The primary issue is people giving up after two losses rather than playing out all their games. Doing so hurts the standings of people you played prior to dropping out. It works well if everyone plays all of their games, but very competitive players get upset because they can't do anything to maximize it. The big advantage of it is you can't do anything to maximize it, so it doesn't artificially affect how people play the game and keeps the purity of different win strategies being equal.
   
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 LunarSol wrote:
 Just_Breathe wrote:
 jaredb wrote:
There are flaws with every system for tie breakers. Ideally, there should be enough rounds to play out the tie breakers, but that is not realistic.

I think strength of schedule is the best tie breaker. Vp tie breakers punishes player who played good opponents and scored less points and rewards those who got lucky with their pairings.


How does someone determine strength of schedule or strength of opponent?


Basically the total wins of all your opponents. The primary issue is people giving up after two losses rather than playing out all their games. Doing so hurts the standings of people you played prior to dropping out. It works well if everyone plays all of their games, but very competitive players get upset because they can't do anything to maximize it. The big advantage of it is you can't do anything to maximize it, so it doesn't artificially affect how people play the game and keeps the purity of different win strategies being equal.

Oh I see now. That is a much better idea, and not too overbearing considering that it's only used for tie breakers.
   
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 LunarSol wrote:
 Just_Breathe wrote:
 jaredb wrote:
There are flaws with every system for tie breakers. Ideally, there should be enough rounds to play out the tie breakers, but that is not realistic.

I think strength of schedule is the best tie breaker. Vp tie breakers punishes player who played good opponents and scored less points and rewards those who got lucky with their pairings.


How does someone determine strength of schedule or strength of opponent?


Basically the total wins of all your opponents. The primary issue is people giving up after two losses rather than playing out all their games. Doing so hurts the standings of people you played prior to dropping out. It works well if everyone plays all of their games, but very competitive players get upset because they can't do anything to maximize it. The big advantage of it is you can't do anything to maximize it, so it doesn't artificially affect how people play the game and keeps the purity of different win strategies being equal.

This is probably the best explanation I've seen. There are ways to factor in opponents who drop as well but the ideal scenario is all players play all games.
   
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Strength of schedual is the proper way to do it, the issue is how you determine strength of schedual.

The simplest way is to look at the placings of the people they played against earlier in the tournament. Obviously this cant be done in round 1.

The best way is to have records on the players for the whole season and base it off their placings, but thats not easy to settup and implement.

You could also just do a die off, which is perfectly fair and balanced.

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 Eihnlazer wrote:
Strength of schedual is the proper way to do it, the issue is how you determine strength of schedual.

The simplest way is to look at the placings of the people they played against earlier in the tournament. Obviously this cant be done in round 1.

The best way is to have records on the players for the whole season and base it off their placings, but thats not easy to settup and implement.

You could also just do a die off, which is perfectly fair and balanced.

This is not how I interpreted it.
I think they mean that they look at your opponents and tally THEIR wins and losses, and whoever's opponents had the most wins within that very tournament would win the tie.

This message was edited 3 times. Last update was at 2022/08/06 02:17:39


 
   
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Yeah, Strength of Schedule is normally a good way of figuring out who sits where within a bracket. You're evaluating how good each player's opponents were at the event to see how tough a road they walked to get to where they are.

For example, let us say we've had an event where we ended up with four players on 4-1. They haven't faced each other during the event, so we want to see how they did getting there.

Player A played players who were X-0 in the first three rounds, lost in round 4 (putting them 3-1), and then beat someone who was 3-1 (dropping them to 3-2.

Player B lost in round 3, player C lost in round 2, and player D lost in round 1.

In theory, if you lose in round 1, you should face an easier set of opponents through the rest of the event - this used to be referred to as the Swiss Gambit when I was helping to run events in the past.

If you win in round 1, lose in round 2, and win your other games, then in theory you've faced an easier field than the player who lost in round 3, who in turn had an easier field than the person who lost in round 4.

If set up properly, a SoS system will take this into account, and our bracket would be ranked A, B, C, D.

Unfortunately, I don't think I've got any of my files to hand where I had built formulae to do this for me for events.

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This is, emphatically, why I will continue suggesting nuking Guard and starting over again. It's a legacy army that needs to be rebooted with a new focal point.

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One problem SoS seems to have is more to do with perception than its usefulness. It's quite an opaque system and the exact value of everyone's SoS is in flux right up until the last game. Personally, I think that's its biggest strength - you can't "game" the system like you can with VPs. A lot of tournament players don't seem to like the idea of not knowing exactly where they stand at any given moment, but the whole point of SoS is it forces you to just play your own game and worry about the tiebreakers later, rather than try to manipulate scores in your favour in one way or another.
   
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I'm not a big tournament player, but this thread is interesting!

Wouldn't just using strength of schedule to determine overall winner be a better choice rather than using VPs at all?

A TO would use VPs as normal to decide who wins each individual game but then no matter what the person who has the highest SoS score wins the tournament. In my head this means that even if someone didn't win every game they could win the event.

For instance, player one goes 5-0 over a weekend, but his SoS score is 8...SoS units...

Meanwhile, player two goes 4-1 over a weekend, but his SoS score is 12 SoS units because he played much better players overall while player one played a bunch of softy balls (like myself when I go to a tournament!)

I mean, I guess one question would be is that even possible, and the next one would be would that work? Just curious, really!

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I don't think SoS works as a sole determinant of where you end up in a tournament - it's normally an add-on to a standard W/D/L record to act as a tie-breaker.

I've taken a look at the sheet for a 14 person X-Wing event I ran a few years ago - the SoS was just a case of adding up the points that each player scored from a game.

First place went 4-0, scoring 20 points; last place went 0-4, scoring 0. However, last place got a higher SoS than first place (40 points compared to 35), and the highest SoS went to a guy who placed 5th, on a 2-2 record, with 55 points.

Ranking the whole tournament just on SoS wouldn't work, as you don't end up with an incentive to try to win all your games - what you do wouldn't directly influence where you end up.

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 Kanluwen wrote:
This is, emphatically, why I will continue suggesting nuking Guard and starting over again. It's a legacy army that needs to be rebooted with a new focal point.

Confirmation of why no-one should listen to Kanluwen when it comes to the IG - he doesn't want the IG, he want's Kan's New Model Army...

tneva82 wrote:
You aren't even trying ty pretend for honest arqument. Open bad faith trolling.
- No reason to keep this here, unless people want to use it for something... 
   
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Colorado Springs, CO

Oh! It never occurred to me that you could lose all of your games and still have a higher SoS score. I kind of just assumed they'd all be closer, like two players with similar records and slightly different SoS scores. Seeing your results, it makes sense why that wouldn't work! Thanks for taking the time to explain that, Dysartes!

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I agree that SoS should be the first tiebreaking metric. As others have explained well it is simply a better measure than VP. Additionally I view using VP as 'double dipping' because VP were already used to determine the wins and losses in the first place.

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I agree that SoS should be used over VPs for tie-breaks, with the exception that if the two players who are tied have played against each other in the tournament already, then the result of their head-to-head should determine the tie.
   
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Aash wrote:
I agree that SoS should be used over VPs for tie-breaks, with the exception that if the two players who are tied have played against each other in the tournament already, then the result of their head-to-head should determine the tie.


Nah that's unnecessary. Just make it SoS.
   
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Just came back from an event that used SoS. I gotta say I get both sides, but it does feel a bit deflating that I got 4th place instead of 2nd simply because my opponents didn't have a 8% better win rate vs. their opponents.

For Comparison, I finished with 29pts and 46pts more than the 2nd and 3rd place finishers.

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SemperMortis wrote:
Just came back from an event that used SoS. I gotta say I get both sides, but it does feel a bit deflating that I got 4th place instead of 2nd simply because my opponents didn't have a 8% better win rate vs. their opponents.

For Comparison, I finished with 29pts and 46pts more than the 2nd and 3rd place finishers.


Sounds like they did better into adversity than you.
   
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SemperMortis wrote:
Just came back from an event that used SoS. I gotta say I get both sides, but it does feel a bit deflating that I got 4th place instead of 2nd simply because my opponents didn't have a 8% better win rate vs. their opponents.

For Comparison, I finished with 29pts and 46pts more than the 2nd and 3rd place finishers.

Are you referring to your VP totals there?

I'd need to look at the dataset (and understand their SoS methodology), but it sounds like they played against people who did better than your opponents did, meaning they had a tougher time to get to the same W/D/L record than you did, "earning" a higher place because of it.

Of course, if you want SoS to be moot, win all your games (assuming a field where a Swiss pairing system should result in one player on X-0)...

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 Kanluwen wrote:
This is, emphatically, why I will continue suggesting nuking Guard and starting over again. It's a legacy army that needs to be rebooted with a new focal point.

Confirmation of why no-one should listen to Kanluwen when it comes to the IG - he doesn't want the IG, he want's Kan's New Model Army...

tneva82 wrote:
You aren't even trying ty pretend for honest arqument. Open bad faith trolling.
- No reason to keep this here, unless people want to use it for something... 
   
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SemperMortis wrote:
Just came back from an event that used SoS. I gotta say I get both sides, but it does feel a bit deflating that I got 4th place instead of 2nd simply because my opponents didn't have a 8% better win rate vs. their opponents.

For Comparison, I finished with 29pts and 46pts more than the 2nd and 3rd place finishers.

That's the system working as it should. You can equally say it's deflating to play against clearly better players and lose out to someone by 29 or 46 points because they played easier opponents.

This is just a problem of mindset and "tradition". VPs have always been used as the tiebreaker, so you're naturally comparing your performance to those above you based on that metric. The whole point of SoS is to provide a better, less easily manipulated way of assessing performance.
   
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More along the lines of the fact that I don't have any influence over who I play. So when it comes down to it, if you draw weaker opponents you literally can't win from the start which is the part I don't like.

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