Guest posts by Misfire

1

PvP Tournaments / Re: Tournament Feedback

« on: January 03, 2012, 01:44:10 pm »

Well, I see your point. There is definitely more work with holding a swiss than a knockout, I'm not questioning that in any way (in fact you need one more person to do the work smoothly). Actually, 32 participants would be a 5-rounder, and less than this probably justifies a knockout at all  (you hardly hold swisses for a handful of people). Also high repeatedness of the tournaments makes for some score inaccuracy of a single knockout event.
Also you got a point with, and I haven't put my mind to the fact some guys just hightail out of tourney when things start to crumble, it of course makes swiss results inadeqaute at all.
I can't argue or agree with the rest of reasons, as judging by my forum acc stats, I'm hardly near the tourney admission threshold. I try to avoid spam so it will take me a bit to cope with that, yet it's great you guys repeated so fast, thanks for this.

2

PvP Tournaments / Re: Tournament Feedback

« on: January 02, 2012, 09:30:48 pm »

I'm not sure where I should post this, as my post is a suggestion of a major change in the tournament system rather than discussion of the rule of 30 posts etc. I'm quite new to The Elements (just several months) and I've never posted before, yet I happened to have fallen in love with The Game and secondly, the topic of tournament organization is somewhat familiar to me.
After having read the tourney rules thread, two main problems hit me: a large number of players willing to participate almost every time and limited capability of knockout game system in dealing with such situations from statistical viewpoint. Moreover, as card games have some significant factors based on randomness (possibility of meeting a counterdeck, drawing sequence, etc.), elimination of a participant according to his performance against just one of the other 32 players can produce somewhat crooked overall results.
The soultion would be a Swiss tournament system preceding the knockout phase, applied widely in chess competition, where all participants play several games, one game per round (usually total of 7 to 9, it is calculated based on entrants number). Pairing in subsequent rounds is based on results from the previous one(s), precisely on number of wins (a player with 2 wins over two rounds will be most likely paired with another player that scored 2 wins, 0'er with another 0'er, etc.). As it tends to pair players of more and more similar strength (performance), after all needed rounds are played it produces highly credible results, and most tournaments see it as preliminary stage before the knockout part commences (which is usually held for the top 8 swiss participants).
For tournament hosts it's a bit harder to hold a swiss than a knockout, since it needs more games, yet it shouldn't take more time, as the number of rounds stays basically the same or alike, and furthermore, every round means just one game instead of a match, as the 7-9 rounds make the results more viable.
There is a lot of software (also freeware) handling swiss tourneys (pairing, scoring, 1-st round pairing (based on rating) etc.) and, of course, in case the organizers are interested I'll do my best to help any further.