On November 10 2010 18:31 Monzterg wrote: Regarding the tournament theory.
I agree somewhat with Taylor but I think there is a point missing.
I dont think a tournament bracket is supposed to create a ranking. If you want to create a ranking and really bring forth the best player over time you HAVE to run a series/league!
When you run a tournament, its about excitement and the MOMENT. Its about ceasing the moment and bringing excitement and tention to an audiance.
So when you get to a point in a tournament, its about that moment and who you are outside of that moment and what has happend earlier should be insignificant. The only thing that should matter is this moment right now and then its about ceasing this moment. Thats a tournament.
Taylor's way of thinking would be more fair and correct in theory if you're trying to determine who's been better during the time of the tournament. But then again what's the tournament all about? I dont agree with Taylor in that it should be a way of as fairly as possible determine who's better then who.
When you're at the finals I want it to be about who can do better IN THE FINALS because the finals is different from the quarterfinals. Also a Tournament can never be fair because you're geting to play 1 out of 16 players in the round of 16 and the eight moving on will be very dependant on who's playing who and will be very different if you swich the matches around.
Liquid`Tyler: Hi Liquid`Tyler: It's Tyler
edit: Great work as per usual guys. Always entertaining!
On November 11 2010 03:51 Firereaver wrote: Indrajit is an INDIAN mythological character not NATIVE AMERICAN.
Pretty sure they prefer "Native American."
LOL. Hilarious first post. Although something tells me it wasn't intentional.
But yeah, that part bugged me a little, just because it took away a little bit from a hilarious inc rant. Blame Columbus I guess. Either that or incontrol's pitiful knowledge of obscure Indian mythological figures. Totally inexcusable on his part.
Ohhhh Geoff... If it has a "jit" (pronounced as "jeet" if I'm not mistaken) at the end its most likely Indian, as in Asian Indian. Although I like to call Native Americans Indian as well. Just what we grew up with I guess.
I'm not saying that Tyler is correct, but InControl/Idra and even Day9's argument about tournament theory was really bad.
Merely because determining the best player from one tournament is impossible, does not mean that the tournament does not even try. The tournament should still try to make the winner = the best player even if that goal is impossible. Their argument is "because it is impossible, we shouldn't try." Day9's argument is just that mathematically it is not likely that the winner will be the best player.
Tyler is absolutely correct in saying that a tournament should try to determine the best player. If it is not to determine the best player, we might as well play the lottery to determine the winner.
Whether or not extended series does this is still in question, but that should be the question. Does extended series help to determine the best player within the context of a double elimination tournament. There are mathematical ways to calculate this and determine this. It is not impossible to figure out if extended series helps determine the best player or not. I have not read any of any studies that studied extended series in a tournament format, but there are papers that are written about tournament formats and which tournament formats.
This study http://www.cerge-ei.cz/pdf/wp/Wp303.pdf shows that the round robin tournament format is the best at determining the best player but requires the most time and resources. Second is double elimination, and the worst is a single elimination or "contest" format.
So studies have been done and can be done to mathematically figure out which is the best tournament format and any discussion about tournament format that does not include this mathematical analysis is incomplete.
On November 11 2010 03:30 NoXious90 wrote:So by your standards and logic, are you satisfied then that Jinro and TTOne are the two absolute best players in North America?
No. This is what I said: The current system is the best way to APPROXIMATE a ranking among the competitors, without having to play an insane number of games.
In that case let me slightly re-word my question, are you satisfied then that jinro and TTOne are approximately, generally speaking, roughly the best two players in North America? From the tournament results that occurred, can a legitimate and 'approximate' ranking, which lists the participants in terms of superiority, be drawn up and used as a guiding light in these dark times? Did the competition played over the course of last weekend provide sufficient information from which purposeful - absolute, approximate or otherwise - inferences can be made?
Doesn't matter what's fair. Tournaments are run for sponsorship money, and not for anything else. It's not a "coin flip," but it isn't nearly 100% the "best player" either. Have to have a reasonable format for entertainment, and it already is. The Koreans are closest to determining this with their leagues and teams, but honestly I think that format is entirely contradicting the "entertainment" aspect of sports, but it does add to the viewership, when it actually becomes big.
Their point is that even if it may be best, the results are so far from the truth that it shouldn't be packaged as a ranking. It's comparing 60% accuracy to 40% accuracy.
On November 11 2010 04:27 randplaty wrote: Whether or not extended series does this is still in question, but that should be the question. Does extended series help to determine the best player within the context of a double elimination tournament. There are mathematical ways to calculate this and determine this. It is not impossible to figure out if extended series helps determine the best player or not. I have not read any of any studies that studied extended series in a tournament format, but there are papers that are written about tournament formats and which tournament formats.
Yeah I'm not aware of any conclusions on extended series either. My intuition tells me that they are an improvement but I know math can be tricksier than hobbitses sometimes.
On November 10 2010 23:31 Mothxal wrote: You can't just say that there is one instance where single-elimination creates results that badly reflect the "real" skill-hierarchy, and that's when two higher ranked players face eachother early on. This can be fixed with seeding anyway.
It is absolutely ridiculous to be okay with seeding and not with extended series. My mind is exploding about this contradiction.
Seeding is justified along the same lines that extended series are except they're way more extreme and harder to defend. You want results from entirely different tournaments, played months before, against different sets of players, to give advantages in this tournament via seeding, but you don't want Person A who beat Person B in THIS tournament no more than ~50 hours ago to get any credit when playing Person B again. Wowowow whaaaaaat.
Anyway, I haven't limited myself to the problems with single elimination I've mentioned. There could be a million problems with single elimination and millions of problems with brackets in general. I don't have to be comprehensive here. My point is that double elim fixes a problem with single elim and extended series fixes a problem with double elim. Explaining how double elim works as a response to why having extended series is bad just doesn't make sense. It's not a good response.
Surprisingly enough there aren't angry polls about how we must destroy the menace of seeding players. There is such a thing as the integrity of a tournament; basically, if it is seen as a credible event by the players and spectators whose results reflect "something". It isn't possible to accurately measure someone's relative skill in the timespan of a tournament, yet winning them still has to be valuable and an accomplishment, and that can only be achieved if winning when it matters is worthwhile. If you start to obsess about the most truthful measuring system in such a short period then you're chasing something you can never accomplish anyway. If this now starts to be a higher priority than the actual place some players have in the brackets and such, then, as can be seen from the viewer reaction, people will start to find it ridiculous.
Seeding on the other hand is a relatively harmless approach to trying to get the results more reflective of real skill, because the tournament's integrity isn't compromised in any way. The rules are still exactly the same, it's just the matches that are somewhat more balanced now. It doesn't matter what they are based on, as long as it's transparent and impartial (and based on past results of course). Even if they don't seem to help a lot, just helping a bit is still helpful and doesn't negatively impact anything of importance.
The tournaments integrity is stronger with extended series than with straight double elim. Since a bo7 is the best way to determine the stronger of 2 players, over 2 bo3's.
The reason it is met with such opposition is people don't truly understand it's purpose, or they have a skewed perspective of what tournament competition should be.
Then there are a few who don't think players that lose games in the winner's bracket should be accountable for those losses.
But as tyler sorta mentioned, if you want to take the clean-slate-in-the-loser-bracket approach you should also oppose the whole seeding system since that isn't a clean slate and gives certain players advantages based on how they placed in a previous tourney.
On November 11 2010 00:36 NoXious90 wrote: Amidst all this debate about the true higher 'purpose' of tournaments as indicators of player skill or whatever, you're overlooking one very simple thing. Tournaments are simply spectacles, forms of entertainment for people to watch and enjoy. For players, tournaments provide an opportunity for players to compete against other high level players whilst offering them a chance to win prize money.
The bottom line is, the extended series rule has an adverse impact on the entertainment value of the tournament that greatly outweights whatever insurance it provides against 'inferior' players beating 'superior' players through luck or some other perceived illegitimate method of victory. This rule is especially detrimental when it comes into play during the grand final, which is supposed to be the culmination of the entire tournament - where the two best players of the tournament face off against one another to decide the ultimate winner. If you have a grand final which begins with one player having a significant advantage over the other, the spectacle of such a match is greatly reduced.
To put it plainly the people who object to extended series are the ones that are going to be most vocal about it. There are plenty of spectators who:
1. Would prefer a tournament with as much integrity as possible
2. Don't care enough either way and just want to kick back and casually watch some SC2 and old spice commercials.
The so-called integrity that would be lost if the tournament didn't follow the extended series rule would be insignificant. The GSL doesn't have an extended series rule, neither does the NFL, nor the World Cup. They all seem to do fine as far as perceived legitimacy goes, and more importantly, provide amazing spectacles which any fan worth their salt will want to see.
Nfl has a regular season that establishes seeds, then has a playoff that cannot be a best of series because of physical limitations. It is one of the reasons college football does not enact playoffs or a plus 1 game, injuries plus time off from school would be a bitch to get enacted. Not only that, people question the NFL champion's legitimacy all the time, lol, who honestly thought the NY giants had a better team then the patriots?
World cup has pool play followed by the final's games, but those games are also contrained by time and budget. If you knew what you were talking about you would know almost all professional football leagues have a best of series at home and away and how much you win by and score matters. So that example is shit honestly, because a team could win 3-1 at home then lose 2-0 away and they would not progress. The reason they can do that is because there aren't as many constraints as in the world cup.
so, let me ask you this (because this is what my point boils down to), what do you think the majority of people would enjoy more as a spectacle, a grand final featuring two players who have to play a Bo7 to decide the winner, where the score starts out at 0-0 or a grand final featuring two players where one player goes into the match with a two game advantage? I know which one would be more exciting for me personally.
as far as football goes, yes, you're correct that many round robin/knockout tournaments use an aggregate scoring format fairly similar to the one used at mlg, however, this is never ever used in the final match, not in the uefa cup, champions league or any other major tournament of that nature. This is because it would risk severely diluting the spectacle of the grand final, where the two best teams are supposed to play off in an epic match to decide the ultimate winner. Having this aggregate rule in place dampens the luster of the final match. see: idra vs select, ttone vs jinro for evidence of this.
I can say from experience that watching a team come into a match and win after being swept in their prior match is fucking amazing to watch. It can go the other way too, where it is over quickly and isn't too exciting.
Guess what? that happens no matter wtf the setup is(GSL 1 final?)
The finals were not what people are making it out to be, it was actually shaping up to be a pretty good game then bnet shut off. Of course watching one game that lasted ten minutes after a two hour wait is not satisfying, but that was not the bracket's fault, it was bnets.
People are throwing away the idea that people watch the tournaments to see who is the best. Great games come from the best and you want the best matchup at the end. This bracket provides the best setup for the best two players to play at the end. That is what I want to watch.
Again, there is reasoning behind them not playing a final over multiple days in the champions league or w/e, and that reason is not applicable to starcraft. In Starcraft the extended series can be played in one location at one time, in a reasonable amount of time.
@NoXious90 why bring the whole "best two players in North America" thing into it? MLG doesn't have that power, nor do I think they have that lofty a goal. They only need to determine who were the "best" x players for THIS TOURNAMENT so they can figure out who to write checks to and in what amount.
i have a short question about all the artosis bashing.
so on the liveon3 show everyone bitched over him with autism and whatnot, idra said he is retarded ( i thought there are friends?) and now on the sotg show nony bitched over him and later on incontrol too.
so is that all trolling or what.....i dont really understand whats going on