UNDER 55% only - Fast Async

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Newt created the tournament on 2021-04-16

Newt

The Tournament description is updated with more detail and clarity. It is updated to include rulings that are in subsequent messages in this thread.

Newt

Newt Hello everyone,

My position on resignation is that it is part of the game.

Facing a player who resigns when he has become nothing but a "whipping boy" and has no chance of winning is part of the risk of going heavy military. Feel free to resign if you find yourself in this position. In most cases it is the most fair thing to do, and the most dignified. It will not be held against you in any way in this tournament.

However, please don't (intentionally) "time out" and/or allow Bot Substitution. Bots can be so stupid that it creates an unfair landscape for the remaining players. This tourney is for live players.

Thanks!

Newt

April 26 update: We are all in the first round. I am starting a new game each time a group finishes a game. Therefore, you should have 3 games in progress most of the time.

Group #3 is fast and has finished 3 games and is working on 3 more,
Group #4 is slow and is still working on their first 3 games,
Groups #1 and #2 have finished at least 1 game and are near complete on the other 2.

We have had several people time out. PLEASE DO NOT TIME OUT! Resign instead. You ARE NOT resigning from the Tournament, just the one game. This Tournament is for live players. Resigning will not be held against you. If this continues I will consider imposing a point deduction for time-outs in future rounds of this Tournament.

3 - FAST
Khyung - This dude is crushing it - Won all thee games completed!
TepSloan
Petrau77
Ragnard

4 - SLOW
Lubaroli
Firedart
Sergeeeee
phixed

1
Eugeneg
Tomtomparking
Rodaxlll
Dienekes

2
Balarithon
Luigino71
Newt
Kabel2

Newt

We have our first results from round one.

Group 3
khyung - 450
Petrau77 - 400
Ragnard - 250
TepSloan - 250

Firedart

Newt hi newt, just wondering why your scores above are different to what the tournament shows?

Newt

Firedart , Points are awarded 100 for first 75 for second 50 for third and 0 for forth. Did I get it wrong? Or are you assuming that raw scores would be tallied?

Firedart

Newt Your scoring in your previous message and the tournament description says "Scoring is 100-50-25-0", so the tournament scores show the below, which is different to your post above:

Khyung - 425
Petrau77 - 275
Tepsloan - 200
Ragnard - 150

Newt

Firedart ooops! Brain fart on my part. Good catch. Sorry about that. I will, of course, use the posted 100-50-25-0 when scoring results.

Thanks Firedart.

Newt

Hello everyone,

I'm going to make another couple of rulings about scoring, because we have had multiple players repeatedly time-out.

I think you all know this my first tournament (that I have either run or participated in). I'm disappointed that after multiple requests not to do so, players are still allowing themselves to time-out. I have even sent private messages asking repeat offenders not to time out.

I've got a couple of players who have continued to timeout. In fact one player, and I'm going to call him out here, (Dienekes) has timed out and been replaced by a bot in 6 out of 6 games completed. In at least one of those games, the bot went on to a crushing victory. In that same game, another player who has timed out in 4 of 5 games, (Rodaxlll), timed out as well. His bot went on to come in second place.

This is unfair to the rest of the competitors who are playing against live opponents and aren't getting (potentially) the free gift of having players who are way ahead time-out, forfeit, and hand the ultimate losers a much higher finish position and more Tournament Victory Points (TVP).

Therefore, in all rounds of this tournament (including round 1, since scores from round 1 can be used as future tiebreakers) I am making the following rulings:

If the bot(s) place in a higher position than other players in that game, those other players will be scored normally, according to their finish position. So, in the example above the two remaining live players would only score 25 and 0 TVP, not 100 an 50 TVP. This requires a little extra work, because it requires me to go back and watch the end of each game in which there is a player who times-out to see what the final victory positions were. But I'm willing to do this to make it a more fair to the live players.
Impose a negative 25 TVP penalty if you allow yourself to time out and be replaced by a robot. Once again, this is retroactive to round one.

The good news is that the way I have structured this tournament, the first round doesn't really have that much relevance, so the retroactive changes aren't that big a deal. In fact, I doubt they will actually change any of the outcomes of round 1 and therefore the seatings for round two. Ultimately, it was a good thing the tournament is structured this way. It gave me a full round of competition to observe, and make changes that I think will make this more fair.

Please "like" this post for a "show of hands" about these rulings. This is not a democracy, my two rulings above are now the law of the land. However, I'm very interested to know how many of you heartily agree.

Newt

A couple of additional notes: you will never be penalized for resigning. Please use the resignation feature when you are truly out of a game.

Also, I sent a note to CGE to ask about problem players (in our case the "problem" is that the players are not fully engaged). I hope they have some suggestions to resolve this.

Update I heard back from cge. Here is their response:

"Hi Newt,

Both players are not dummy players for sure, both of them are skilled players with long and successful gaming history, their drop rate is usually very low, their expiration within these days may be caused by temporary not-working notifications on Android or for some other maybe personal reason, difficult to quess.
But it is completely up to you and you have full right to exclude them from future stages of your tournament and replace them with others. You will be able to do so during setup of the next stage.

I hope I have answered all your questions, I other case feel free to contact us any time.

Best regards and thanks for your contribution to the TTA tournaments community

George
CGE "

At this point, I'm going to ask the two players involved to make a commitment not to time out in any future games.

Firedart

Newt Hi Newt - thanks for the info. I run a couple of tournaments here (TTA Orchestra and TTA 2 player leaderboard) that have quite a large number of players, and timeouts are always a problem. Usually after 2-3 rounds you can weed out these players and replace them with more reliable ones. Unfortunately at the moment with the Android notification issues it may be that they have just not seen their turns. I’ve played with Dienekes a few times and know that he’s been a reliable player before, so it may be down to the notification issue.

Newt

Firedart I do understand that there is a notification issue right now with Android. I have an Android and the notification certainly doesn't work right.

However, with 36 hours of reserve for each age, if you simply check your games morning and evening it is very unlikely that you will run out of reserve time. There is no "notification issue" if you are in the lobby looking at the list of your active games.

Given that each of us knowingly signed up for this "fast async" tournament, I can't imagine an active player who would be unable or unwilling to check the app twice a day, barring extraordinary circumstances.

Bottom line: "Android notification issues" is a lame excuse.

Newt

I have contacted the Dienekes and Rodaxlll by private message asking each of them to make a commitment to not timeout in any more games in this tournament. Neither of them have responded.

Therefore, I am seeking two replacement players. Those players will enter the tournament at the start of Stage 2 and will be awarded the mode number of Stage 1 Tournament Points (TP) of the remaining 14 players (the sum of the TP earned by the 7th place and 8th place player, divided by 2). As you know, these Stage 1 TP are only used to break ties in future stages.

I have posted a thread with this request for two additional players to the main forums on the CGE site.

If any of you have suggestions for players who you think might be interested, please respond to this email by posting their usernames here.

Tournament update: there are only two games left that need to be completed. Both of them are near the end.

Therefore, once I get replacement players, I will post a message here about the seatings for Stage 2, with a description of how I arrived at those seatings. I'll give a day for people to respond, and then I will start Stage 2.

Newt

SEATING FOR STAGE 2

Guiding Principles:
Seating for Stage 2 is based on the results of stage 1.
All players will play against an entirely new slate of opponents.
Two winners and two losers will be in each group.

Here is the pattern that will be used. It is the most objective way I could think of to do it.

STAGE 2 GROUP 1
Stage 1, Group 1, 1st Place
Stage 1, Group 2, 2nd Place
Stage 1, Group 3, 3rd Place
Stage 1, Group 4, 4th Place

STAGE 2 GROUP 2
Stage 1, Group 2, 1st Place
Stage 1, Group 3, 2nd Place
Stage 1, Group 4, 3rd Place
Stage 1, Group 1, 4th Place

STAGE 2 GROUP 3
Stage 1, Group 3, 1st Place
Stage 1, Group 4, 2nd Place
Stage 1, Group 1, 3rd Place
Stage 1, Group 2, 4th Place

STAGE 2 GROUP 4

Stage 1, Group 4, 1st Place
Stage 1, Group 1, 2nd Place
Stage 1, Group 2, 3rd Place
Stage 1, Group 3, 4th Place

Note: The Two New Players will be seated according to the finish the positions of Dienekes and Rodaxlll and will receive the mode number of tournament points (TP) of the remaining field for the purpose of future tie breakers.

Newt

STAGE 2 SEATING
There were no ties within any single group; Stage 1 coin-toss tiebreaker unnecessary.

TIME-OUT PENALTIES
The neg 25 TVP penalty for "timing-out" is applied 3 times in this list (lubaroli x2, and Ragnard x1).

The neg 25 point penalty was not applied to Dienekes and Rodaxlll because they are dropped from the tournament. Instead, the finish position of their many bots (10) is used to determine their finish positions within their groups. In these two cases, the TVP scores below reflect this. It seemed most fair to the replacement players and least disruptive to the balance of rest of the field to not penalize the new-player starting positions by carrying forward the penalties incurred by their predecessors.

STAGE 2 - GROUP 1
G1 – 1 new player
G2 – 2 Newt
G3 – 3 TepSloan
G4 – 4 lubaroli

STAGE 2 - GROUP 2
G2 – 1 Luigino71
G3 – 2 Petrau77
G4 – 3 Sergeeeee
G1 – 4 Eugeneg

STAGE 2 - GROUP 3
G3 – 1 khyung
G4 – 2 Phixed
G1 – 3 new player
G2 – 4 Balariton

STAGE 2 - GROUP 4
G4 – 1 Firedart
G1 – 2 Tomtomparking
G2 – 3 Kabel2
G3 – 4 Ragnard

Here are the Stage 1 Tournament Victory Points (TVP) awarded in descending order.
In this Tournament, the first stage TVP determined rank within each play group for purposes of seating the 2nd Stage.
Cumulative TVP will be used to break future ties. The replacement players will be awarded the mode TVP of the remaining 14 players (250 points) for purposes of breaking future ties.

425 Firedart, khyung, Luigino71
400 Newt
375 RodaxIII (x6 bot finishes)
325 Tomtomparking
275 Petrau77, Phixed
250 Dienekes (x4 bot finishes)
225 Kabel2, Sergeeeee
200 TepSloane
125 Ragnard (x1 bot finish)
100 Eugeneg
50 lubaroli (×2 bot finish)
0 Balariton (x1 resignation)

REPLACEMENT PLAYERS (Thanks!)
250 LyzzeeP
250 Nealio

Newt

It seems that this tournament has been taken private.
I have a note into CGE to ask them how to publicize the availability of two slots - I think they can open it back up to public visibility.

Newt

UPDATE: Jura made the Tournament public for us again about 5 hours ago. It is now open to new players.

As soon as we get two additional players, we are ready to start the second stage.

We can invite players by sending them this link
https://account.czechgames.com/tournaments/invite/61d89098a84d4d7ce07b55e95f3641ae8a97bb7ac35c7a9eb027708a1054e3dd

Please feel free to invite players. Remember the "under 55% Average Result" eligibility requirement.

Newt

Stage 2 has begun!

Welcome to new players: LyzzeeP and Nealio. Each of you have 250 Tournament Victory Points (TVP) from Stage 1 for the sole purpose of breaking future ties. There were no ties in stage 1.

Newt

Attention European and Asia/ Australia located player:

Do we have any Europe-based players in this tournament?
How about Asia / Australia?

I know we have at least one Australian player. I ask because if there is an Australian and a European and North American players in the same group - very slow progress (and maybe risk of time-outs) is virtually guaranteed.

I'm asking so that I can engineer future seatings (with player permission) to avoid this combination until the final round, where it may prove unavoidable. Here is a link to a cool utility that provides a visual representation of the problem.
https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/?pl=1&lid=2988507,22,7&h=2988507&hf=1