Full Tablet wrote:

Will the Grand Finals require Japan to win to USA 2 matches in a row in order to win the tournament? (That requirement is not always applied for Double Elimination tournaments, and the wiki is not very clear about that, the only possible allusion is this image http://puu.sh/bUq5V/f1066103b0.png).

Yes it is; all double elimination tournaments have this stipulation. If it doesn't, it's a malformed tournament structure because it implies that an undefeated team is immediately eliminated upon a single loss in the grand finals - quite the unfair disadvantage for a team to not have the ability to lose once when others do.

For me, the confusion is not with the structure of the physical bracket, but rather the terminology of the bracket: I was always under the impression that a winner's bracket winner and loser's bracket winner matchup was noted as the finals, and only if the winner's bracket team loses did the upcoming match be called the grand finals (and rightfully so, as there is no other match due to the winner's bracket team terminating the winner's bracket and falling into a sudden-death matchup in the loser's bracket where the loser is eliminated and the winner has no one else to face).

Loctav wrote:

The third place is the loser of the loser brackets finals.

The loser in the loser bracket finals doesn't indicate who is the third best team in the tournament.

A simple example where the double elimination tournament format fails in that regard, is a competition of who has the most amount of birthmarks on the face (a game that is completely deterministic, since the amount of birthmarks doesn't change between games, and there is no randomness involved).

If the brackets are set like this:


Then the 3rd place would go to the player that has 4 birthmarks on their face, even though there are 4 people who have more birthmarks. The result of who is 3rd place is dependent on how the brackets are set, which allows tournament organizers to have control over who gets the 3rd place award (as long as they can estimate the relative skills of the teams before the tournament).

Full Tablet wrote:

Then the 3rd place would go to the player that has 4 birthmarks on their face, even though there are 4 people who have more birthmarks.The result of who is 3rd place is dependent on how the brackets are set, which allows tournament organizers to have control over who gets the 3rd place award (as long as they can estimate the relative skills of the teams before the tournament).

... what?

You sit here and bring up a methodology of organizing a mock bracket that is completely deterministic which is hardly applicable given that there are numerous variables in a given match. If you paid attention at all to the tournament, you would realize the following:

- a.) the group stage drawings were randomized
- b.) the winning two teams from each group were placed against teams from the opposing side of the bracket (group A v. group H, group B v. group G, group C v. group F, etc -- with the better seed team from one group playing the lower seed team from the other)
- c.) being "deterministic" makes absolutely no sense because it absolutely does not dictate how a team is going to perform: if you need a perfect example of this, take note of how Brazil nearly missed the cut of getting out of Group Stages and made it to the finals of the loser's bracket.

Tournaments assess skill, but they do so on the fly, and trying to set a virtually level playing field to prove a point is substantially less realistic than you might believe. If you're going to seriously make some sort of implication that something was even remotely rigged... you really should stop. >_>

EDIT: in fact, let's take this whole "deterministic" model of yours and tear it to shreds using South Korea and Brazil teams: if you were to seed these players based off of their overall performance on all of the maps (by %, which is admittedly not the most consistent metric but one that is realistic and fluctuates throughout the tournament), I'd be willing to bet that Brazil's performance was pretty weak (acceptable to assume given that they had to draw it all the way out to a tiebreaker). They also lost to South Korea in Group Stages, and rightfully so, because the SK team has much better accuracy in the lower rounds. Carry that seeding through the tournament and you'll see the likely lower seeded Brazil team wipe out the SK team with ease.

Again, you can't just create a linear example and assume that it's sound logic. Too many variables are present during live play.

Halogen- wrote:

... what?

You sit here and bring up a methodology of organizing a mock bracket that is completely deterministic which is hardly applicable given that there are numerous variables in a given match. If you paid attention at all to the tournament, you would realize the following:

- a.) the group stage drawings were randomized
- b.) the winning two teams from each group were placed against teams from the opposing side of the bracket (group A v. group H, group B v. group G, group C v. group F, etc -- with the better seed team from one group playing the lower seed team from the other)
- c.) being "deterministic" makes absolutely no sense because it absolutely does not dictate how a team is going to perform: if you need a perfect example of this, take note of how Brazil nearly missed the cut of getting out of Group Stages and made it to the finals of the loser's bracket.

Tournaments assess skill, but they do so on the fly, and trying to set a virtually level playing field to prove a point is substantially less realistic than you might believe. If you're going to seriously make some sort of implication that something was even remotely rigged... you really should stop. >_>

EDIT: in fact, let's take this whole "deterministic" model of yours and tear it to shreds using South Korea and Brazil teams: if you were to seed these players based off of their overall performance on all of the maps (by %, which is admittedly not the most consistent metric but one that is realistic and fluctuates throughout the tournament), I'd be willing to bet that Brazil's performance was pretty weak (acceptable to assume given that they had to draw it all the way out to a tiebreaker). They also lost to South Korea in Group Stages, and rightfully so, because the SK team has much better accuracy in the lower rounds. Carry that seeding through the tournament and you'll see the likely lower seeded Brazil team wipe out the SK team with ease.

Again, you can't just create a linear example and assume that it's sound logic. Too many variables are present during live play.

I didn't claim that the game played in this tournament is deterministic (after all, under the assumption that a one-dimensional measure of skill exists, it's not safe to assume that a more skilled team will always win against a less skilled team).

The double elimination tournament format is not well-suited to estimate a third place in terms of skill, in a non-deterministic game, if it is not even well-suited to determine a third place in a deterministic game. Making a competition system in a non-deterministic game has stronger requirements, if the objective is estimating accurately which teams are the best. Fulfilling those requirements is not practical (for example, a system where every team plays against every other team a fixed amount of times, the higher the amount the better, and each team doesn't know whether they won each match or not, is much more likely to achieve accurate results than the tournament, even if is not feasible to do).

One of the simplest alternatives that is well-suited for estimating a third place in terms of skill is a triple elimination tournament.

The way the better seeded teams were paired with lower seeded teams in the first round does reduce the probabilities of a case similar to the example I gave previously (assuming a simple random selection for the teams in each group), compared to setting the brackets randomly at the start of the tournament. The problem with making the selections completely random, is that the system introduces an element of randomness that is not inherent to the game that is being played; the alternative of not doing the selections completely random at some point of the competition, is that the tournament organizers would then have the power to influence the results.

tl;dr: all your examples are highly hypothetical and not applicable to anything we do here. Nothing is under our control. Double Elimination perfectly works to determine a podium in a simple "who drops out first, who drops out last" format. Your entire asset of "determining skill" fails to begin with, because a tournament is not only influenced by skill, but also by environment.

Do not forget that every stage has different pools of extremely different skill level that it requires to play. You are comparing apples with peaches.
Any of your suggestions are overhypothesized. What you complain about is a very unlikely to happen constellation. Every tournament format has said edge cases. They are anyways super unlikely to happen. And even if it happens in 1 of 200 tournaments, people will just book it under "bad fortune" and move on.

This entire discussion is bullshit. Get out.

Loctav wrote:

This entire discussion is bullshit. Get out.

Niceeeee

KevEz wrote:

Loctav wrote:

This entire discussion is bullshit. Get out.

Niceeeee

talala

This informative post will be deleted anyway, just move along

Loctav wrote:

This entire discussion is bullshit. Get out.

Just ignore this if you aren't interested in the discussion, please.

Loctav wrote:

Your entire asset of "determining skill" fails to begin with, because a tournament is not only influenced by skill, but also by environment.

Do not forget that every stage has different pools of extremely different skill level that it requires to play. You are comparing apples with peaches.

This depends on how you define skill. One could define skill in a way that is completely isolated from the effects of the environment, and in that way performance would be dependent on skill+environment+chance+(other possible factors). Another possibility is considering skill as dependent on environment, in this case, "skill during a multiplayer game with the pressure of a possible prize" is something different to "skill during single play without pressure", for example. The relevant skill for the tournament would be "skill during a multiplayer game with the pressure of a possible prize".

The fact that different stages have different map pools, does make using the tournament as a mean of determining a certain kind of skill, that is independent from the tournament format itself, a harder task. In the "amount of birthmarks tournament" analogy, this is similar to changing the winning criteria from stage to stage (for example, in the first stage, it is "most amount of birthmarks in the face wins", while in the second stage it is "most amount of birthmarks in the arms wins"), which makes the relevant skill parameter of each player not be unidimensional anymore.

In practice, there is some correlation between 1 dimension of skill and another (i.e. teams that do well in a certain map pool tend to do also well in another map pool). If the correlation is strong enough, it is possible to consider a unidimensional value for the overall skill of a team; if there is no correlation, then the the overall skill of a team can't be separated from the format of the tournament itself.

Loctav wrote:

tl;dr: all your examples are highly hypothetical and not applicable to anything we do here.

The examples were based on an ideal scenario. If a certain method is not reliable on ideal conditions, then the reliability of the method in non-ideal conditions is expected to be even worse in most cases.

This is analogous to trying to find the triangle with the most area. You could try finding the answer by measuring the perimeter of the triangles, but, even if all measurements are done perfectly, it is possible that the triangle that has the biggest perimeter is not the triangle with the most area. Since the method is not reliable with perfect measurements, it is not reliable either when there is a chance that some of the measurements are wrong.

Loctav wrote:

Double Elimination perfectly works to determine a podium in a simple "who drops out first, who drops out last" format.

Whether or not the Double Elimination works perfectly depends on the objectives of the tournament. If the objective is: determine a podium in a "who drop out first, who drop out last" format, then the objective is met indeed (since that is what the tournament literally does).

But, that doesn't mean it meets other objectives, such as "determining which teams are the best at playing the game in a tournament", or "give entertainment value to the players and spectators".

Loctav wrote:

Nothing is under our control.

Because of the format of the tournament, even if the team groups are selected randomly, the overall method is biased (with respect to the result of the third place). There are 2 possibilities:

- The organizer decides to set up the groups randomly: the decision to do so introduces a probability where the third place is not given to the third best team (which is independent to the uncertainty caused by the fact that a better team doesn't always win against a worse team in a match). This is most likely the case of this tournament.

- The organizer uses a non-random criteria to set up the groups: the 3rd place in the tournament is affected by the criteria used. The third place wouldn't be determined in advance certainly, because of the probability of a better team not always winning against a worse team, but the 3rd place would incline towards a certain result.

Loctav wrote:

What you complain about is a very unlikely to happen constellation. Every tournament format has said edge cases. They are anyways super unlikely to happen. And even if it happens in 1 of 200 tournaments, people will just book it under "bad fortune" and move on.

In the ideal case where a team always wins against another team if they are more skilled (and it is possible to talk about a one-dimensional measure of skill that is relevant to the competition), and the groups are selected randomly, the probabilities are:

Chances of the Best Team entering the Double Elimination Tournament: 100%
Chances of the 2nd Best Team entering the Double Elimination Tournament: 100%
Chances of the 3rd Best Team entering the Double Elimination Tournament: 154/155 = 99.3548%

With the tournament brackets selected by seed, then:
Chance of the Best Team that entered the Double Elimination Tournament winning 1st place: 100%
Chance of the 2nd Best Team that entered the Double Elimination Tournament winning 2st place: 100%
Chance of the 3rd Best Team that entered the Double Elimination Tournament winning 3st place: 100%
Edit: 100% was in the case with 8 teams, with 16 teams the probability is less than 100%. The probability is approximately 88.5831%.

So, in the ideal case, there is a chance of about 11.9884% of the 3rd best team not winning the 3rd place.

If you are curious, those are the probabilities if the tournament brackets were selected randomly instead of by seed:
Chance of the Best Team that entered the Double Elimination Tournament winning 1st place: 100%
Chance of the 2nd Best Team that entered the Double Elimination Tournament winning 2st place: 100%
Chance of the 3rd Best Team that entered the Double Elimination Tournament winning 3st place: 80%
So, the chance of the 3rd best team not winning the 3rd place is 159/775=20.5161%

Just stop, no one cares

Zzzzzzzz

Full Tablet wrote:

Just ignore this if you aren't interested in the discussion, please.

"yeah tournament organizer, ignore every irrelevant thing that i'm saying about your tournament"

(wall of text directed at said tournament organizer)

oh

In other news: grand finals hype - just under 31 hours to go!

Halogen- wrote:

In other news: grand finals hype - just under 31 hours to go!

H-Y-P-E

I failed the tiebreaker. ;______;

GOD BLESS AMERICA

What I read from Full Tablet's scenario is The Winner has been 'decided' before The Tournament even started. What's the point to run the tournament if The winner/2nd/3rd has been decided?

So I thought this model of tournament is already perfect. ANYTHING can happen in ANY tournament. Best team eliminated earlier? Let it go, man. Who knows if any other tournament won by the 'lowly-seeded' participant?

Anyway, congratz to USA for the 4K victory! StaiainFangirl EtienneXC is so ET, man!
Everybody in USA team are very well-played

Gonna drop this in here, but goddamn I played STUPID good last night, holy shit. Those combos on Yura Yura and Japanese Transformation are the highest I've ever gotten.

Out of the six songs I played in the tournament, I got personal bests on four of them (the only two non PBs were Yura Yura and Sayonara), and that MESSIER 333 run was absolutely fucking inhuman for me -- holding 99.9% through 1600 combo was... yeaaaaaaaaaaaaah.

You have ascended my friend.
Big congratz to whole US team for the amazing performance and thorough destruction of the tournament. Well done!

at least america wins SOME tournament...

WTF HIW AMERICANS BECOME LIKE AN ASIAN XD NICE WIN USAAAAAAAA XD