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Going forward with the World Cups

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deadbeat
As many of you are aware, Loctav has stepped down from running the World Cups leaving us with no host. In a recent internal discussion with the World Cup team, we talked about the short term plans, mostly looking at osu!mania 7K and the new hosts. We are looking into replacing the single point we had which Loctav filled and instead, we will expand out and create a small team of people to lead the charge.

  1. juankristal will be taking the lead point in organization
  2. Happystick will be working on streaming
  3. deadbeat be working on commentary management.


Our current goal is to look into the osu!mania 7K World Cup. It's currently in an awkward state and we are looking into ways to address this. The plan for now is to downscale it to a 2v2 format in the hopes of making the matches closer and making the overall feel of the tournament more intense. We've posted a poll on the osugame twitter asking what people think about this, and once we have the results from that, we'll be moving forward into setting up the registration. We will need some time to adjust to a new staff and get things sorted on our end, but we do aim to having everything tested and working in a timely manner.

Lastly, we are also looking into making things with the World Cups more transparent as with everything else. While there will still be matters settled in our internal server, we are looking into moving things to the osu!dev server for better public feedback and communication.
DDMythical
first
Hede
second
Chippy
2v2 format sounds a lot better for 7K, excited to see how it turns out.
LowAccuracySS
ok cool
-Konner-
Hopefully 2v2 idea will help out the countries with smaller 7k player bases. Will be interesting to see how people vote on the subject.

Also blame Juan.
Kano
I'm excited to see what the future holds with these changes

Also 2v2 format could work, but probably wouldn't be a bad idea to gauge interest from the top players potentially participating as well as the community vote and then make a decision based on the input from both
Hououin Kyouma
i love you juan
Evening
While 2 v 2 is more accessible for most countries, I find it restrictive when it comes to player selection if the map pool is also accessible for most players.

This might lead to just 2 - 3 players from most countries spearheading the games coming forward, in which makes the outcome predictable for the most part due to consistent performance by those 2 - 3 players.

Usually the exciting parts that makes a tournament work would be the room for error, else it becomes predictable and feels like a long drawn movie cliché

The room for error coming from 2 players would be lower:

- The choice for additional players comes at a price of average lower performance, this adds on a lot more when you have to choose more and more players, in which makes the room for error much bigger. However, if it's only 2, there isn't really much room for debate as you would just send in the "usual good players" from the team.

- It's kind of the same problem with a relatively weaker country facing a stronger team, where they know that they have a high chance to lose. However, the room for error is where they are able to make calculated choices in order to win, even if the chance is small. However, due to the small room for error, the opportunity is much lower and it's most definite that they are going to lose (so why bother?).

- While I do understand that the participation rate would be lower than 4K, and this rule can be used to encourage signing up, I think the repercussion will be more fatal than that of benefits.

There are some ideas to make it more "intense":

Making the pools more diverse and increasing the deviation of difficulty in all pools
More Gimmick choices, inclusive of "BPM-Abuse" maps
*More rules in place to prevent spearheading of players (eg. only allowed to use players for a certain amount of rounds)
- I think you could play around with rules, but I'd understand if you want this to be as "standard" as can be

I would like something like this to happen more often basically


note the weaker players and brutal/odd choice of map in the pool itself
juankristal
The main issue though is the amount of participants we expect to have this time around. As you should know Evening we had only 16 teams last edition and we barely even reached that point with teams that consisted of only 3 players. The main focus is over there, as much as I would also love to see those type of matches more often I would like to have the tournament running as a higher priority.

On the other side of things I think a 2v2 format helps more the weaker teams that hurting them. Or at least the teams that are around the high seeds (not quite top but strong) given that this teams usually lack a 3rd player and specially in some specific type of maps. While the idea is to mantain the map pools as they were (at least the general idea) I dont think that changing them drastically as you suggest would have much of an impact unless there is fail potential. Weaker teams would almost always have a harder time against stronger teams regardless of the difficulty level.

However I do find the idea of using "player restrictions" to have more strategical picking cool but it would need a decent amount of work to be executed properly. Consider that if you restrict teams you have to do it for all of them which means that matches like the ones you linked might not even happen on the first place since the "star of the team" might not be able to play under certain circunstances.

The room of error is smaller, yes, but it is for both teams!
Raveille
Interesting...
Kephin
In order to have better competitiveness between "stronger" countries and "weaker" countries, the mappool should consist lots of uncommon maps but fit the standard and the quality set by the tournament management.

As one of Indonesian MWC 7K 2017 member, in previous 7K world cup, I regret to say that I successfully predicted almost 70% of the maps selected as the Finals Mappool. Even before the world cup starts, I encouraged my "possible teammates" to practice those maps beforehand and thus, gave us more advantage in the Finals.

The previous map selector did a good job though, especially in the Group Elimination Stages. The maps chosen are not complicated in terms of pattern and timing, thus increasing the influence of "out-of-the-game" problems such as anxiety. Even the "stronger" teams worried that the single miss might affect the score significantly and led the team to defeat.

I expect this year's MWC 7K will have much more maps that looks easy but deadly, in order to have intense matches especially between "stronger" countries and "weaker" countries.
SillyFangirl
i like turtles
Evening

juankristal wrote:

The room of error is smaller, yes, but it is for both teams!
While I wholly understand the situation for small signup numbers, I believe that you need to understand the situation with 2v2 matches having smaller room for errors, be boring.

Room for error is important for weaker teams as RNG could allow them to chip some points out of the stronger ones. While it does, too affect the weaker team, the room of error at least, creates the chance

The spearheading situation I talked about happens more often when you have too less RNG in a match.
While I don't truly advocate too much RNG in a tournament to reflect true skill, too less of it makes the revelation of results "meh", and I think it's more towards the latter at this point.

PS: glad that you liked the idea for player restrictions
lemonguy
Would it be a bad idea to wait and see how many players sign up from each country to determine if the format should be 2v2 or 3v3? I'm fairly certain that the turnout will be low enough that 2v2 is most likely necessary, but in the case that enough people sign up, 3v3 should still be an option.

I have to agree that 2v2 helps weaker teams more than it hurts them, at least from previous experience. There were many cases from several teams where there were two strong players (possibly stronger than the two top players from the other team), but the third player was significantly less strong, which led to that team losing. Of course, it wouldn't help much against top countries like SK or China or whoever, but most of the top countries have more than two strong players anyways so 2v2 wouldn't hurt the weaker teams anymore than 3v3 would honestly.
Pope Gadget
2v2 for ln maps and 3v3 for rice maps hue

also "RNG" (luck, because RNG is an incorrect term here) should be as close to 0% as possible. tournaments are designed to test skill, and a predictable match can still be an entertaining one with a generous amount of variety. besides, luck in maps usually boil down to bad patterning or immoral SV usage anyways.

also restricting players to only a number of plays may be a decent idea if there weren't teams of only 3 in what you want to keep as a 3v3 tournament
projectc1
imho i prefer 3 vs 3, 2 vs 2 sound very awkward for me consider there's plenty 7k ranked map, more player learning 7k and more player getting good at that key (i can only tolerate in 2014 because it's still new)
but

Gekido- wrote:

Would it be a bad idea to wait and see how many players sign up from each country to determine if the format should be 2v2 or 3v3? I'm fairly certain that the turnout will be low enough that 2v2 is most likely necessary, but in the case that enough people sign up, 3v3 should still be an option.
this suggestion also fine.
but hey at least hyoe for MWC 7k tbh i thought you guys are gonna delete 7k mwc since there's not many country who register at all last year and italy being forgotten
i can only think the reason why not many country register into 7k mwc is because most of them already know who's gonna win
Evening
I was referring "RNG" as in deviation in scoring and also player compromising to get the 3rd player for the team, hence the results being slightly unpredictable, it was bad wording on my part.

Not sure how you would include variety without compromising accurate skill measurement and also being entertaining (subjectively).
Personally don't see these kind of matches being entertaining if they are straightforward and predictable.

I do agree that world cups' intentions are to test skill level. However, I feel that it should focus on a balance of luck and fairness rather than trying to restrict it to a 0% luck case in which is just total fairness.

I doubt skill level measurement can be done well in tournaments due to the small amount of maps that can be accurately used to compare between teams. This also includes bad luck and bad timing slots in which factors in the measurement, in which, shouldn't. It can be done more effectively through other means and it shouldn't be what the vision of this tournament to be.

I understand that all players cannot go through an ideal world cup that will leave them all satisfied, but I just don't agree with the notion of having the main idea of the tournament to be as accurate as possible in determining skill level.

While there are currently luck incorporated within the previous 7K MWC, I felt that the luck wasn't enough or at least, should be maintained, if possible anyways.
Pope Gadget

Evening wrote:

Not sure how you would include variety without compromising accurate skill measurement and also being entertaining (subjectively).
Personally don't see these kind of matches being entertaining if they are straightforward and predictable.
If a mappool is diverse enough that it's possible for each team to attack each other on every front, but it's clear that a team is elevated in experience compared to the other, then an alternative source of entertainment comes from seeing players excel at maps and going above and beyond to get ludicrous scores that even the most knowledgeable won't be able to predict. Having luck in this situation screws the star from shining, which is especially damning as it's out of their control, since that's what luck is.

Evening wrote:

I do agree that world cups' intentions are to test skill level. However, I feel that it should focus on a balance of luck and fairness rather than trying to restrict it to a 0% luck case in which is just total fairness.
This will only frustrate players because, again, they feel it's out of their control. The mappool has to be enjoyable to get the best out of people, and having them go into a game without a clue on what to do differently is going to make the players swear at the selectors, then potentially ruin the atmosphere of the whole match.

I'm still curious about what you constitute as 'luck' which isn't outright bad patterning or immoral SV usage, as I put it in my previous post.

Evening wrote:

I understand that all players cannot go through an ideal world cup that will leave them all satisfied, but I just don't agree with the notion of having the main idea of the tournament to be as accurate as possible in determining skill level.
I mean no offense but can you repeat this? I don't want to reply to something I don't think I understand fully.
Kephin
is it possible to implement restriction at forming a team?

for example, a team consisted of 6 people is limited as:
1 person whose global rank is between 1-100
3 person whose global rank is between 101-1000
2 person whose global rank is between 1001-5000
Pope Gadget

Kephin wrote:

is it possible to implement restriction at forming a team?

for example, a team consisted of 6 people is limited as:
1 person whose global rank is between 1-100
3 person whose global rank is between 101-1000
2 person whose global rank is between 1001-5000
well that would just be unfair to the people who've worked their asses off to get to where they are today
juankristal

Kephin wrote:

is it possible to implement restriction at forming a team?

for example, a team consisted of 6 people is limited as:
1 person whose global rank is between 1-100
3 person whose global rank is between 101-1000
2 person whose global rank is between 1001-5000


As Pope mentioned this isn't a possibility.
coldloops
some ideas to make the tournaments for "intense":

- increase the map pool size, more maps means more choices and better representation of different skillsets.
- no map bans, bans sound nice in theory but in practice they are very predictable and only reduce the map pool, which goes against my first point.
- reduce the time between map pool showcase and the matches, 1 week to grind the maps is too much, I want to see more sight reading and less memorising.
- the loser picks, instead of alternating who picks a map, the loser of the current map picks the next, this should reduce sweep matches.
- technical draw, if the score difference between teams is smaller than 5k (i dunno how much exactly), the game is a draw.

I don't know how I feel about 2v2, but if that increases the amount of countries then I think it is a positive change.
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