Poggers, gl to everyone participating!

That time of the year again

it's time

Oh boi here we go

Good Morning 4dm Forum Chat !!!

I wish that ill be playing too, Team GERMANYYYYY

glhf

soutin wrote:

DannyPX wrote:

Tournament hosts have the right to revoke any signed player’s eligibility to participate in the tournament due to an obvious excess of skill compared to the tournament’s target demographic

I wish you guys could make this rule either more clear or notice the player that you think has an "obvious excess of skill" more ahead of the time. Last year I was told I would not be able to play by the time the tournament was about to start. At that point, I had downloaded all the 4DMWC2 and 4DMWC1 pools, was participating in the Brazil tryouts and was practicing for over a month to play with friends from my country.

From my point of view, I played through almost all of the past map pools and I believed that I was at the right skill to participate, so the use of words like "obvious excess of skill" clearly isn't enough.

The last edition's method of screening out "sandbaggers" was neither transparent nor efficient. When I asked the past host why I was screened out, not much information was given to me but a "you have a good score on X loved map". I was frustrated but I thought that maybe I was too good to participate and that players at my level wouldn't participate. However not only people of my level participated, but teams that did not have players of such caliber had no chances of competing in the late game pools.

I recognize that this is a very complicated topic and that I'm writing this from a place of frustration, but I wish from the bottom of my heart that you guys do better this edition and that things run smoothly this time.

Heya, while I am just a consultant this year and no longer involved with making managerial decisions, I felt some amount of obligation to respond to this to address some of the points here and hopefully give a little bit more clarity to all on how management attempts to address the challenge of keeping 4dm a tournament with a clear skill demographic.

I’ll start out by addressing why there is a general secrecy in terms of giving out specifics to our skillbanning processes. I personally believed then and still believe now that secrecy is a key to ensuring holistic accuracy in finding out which players were “too good” because any details made public may be taken advantage of by shady sandbaggers. For example, if we announce ahead of time that we shall require players to submit a score on a map “we will skill ban anyone with x score on this map”, then players who have ability to score far above that cutoff may submit a purposefully lower score to bypass this check, thus making our check ineffective. For another example (this suggestion has been a popular one to try and weed out sandbags), if we were to say “anyone with x dan clear will be banned” then a less known player with this clear could just falsely claim they are a lower dan to checkers who are none the wiser. Unfortunately, more often than not it’s unknown players who are problematically good than known ones and we need ways of checking skill levels that anonymity cannot bypass, so we need to be a bit sneakier and less clear than may be expected on our skill benchmarks so we do not get taken advantage of. This principle is not even the only reason why I was so generally secretive last year and why skill banned players weren’t announced until after signups and I’ll discuss another major reason for this later, but please keep it in mind moving forward.

With the above principle in mind, there is still another large issue to conquer which is answering the question of “how good is too good”. osu!mania has experienced leaps and bounds of physical skill improvement in its general community, gradually but quickly moving the standard for what should be considered an average, good, top-end or overpowered 4 digit player from a purely physical perspective. For example, when 4DM debuted in 2019, being a Dan 10 player made you a very high end 4 digit while there were a very few standout luminal+ players. Fast forward 2 years to 4DM3 where multiple entire teams of Dan 10+ players were eliminated in Group Stage and having a player who was at or approaching luminal skill was normal for every top 8 team. But as we all know, Dans are rudimentary and sometimes useless ways of looking at things and while nice for this example, there are many other more important factors we need to pay attention to such as the general increase in accuracy fundamentals and tournament oriented skillets among 4 digit players and the fact that many are deranking specifically to play in 4DM due to lack of incentive to stay higher ranked as no exclusive tournaments exist for these players (3DM when ???). All these factors make drawing any sort of solid line that would solve the “how good is too good” question basically impossible, so instead we decided to approach this issue from a different angle, more on this in a second. There were some core principles considered when making decisions on what skill level we think players should be at and what level was too good, mostly on principles of how tournament map pools scale. There is a lot to say here alone but to be consise, by the finals and grand finals of tournaments, players scores will generally decline from 980-990k+ FCs on maps to scores of around 930-970k, scores that are much more physicality oriented than ones that hinge on accuracy. Our goal was to skill ban players who could potentially remain getting consistently high accuracy FCs in these stages, as having a player on a team getting +20-50k higher than the rest of the lobby can heavily swing a match in favor of that team, making that team imbalancedly dominant in the end stages. (Side note: this is why our skill ban generally targets physical players over early game accuracy powerhouses, as in early stages, the average score already being so high makes a carry player setting a large difference like described above impossible) We aim to rid this imbalance as to make the lineup of teams as balanced as possible in the end game because it goes against our mission of making 4dm a fair tournament for newer players when dominantly good teams such as the 4dm1/4dm2 United States team exist. Thus, we decided to focus our skill banning effort on ridding any player who could potentially accurately full combo all or most of our grand finals difficulty (set at about 4kMWC19/20 semifinals level). However, having this sort of objective skill line is still not enough to answer the aforementioned “how good is too good?” question, as this question is inherently relative, so we also decided with our core principles in mind to also skill ban in relative terms. We compared every single signups to another on a large set of maps by creating a sheet that allowed us to make a leaderboard of signup scores on any ranked/loved map we wanted. While still arguably “inefficient” and with shortcomings as any process will have, this allowed for a large sample size of maps and allowed us to compared players who we hosts knew to players who no one seemed to know without any bias in that knowledge or lack thereof. There was stark consistency in who ranked at the top of any harder maps we checked and usually by margins of more than a percent compared to the average. Taking this top tier list of players who we both knew had exceedingly high physical skill compared to the bottom ~97% of players and who definitely could destroy the grand finals difficulty and sparing a select few who were found to have relatively little in the way of accuracy fundamentals, this is how we decided our final skillban list. However, one large drawback of this process is we cannot compare all signups to each other until we know who all signups are, and while we did as much ahead of time as possible, this is the biggest reason why we could not announce who was skill banned until after signups. While I think there certainly were players that should have been skill banned that weren’t, match results from semifinals onwards clearly showed evenness of team balance in pools that were not accuracy oriented, as every team had a fighting chance against another, near every match result was very closely contested, and no player was destroying every single map. (While team structures of nearly all top 8 teams did have an all rounded player who may have seemed to be a overpowered carry, even these players were not getting close to scores in the skill ban check that matched the scores of those banned)

I hope what I have said generally makes sense and I would like to take this last paragraph to address some mistakes I made and, as is the goal with writing this, see what can be applied moving into 4dm4. I would like to acknowledge and apologize to you personally soutin for the lack of detail given about your ban at the time. I took a second before writing this to read our chat logs from then and while much detail wasn’t asked for, I will admit I did not screenshot much of the evidence I found for banning players as most of the sheet running was done in a voice chat with the hosts so there was no need to for host communication and I never planned on releasing much information anyways, which in retrospect was a large mistake. However, as a consultant who still regularly interacts with the hosts regarding 4dm4 managerial affairs, I can assure you that your comment has brought some beneficial things to attention and that we will work to find ways to be more clear about skill bans this upcoming tournament while not sacrificing the needed secrecy to ensure as few people evade our skill checks as possible. Thanks a bunch. If there’s still confusion from you or others, this thread and my discord/osu inbox are both open. (edit nvm i can’t comment again on this post gg)

👀

Can i join?

welp ive never done a tournament i guess i will try this

Albionthegreat wrote:

Here we go again.

ah sheet

:eyes:

This is cool, but I got rick-rolled

Ñam

REGISTRATIONS ARE OPEN
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1EE_ySIAYL3EdnVwYFN8H0UAdOHbMCSiluJl3DIJU9XM

good luck to the participants hoping for an exciting tournament

hope i get qualified

glhf guys

id love to but ill be on vacation so goodl uck to everyone!!!

good luck everyone!!