Implemented Adjustment to Point System for Classic

[Merritt]

In order to partially address the increased number of byes in Round 1 of tournaments, and to bring the structure for Classic's point system in line with Grand Slam, the Tournament Oversight team has elected to slightly change the point yield for Classic Cups.

Cups will award 1 point per win until the round of 32, and wins from that point onwards will award 2 points. Nothing else will be changing with regards to the point system of Classic (no BFL will be implemented, first round bye and all coinflip wins will still defer points until the following win, etc.) If Round Robin tournaments are reintroduced at some point, this will default to being 1 point until the round of 48 while winning a round robin final will provide 3 points for the winner.

The intention behind this change is to slightly curb point yield for early rounds, which are in many cases easier to advance through due to the increase in tolerated bye % with the removal of round robin sized tournaments.

At this point in time we do not intend to apply this change to Smogon Tour, due to their smaller tournament size reaching the round of 32 fairly quickly in some cases. Changes to Smogon Tour points to handle the increase in round 1 byes are still in discussion, including partial discussion in this thread.


This thread will remain open to provide feedback on potential changes to the point system for both Classic/Grand Slam and the Smogon Tour point structure, now that people have had a chance to experience both Slam and Stour and can provide qualified feedback. Please do not use this thread for proposing changes outside of playoff qualification points (not number of cups in classic, stour times, and so on) so that discussion can remain focused.

 

[Reymedy]

Hello,

I think the change does not address the two main issues :
1) it feels unfair to have to play r1 in cups where like less than 50 players got paired
2) the cups do not have the same number of byes, which make some runs less valuable than others for a similar amount of wins

I checked the cups and we have this year (correct me if I'm wrong) :
- BW 80 byes
- DP 48 byes
- ADV 41 byes
- GSC 217 byes
- RBY 226 byes

Right now you basically can consider that everyone bar 30ish people got a bye for GSC/RBY R1, yet these cups have the same point structure as the first 3.
The change you made is fine and it's not what I'm after, it doesn't really matter in theory where you put the threshold for the 2pt jump anyway since everyone is dealt the same points; but this change does nothing to address the real issue : the later cups don't have a R1. The change should not have applied to every cup in my opinion, since only some cups have this "large amount of byes" we're after.

I'll give you an example; in DPP I played and won against 4 people and got 4 points for it. In GSC if I win the next round (R4) I'd have played exactly 2 people and got the same amount of points. And this is an experience that I think is close to being the norm and strongly skews the point distribution.
Ideally, every win should count the same from one cup to another, yet this isn't the case right now.

So I think we should :
- Introduce a +1pt bonus for people playing the R1 of cups where everyone basically got a bye (I'd leave the decision to pick which cups to a year per year appreciation rather than a hard #)
- Keep the old point system, where R4 gives 5 points instead of 4, for the cups that get played normally, and only use the new point system for cups which have a large number of byes (like GSC & RBY this year)

This should address issue #1 & #2.

edit : I'd strongly suggest implementing a change to address issue #2 at least for the current Classic (since I assume that issue #1 has always been identified and willingly ignored), before any playoffs cutoff gets drawn. I find the integrity of the point distribution this year very concerning between the three first cups, and the two last ones. I think we all rather avoid an unfair treatment of players for a tournament this heavy and taxing.

 

[Reymedy]

I understand considering the discussion that ensued my post, or lack thereof, that pretty much nobody really considers this as an issue. Or maybe I'm posting in a dead forum, what do I know.
However I want to reiterate just how bad the situation is.

So I did crunch the numbers :

Above are the points awarded per BO3 played for each cup. To the surprise of absolutely nobody, and as pointed out in my previous post, we have two outliers here : RBY & GSC.

Below the cumulative distribution after R4 (can't go any further because that's the current round for the latest cup).

I think it mostly speaks for itself, but to give an example, it means that :

• the BW cup (after R4) awarded an average of 1.43pt per BO3 played
• the GSC cup (after R4) awarded an average of 3.12pt per BO3 played

In other terms, the GSC & RBY cup, give two times the amount of points per BO3 when compared to the first three cups. To put it bluntly, you get on average twice the points for an equal amount of games played.
Please understand that this is a massive issue because the amount of points awarded after R4 is supposed to follow the increasing difficulty of games in tandem with the rising competition. However as it stands GSC & RBY are more than one round behind BW for instance (since every round /2 the players).

So I'll ask again, and sorry to sound rude but understand that this no doubt ruined the tournament and that I feel strongly about disrespecting the time and effort put by the players into such a draining tournament only for it to remain utterly uncompetitive in its design :

what the fuck is this point structure and why was it not corrected ?

And please don't tell me it's because we don't change it mid-tournament, this does not make any sense in this case. We're not making a change, we're fixing something, and that something was brought up before any kind of top 16 was in sight.

-

This tournament is like 10 years old at this point, and it's still nothing more than a pairings lottery. We could easily have a flexible point structure based on the number of byes. We could also very easily have a much needed seeding system based on the previous Classics which definitely would help considering that this is no OST where you will anyway have to "beat" anyone directly or indirectly. Classic encourages you to make deep runs in several cups, and I'm sorry but if you fight a S-tier player in like 3+ cups for R1/2 you're just cooked and your tournament has been ruined because unlike OST where the round you lost at doesn't matter, unlike ST where you get several chances etc, you don't get anything to make up for it here and to add insult to injury : the point structure makes literally no sense. Kinda infuriating to know that in RBY cup R5 there are people who got here not playing a single game, whereas some dude had to play ABR R1.
But I'm glad we have the replays enforced where everyone unlist them anyway, that's the one change I noticed since I was gone and thank god I'm forced into building something every round to make sure that player fatigue is even stronger for those who got a pairing vs those who win activities.
Sorry for the rant but I am baffled by the state of the tournament and it seems like a very important issue yet no discussion took place.

 

[Reymedy]

Me again with a last post.
I had a talk with Merritt who said my post wasn't all that conclusive because with R1 having 512 people in it, and effectively +256pt, it skewed everything because of how much it weighted.

Fair enough, below what I was actually getting at, I'll try to make my point across better this time around :

I checked for every player who qualified for R6 of each of these cups how many BO3s they had to play (and win) in order to find out what it took to get to the +2pt jump (total +6pt basically a third of the work to get to playoffs). Ideally the number should be 5 (= the players had to play all the rounds).

As you can see, in GSC, on average, people had to play less than 3 BO3s to get the 6 points, while in BW (and DPP/ADV) you're between 4 and 5 BO3s.

I expect RBY to be obviously similar to GSC in this aspect.

So unless there is some sort of explanation as to why trying to hit Thunders is worth two times more than missing Focus Blasts, I think I can claim that the tournament is objectively unfair in its point structure. Every BO3 won across the cups should be worth the same, it is far from being the case currently.

 

[Reymedy]

bump..

Updated with RBY and added the exact spread (how many players had to play 5 BO3s to reach R6, how many had to play 4 etc.).
Ultimately not a single player had to play 5 BO3s in any of the two last cups, so I don't think there could be a argument defending the fact that they should get to +2pt at the same pace as the first three cups.

Could a TD weigh in please ?
Is this even remotely considered as an issue or am I wasting my breath here ?

 

[ego]

bump..

I think it's worth distinguishing two separate issues. You did acknowledge that this chart contains some misleading data, but it still contains useful info. For the most part, it seems like we are specifically talking about R1 byes as the issue rather than the fact that (as your data shows) there are more noticeably R2 and R3 act wins in GSC and RBY Cup than in the others. Once we've established that the byes and the act wins are separate topics here, we can talk about the act wins, but I'm not really convinced it's an issue. For one, in these charts you provided below, the other three cups just have more act wins in R1 rather than the later rounds. GSC Cup has 116 act wins across the first four rounds while RBY Cup has 115; that's more than BW's 95, but it's much less than DPP's 170 and ADV's 156. Is this a long-term trend across several Classics? Are there really major implications if there are? Unlike byes, discrepancies in the number of act wins can actually result in a difference of more than one point per tournament run, so they can theoretically be a more impactful issue, but these don't seem to me like an issue that's worse in RBY and GSC than the others, nor does the solution of "you get the points after the next real game you win" seem inadequate. And beyond that, is there even anything that can/should be done about these? Early-round no-shows are just something that's going to happen in open bracket tournaments, and I don't think there's any real way to legislate that (awarding zero points for act wins has problems in the other direction). So we're mostly worrying about byes here.

So I did crunch the numbers :

Above are the points awarded per BO3 played for each cup. To the surprise of absolutely nobody, and as pointed out in my previous post, we have two outliers here : RBY & GSC.
Below the cumulative distribution after R4 (can't go any further because that's the current round for the latest cup).

I think it mostly speaks for itself, but to give an example, it means that :

• the BW cup (after R4) awarded an average of 1.43pt per BO3 played
• the GSC cup (after R4) awarded an average of 3.12pt per BO3 played

So whereas act wins can range in their impact (some players might have several act wins, others could have none), byes only impact the first round; you get 1 point from it or you get 0. The players that are affected are the 11ish% of players that actually had to play a round 1 match in GSC Cup (32/302) and the 12ish% that did the same in RBY Cup (36/295), but for the most part that's a disadvantage that doesn't actually translate into the bracket results. I did a very unrigorous check where I quickly scanned for every player with at least 10 points right now (there's 57) and just made a note of the ones that had to actually play round 1 in those cups. It's 15/57, and of them, 10 won anyway. That leaves 5 players currently with at least 10 points that actually did get eliminated in a round that most people didn't have to play, but two of them (kjdaas and harshest) lost because they got coinflipped. Of those remaining 3, GaryTheGengar (who got the brutal Kaz R1 in RBY) made it anyway, Exiline is almost certainly TB anyway and would just be looking for the full spot, so that leaves sayyonara as the only one who got eliminated in that "extra" round and whose playoff odds really took a hit from it. If I missed one feel free to call me out for my lack of rigour, of course.

They're not the only ones whose odds took a hit from getting unlucky here, sure. Maybe TGA makes semis in GSC Cup if they hadn't missed out on the bye and lost round 1. Maybe Triangles would have made the finals in RBY Cup if they hadn't played that round 1 game and lost, maybe without getting unfortunate there Texas Cloverleaf wins the whole RBY Cup and gets just enough points to qualify. Yes, their odds did take a hit, and they're not the only ones, but even if they dodged that first round matchup they would have then needed to win many more games, so I think it's reasonable to say that the mathematical impact on the bracket counts as "very small."

Of course, the correct number of players that get screwed over because they were in the ~12% that rolled an actual opponent and then lost a game no one else had to play should ideally be 0. For that matter, even if you didn't roll an unlucky R1 opponent that extra round still slices your odds a bit just because Pokemon is a high-variance game, and that's true if you end up winning too. We don't live an an ideal world, though, and that's going to be an issue for any number of byes that's not literally zero. For instance, JabbaTheGriffin has 17 points, and that includes a "free" point for being one of the 10ish% of players in BW Cup (49/463) to get a bye through pure RNG. I think that unless you want to remove byes entirely (and cut out players from the tournament), there is going to be a discrepancy, and the best thing you can do is either minimize their impact or find a non-arbitrary way to distribute that impact. As is, we're talking about a possible difference of 1 point from extra byes in GSC and RBY Cup, whose impact is largely hypothetical and which more likely than not wouldn't have changed who ends up making it and who doesn't. That seems, to me, to be fairly minimal.

(Of course, it might be minimal but it's still arbitrary and distributed at random, and maybe there's interest in a larger discussion about seeding cups to make it less arbitrary, but that is a larger discussion).

 

[Reymedy]

I think it's worth distinguishing two separate issues. You did acknowledge that this chart contains some misleading data, but it still contains useful info. For the most part, it seems like we are specifically talking about R1 byes as the issue rather than the fact that (as your data shows) there are more noticeably R2 and R3 act wins in GSC and RBY Cup than in the others. Once we've established that the byes and the act wins are separate topics here, we can talk about the act wins, but I'm not really convinced it's an issue. For one, in these charts you provided below, the other three cups just have more act wins in R1 rather than the later rounds. GSC Cup has 116 act wins across the first four rounds while RBY Cup has 115; that's more than BW's 95, but it's much less than DPP's 170 and ADV's 156. Is this a long-term trend across several Classics? Are there really major implications if there are? Unlike byes, discrepancies in the number of act wins can actually result in a difference of more than one point per tournament run, so they can theoretically be a more impactful issue, but these don't seem to me like an issue that's worse in RBY and GSC than the others, nor does the solution of "you get the points after the next real game you win" seem inadequate. And beyond that, is there even anything that can/should be done about these? Early-round no-shows are just something that's going to happen in open bracket tournaments, and I don't think there's any real way to legislate that (awarding zero points for act wins has problems in the other direction). So we're mostly worrying about byes here.

I agree with you, the thing is that act wins are not something I'd like to discuss here unless they are a result of massive R1 byes.
In every tournament you'll have activity wins, that's sad, it totally skews some runs, but there's nothing you can do and devaluing a player's endeavor because of his opponent's inability to show up would be unfair. This issue is as old as Smogon itself, and might be worth tackling one day but right now it's too big and I don't think there could be a consensus.

So whereas act wins can range in their impact (some players might have several act wins, others could have none), byes only impact the first round; you get 1 point from it or you get 0. The players that are affected are the 11ish% of players that actually had to play a round 1 match in GSC Cup (32/302) and the 12ish% that did the same in RBY Cup (36/295), but for the most part that's a disadvantage that doesn't actually translate into the bracket results.

From there you talk about the people who had to play "one extra" game and it's a fair concern as I think these players should get a bonus point anyway but that's not my main concern (and I don't think that you touched on that main concern). I think you're missing on the fact that the points are not linear, you get +1 for R1/2/3/4 then you get +2 for each additional round, so for instance winning R7 gives you +1+1+1+1+2+2+2=10pt.
My main concern is : - if RBY & GSC did not have a R1 (200+ byes in each cup) then why do their follow the same structure as the first three cups, they should give +2 at a later round.

So for instance let's talk R5 when the jump happens :
- BW gives +6pt currently if you win R5 and on average the players had to play 4.5 BO3 (so all their games -0.5 because some inactivity is always bound to exist)
- GSC gives +6pt if you win R5 and on average the players had to play 2.8 BO3...

What if we move the +2pt jump in BW to R4 (was the case previously), then BW would be granting +7 pt if you win R5 which is the least you could do to compensate compared to another cup without a R1.
To sum it up it is as I explained in my first post : the +2pt jump should not be at the round same across the cups because the cups are not the same (ie: some cups did not have a R1).


Let's take an example that could (and probably did) happen as it stands :
- Player 1 won R4 in BW&DPP&ADV, he racked up 4*3=12 points and won (on average) 9.6 BO3
- Player 2 won R5 in RBY&GSC, he racked up 6*2=12 points and won (on average) 6.1 BO3..

Same amount of points for 2/3rd of the games, and you might say "yes but since he got further the quality of the opponents got better" but that'd not even be true because in both RBY and GSC he played on average close to 3 BO3 which is not more than each of the first three cups at R4. BO3 played are an indicator of quality for the players left in the tournament because that's by playing that the better player advances over the worse one.

I'm running out of ways of explaining it but : if there is no R1 then the cups shouldnt be advancing towards the +2pt at the same pace.