AG 2020 AG Circuit Playoffs - Seed Tiebreaker

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Lana

Lana

formerly pichus
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OMPL Champion

Welcome to the 2020 AG Circuit Playoffs! The top 16 players have emerged after competing in this year's AG tournament circuit. The winner of this tournament will be crowned as the AG Circuit Champion and will earn a banner saying the same!

This is the tiebreaker round to determine the seedings.
​
Tournament Rules:
  • This tour is in the National Dex Anything Goes format. POST DLC 2 additions are BANNED. This entire tour is locked into Pre DLC2 Gen8 National Dex AG.
  • General tournament rules and regulations can be found here.
  • The banlist for this tournament is the same as the National Dex Anything Goes ladder of the Smogon University server of Pokemon Showdown, and can be found here.
  • Best of three.
  • Battles must take place on Pokemon Showdown!.
  • SS cartridge win conditions are in place; there are no ties.
  • REPLAYS ARE MANDATORY
Tiebreaker for 5th seed.
- Standard 3 way round robin.
- Player with most wins (2) takes the 5th seed, player with second most wins (1) takes the 6 and the last place takes 7th seed.
- In a scenario where all players tie, their individual win-loss record in this series will be considered.
- Player with best record takes 5th seed, second best record takes 6th and 3rd best takes 7th. If two players have an identical win-loss record, then the winner of their head to head in the round robin will earn the higher seed.​
- If all three end up with the same record, the seed will be judged based off their best run in the circuit, followed by second and then third best run if there is yet another tie.​

Kaitlyn vs ADF Test
ADF Test vs Geysers
Geysers vs Kaitlyn

Deadline: 5th December GMT 5:30 AM. This will be coinflipped if games arent done before 7th December.

Tiebreaker for 15th and 16th seed.
- Since there is no real way to deal with a 5 way tiebreaker, we have picked the top 2 seeds (based on their tours performance in the circuit) to play in a head to head and the other 3 in a round robin. Winner of the head to head earns the 15th seed. Winner of the round robin takes the 16th seed. Loser of the head to head plays the winner of the round robin to get the 16th seed. This round robin will work in a similar fashion to the one for 5th seed tiebreaker (rules are typed above). So player with 2 wins will qualify for the head to head. If the tiebreaker ends with each player winning one game, player with better win loss will qualify. Exception is that the tiebreaker will be redone if all finish with the same win loss record.

default0 vs Nevelle

Fardin vs Guard
Guard vs Bread Sandwich
Bread Sandwich vs Fardin

Deadline: 5th December 5:30 AM GMT
Deadline for 16th seed tiebreaker game (loser of head to head vs winner of round robin): 7th December 5:30 AM GMT
ALL OF THESE GAMES ARE BEST OF 3
Leave a message on my Smogon wall or this post if you have any questions.
 
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Snoms

woooo first predicts.
default0 vs Nevelle- both are wildcards.
Fardin vs Guard- fardin seems to be more experienced and refined.
Guard vs Bread Sandwich- guard is more experienced. sorry mr bread man.
Bread Sandwich vs Fardin- the din.
Kaitlyn vs ADF Test- kate has harnessed the inner power of the fursuit.
ADF Test vs Geysers- wild card.
Geysers vs Kaitlyn- wildcard.
 
Chloe

Chloe

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NUPL Champion
hi bitches

Kaitlyn vs ADF Test - kate is better
ADF Test vs Geysers - geysers will luck it, but adf is better
Geysers vs Kaitlyn - kate is better

idk if any of those 3 will take it seriously given its for seeds, but id rather play monsareeasy than arifgoku if i needed a win so i think they will.

default0 vs Nevelle - i'd like to hope nevelle can take this but it'll rly come down to whether this series is a repeat of two days ago.

Fardin vs Guard - fardin is better
Guard vs Bread Sandwich -

Bread Sandwich vs Fardin - fardin for 16th seed

gl to all! hoping for some quality games
 
Lana

Lana

formerly pichus
is a Forum Moderatoris a Community Contributoris a Contributor to Smogonis a Battle Simulator Staff Alumnus
OMPL Champion
Hey, small change in plans.
We've realized that the top 2 places for the 16th seed tiebreaker (nevelle and default) have an unfair advantage, since they get 2 chances to make playoffs, while 2 of the bottom 3 are knocked out if they lose.
They're already getting a slight upper hand by playing in a head to head than a round robin (since a player has better chance at winning a h2h compared to a round robin), and on top of that getting yet another chance to make playoffs by beating the winner of round robin, seems a bit too much. This is not only advantageous to the head to head players but also very unfair for the round robin winner, since they had to win more games to make playoffs to begin with. As a result, we've decided that the winner of round robin will earn the 16th seed and the winner of the head to head will take the 15th seed.
in short, Nevelle vs default0 is now an elimination game. Winner of this game will be the 15th seed of circuit playoffs and the loser will be knocked out. Winner of the round robin will be the 16th seed of circuit playoffs.
 

Cynara

Banned deucer.
Why the bloody hell is the 5 way tiebreak being handled like this? The only reason it exists is because of your AG circuits nonsense points system to begin with which allowed for too many tiebreaks. (Such as excluding a players "worst" seasonal performance by not awarding points for that seasonal, along with poor points distribution due to the small numbers that are used (1-15)).

Why is there a elimination game when all 5 players achieved the same amount of points. (Best individual performances are only used to tiebreak seeds of players who have already qualified for play-offs, as per official tour standards and settings), all these players are competing for a spot to actually get into the playoff stage of the tournament, the fairest way to handle this was a 5-way round robin with the winner getting seed 15 and the runner-up of the round robin getting seed 16, bottom 3 eliminated. (This would have also saved time over the current setup).

Certain players are significantly advantaged / disadvantaged (if i'm reading correctly), despite having the same performance as 4 other players and Default0 is now magically seed 15 by playing one game. and Nevelle is out ? (Idk i'm still kinda confused reading all this). This is absolutely ludricrous; please revise the circuit points system for future tours to prevent a 5-way tiebreak.
 
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Boat

Boat

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Cynara said:
Why the bloody hell is the 5 way tiebreak being handled like this? The only reason it exists is because of your AG circuits nonsense points system to begin with which allowed for too many tiebreaks. Why is there a elimination game when all 5 players achieved the same amount of points. (Best individual performances are only used to tiebreak seeds of players who have already qualified for play-offs, as per official tour standards and settings), all these players are competing for a spot to actually get into the playoff stage of the tournament, the fairest way to handle this was a 5-way round robin with the winner getting seed 15 and the runner-up of the round robin getting seed 16, bottom 3 eliminated. (This would have also saved time over the current setup). Certain players are significantly advantaged / disadvantaged (if i'm reading correctly), despite having the same performance as 4 other players and Default0 is now magically seed 15 by playing one game. This is absolutely ludricrous; please revise the circuit points system for future tours to prevent a 5-way tiebreak.
Click to expand...
Disclaimer : not an AG player, just a fan of logically consistent tour circuits and treating hosts properly

Twice in your post you mention that the "circuits nonsense points system...allowed for too many tiebreaks". If you can find a way to design a circuit that has no possibility of nasty tiebreaks, I would love to see it. Most circuits awards points on a per win basis, so you are naturally going to have large clusters of people around individual point values. The easiest way to spread out the players is to have many more tournaments. However, most circuits have between 4 to 6 tournaments in the whole circuit. That's nowhere near enough to ensure there won't be tiebreaks, and there's not a whole lot to be done without massively increasing the scope of a circuit (which will almost certainly cause tour saturation).

You also mention that this tiebreaker is being mishandled. I don't disagree; this solution is not ideal. However, it's not exactly worse than your suggestion. Options for 5-way tiebreaks entirely depend upon how many seeds need to be filled, and are always extremely messy. That being said, in my opinion, 5-way round robin is the worst option in every scenario. 5-way round robins are extremely long, don't always resolve in one cycle, and given the generally short timeline that tiebreakers are put on, completely inappropriate, in my opinion. Qualifying in larger round robin also, very often, depends on players who already are eliminated. The negative implications of that should be obvious. A better system is to shuffle the list of players, and have each person play the person above and below them in the list. This system requires far fewer games, and works for any number of qualifiers.

Likelihood for each result, math done ages ago by lost heros
0 Qualifiers (only happens if every player goes 1-1) - 6.25%
1 Qualifier (one player goes 2-0, one player goes 0-2, rest go 1-1) - 62.5%
2 or 3 Qualifiers (two players go 2-0, one player goes 1-1, two players go 0-2) - 31.25%

So in this case, you'd run this system on the five tiebreaking players. If 2 players go 2-0, you have your qualifiers. If one person goes 2-0, you eliminate the person who went 0-2, and the tiebreak reduces to a 3 way tiebreak for 1 spot.

I don't have the math for a 5-way round robin handy, but I don't think it'll be better. Playing a total of 5 games is way better than playing a total of 15 games as well.
 
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Cynara

Banned deucer.
Boat said:
Disclaimer : not an AG player, just a fan of logically consistent tour circuits and treating hosts properly

Twice in your post you mention that the "circuits nonsense points...allowed for too many tiebreaks". If you can find a way to design a circuit that has no possibiltiy of nasty tiebreaks, I would love to see it. Most circuits awards points on a per win basis, so you are naturally going to have large clusters of people around individual point values. The easiest way to spread out the players is to have many more tournaments. However, most circuits have between 4 to 6 tournaments in the whole circuit. That's nowhere near enough to ensure there won't be tiebreaks, and there's not a whole lot to be done without massively increasing the scope of a circuit (which will almost certainly cause tour saturation).

You also mention that this tiebreaker is being mishandled. I don't disagree; this solution is not ideal. However, it's not exactly worse than your suggestion. Options for 5-way tiebreaks entirely depend upon how many seeds need to be filled, and are always extremely messy. That being said, in my opinion, 5-way round robin is the worst option in every scenario. 5-way round robins are extremely long, don't always resolve in one cycle, and given the generally short timeline that tiebreakers are put on, completely inappropriate, in my opinion. A better system is to shuffle the list of players, and have each person play the person above and below them in the list. This system requires far fewer games, and works for any number of qualifiers.

Likelihood for each result, math done ages ago by lost heros
0 Qualifiers (only happens if every player goes 1-1) - 6.25%
1 Qualifier (one player goes 2-0, one player goes 0-2, rest go 1-1) - 62.5%
2 or 3 Qualifiers (two players go 2-0, one player goes 1-1, two players go 0-2) - 31.25%

So in this case, you'd run this system on the five tiebreaking players. If 2 players go 2-0, you have your qualifiers. If one person goes 2-0, you eliminate the person who went 0-2, and the tiebreak reduces to a 3 way tiebreak for 1 spot.

I don't have the math for a 5-way round robin handy, but I don't think it'll be better. Playing a total of 5 games is way better than playing a total of 15 games as well.
Click to expand...
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ngw5CdkqZs2sqf68HqfMqq1Oza3nZUg-Rx0vg0gU7C8/edit#gid=0

Ubers circuit playoffs sheet. Weighting your tours helps reduce the number of tiebreaks and imo helps increase the overall competitiveness and encourages players to participate in all or more tours.

As you can see, 0 players are tied to qualify for a playoffs spot, following the actual circuit tournament point system, reduces the sheer number of tiebreaks. we both know a 5-way is ludicrous. This style could be scaled down to suit AG. I know its impossible to competely eliminate tiebreaks in any scenario but you can reduce them sufficiently to the point where its between two players or very rarely three players at worst. thank you for pointing out a better tiebreaking solution.

Another issue with the AG setup is all tours have the same weighting, i.e a double elim seasonal vs a smaller tour such as old gens tour awarding the same amount of points.
 
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Lana

Lana

formerly pichus
is a Forum Moderatoris a Community Contributoris a Contributor to Smogonis a Battle Simulator Staff Alumnus
OMPL Champion
Hi

I don't disagree that we picked a flawed points system for this years circuit, however it was designed last year and we didn't feel it was appropriate to change the scoring system at the end of the circuit and potentially remove players who expected to qualify. It was too late to go back and so we had to make the best of a bad situation. Using a better points system is what we're planning to do for the next years circuit, which we have made pretty clear in this thread. All the constructive criticism regarding this years circuit + any suggestions you'd like to make for next years circuit should go there.

I asked plenty of people (including a TD) about how we could handle this messy tiebreaker, and I did not get any solid suggestions. 5 way tiebreakers are really rare and really hard to handle. 5 way round robin was the first option we considered, but each player playing 4 series and then playing for the actual playoffs next week onwards would've been extreme tiring for the player. Not to mention, its fairly likely that this could've ended up in a tie between 2 (or more) players, so they'd have to redo the 4 series and delaying playoffs.
We decided to pick 2 out of the 5 players (these 2 had the better individual tour run in this years circuit, and there was no other factor we could've used to pick 2 out of 5 players tied at the same points) to play each other while the other 3 players played each other in a round robin. Winner of each bracket would qualify for playoffs. I don't think any of these 5 had a clear advantage over the other players. In the head to head, a player could've made playoffs by winning one series but at the same time they would've been 100% knocked out if they lost it. In the round robin, a player had to win not one but two series to make playoffs, but they would've gotten another chance if they lost one game but round robin ended in a tie. The players were at a nearly equal advantage (or disadvantage if you want to look at it that way). This seemed like the fairest way to us. Additionally, with this system we could've wrapped this tiebreaker up in a week, hence allowing us to complete the playoffs (hopefully) before January. We would've considered the unique randomized list system brought up by Boat if someone brought it up earlier.

Ultimately, everything comes back to the scoring system which we couldn't have changed. This was AG's first proper circuit and admittedly a bunch of things could've been handled better. Icemaster and I are willing to any and all complains regarding things which we may have mishandled, in PMs or elsewhere, so that we can have a nice conversation about it and do whats best for AG. :blobthumbsup:
 
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