Rejected Lock the OU-Ladder at the end of an OLT cycle and let ongoing games finish.

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Larry

Larry

The Cable Guy
is a Tiering Contributoris a Dedicated Tournament Hostis a defending SCL Championis a Past SPL Championis a Past SCL Champion
I think that the OU ladder should be locked at the deadline of an OLT cycle so no more games can be found and the currently existing games with impact on the standings can be finished. The issue I want to tackle with this proposal is timerstalling at the end of an OLT cycle.

I believe timerstalling at the end of an OLT cycle to be uncompetitive and it should never be a viable (let alone existing) qualifying condition at the end of a cycle. If you need to timerstall a battle you are losing to qualify, you do not deserve to qualify. By locking the ladder and waiting for games to finish, you effectively remove this uncompetitive method of qualifying from the list of options a player has at the end of a cycle, increasing the competitiveness of the qualifying process.

How?
The server restart mechanic comes with a function that disables all methods of getting a new battle while the server is in the process of restarting. A function similar to this can be implemented, that only disables a singular ladder (in this case, the OU ladder) from procuring new games when the deadline for a cycle passes, for as long as needed for all remaining games with OLT players involved to be finished.

Pro’s
  • Timerstalling is not a viable qualifying condition at the end of a cycle anymore, so this uncompetitive ‘wincon’ is removed from a player’s options, making the qualifying process more competitive.
Con’s
  • This would need to be implemented. I believe that part of the required code already exists (server restart) and would only need to be altered to only affect the OU ladder, though.
  • The ladder would have to be locked for a small period of time, preventing even non-OLT players from laddering for a small period of time (4 times during OLT, for about 10-60 minutes, depending on how last the remaining OLT-relevant games take.)
I believe the second con could maybe be tackled by making the ladder-lock only apply to people with the OLT-tag in their name, but because I’m not well-versed in coding, I am not sure how feasible this option is.

I’d like to hear opinions on this proposal, potential improvements if applicable and hopefully enough positive feedback for this to be implemented before the next OLT.
 
I have experienced this OLT deadline thing first-hand for the last 7 years. I think this would definitely be an improvement if possible in terms of coding.

Bonus: there are no more claims of "I got points but it didn't update" because the cycle would effectively end when all games end (and are updated), not necessarily by the deadline time.
 
Leru said:
I believe the second con could maybe be tackled by making the ladder-lock only apply to people with the OLT-tag in their name, but because I’m not well-versed in coding, I am not sure how feasible this option is.
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I see this as an almost exclusive condition to apply this suggestion. Otherwise I believe it will be quite disruptive for the server, specially for help room and help tickets.

As hip points out, server restarts waiting for battles to end take some time, but let's see what happens if we have to wait 15 minutes (being quite amicable) until all battles are completed. In April 2022, the OU ladder got 1.383.030 games played. That's 46.101 games per day. There are 96 "15 minutes periods" per day, so we are talking about around 480 battles being disrupted and not being able to start (so 960 users waiting at least 15 minutes to be able to search a battle!). 480 is the absolute minimum assuming a very short wait time for all battles to end and assuming that at cycle end we have regular traffic numbers, which is probably false because USA afternoons are quite high traffic times.

So I believe it'd be preferable that, if this passes policy stages, it heavily takes on account the possibility of only disrupting OLT-tagged accounts, and/or is heavily explained for all disrupted users at the moment of the ladder-lock.
 
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To be clear, a server-wide lock of the OU ladder (or any ladder that runs a ladder tour if we'd apply this uniformly to all circuit ladder tours as well) will not happen. That's an unacceptable level of disruption that nobody is going to okay as a policy. Both PS admins and I have already agreed on that point. Blocking ladder tour alts specifically from looking for games while allowing anyone else is possible and the only implementation of this proposal that could be considered.

Personally, though, I dislike the idea of having no clue when the cycle has actually ended. Having to sit around for an unknown amount of time waiting while people finish up laddering is a lot less engaging than actually having a deadline. Especially when you could start up as many games as you pleased before whatever ending point you put in and just slowly play through all of them. Last year we saw at least a few people start up three games >2100, so I would assume that much at least. I'd rather do something like the VGC timeout rules @ deadline to force all ongoing games to have an outcome then put the ladder update after that as the final result. If you're timer stalling a losing game it'll still count as a loss, a win is a win, and the deadline is the deadline.
 
I did not intend to shut down the discussion with my previous post, but apparently that happened anyway. If it came across as that then my bad, but I just really don't like the concept of smearing the deadline out over 30 minutes.

With that said I would initially support restricting how many games a user could play as the deadline approaches. One of the biggest contributors to timer stalling is getting into a losing position and rather than play it out people tend to just open another game. Getting rid of all of that seems like a good idea on its own.

So initially I would suggest the following:
For the last 10-15 minutes of a cycle all users on OLT alts are limited to one game at a time. We don't (right now) do anything about the deadline but let this play out for this year and reconsider it afterwards.
 
After some consultation with the PS Devs, there is likely a technical solution to this problem, but has its own set of tradeoffs that we want input on.

It is likely possible that the ladder track tool can be updated to track the Elo changes from all games started before the deadline regardless of when they end and use those games for the final standings. This would mean that players can no longer stall out losing end games or get stalled out of wins.

Compared to the status quo, however, this has the downside of not knowing when the cycle ends. It would depend on when the last valid game ends, which isn't predictable. While unlikely and not the most practical, someone could queue up several games right before deadline and gain or lose a ton of points. While not necessarily a negative (#TeamChaos), it certainly could be disruptive in practice. It could also make the host's job more difficult and potentially demanding.

Both the new proposed solution and the status quo have advantages (knowing exactly which games count and removing the advantage possibly afforded by stalling vs firm, predictable deadline and less potential for cheese strategies to delay the tour / swing results).

As a result, we want input from the community as to which option they prefer: the status quo (firm deadline) or the new technical change (all games start before deadline count). Other methods of addressing this are either techincally challenging or too disruptive to the ladder itself, so we would like to focus on these two options.
 
Keeping the hard deadline is the best decision. I don't think people who load up 5 games with 3 minutes left should be rewarded and have a grace period after the clock runs out. I personally think getting timer stalled at the end is a skill issue. Manage your time better. Adding ambiguity to the deadline at each cycle kills hype and creates more headaches for everyone competing. Keep it the same.
 
I think this change would the make the tournament worse overall.

A hard deadline is part of OLT’s identity to me. As others have said, there is a whole ass week to ladder and if you’re queuing games at the very end then you live with the results if you can’t finish in time.

There are also a ton of potential issues with allowing games to play out if they’re started before the deadline. People can queue 4-5 games, play several/all of them without even having timer on potentially since it’s not mandatory on ladder and then gain 60 points in the end like 30 minutes after the deadline (less extreme if we like forced timer for these games but that has its own set of issues). Not to mention the fact that people (who don’t even have to be in the tour) can troll this by queuing up with stall in the last few minutes and extend the “deadline” by 2 hours.

From the spectator experience this is also way worse to me, because now you’re just waiting around way after the deadline with the shitload of games people queued up in the final seconds with no set end in sight. The last hour of OLT is one of the most fun things to watch on the site and I think this change would ruin that.
 
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