I think the point system in WCoP is a little weird and I figured I'd look over it and see if there's ways to improve it.
Currently, the idea behind the point system works as such:
3-0s always get 6 points and 0-3s always get 0 points. 2-1s and 1-2s get 4 and 2 points respectively, except for one edge case: if the final score of the group has two 2-1s and two 1-2s, the 2-1s will receive 5 points, and the 1-2s will receive 1 point.
When explained by the paragraph quoted above this seems to make some sense, however let's look at how this actually functions - I'll use the example of Group 1 from the current World Cup.
Whether Gtcha earns 4 or 5 points is entirely decided by a game that isn't his own - Samqian vs Tamahome. Had Samqian won, he'd have taken 6 points and left Gtcha with 4. Instead he lost and Gtcha got a free point for doing nothing at all. Similar but reversed situation for Stallion, of course.
Now when you consider this individual situation and apply it across the full tournament, you can see that this doesn't make a whole lot of sense as a method to seed teams. For example, take US Midwest which earned one more point than France while finishing with the same score: to take a random example out of many possible outcomes, had Pohjis (Europe) beaten watashi (Canada) and had Bloody alfa (Europe again) dropped his game against FMG (US South), Luthier would have gained one less point and Cdumas would have gained one more, inverting the seeding of these teams. Surely everyone can agree it's silly to seed teams based on games of players and teams that are completely unrelated? (Side note: even if you like this system I think Strength of Victory is similar but better - see later paragraphs)
The gist of my proposal is to get rid of points and replace them with something else. I will now attempt to present systems that I think would be fairer, but I want to state that if all else fails I believe that even randomizing seeding between tied teams would be superior to the point system, by virtue of producing results that are similarly arbitrary while simplifying the whole process. The following section is just brainstorming replacements; the core issue of this post is getting rid of points.
To sum up, there are a lot of mediocre ideas which are essentially all better than points but I'm doubtful about whether or not they're better than randomization. Feel free to discuss and expand on these ideas; keep in mind that multiple tiebreaker options can be used in conjunction eg. if the first tiebreaker fails to break the tie you can always add a second and a third and a fourth. And keep in mind once again that I really think we should focus on how awful points are first, and look at replacements after - randomization is a fine tiebreaker if all else fails.
Currently, the idea behind the point system works as such:
However, when you look at the actual outcomes for a group, in almost every case this just directly converts to 2 points for each win.
3-0s always get 6 points and 0-3s always get 0 points. 2-1s and 1-2s get 4 and 2 points respectively, except for one edge case: if the final score of the group has two 2-1s and two 1-2s, the 2-1s will receive 5 points, and the 1-2s will receive 1 point.
When explained by the paragraph quoted above this seems to make some sense, however let's look at how this actually functions - I'll use the example of Group 1 from the current World Cup.
Whether Gtcha earns 4 or 5 points is entirely decided by a game that isn't his own - Samqian vs Tamahome. Had Samqian won, he'd have taken 6 points and left Gtcha with 4. Instead he lost and Gtcha got a free point for doing nothing at all. Similar but reversed situation for Stallion, of course.
Now when you consider this individual situation and apply it across the full tournament, you can see that this doesn't make a whole lot of sense as a method to seed teams. For example, take US Midwest which earned one more point than France while finishing with the same score: to take a random example out of many possible outcomes, had Pohjis (Europe) beaten watashi (Canada) and had Bloody alfa (Europe again) dropped his game against FMG (US South), Luthier would have gained one less point and Cdumas would have gained one more, inverting the seeding of these teams. Surely everyone can agree it's silly to seed teams based on games of players and teams that are completely unrelated? (Side note: even if you like this system I think Strength of Victory is similar but better - see later paragraphs)
The gist of my proposal is to get rid of points and replace them with something else. I will now attempt to present systems that I think would be fairer, but I want to state that if all else fails I believe that even randomizing seeding between tied teams would be superior to the point system, by virtue of producing results that are similarly arbitrary while simplifying the whole process. The following section is just brainstorming replacements; the core issue of this post is getting rid of points.
Idea A revolves around breaking ties by letting higher seeds pick the opponents. Two teams tie at 7th-8th? Let the 1st seed pick who they want to face, and send the other to 7th. The general idea is that, given that there is no objective metric by which we can sort the tied teams, we allow the subjectivity of a team which has earned it to be the decider. The main benefit to this is that it would provide more incentive to tryhard every single game in Round 1 - I'm sure people remember US Northeast slipping to a 7-8-9th place tiebreak in 2018 before smashing quarters and semis and winning the whole thing. We already reward higher seeds in relegation playoffs in a similar way, so there is precedent for letting teams judge which potential opponent is weaker when we have no objective way to determine it. The obvious downfall with this idea comes in its inability to break ties in the top 4 places, since obviously you cannot ask the lower seeded teams which opponents they'd like to face the least, though there are still some options here before resorting to randomization: two teams tied for 1st could be asked which team they'd like to face more between 7th and 8th (even if 7-8 are not tied), and if they pick different teams then both 'Seed 1' teams can get their reward - though a backup deciding method must exist because it is quite clear that this system will not be able to provide a solution to every tied situation. This would very much be a partial solution, but one that may be better than what is essentially the 'no solution' option of randomization (or points, which again I believe to be strictly worse than randomization).
Idea B is an a general attempt at finding an objective metric for breaking seeding ties. I'll detail my process in searching for this answer but I haven't found anything too satisfactory.
Approach 1 - Sorting through metrics that are used in other games and sports, the most common one is probably goal difference / point difference; in Pokemon terms the simplest comparison would be differential (eg. a 6-0 win would give +6, a 1-0 win would give +1), though this is obviously flawed in our game, as sacrificing pokemon is a very legitimate path to victory for a majority of playstyles. It could be argued that some combination of Differential x Turn Count would be somewhat of a fair representation of performance, seeing as a 1-0 win in 20 turns is roughly as impressive as a 6-0 win in 200 turns, while a 6-0 win in 20 turns is more impressive than either, and a 1-0 win in 200 is the least convincing out of these four, but this option still falls short of accounting for some middle ground playstyles and still misrepresents the quality of some victories (a 6-0 win in 20 turns can just be 'my opponent forgot Volcarona checks', for instance). Due to the very mechanics of our game I don't think there's any way for a tiebreaker of this kind to be satisfactory; then again it could be argued that this tiebreak isn't very satisfactory in many other games (eg. boosting your goal difference against weaker opponents by pumping them with ridiculous scorelines) and yet it is still used, so perhaps this isn't utter garbage.
Approach 2 - Looking over at the notoriously randomic strategy game known as Chess, they sometimes account for most games played or won using the black pieces as a tiebreaker option (admittedly rarely, but I couldn't think of many other games where this happens); for those unfamiliar with chess, playing as black is unfavored, so this is essentially a reward to whoever was the unluckiest or made the best out of their unlucky games. While the idea sounds good to me, it is clear to anyone who has ever played a game of competitive pokemon that some crits are more impactful than others, and quantifying that impact would almost surely involve human input into the process, which would then inevitably lead to disputes and just doesn't sound worth the effort overall. If someone has a genius idea for making a 'hard numbers' hax quantifier that would represent all situations fairly then this idea can be explored in better depth, but until then this is also discarded, unless we deadass want to make a Hax Tribunal to judge these things, but that doesn't sound desirable to me
Approach 3 - Head to head record is a tiebreak that could exist, but wouldn't really solve much in many situations given that teams play each other just twice and the outcome of two coinflips is most likely to be a 1-1 split, not to mention many people question the validity of H2H even in the sports where it is applied, so this seems like an all around poor option.
Approach 4 - Strength of Schedule is the last big common idea, but naturally due to the group stage structure this does not break any ties. An idea that could actually be applied here is Strength of Victory however, which simply means tallying up the number of wins of the people you beat. Once again though this falls into the same pitfall as the point system we currently have, in that it directly ties your scoring to the results of other people; that said, if we must have a system that does this then SoV would be superior to points, given that points actually punishes you for beating better players (if you're 0-2 and you beat someone who is 2-0, with the other two people naturally ending at 2-1 and 1-2, you're 'rewarded' with a single point while a normal win gives 2 points, as I covered earlier). For reference, applying SoV to the Group 1 example I made earlier would give Samqian a higher score (for beating Gtcha, while he was only able to beat the two 'weaker' players), and would also give Tamahome a higher score (for getting his only win against otherwise leader Samqian, while Stallion lost to both 2-1 players). I still don't really like this, but it at least makes more sense than the points system, which treats two 1-2 records the same (and punishes both) while clearly they are not the same. This solution is also philosophically in line with some golfing tiebreakers that reward better results on the hardest holes to decide a winner.
Approach 5 - Another idea that I've found in chess is assigning an artificial Strength of Schedule value by looking at your opponent's ratings rather than their score in the specific tournament. Naturally this is quite difficult to apply since we don't have an overall rating system in place, and it would force people other than -Tsunami- to care about the sheet, so I don't really see how this can ever be viable (certified unviable method LOOOOOOOL), but I'll put it in here in case it helps anyone come up with ideas to do this fairly.
Approach 6 - Fair play (least yellow+red cards) is used in some football leagues as the last possible tiebreaker before randomization. Force people to say GLHF and GG and not trashtalk in tours chat lmfao. I mean I'm in favor of removing certain types of clownery from our tournaments but I don't think this is the way to do it.
Approach 1 - Sorting through metrics that are used in other games and sports, the most common one is probably goal difference / point difference; in Pokemon terms the simplest comparison would be differential (eg. a 6-0 win would give +6, a 1-0 win would give +1), though this is obviously flawed in our game, as sacrificing pokemon is a very legitimate path to victory for a majority of playstyles. It could be argued that some combination of Differential x Turn Count would be somewhat of a fair representation of performance, seeing as a 1-0 win in 20 turns is roughly as impressive as a 6-0 win in 200 turns, while a 6-0 win in 20 turns is more impressive than either, and a 1-0 win in 200 is the least convincing out of these four, but this option still falls short of accounting for some middle ground playstyles and still misrepresents the quality of some victories (a 6-0 win in 20 turns can just be 'my opponent forgot Volcarona checks', for instance). Due to the very mechanics of our game I don't think there's any way for a tiebreaker of this kind to be satisfactory; then again it could be argued that this tiebreak isn't very satisfactory in many other games (eg. boosting your goal difference against weaker opponents by pumping them with ridiculous scorelines) and yet it is still used, so perhaps this isn't utter garbage.
Approach 2 - Looking over at the notoriously randomic strategy game known as Chess, they sometimes account for most games played or won using the black pieces as a tiebreaker option (admittedly rarely, but I couldn't think of many other games where this happens); for those unfamiliar with chess, playing as black is unfavored, so this is essentially a reward to whoever was the unluckiest or made the best out of their unlucky games. While the idea sounds good to me, it is clear to anyone who has ever played a game of competitive pokemon that some crits are more impactful than others, and quantifying that impact would almost surely involve human input into the process, which would then inevitably lead to disputes and just doesn't sound worth the effort overall. If someone has a genius idea for making a 'hard numbers' hax quantifier that would represent all situations fairly then this idea can be explored in better depth, but until then this is also discarded, unless we deadass want to make a Hax Tribunal to judge these things, but that doesn't sound desirable to me
Approach 3 - Head to head record is a tiebreak that could exist, but wouldn't really solve much in many situations given that teams play each other just twice and the outcome of two coinflips is most likely to be a 1-1 split, not to mention many people question the validity of H2H even in the sports where it is applied, so this seems like an all around poor option.
Approach 4 - Strength of Schedule is the last big common idea, but naturally due to the group stage structure this does not break any ties. An idea that could actually be applied here is Strength of Victory however, which simply means tallying up the number of wins of the people you beat. Once again though this falls into the same pitfall as the point system we currently have, in that it directly ties your scoring to the results of other people; that said, if we must have a system that does this then SoV would be superior to points, given that points actually punishes you for beating better players (if you're 0-2 and you beat someone who is 2-0, with the other two people naturally ending at 2-1 and 1-2, you're 'rewarded' with a single point while a normal win gives 2 points, as I covered earlier). For reference, applying SoV to the Group 1 example I made earlier would give Samqian a higher score (for beating Gtcha, while he was only able to beat the two 'weaker' players), and would also give Tamahome a higher score (for getting his only win against otherwise leader Samqian, while Stallion lost to both 2-1 players). I still don't really like this, but it at least makes more sense than the points system, which treats two 1-2 records the same (and punishes both) while clearly they are not the same. This solution is also philosophically in line with some golfing tiebreakers that reward better results on the hardest holes to decide a winner.
Approach 5 - Another idea that I've found in chess is assigning an artificial Strength of Schedule value by looking at your opponent's ratings rather than their score in the specific tournament. Naturally this is quite difficult to apply since we don't have an overall rating system in place, and it would force people other than -Tsunami- to care about the sheet, so I don't really see how this can ever be viable (certified unviable method LOOOOOOOL), but I'll put it in here in case it helps anyone come up with ideas to do this fairly.
Approach 6 - Fair play (least yellow+red cards) is used in some football leagues as the last possible tiebreaker before randomization. Force people to say GLHF and GG and not trashtalk in tours chat lmfao. I mean I'm in favor of removing certain types of clownery from our tournaments but I don't think this is the way to do it.
To sum up, there are a lot of mediocre ideas which are essentially all better than points but I'm doubtful about whether or not they're better than randomization. Feel free to discuss and expand on these ideas; keep in mind that multiple tiebreaker options can be used in conjunction eg. if the first tiebreaker fails to break the tie you can always add a second and a third and a fourth. And keep in mind once again that I really think we should focus on how awful points are first, and look at replacements after - randomization is a fine tiebreaker if all else fails.