Howdy! This is the first PR thread that I've posted, so please pardon me if I missed any protocol.
I speak primarily from the RBY Community here, but I think that a lot of the RoA Communities have realized that there are many issues with the Spotlight Tournaments that generally accompany the rotating RoA Spotlight Ladders. I want to start by saying that I really like these tournaments, at least as an idea. I'm not a huge fan of laddering, so I'm very glad that I get the opportunity to play and watch games during the ladder period without needing to actually ladder. This is all great, so I do not want to do away with the tournaments. However, I think there is significant room for improvement.
The greatest purpose of the Spotlight Tournaments are to get games played for less popular tiers. It is thus very unfortunate that the biggest issues with these tournaments stem from byes, dead games, and given wins.
Let's start with the byes. Byes are a necessary evil of any tournament without a 2^n player count, but I do think we can work to mitigate them. For those unaware, Spotlight Tournaments follow a Swiss-system, where players get paired each week with a player with the same record for usually four weeks, until a winner is declared or (usually two) finalists are realized and they play to win the tournament. Thus, winning a typical RoA Spotlight Tournament essentially necessitates a perfect record. This leads to my proposal: for players that do not have a perfect record, let's no longer prioritize matching them with players of the same record and instead prioritize letting them play games.
Let's look at an example from the ongoing Spotlight Tournament for RBY PU. Post #28 has our Round 1 Bracket. Already, we have six byes. Not great, but not really avoidable. Post #41 has our Round 2 Bracket and there are only 2 byes (none are shown because two late subs joined and were placed in the 0-1 bracket). Not bad, but again, mostly unavoidable. Now Post #58, where we find our Round 3 Bracket, is where my issue rests. We have two byes (which I think would have been four without the aforementioned subs), both in the 1-1 bracket. My question is: why are we doing this? Why are there unpaired players that could be playing against each other?
Now, the "correct" answer to my question is that not pairing them preserves the even shapes of the upcoming 1-2 and 2-1 brackets of week 4. But I don't think this is worth it, primarily because, considering both players have lost a set, necessarily neither player will win the tournament. I don't think preserving the shape of brackets for players that will not win the tournament is worth giving up games played, simple as that. Not to mention this setup is especially depressing because one player already got a bye in week 1! At a bare minimum, we should try our best to reroll pairings to prevent duplicate byes when possible. But even better would be just pairing as many players (excluding those in the x-0 bracket, including week 1) with like records as possible each round and then just pair up as many of the rest as you can without regard to record. In essence, just let people play the game.
I believe I've seen a couple of other format issues with Spotlight Tournaments, such as x-0 players having to play non x-0 players and three-way finals, but I wanted to focus on this example because it's recent and fresh in my mind. This is a low-hanging fruit and should be an easy fix.
While I'm here, I'd like to also discuss the arguably greater, but more complex, issue with Spotlight Tournaments. The tournaments follow a Swiss format and everyone should ostensibly play four games at minimum; however, this rarely happens, especially to players that have lost even one of their sets. Because winning the tournament is generally impossible after your first loss, there is a huge problem in a loss of motivation. Dead games, coinflips, activity wins, and given wins are extremely common in Spotlight Tournaments. Thus, it becomes challenging to get an opponent you can play, even if you want to. This is a much harder problem to solve, so I would like to see if anyone has any solutions. I do have a few recommendations, which I've outlined below.
Remove players that have lost via activity, dead game, or given win from the player pool. No more coinflips either. If any of the bolded situations apply to you, you definitionally can't win the tournament anymore. Moreover, it's probably self-evident that you aren't prioritizing this tournament anymore. So here's the idea: leave the tournament. Players with no motivation after losing (or worse, those that forget they signed up / don't care to play despite signing up from the start) effectively become floating byes in the pool, killing the possibility of games for players looking to play them. And because so many of these byes float around, they bump into each other and coinflip their ways into higher brackets too. Removing these players greatly increases the odds of players who, despite their records, actually want to play meeting each other. A corollary to this suggestion to make it an even better solution, if players play along, would be to have players who have lost announce if they would like to drop out before the next week is posted, so they can be removed even sooner and do no damage. Spotlights are supposed to be low-stakes and fun, so I don't think we necessarily need to institute a punishment for these players beyond dropping them from the tournament, but that is also an idea (I would only consider a play restriction if a player joins and drops in week 1 several times in a row, which, as far as I know, doesn't seem to be a huge problem right now).
Have Spotlight Tournament performance be counted towards some kind of circuit or greater tournament. This would probably be the most logistically challenging solution to implement, but if there was some kind of way to have these tournaments count towards a circuit for the tier the Spotlight is shining on or if there was some kind of broad Spotlight Circuit in general (maybe by generation or overall), we could incentivize a player who lost early to strive for a 3-1 record, even if they know they won't win this tournament. I know this is extremely ambitious and would require time and management, but it would be very cool if we actually felt like coordinating it. Another similar idea I've seen floating around is the idea of a Ladder Tournament replacing the Swiss Spotlight Tournament. I resent this idea because I like the Spotlight Tournaments a lot more than I like laddering. However, I did have the idea to perhaps merge the two into a greater playoffs. My current plan was to take the top finishers of the Spotlight (probably the finalists, which is usually two and occasionally three players; you could take the top four if the numbers permit that as well) and pair them against the top placers on the Ladder at the end of the month. Then you play a three-week, eight-person (or greater than that, if there's demand) tournament to declare an overall winner. It might look something like this:
Ladder #1 vs. Ladder #6 / Ladder #5
Ladder #2 vs. Ladder #5 / Spotlight #3
Spotlight #1 vs. Ladder #4
Ladder #3 vs. Spotlight #2
A bigger tournament, say a 16-person one, could potentially incorporate some 3-1 Spotlight players as well, so that could incentivize a few more games to get played during the regular tournament itself. I think my idea here was passed along to Tournament Organizers already, but I figured I'd publish it here too because I think it's neat.
Employ a different tournament format. Swiss is theoretically extremely well suited to get many low-stakes games played, which is great. But maybe some other format could help keep motivation up? Single Elimination isn't really a good idea because the tour is already effectively Single Elimination, and Single Elimination would just remove the already slim possibility of playing at all for players who have lost once but want to keep playing. I'm always a big proponent of Double Elimination but the logistics and length of Double Elimination tournaments can be daunting. Maybe some other good format exists? Maybe players that have lost can just challenge each other at will or something? I'm up for ideas here.
Another sidenote is that Spotlights are very often used to give players requisites to vote on VRs and suspect tests for the tiers being played, as many of the tiers covered just don't see that many tournaments. It'd be really cool if the players winning these tournaments and becoming qualified actually faced reasonable opposition for the whole tournament. Heck, if we do a good enough job, we could probably justify extending requisites to 3-1 players in addition to the finalists/winners. Or, another idea, if there is a playoffs between finalists, the 3-1 players could also play each other and all 4-1 players could qualify for requisites.
I think any combination of the above proposals could go a long way in improving the Spotlight Tournaments. I'm looking forward to reading what others think about this problem. I apologize for the post length, but there is just so much potential for improvement here. Cheers!
I speak primarily from the RBY Community here, but I think that a lot of the RoA Communities have realized that there are many issues with the Spotlight Tournaments that generally accompany the rotating RoA Spotlight Ladders. I want to start by saying that I really like these tournaments, at least as an idea. I'm not a huge fan of laddering, so I'm very glad that I get the opportunity to play and watch games during the ladder period without needing to actually ladder. This is all great, so I do not want to do away with the tournaments. However, I think there is significant room for improvement.
The greatest purpose of the Spotlight Tournaments are to get games played for less popular tiers. It is thus very unfortunate that the biggest issues with these tournaments stem from byes, dead games, and given wins.
Let's start with the byes. Byes are a necessary evil of any tournament without a 2^n player count, but I do think we can work to mitigate them. For those unaware, Spotlight Tournaments follow a Swiss-system, where players get paired each week with a player with the same record for usually four weeks, until a winner is declared or (usually two) finalists are realized and they play to win the tournament. Thus, winning a typical RoA Spotlight Tournament essentially necessitates a perfect record. This leads to my proposal: for players that do not have a perfect record, let's no longer prioritize matching them with players of the same record and instead prioritize letting them play games.
Let's look at an example from the ongoing Spotlight Tournament for RBY PU. Post #28 has our Round 1 Bracket. Already, we have six byes. Not great, but not really avoidable. Post #41 has our Round 2 Bracket and there are only 2 byes (none are shown because two late subs joined and were placed in the 0-1 bracket). Not bad, but again, mostly unavoidable. Now Post #58, where we find our Round 3 Bracket, is where my issue rests. We have two byes (which I think would have been four without the aforementioned subs), both in the 1-1 bracket. My question is: why are we doing this? Why are there unpaired players that could be playing against each other?
Now, the "correct" answer to my question is that not pairing them preserves the even shapes of the upcoming 1-2 and 2-1 brackets of week 4. But I don't think this is worth it, primarily because, considering both players have lost a set, necessarily neither player will win the tournament. I don't think preserving the shape of brackets for players that will not win the tournament is worth giving up games played, simple as that. Not to mention this setup is especially depressing because one player already got a bye in week 1! At a bare minimum, we should try our best to reroll pairings to prevent duplicate byes when possible. But even better would be just pairing as many players (excluding those in the x-0 bracket, including week 1) with like records as possible each round and then just pair up as many of the rest as you can without regard to record. In essence, just let people play the game.
I believe I've seen a couple of other format issues with Spotlight Tournaments, such as x-0 players having to play non x-0 players and three-way finals, but I wanted to focus on this example because it's recent and fresh in my mind. This is a low-hanging fruit and should be an easy fix.
While I'm here, I'd like to also discuss the arguably greater, but more complex, issue with Spotlight Tournaments. The tournaments follow a Swiss format and everyone should ostensibly play four games at minimum; however, this rarely happens, especially to players that have lost even one of their sets. Because winning the tournament is generally impossible after your first loss, there is a huge problem in a loss of motivation. Dead games, coinflips, activity wins, and given wins are extremely common in Spotlight Tournaments. Thus, it becomes challenging to get an opponent you can play, even if you want to. This is a much harder problem to solve, so I would like to see if anyone has any solutions. I do have a few recommendations, which I've outlined below.
Remove players that have lost via activity, dead game, or given win from the player pool. No more coinflips either. If any of the bolded situations apply to you, you definitionally can't win the tournament anymore. Moreover, it's probably self-evident that you aren't prioritizing this tournament anymore. So here's the idea: leave the tournament. Players with no motivation after losing (or worse, those that forget they signed up / don't care to play despite signing up from the start) effectively become floating byes in the pool, killing the possibility of games for players looking to play them. And because so many of these byes float around, they bump into each other and coinflip their ways into higher brackets too. Removing these players greatly increases the odds of players who, despite their records, actually want to play meeting each other. A corollary to this suggestion to make it an even better solution, if players play along, would be to have players who have lost announce if they would like to drop out before the next week is posted, so they can be removed even sooner and do no damage. Spotlights are supposed to be low-stakes and fun, so I don't think we necessarily need to institute a punishment for these players beyond dropping them from the tournament, but that is also an idea (I would only consider a play restriction if a player joins and drops in week 1 several times in a row, which, as far as I know, doesn't seem to be a huge problem right now).
Have Spotlight Tournament performance be counted towards some kind of circuit or greater tournament. This would probably be the most logistically challenging solution to implement, but if there was some kind of way to have these tournaments count towards a circuit for the tier the Spotlight is shining on or if there was some kind of broad Spotlight Circuit in general (maybe by generation or overall), we could incentivize a player who lost early to strive for a 3-1 record, even if they know they won't win this tournament. I know this is extremely ambitious and would require time and management, but it would be very cool if we actually felt like coordinating it. Another similar idea I've seen floating around is the idea of a Ladder Tournament replacing the Swiss Spotlight Tournament. I resent this idea because I like the Spotlight Tournaments a lot more than I like laddering. However, I did have the idea to perhaps merge the two into a greater playoffs. My current plan was to take the top finishers of the Spotlight (probably the finalists, which is usually two and occasionally three players; you could take the top four if the numbers permit that as well) and pair them against the top placers on the Ladder at the end of the month. Then you play a three-week, eight-person (or greater than that, if there's demand) tournament to declare an overall winner. It might look something like this:
Ladder #1 vs. Ladder #6 / Ladder #5
Ladder #2 vs. Ladder #5 / Spotlight #3
Spotlight #1 vs. Ladder #4
Ladder #3 vs. Spotlight #2
A bigger tournament, say a 16-person one, could potentially incorporate some 3-1 Spotlight players as well, so that could incentivize a few more games to get played during the regular tournament itself. I think my idea here was passed along to Tournament Organizers already, but I figured I'd publish it here too because I think it's neat.
Employ a different tournament format. Swiss is theoretically extremely well suited to get many low-stakes games played, which is great. But maybe some other format could help keep motivation up? Single Elimination isn't really a good idea because the tour is already effectively Single Elimination, and Single Elimination would just remove the already slim possibility of playing at all for players who have lost once but want to keep playing. I'm always a big proponent of Double Elimination but the logistics and length of Double Elimination tournaments can be daunting. Maybe some other good format exists? Maybe players that have lost can just challenge each other at will or something? I'm up for ideas here.
Another sidenote is that Spotlights are very often used to give players requisites to vote on VRs and suspect tests for the tiers being played, as many of the tiers covered just don't see that many tournaments. It'd be really cool if the players winning these tournaments and becoming qualified actually faced reasonable opposition for the whole tournament. Heck, if we do a good enough job, we could probably justify extending requisites to 3-1 players in addition to the finalists/winners. Or, another idea, if there is a playoffs between finalists, the 3-1 players could also play each other and all 4-1 players could qualify for requisites.
I think any combination of the above proposals could go a long way in improving the Spotlight Tournaments. I'm looking forward to reading what others think about this problem. I apologize for the post length, but there is just so much potential for improvement here. Cheers!
