Bye Points for Tournament Games

[Shards]

Hi,

So, our current system for tournaments relies upon a developer or producer manually selecting a Bye point value for each tournament. This is fixed per tournament and is the same for each round of that tournament.

In OOB Tournaments I've generally been picking 90 points as the per game Bye point value

(The Bye points are awarded in full to anyone who doesn't get drawn against an opponent and also to anyone whose opponent doesn't play. It is used as a target point for awarding of compensation points for any player who opponent only plays a few turns)

I'm now investigating ways to make this system more automated and able to be varied per scenario.

My question for the group

If you take a look at the scores that players got in the last tournaments:
https://www.slitherine.com/tournaments/scores/856
https://www.slitherine.com/tournaments/scores/827

What do YOU think that the Bye point score should have been for each scenario?

These being:

Cyrenaica
Cobra
Caen
Karjalan Kesa
Island Hopping

To reiterate, this is the score that a player who did not get a game should get. My general theory is that they should get a score that keeps them in contention but should not be the best score of the round. aka as if they had a Good Win but did not obliterate their opponent.

[Shards]

e.g. You might say:

Cyrenaica - 130 pts
Cobra - 110 pts
Caen - 90 pts
Karjalan Kesa - 100 pts
Island Hopping - 95 pts

(dummy values I've just made up quickly)

N.b. these are just to help me design a system to a consensus, so they don't need to be precise, go with what you feel is right

[Shards]

(as an example of why this is relevant. The first time we played Caen the AVERAGE score was 97 per game. The second time we played the AVERAGE was 79 points per game)

[omistaja]

I think 90 is quite right. The problem is that you get too much points if the base is captured in the first turns. (also too little points if you capture in the last turn)

So fixed 30 points for the capture of base would solve all the problems

[Shards]

I think 90 is quite right. The problem is that you get too much points if the base is captured in the first turns. (also too little points if you capture in the last turn)

So fixed 30 points for the capture of base would solve all the problems

The main issue with a fixed score is that it encourages you to wait until the very last turn before entering the base, which you'll spend going around trying to pick off all the last stragglers of your enemy.

That's not very fun if you're on the other side

Generally the maps are designed to give you (just) more points for capturing a base than if you'd just hung around and passed the turns racking up Victory Location points and picking off the odd straggler.

[omistaja]

The main issue with a fixed score is that it encourages you to wait until the very last turn before entering the base, which you'll spend going around trying to pick off all the last stragglers of your enemy.

That's not very fun if you're on the other side

Generally the maps are designed to give you (just) more points for capturing a base than if you'd just hung around and passed the turns racking up Victory Location points and picking off the odd straggler.

I get that speed is important and fast attacks should be somehow rewarded. But you would still get 2 points more per turn if you control the base. And maybe the game could continue after the conquest of the second base.

Or if the reward is now starting at 120 and ending to 15(?) in the last turn, it could be starting at 60 and ending to 30 (maybe in both bases?)

[Shards]

Most of the maps have a bonus pool that starts at 120 and goes down 7 per turn. Which ends at 15 points if you take in turn 15.

Generally, by that stage, you'll be holding victory locations worth 6vp per turn so if you choose to hang on and delay to pick up more points, you need to score more than 1vp per turn from other sources to keep pace with the base depreciation.

Now, where that gets a bit broken is when someone does a paradrop or similar to take a sudden points grab without total battlefield control. And I don't know if I'm entirely against that? I'm happy to reduce availability of paradrops in deployment (it feels a bit of a YOLO to beat up newbs in places), but I still think there should be a place for a well timed line break/focal point strike rather than rewarding always fighting a war of attrition to defeat the enemy forces in detail.

[AdmiralYamamoto]

Hello Shards. I finally had a chance to do some math. I put the scores from the last 2 tournaments into a spreadsheet. I deleted out the scores for both players of a significant timed out match and got rid of the free score of the unpaired player. I then figured out the average score based on the remaining number of matches played to completion. My averages per game were a little bit lower than yours. The highest was Cobra at about 85 per game and the lowest was Caen in round 3 at about 64 per game.

I also reviewed the 5 scenarios you requested. I do feel we are pretty good with the 90 points per game for most of these scenarios. What I did notice was that Cobra and Caen had fewer objective points available. These two scenarios only had 6 objective points total per turn while the others had 8. You might want to consider downgraded these scenarios to 75 points per game.

Here is my proposed formula for determining the Default score per game. [(Total number of Objective Points per turn / 2) X The number of turns] + [(2 Kill points per turn) X The number of turns]. Example: for Cyrenaica the Default score would be 8/2*15 + 2*15 = 60 + 30 = 90. For Caen the Default score would be 6/2*15 + 2*15 = 45 + 30 = 75. This formula disregards the bonus points for capturing an HQ. This typically only occurs in games against mismatched opponents. It is pretty hard to achieve this objective against an equal opponent. The above mentioned formula can be applied to most of the scenarios used for tournaments or for new scenarios as a base line.

There is one other thing you might want to consider regarding the Default scores. It seems to me like the 1st round of the tournament has more potential for some outrageous scores due to the random pairing of opponents which results in significant mismatches in skill levels. You might want to consider some additional points for 1st round matches and a reduction in the default for round 3 matches. I would suggest a +5 points per game for round 1, no change for round 2 and a -5 points per game for round 3.

The last thing I would like to discuss on the tournament scoring is the penalty the current scoring system applies to the guiltless opponent of a timed out match. There were several comments on this in the Victorious Tournament post. Everyone agrees that the player who does not finish a match should have their score reduced. The current system though also penalizes the offended player by reducing his score below the default. In my opinion the offended player should receive the full default score in this situation. This should be able to be handled with a fairly simple if/then statement in the tournament scoring system. My suggestion is that if an opponent does not compete 3/4 of the turns for the game, then the offended player should receive points equal to the higher of the default score or his current score. I do not know how hard this would be to add to the tournament scoring system but I am throwing it out their for consideration anyway.

Thanks for all your hard work Shards.

[Shards]

For what it's worth, that last bit, about reducing the blameless player, was a bug and should be fixed now

[AdmiralYamamoto]

Sounds good. Thanks.