New FFR Features ?

[SputnikOwns]

Re: New FFR Features ?

The idea that only the top players should win tournaments, and not people who are currently at the top of multiple subdivisions.

That sounds good to me. Who wins tournaments at the moment is kind of a function of who's near the highest level of each division.
There's chances to be creative with new ways of unlocking Fractured and vrofl instead of top 8. Like at 1000 and 500 average rank.

[devonin]

Re: New FFR Features ?

My problem with the argument, especially the one that points to other esports not having formal divisions (For competitive play they absolutely do, by having divisions bounded by your ELO and MMR and matching you against players of similar skill) is that we have a game where literally 100% of the playing of the game happens via this website, and 100% of "official" events are run by our team of staff.

There's nowhere else to HAVE tournaments to do seeding, and ranking and sorting so there can be a major event that only invites the top players, and other lower tier events where high tier players won't waste their time for lower ability players to shine and improve that are open to anybody etc.

That's also always been one of the biggest flaws of the prizing system which is what actually makes people sandbag, not the division system on its own necessarily.

You are rewarded dramatically better for finishing 1st in a division than finishing basically ANYWHERE other than near the top of the division above it, so you have a structural incentive to try and NOT move up until after you've been placed, which, combined with not moving anybody up -during- the event is what makes people not put effort into having their level actually reflective of their skill.

[TheSaxRunner05]

Re: New FFR Features ?

That sounds good to me. Who wins tournaments at the moment is kind of a function of who's near the highest level of each division.
There's chances to be creative with new ways of unlocking Fractured and vrofl instead of top 8. Like at 1000 and 500 average rank.

I guess the cutoffs would just depend on what skill level you'd like to cut off at. I'm bottom-tier D5 with most of my songs optimized to my skill level, and I'm sitting just below 170 for example. Most players who have played all songs end up being at least D4 from all the practice, so 1000 I feel would be way too high of a bar. A D3 player would likely be able to get under 500, but like I said, it depends on what skill level is in mind if you go that route.

[SputnikOwns]

Re: New FFR Features ?

I guess the cutoffs would just depend on what skill level you'd like to cut off at. I'm bottom-tier D5 with most of my songs optimized to my skill level, and I'm sitting just below 170 for example. Most players who have played all songs end up being at least D4 from all the practice, so 1000 I feel would be way too high of a bar. A D3 player would likely be able to get under 500, but like I said, it depends on what skill level is in mind if you go that route.

It's more the ridiculous dedication that would go into playing the now over 2000 songs that I'm thinking of. Plus having to do so at a pretty decent skill level.
It's better than getting 8th in D1, haha!

[TheSaxRunner05]

Re: New FFR Features ?

vRofl was never easy to get (Unless you're a sandbagger)

[TC_Halogen]

Re: New FFR Features ?

My problem with the argument, especially the one that points to other esports not having formal divisions (For competitive play they absolutely do, by having divisions bounded by your ELO and MMR and matching you against players of similar skill) is that we have a game where literally 100% of the playing of the game happens via this website, and 100% of "official" events are run by our team of staff.

e-sports doesn't have formal divisions in competition, which is the point i've been trying to get across in the first place. everything that i'm arguing against has to do with the constraint of divisions in competition. major competitions do not have these divisions.

skill rankings that determine your capability in a game are great and incentivize player growth. however, tournaments do not give a shit what your skill grouping is. and e-sports follow this motto.

if you're at the top of your game, you are expected to do well in a tournament because you are classified to be in the top of that rank. that doesn't mean someone who is of a lower rank can't perform well in a tournament at all.

in LoL, you can expect all of the competitors at the highest levels to be Challenger because that's likely the absolute minimum to get to a professional team that plays in a major circuit. there is nothing that forces you to be that level, but you're likely not going to succeed unless you're at the top-of-the-top. this fits into the tournament structure i mentioned: you'll need to be at the top.

in Rocket League, you can expect all of the competitors at a large event to be Grand Champion, because that's likely the absolute minimum to get to a professional team that plays in a major circuit. same thing as above. nothing forces you to be that level, but you're likely not going to succeed unless you're at the top-of-the-top.

in Apex Legends, you can expect all of the competitors at a large event to be Apex Predator ranking, because that's likely the absolute minimum to get to a professional team. this game is newer and because of that, there's room for exceptions, which fits even more nicely in this example that there are people NOT at the top "ranking" still playing at the top levels.

even for non e-sports games, chess tournaments are a great example - as some tournaments have a separate bracket depending on whether or not they're FIDE-ranked players. as a result, you won't find someone like Nakamura/Caruana/Carlsen playing in the same bracket as you, but you're bound to have a shitton of players way better than you in the non-elite bracket.

i'll keep saying this until i'm blue in the face. competitions with excessive divisions are a complacency that has been developed within this community, and the existence of this ridiculous separation causes a nightmare in logistics.

for many other games, if you want exposure to competition, you have to play in *smaller* events.

There's nowhere else to HAVE tournaments to do seeding, and ranking and sorting so there can be a major event that only invites the top players, and other lower tier events where high tier players won't waste their time for lower ability players to shine and improve that are open to anybody etc.

having events that are split into upper/lower flights is not terrible. if a standard can be established to showcase players who might be "ranked" and players who might be above the curve, whatever. but FFR needs to lose this obsession of hyper-separating divisions more and more and more. we had basically an argumentative discussion about the incorporation of a 7th division back during the 8th Official Tournament and had another one this tournament. people keep advocating for more and more and more and more separation - when in reality, there really should just be a pool of players who are interested in playing an event that is *maybe* split once and that's it.

the problem is that FFR itself also doesn't have a good system for playing competitively as it is because your performance is not determined by your ability to perform in a given moment - it is about how much you can improve over a fixed period of time. as a result, there's also no variance in capability. you can't really "underperform" unless you've lost enough skill to fall an entire division beneath, which then opens the doors for people to complain about the fact that they had some sort of issue that merits them needing to be dropped a division -- which is something that also gets eliminated when you remove the notion of division.

That's also always been one of the biggest flaws of the prizing system which is what actually makes people sandbag, not the division system on its own necessarily.

You are rewarded dramatically better for finishing 1st in a division than finishing basically ANYWHERE other than near the top of the division above it, so you have a structural incentive to try and NOT move up until after you've been placed, which, combined with not moving anybody up -during- the event is what makes people not put effort into having their level actually reflective of their skill.

except that's an inherent fault with the division system... people are contained within this grouping that they're trying to keep themselves within. this would happen if there were no prizes, because people are more willing to say they got a better rank in a lower division than they would be to see a larger number out of an even larger pool of contestants.

none of this happens if divisions are removed. you get what you get out of it.

[TheSaxRunner05]

Re: New FFR Features ?

I have a feeling you are both proposing radical changes to how we do tournaments and are really not that far off of each other and what you actually believe. Seems your differences are mostly semantic.

[Seoulslayer]

Re: New FFR Features ?

We desperately need a credit sink.

You can always just give all your extra credits to me

But yeah, I'm with Devonin on not liking credits. As far as I'm concerned, they're just a giant annoying grind.

[devonin]

Re: New FFR Features ?

i'll keep saying this until i'm blue in the face. competitions with excessive divisions are a complacency that has been developed within this community, and the existence of this ridiculous separation causes a nightmare in logistics.

Tournaments on FFR that have divisions where players who aren't in the top 20 can win prizes of meaning or significance has some negative consequences, but I find those consequences preferable to the fact that without divisions, participation in site tournaments/events will drop even more than it already has.

It feels like there's a tacit assumption that every player is capable if they wanna, to be a top player, and so there's nothing gained from a community and involvement and good user experience from having a way to identify players with lower skill and allow them to compete against other players of lower skill, for prizes that are at all relevant.

When you add in that we basically don't do anything in terms of direct competition, but instead let each player simply work away on their own time, for as much time as they want, to generate their best score, you end up in situations where your claim of

that doesn't mean someone who is of a lower rank can't perform well in a tournament at all.

holds literally no water at all.

There is not a single circumstance, not a single tournament round out of 100, 1000, 1 million, that I can think of where a level 40 player is going to beat a level 106 player if they both try to the best of their abilities.

If you put every person in this tournament in one big division, all 317 people; the 53 players in division 7 and 8 would account for the entire top 8, top 16, and top 32, probably the top 53 in fact.

You could rerun the tournament 1000 times from the same starting point, and that would be the result. Over a long span of time, there would gradually come to be individual people who work their way up into that level and supplant some of those people, who would continue to take up a spot above everybody else.

In Magic the Gathering, the game has built in variance that can counteract even a huge imbalance of skill. In games like Overwatch, and even Chess, a sufficiently novel strategy is capable of taking superior players by surprise, and generating an upset. Some games have elements of luck that can offset a skill differential.

Basically the -only possible way- FFR allows for an "upset" is "A player forgot to submit, or didn't bother to try."

That's why I think some kind of division system is necessary if we want to have competitions, unless you want to communicate the clear understanding that the desire is anybody who isn't a D8 player just doesn't ever get to win anything.

[TheSaxRunner05]

Re: New FFR Features ?

You can go divisionless and still have prizes. There could be a token for each 10 percentile finish (top 10%, 20% etc.) and players could push themselves each one to finish higher than before. There are even suggestions in my previous post on how to not have D8 bored the entire time either. I mean, if we threw out divisions, of course the current prizes according to division would be reworked too. I don't think anyone would expect the top 32 to be much different than expected. But you could design it around improving your percentile each time. And requiring fewer files would mean it could be done feasibly every three months. I wouldn't treat it like we'd throw out divisions and keep everything else tre same.

There are other ways to format things, you just have to think outside of the box. Like said previously, we've got our minds too wrapped up in how things were. We can design a system that motivates players to push themselves into higher percentiles of skill.

[devonin]

Re: New FFR Features ?

I've put a lot of thought and effort and consultation with people who are better with the math, to try and find a way to accurately track the difficulty of improvement but it's a lot more complicated than it seems.

Improving from 10 to 20 is a totally different thing than improving from 60 to 70 or 90 to 100, and coming up with a prize schema that rewards overall improvement that gives players going from 100 to 100.3 prizing that actually represents the difficulty of that increase without the prizing for the person who went from 20 to 30 being basically zero, or the reverse being true, is not exactly simple to construct.

What is wanted by me anyway, if you remove divisions entirely, is having structures and tiers of competition where prizes are compelling enough for players to participate without being compelling enough for players to spike it.

You want a tournament to attract the best players by giving them prizes worth the effort of coming out and playing, and having winning be a substantial accomplishment. That's easy to do. Give amazing prizes, and the top players who have a chance to actually win will want to come compete for those prizes.

The problem is when you make a tournament that is designed to attract non-professional-tier players. The way you do that is by offering prizes good enough for more casual players to say "That's worth coming out to try" without being good enough that it's worthwhile for somebody in D7/D8 to come and just auto-win. You can hold a local Overwatch tournament where the first prize is 500 bucks, and chances are good that the pro-tier teams are too busy earning their 100,000 dollar OWL salaries, and preparing for the World Cup to come enter.

We don't really have a way to have an equivalent to 500 dollar local scene tournament, and also a 10 million dollar The International.

[TheSaxRunner05]

Re: New FFR Features ?

We've already discussed how credits as prizes are basically useless, so the only real valuable prizes are the tokens. If you lock several behind percentiles, you better judge those gaps based on player performance anyways. The prizes now are tokens, this would still spread out token prize rewards based on skill and you can unlock more through improving your game.

Side note I had a 0% chance of winning a prize this tournament but I still squeaked into round 3 with 61st/61st place. So at least some people are just motivated by an official event, the hype that comes with all the new files, and a leaderboard. I just wouldn't be overly obsessed with prizes, although they should exist. Percentile based tokens and/or profile badges I think would be enough motivation.

[devonin]

Re: New FFR Features ?

Side note I had a 0% chance of winning a prize this tournament but I still squeaked into round 3 with 61st/61st place. So at least some people are just motivated by an official event, the hype that comes with all the new files, and a leaderboard. I just wouldn't be overly obsessed with prizes, although they should exist. Percentile based tokens and/or profile badges I think would be enough motivation.

Yeah I mean, I've entered 7 officials without a real hope of winning anything either. There's something generally to be said about novelty taking part in the one big event that happens every 1-2+ years.

But in terms of trying to actually create and sustain a more regular tournament and competition scene using existing songs etc, the novelty aspect can't be relied upon, and I don't want the site to end up with "Basically, there's one tournament a year/two years/whenever we get enough "tournament type" new songs" and then nothing else, just so the novelty can get us participants.

We are losing players faster than we gain them, and even the Official Tournament is slowly declining every time. We've gone from 508->454->366 and this year, we basically stayed the course at 371, and that's with the addition of several high profile players from other games, and some major revitalizing hype around the RATO AAA coming right before the tournament started, combined with the promise of a large number of new very high difficulty files coming in.

[TheSaxRunner05]

Re: New FFR Features ?

The divisions are the reason it takes so long to get an official because of the number of required files. I think a properly structured divisionless tournament would require fewer files, not take two months to complete, and could be done every 3 months or so, giving once a season to have a go at better tokens. A long time passes between official events. I think a smaller seasonal divisionless tournament as I've described in a few posts above could spur more activity than a giant tournament every one to two years.

[Moria]

Re: New FFR Features ?

the thing with divisionless tournaments is it would get a lot less attention probably, noones gonna join something they know they have no chance of winning. thats like the first rule of war, never start something you know you cant finish