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I can’t wait to sleep with viqun again at i38 :>
(_(_)======D O:<

I felt the need to contribute to this one, as I was the FragSoc team leader for i37, and although I had great fun and the end match was a delight to watch (the surprise proro by SAS was fab) there was far too much confusion about the start of the tournament.

Being the one who came up with the suggestion to fix the tournament I feel like I owe an explanation about what happened, because whilst many people are blaming everyone else the tournament start was screwed up by confusion and misunderstanding.

There were two key issues:
1) The randomisation of the teams into groups had placed several of the best teams in the same group, meaning that at the end of the elimination the best teams would not be present, making for an un-professional looking final and semi-final
2) The chap who organised the tournament in the first place was using double-elimination for the winners bracket, however with 6 groups there would be 6 teams going through, which is impossible to do with double elimination.

1) When faced with the choice of re-starting the whole tournament team leaders were given the choice of restarting with the best teams in different groups, or to carry on. Many lower-ranked clans voted against this because, if this were the case, it would appear to be a cynical ploy by the pro teams to ensure they all got in the limelight by pre-picking the winning team for each group. Regardless of the end result this would be a most unprofessional move by the pro teams, as it would fly in the face of proper competitive play. Equally I was swayed by the argument that the final would only focus on two teams, and they would have to give a good show to impress Wizzo, so I voted in favour of restarting the tournament.

2) This first problem was all besides the point. Even with the 6 best teams going through, the admins would still have to fiddle the results to include another 2 ‘runner up’ teams from the 6 groups in order to fill out the numbers in the elimination to 8.
This led to the chief admin (whose name I didn’t catch) deciding to ‘seed’ the teams by their performance in the group stages by the number of rounds won. The result was that when two high-skilled clans played in the group stages their matches were close and the difference between rounds were smaller than the difference between rounds elsewhere.
Am I right in saying this? I think that this is the reason that the cows did not go through to the winners bracket.

The only way it would have worked, short of deliberately sabotaging the groups to favour the best teams, would be to play another group stage where teams would be shuffled again to reduce the chance of the best teams coming up against each other again, and creating a scoring system for wins, losses and draws, that could be totalled from first & second group stages to create a top 8 of teams to go through to elimination.
The only other solution would have been to take the top 2 teams from each group and then play a triple elimination between 12 teams, which is uneccesarily complex and would have taken up more time.

Either way, apologies for sitting there and not being more direct with the admins. I ended up being in the background for most of the time I was there, and didn’t really follow the admin’s solution. They received a list of seedings from team leaders (I hope they went to X-man as I asked), put them down, and then I left. I guess they still didn’t know what to do once I had gone, since they appeared to have changed their minds later on.

At the end of the day, Wizzo was impressed enough to give TF2 cash at i38, and tapley will do an ace job at admining the tournament.

N/B: When explaining my method I accidentally said there were 3 teams a group, instead of 4. Doesn’t make much difference but I’m sure my crap maths confused people.
N/B2: Wordy post is wordy.

i38 – 1500 places
13 November 2009 till 16 November 2009
Newbury Racecourse – Grandstand

http://www.multiplay.co.uk/eventdiary.asp

:>

i38 – 1500 places
13 November 2009 till 16 November 2009
Newbury Racecourse – Grandstand

http://www.multiplay.co.uk/eventdiary.asp

:>

What airport is near that :/

i38 – 1500 places
13 November 2009 till 16 November 2009
Newbury Racecourse – Grandstand

http://www.multiplay.co.uk/eventdiary.asp

:>

What airport is near that :/

Right by me Southampton! :-) but it may be cheaper to fly to gatwick.

Cheers Dublin-Gatwick with Ryanair €10 euro return :D. Well more like €40 with random crap they add in afterwards.

yay back to newbury =D

Makes sense it will be though, last years winter LAN, fun as it was, didn’t fit right for Stoneleigh, and I’m sure it costs them a lot more to run Stoneleigh than Newbury.

Looking forward to it, not been to one in Newbury since i10 – lets hope they give a whole section to TF2. :D

the problem is that the possible scores are a lot more limited than in other matches. Even if you multiply them up, it still makes the range a lot less nuanced (i.e. in dustbowl you either totally win or totally lose)

solution would be to avoid playing stopwatch maps in any situation where cap difference is going to matter… (i.e. not in group stages, or change to a 3 for win / 1 for draw / 0 for lose system for all matches)

realistically, using cap difference is unfair to a certain extent ANYWAY, as different maps are harder to cap than others… (only works for footy because all matches are played on the same kind of “map”)