Re: D8 Deb8
 

d8 looks cool, its symbolic, a "cool historic thing happened" on ur site and it feels good to milk it like this for the sake of ur websites continued growth. everybody loves seeing the heros duke it out

"d7" shld remain the only thing with a forum role, "d8" should have a d7 forum role too, dont even bother to change the name of the badge, they can b "d7 keysmasher", feels traditional and intuitive, idea of d8 as d7 but fuccckking way insane elite feels "good" to me. idea that u have to pedantically Give The Forum Role To Highest Role etc etc seems out of touch, just play it by what looks and feels good, read the crowd, etc

[im drunk hello]

Re: D8 Deb8
 

Considering that only one person has AAA'd RATO (so far) I don't think an 8th division is necessary yet since it's only one individual versus many others. It's of an interesting note to me that when you think about the idea in and of itself, it's worth mentioning.

Does that mean that it's an absolute must? I personally don't think so and here's why I say that. The number of level 100+ charts is so few and so few of these charts have been slain by the legendary players of the site (kind of a ramble, I know) is kind of meaningless in a sense. Don't get me wrong - AAA'ing any of these charts is an impressive feat in and of itself and as it has been shown, it IS doable.

But the whole debate arose when RATO was finally killed and put to bed, being the second highest public difficulty of any song in the game, and to make D8 a thing off of this one historical achievement is jumping the boat before it's even set sail on its maiden voyage.

I would honestly consider the idea as just that: an idea. It has its merits, but I wouldn't warrant the creation of it until at least three people get a AAA on vROFL, and I just don't see that happening.

Re: D8 Deb8
 

Yes it should, doesn't matter that there isn't as many people that is what being in a top division means. If the game had more top end files the cutoff would be around level 104 or something. This honestly is going to be a really boring tournament for a lot of the D7 players and anyone spectating if you insist on still keeping the people that are D8 in D7.

Re: D8 Deb8
 

i like how you already knew who i was talking about lol

mikeshinoda is another example of coming out of nowhere and wrecking D6 :P

Re: D8 Deb8
 

Is this about last tournament? Because he didn't really come out of nowhere, he was already high D6 before the tournament. In fact, almost no one truly "came out of nowhere" last tournament.

Looking at last tournament's results and Trumpet's data, we can see the following results:

D7 (41 entrants):
Participants ranged from 85 to 95 skill rating (with an outlier at 79)
1st: EtienneSM - 95.0018 (2nd) by skill rating before tournament
2nd: shadow1800 - 94.4655 (4th) by skill rating before tournament
3rd: smartdude1212 - 93.1637 (8th) by skill rating before tournament

D6 (51 entrants):
Participants ranged from 76 to 87 skill rating (with an unranked outlier)
1st: YoshL - 87.003 (1st) by skill rating before tournament
2nd: ItsOnlyDanO - 86.1012 (5th) by skill rating before tournament
3rd: MikeShinoda12345 - 85.7518 (9th) by skill rating before tournament

D5 (82 entrants):
Participants ranged from 65 to 78 skill rating (with two outliers at 62 and 60)
1st: jose656 - 75.9966 (23rd) by skill rating before tournament
2nd: Ghost_Medley - 77.3321 (5th) by skill rating before tournament
3rd: alphanish - 75.7505 (25th) by skill rating before tournament

D4 (50 entrants):
Participants ranged from 57 to 66 skill rating (with one outlier at 55.5)
1st: magnans - 61.796 (27th) by skill rating before tournament
2nd: Winrar - 64.0114 (12th) by skill rating before tournament
3rd: Conorn - 63.3008 (17th) by skill rating before tournament

D3 (51 entrants)
Participants ranged from 46 to 55 skill rating (with an outlier at 57, and two at 44 and 39)
1st: chuybar - 54.1844 (10th) by skill rating before tournament
2nd: JotaCeOK - 47.848 (43rd) by skill rating before tournament
3rd: Shadowcliff - 54.8308 (6th) by skill rating before tournament

D2 (52 entrants)
Participants ranged from 23 to 47 skill rating (with three outliers at 19, 18, and 13)
1st: Stopmovin - 45.5377 (3rd) by skill rating before tournament
2nd: Felyx - 44.6172 (4th) by skill rating before tournament
3rd: Kriptos - 40.345 (12th) by skill rating before tournament

D1 (34 entrants)
Participants ranged from 5 to 24 skill rating (with three outliers at 1 each)
1st: Nighdragon - 24.3243 (1st) by skill rating before tournament
2nd: Charmoeleon - 16.0729 (13th) by skill rating before tournament
3rd: Killionz - 16.8736 (12th) by skill rating before tournament

In summary, out of the entire tournament, only two of the 21 podium finishers, magnans (D4) and Jota (D3) started in even the bottom half of their division, and only Jota started from what could be considered the bottom. Even in the lowest divisions, which would seem to be the most equal playing fields all things considered (since improvement is more important than base skill level at these divisions), the tournament was mostly won by those starting at or near the top.

Re: D8 Deb8
 

25th in D5 and coming 3rd seems pretty good to me but aight

Re: D8 Deb8
 

Yeah my takeaway is that we reward top 8s with the really cool thing, and of the 21 people in top 3s, 11, over half, were outside the top 8 going in, and 17/21 were outside the top 3.

Re: D8 Deb8
 

from personal experience, usually the winner of a division ends up in at least a division or two above their starting division, in the 10th OT by the time i was at the last round in D3 I was D5 lol, obviously this wouldnt apply to D7 etc but usually people improve alot over the course of a tourney

Re: D8 Deb8
 

Sure, but from my point of view this is less a measure a success of the divisional system and more of a measure that it's not a catastrophic failure, as if every division went 1-2-3 there would be little point to even holding a tournament in the first place.

What I've been trying to get at is that starting from the bottom of a division effectively ends your tournament before it even begins, at least from the perspective of winning/placing high, with very few exceptions (like Jota.) This is compounded by Dingleberry's point about the winners of OTs usually having advanced out of their division by the end of the tournament--maybe a low D5 player can reach high D5 by the end of the tournament, but in that time, the high D5 players will be in mid D6. Having to overcome a gap of nearly an entire division before you can even reach parity with the front runners in your division, let alone start leading the charge yourself, is almost an insurmountable obstacle. That's why I don't think the divisional system as it stands today is doing its job, if that job is to place each contestant in a bracket that they have a chance to win.

Re: D8 Deb8
 

Renegadelucien, of course stats are gonna trend more towards the top. But I think only in d6 and d7 can an argument be made for what you're describing really being all that egregious. What are you arguing for, exactly? How many divisions would we need before everyone has an equal enough chance? There will be inequality as long as there is more than one player per division. In the end, concessions have to be made for practicality's sake, and for most players, achieving top 3 isn't the sole criterion for having a fun tournament.

Re: D8 Deb8
 

I'm arguing that the divisional system as a whole is flawed and needs to be replaced. That's why I said at the beginning that adding a D8 might work for now (since it reduces the number of players who are in a division with the god tiers and have no chance of winning) but it's just a band-aid solution to the larger problem at hand. If the goal of the divisional system is to be able to put everyone in a bracket where they have a chance of winning a tournament, the current system simply does not do that, D8 or no D8. Nor do I think that just adding more divisions is a realistic solution--as you just pointed out, if we tried to do that we'd just end up with 20 divisions and the system would lose all meaning. If the goal of the divisional system is something else, then I'd question why it's even being used for the tournament.

I get that removing the divisions has some very obvious gotcha points. No D1 wants to directly play a D8 player. But given a proper format, I don't think they'd have to, or at least not in a way that would negatively affect their tournament experience.

Re: D8 Deb8
 

Yeah, I think most everyone in the community agrees with that. What would be better then?

Re: D8 Deb8
 

official tournaments are what motivated me to actually begin improving and to realize that there was more to the game than just "smack keys to songs you enjoy", but to each their own

nearly every competitive game has divisions. if you played league of legends or overwatch and tried competitive and were immediately placed vs the best players then you would have a horrible experience and get absolutely destroyed, so they start you off at silver or bronze or whatever and you work your way up, same with ffr

Re: D8 Deb8
 

like for example, in a game oriented towards self improvement and getting better, D1 is basically arbitrary because if anyone actually was motivated to win the tournament and get better, the chance of them being in D1 at the end (or lets be real, by round 2 or 3) is probably like 0%

in a game like this, the better player wins 100% of the time, theres no possible way to make a format where someone who isn't good is able to beat someone who has invested a ton of time and energy into becoming good at the game, unless the format is some cheese bs where people dont play the same songs, theres some handicap, or theres some pseudo division seperation based on something

Re: D8 Deb8
 

I know there have been several different proposals for divisionless tournaments in the past. Trumpet ran a divisionless tournament that let people choose one of several songs to play. I think one of the staff members suggested triple elimination a while back. Blanky had a proposal earlier in this thread.

If I had to come up with something on the spot...

First round, everyone plays together. Song difficulty would be high enough that there'd be little to no chance that more than 50% would AAA. Bottom 50% scoring participants receive a "strike" or a "loss".

Second round, the players without a strike play together on one song, and the players with a strike play together on another song. Same deal with song difficulties, in that they'd ensure less than 50% would AAA. Bottom 50% of each group get a strike.

Rounds continue in this fashion. Each round, players play only against others with the same number of strikes. Bottom 50% of each group gets another strike. This would continue until only one player had zero strikes, at which point they would be declared the winner and the tournament would end.

This is just a rough sketch, there's a lot of refining it would need to go through before it's a valid tournament format, but I'm just throwing out an idea.

Yeah, but League and Overwatch don't have "official tournaments" that try to place everyone into their own bracket and tell everyone that they can win if they play hard enough. I'm sure if there was a similar thing for League, people would complain that a Dia IV team would stand no chance against a Dia I team.

Re: D8 Deb8
 

if you think of each competitive season as a tournament then they pretty much do that, and yes people complain that the borders between divisions are gross and hard to climb from

edit: also i think ur idea is pretty interesting actually, starting at max division or w/e and progressively moving to a weaker pool of players/songs while still having the potential to be eliminated if you arent at that level... i stand corrected that its impossible to make it fair cuz ur idea is a pretty solid idea

Re: D8 Deb8
 

I agree, that's a really neat idea and I think it would work out fine for the most part.

Re: D8 Deb8
 

Goods points Renegade. A few interesting perspectives in your last few posts.

How many files would that require ? I believe that's:
nbFiles = [sum 2^(i - 1), i = 1 to n] = 2^n - 1
where n is the number of rounds. That means if we assume the end condition (1 player with no strike) happens on round 8, we'd need a total of 255 files.

Since we're splitting the group in 2 for each round, and if we use the number or participants so far, that means a final split of 1 person in the top 50% will happen at 275 * 0.5^8 ~= 1. That assumes no tie happens. So 8 rounds is most likely the minimum that would be needed, which means 255 files. Therefore we'd need to have a way to recycle files somehow.

Edit: compared to a 7 divisions 8 rounds tourney, which is 56 files, that means we'd need to be able to recycle about 80% of the files without making it redundant for players, because there's no way we can improve the content quantity by 500%.

Re: D8 Deb8
 

I know it doesn't solve this completely but the length of the tournament and required files could be alleviated some if the split between strike/no strike was a little more strict. Say bottom 60% or so each round, for example.

Re: D8 Deb8
 

No, we actually wouldn't.

In the first round, we'd need one file, since there's one group.

In the second round, we'd need two files: one for the zero-strike group, and one for the one-strike group.

In the third round, we'd need three files: one for the zero-strike group, one for the one-strike group, and one for the two-strike group.

And so on.

So in an 8-round tournament, we'd only need 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8 = 36 files. For a tournament the size of the current OT (275 total signups), we'd actually need 9 rounds to get down to one player, but that still means we'd only need 45 files. That's less than the current OT requires. (7*8 = 56 files.)