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Originally Posted by ShurykaN
I think Masquerade of Shadow brought up a really great point about the format of the tournament. It's really like seven different tournaments where people are placed arbitrarily based upon their level ranks. Do some people possibly belong in different divisions? Maybe. It's also unclear as to how exactly people get assigned to where they are, but this needs to be in place so people don't sandbag or try to cheat the system to get into a division they don't belong to. I think the tournament organizers did a spectacular job placing people in the correct divisions, but there are still problems that arise.
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More precise transparency would be nice, but the absence of it doesn't make it arbitrary. The placements are mostly based on the difficulty of your best AAA, BF, SDG, and further levels of goods. It is explained in the FAQ
here. Level ranks are more closely inspected when these stats aren't decisive enough.
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I would be willing to bet credits that the people who get top 8 of their divisions are also the same 8 people who were the best at the start of the tournament. It's great to say that the person who worked the hardest or improved the most is doing the best, but this is more of a fantasy than what actually happens.
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Check out the ALL page on the
Zenith Table Spreadsheet. The level ranks from everyone in the tournament were analyzed (not related to how placement is actually done) during the second week. The equations are definitely not infallible or anything, but it's neat to look at. I've been coloring users by the round they've been eliminated in (and if they completely played the file in that round). You can see how some people whose scores were not the best around the beginning of the tourney are still in the game, but you can also see that many of the top-of-the-pack players are still in. So both sides still stand, really.
It will be interesting to run this analysis again on everyone after the tournament to see how the standings change.
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However, this bring another point. Every (or almost every) person in a higher division would be able to crush through any division lower than theirs! How is it fair that people worse than them get rewarded more? Every one of them has put in more effort and has more skill to get to where they are today. Everything other than d7 isn't at a truly competitive level. The reason for having divisions in the first place is to allow lower skilled players to still participate and for their efforts to be recognized.
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For the first point, that's not necessarily the case. I know that, being in D5, the final rounds in D4 do get too hard for me, and ... well, I never actually shadowed a lower division before, so I didn't keep track if I could beat D4's scores. But there are some users who do shadowing here who could give their take on that whole thing.
But yeah, you answer your own question here in the rest of that paragraph. And I agree, people with less skill—because the scale is so huge—shouldn't be left out from being rewarded. And you do the same in your next two paragraphs, bringing up the points and then refuting them with your opinion. And I pretty much agree with all of that—that it will be too difficult to gather the content to run too many divisions ... (Look at the Histogram page of the Zenith Table Spreadsheet, and you can see how wide the different divisions are. Between D1 and D2 seems like the most needed place for an extra division) ... and that no matter how many divisions there are, there will always be those on top and those on bottom, and that if everyone placed a "placer" file that's just asking for sandbagging ...
"Everyone playing the same file" was only suggested for D7 and D6 I think, and only up to a point. And whether you agree with that depends on what you think about the number of hard files in the game, yeah. (That's the one thing I disagree with you here on, I don't enjoy playing files that I get over 300 goods on. Check out the
Input Hypothesis. You don't learn when you stay in your comfort zone, but you can't go too far out. Me trying to play 90+s is like being a first-semester language student in a third-year class.)
Anyway, it's always nice to see some calmly thought-out posts in here~