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Old 09-19-2019, 09:30 PM   #69
devonin
Very Grave Indeed
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Join Date: Apr 2004
Location: Ontario, Canada
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Default Re: New FFR Features ?

Quote:
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

Quote:
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.

Last edited by devonin; 09-19-2019 at 09:31 PM..
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