[WirryWoo]

Hey all, thank you again for the kind comments and I hope you all had fun throughout! Going to address some things I can work on to improve for next time right now!

Firstly, I'm really sorry to those that did submit late scores for the last round. Although your improvements were great, I unfortunately cannot accept them. There will certainly be a next time, so keep an eye out sometime next year when I will host this tournament with some improvements.

Originally Posted by Janko2000

Thanks for Tournament and 48 improved my TOP 100 song scores. I´m really don´t know when would I improve my TOP 100 scores if would´t be this tournament.
(most top scores I had for more than 1 year and I don´t be so motivated to improve them)
But if I had earlier improved them I didn´t definitely get 100k+credit and wouldn´t be in TOP 5 most improved players...
I hope for more similar tournaments and competitions on FFR server.

PS: @allparticipants Congratulations to everyone for your songs improvements and prizes and I really hope to see you in next tournaments.

PS2: @WirryWoo I´m not really sure if I didn´t still dreaming when I at 9 CET morning woke up and looked on the prize winners and I was written there and later in the afternoon
it was changed and I found out I hadn't won $$$ prize... FellsBadMan
Otherwise thanks for your hosting. <3 <3

I'm so sorry about incorrectly mentioning your name as a cash prize winner. There is a Youtube recording of me doing the randomization on FFR Discord, so I promise that the correct people were rewarded their cash prizes. Doing so much copy and pasting late at night yesterday was so tiring, so it was a mistake on my end I'm glad you are happy of your improvements and your overall performance!

Originally Posted by badman7772

First of all, this tournament was very well ran and I didn't see any point where something went wrong at all. Players that were ineligible were handled accordingly and had a chance to become eligible by following whatever instructions they may have been given. Also it was quite nice to have 20 songs to pick from each round instead of everything riding on one song. Even if you were rusty and you submitted something, it seems like you'll still be getting quite a bit for the efforts.

I do have a question though before I get to my suggestion.

The AAA column in the spreadsheet. Is that for if we AAA songs or is it based on how much AAA equivalency we've obtained over the course of the tournament?

Now for my suggestion. Seems that the ones that are gonna get the most credits are gonna be the ones that got the most raw score improvements on one song. Based on my experience, there wasn't as much of an incentive to fix a blackflag/low SDG on a song that's within my choice of 20 songs. I was having to choose which songs had the most raw score potential and go with that, hoping I could shave off a fairly great amount of raw goods to get something good submitted.

That leads to this: Next time, make it to where improvements on all songs count to get a combined total. This would incentivize players to fix their blackflags/low SDG's instead of leaving them alone because it'd only net them 25 points or something vs the 200 they could get on an 8g to AAA score.

It would lead to another suggestion that would come up. If you were to do all songs at once instead of just their best improvement, next flaw would be this. Players that have many more raw goods to shed than others, and actually shedding a lot of them. I don't see much that can be done about that on my end, but I'm sure together the community can come up with some sort of suggestion in that category like reward more credits per raw good shed or something for those who don't have as many. Example being Matthia with all of his AAA's in top 100.

I will admit that when I did try to create the AAA column, it was intended to balance the fact that higher ranked players can be rewarded for improving scores on harder files, as opposed to lower ranked players where there is more opportunity to improve their score. It was intended to account for both AAA and difficulty of the file, but I realized that after observing my model's performance during the last round of the tournament it didn't do its justice, so I deeply apologize for that. Maybe it's because I didn't improve as much as I should since my prize was given away to help make this balance happen haha.

So although total cumulative improvement is a reasonable solution to tackle this issue, I personally think that implementing that will make the problem worse. Using Matthias as a good example here, he has pretty much all AAAs in his level ranks, so despite him "improving" all 20 of his scores per round, someone lower ranked can easily beat him by playing only a handful of songs.

I have spent some time to think of good solutions moving forward to address some of these concerns:

• • I plan to make the eligibility requirements a little more strict than this tournament where I will be building my requirements based on the new Top 5 Average Rank and the Top 100 Average Rank. This would better control the discrepancy of how "maxed out" the level ranks are, but I haven't figured out the full details yet.
• • I plan to reward significantly less for people who scored negative during the entire duration of the tournament. It defeats the purpose of "self-improvement" if there is no improvement made for each round. I have an idea to fix this, but I'll have to implement this and test it out.
• • I also plan to reward participation prizes for folks who forget to submit scores during the round. The more rounds they participated in, the more participation credits they will receive. This should net up to be less than someone who completed the tournament with a negative overall improvement.
• • I also want to create greater incentives to award credits for players who improve more than one score per round. Haven't figured out the details there yet.
• • Tracking players initial skill rating to see progress from Day 1 of Tournament to end of tournament would be really awesome to see. I plan to capture more information in my caching scripts to see this change and acknowledge those that met their goals.
• • Instead of defining a AAA column, I will compare a player's skill rating to the AAA equivalency achieved for a song's submission and reward players based on this comparison.

There will be more improvements made for next time. I think I have a ton of tweaking to do to make sure the tournament is more fair. Overall, I'm glad you all enjoyed the experience. Thanks again for everyone's participation