World Championship Mode - possible changes: no deck changing for Finals

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CDavis7M
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thorondor wrote: Wed Aug 24, 2022 8:24 pmObviously the COE is dormant since a while (again). There should have been election before 2022, but nobody cared. The charter says "The acting Council shall remain in office until a new Council is elected." So i guess it makes sense to call upon the other COE members and start a vote.
Hmm... seeing all the Committee action raises concerns. I don't understand the reason for the charter. The old carter was not followed. And then it was recently revised, and that current charter is not being followed. I get it was Covid but, there seems to be a history of this.

Maybe the players don't care because the Council doesn't do anything? And the Council doesn't bother because they know that?
b) The term of office shall be twenty-four months. In the event that a member is not able to bring his term to completion, the Council shall appoint a new member chosen from the community. Election procedures for a new session of the Council shall be started twenty-two months after the appointment of the current Council. The acting Council shall remain in office until a new Council is elected.
The term of office for CoE members is over. It ended in March 2021. The provision for remaining in office is to see the election through. The term is over and the only thing left to do is elections.

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By the way...

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Good to see that the tournament director just made their own decision.
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Theo
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Manuel wrote: Thu Sep 01, 2022 10:01 am I believe scouting is not so powerful when you don't have the chance to change your deck.
But how much of that is because players acknowledge scouting will likely happen so they choose (one might say, are strategically forced?) to play decks for which scouting is less powerful?
Mordakai wrote: Thu Sep 01, 2022 11:23 am This iniciative of the Council of Rivendel pretend to filter the decks by consistency, not by who plays the finals, so the newcomers of the game have a better understanding of the game mechanics. It's difficult to understand why a deck with many ant-FW cards directly in the deck can lead to the top, when the reality is that some player made that simply because he nows the preferences of the final 4 playes that year.
As Manuel alluded to, it sounds like those newcomers are simply looking in the wrong place for the information they desire and confusing themselves into thinking a 4-player event represented consistency. A different solution than making the semi-finals decks be used in finals would be as simple as providing those newcomers the deck lists from those at the top of the much larger and more general semi-finals tournaments. *shrug*
One [online community] with hammer and chisel might mar more than they make...
All players are welcome at Meduseld! https://theo-donly.github.io/MECCG/
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Mordakai
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Yeah, totally agree with that, but that was not my only point. Card carrying can be difficult when travelling by plane or even by train. Constructing a new deck for finals will hamper or directly cancel your participation in the Drinking game. Keeping decks will probably reward the most solid ones, which I think is good for general knowledge of the game.
Of course nothing is life-changing here, we are just testing other possibilities.
C'mon, not the Elves of Lindon AGAIN...
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Theo
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With Worlds 2023 "trying" a top-4 Final with repeated decks, I've been thinking about the impacts some more.

Disclaimer: I'm not saying any of the behavior I consider below happened in Worlds 2023. I'm just using the numbers from Worlds as a theoretical example.

As mentioned earlier in the discussion, a downside of re-matching players is that the entire game is different once you've scouted your opponent's deck. Nothing new here. At least players know the potential for that going in, so can decide what kind of surprises they want to include up front or reveal throughout.

The new horror I had was considering the incentive structure for players during the main tournament, which I don't think has been mentioned. It is not unlikely for some of the highest TP players nearing the end of their final game to have very high certainty that they will be in Finals (i.e., if they are going to win their game, or at least not lose by more than 2 TP). In Worlds 2023, for instance, the top players going into the final round had TPs of 21, 20, 20, 18, 16, and then a bunch of 14s. The 20+ players are nearly certain they will be going to finals if they can get at least 3 TP. Particularly for matches with threshold players---in this example a 20 and 18---there is a potential to have an awkward incentive structure. Some examples:
  • The 20 player may want to only marginally beat the 18 player to make it more likely that the 18 player gets to a top-4 rather than a 16 or 14 player they previously played and only barely beat.
  • Similarly, the 20 player may have played the other 20 player before (as for Worlds 2023) rather than a 16 or 14 player, and it may be that in the 20 vs. 18 game that the 20 player thinks they will do better against the 18 player in Finals compared to the other 20 player they played before.
  • The 20 player hasn't played any of the other contenders before, but knows that their knowledge of the 18 players' deck will give them a greater edge in Finals that the other top players who haven't played 18 yet won't have.
In each case, the 20 player who is winning against the 18 player is incentivized to score lower, to be able to "choose" the pool of opponents for Finals.

This is an incentive problem among players going into top-4 Finals (e.g. final round of Qualifiers) regardless of whether or not the same deck is used. But requiring the same deck means that not only a player's ability or tendencies are evaluated but certainty about deck vs. deck ability, along with deck surprise knowledge.

The only solution I can think of for removing these kinds of incentives is to not force decks to be the same going into Finals.

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Alternatively, rather than needing to remove those incentives entirely, a related problem is the LACK of incentive among top players with a large enough TP gap over threshold players to actually care about the outcome of their final Qualifier game when top-4 Finals resets scores. E.g., the 20 player above may not care about getting 4 vs. 6 points because it makes no difference for Finals. (To be fair, there is at least more bragging rights for placing higher during Qualifiers, and at Worlds 2023 they even had some physical prizes based on relative placement. But I'm talking about for those prizing the Worlds win.)

For this problem, what if placement in Qualifiers was used as a tiebreaker in Finals or gave some other small advantage, like a starting 0.5 TP separation between Finalists? It might be possible to make this significant enough to outweigh the above incentives for choosing the Finals pool, at least most of the time, to reduce the concern of players being overly conservative at the end of their last Qualifier game? I don't really like this; I'm just trying to consider different types of ideas.
One [online community] with hammer and chisel might mar more than they make...
All players are welcome at Meduseld! https://theo-donly.github.io/MECCG/
Goblin King
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Honestly Theo, I think your theoretical scenario is extremely unlikely.
Based upon what I've just witnessed at the 2023 Worlds and it also jogged some memories from 2014, I don't see anyone having enough confidence in their deck and the outcome of a game to take their foot off the pedal or try to only win by a little.
In late rounds the pairings are pretty tight. By Round 4 you are likely just under 20 points. But a 6-0 loss is still a real possibility vs. another deck that is of your caliber. The risk of coming in 5th is too great. Even if you have beaten everyone 6-0 in the first 4 rounds that's just 18 points and no promise of being in the top 4. Even a 5 to 1 loss is a risk that The Way Is Shut in your face.

Something else brought up in this old thread and not directed towards your comment that I would like to also address.
In the thread it was mentioned the possibility of not having a Top 4 round robin tournament to decide the ultimate winner. I think the Top 4 is a good thing to have. There were two good examples of reasons why in 2023. First, Chris Davis and Antonio never faced each other in the Swiss. There were others that also never faced each other as well (Sean and Skye).
Second reason is rematches from Day 1 can have different outcomes. Sean beat Antonio on Day 1 with a 4-2 victory. On Sunday it was Antonio with the win 5-1. Exciting stuff!

I really did like seeing decks go the distance. There's lots of analysis to be done there. It's not my cup of tea but I will read with interest. And I look forward to see what comes next in World Championship Mode.
Goblin King
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