Cool, thanks.

The leagues give 12 to a win and 12/drawees to each participant in a draw. You could just as easily give a fraction of a point to the participants in the draw if you desired.

That is much closer to the way the master's tournament was set up, which was a great tournament, at least the first year when I played.

Right, but this isn't what I am asking. I have a specific question, and, maybe, if you have experience with a similar scoring system your experiences could help me get an answer to this question.

You could also use 21 which would make every draw easily divided as 7=2 pts, 6=3.5, 5=4.2, 4=5.25, 3=7, 2=10.5 and the solo gets all 21.

@uclabb, I am trying to do something similar to the masters.

You are asking how the games changed? The end games were a bit more cutthroat than usual and people took more risks to try to solo. Besides that it was normal, though. It's not like people were less determined to stop solos, if anything they were more determined.

I think the winner had 2 solos (maybe 3?) in 8 games.

So you only want to count solos OK. Obviously it works for the masters.

Right, ok, so let me modify this a bit. I understand how implementing solos as the scoring medium to determine a winner comes in. But I guess I am more wondering about the total centres as a tiebreak.

For those of us with experience in stalemates,etc. And in particular with gunboats, not very many games are soloed, most games end in a draw. So, I guess the real variable I am looking to experiment with here is just how far you can push a small war when a solo threat props up. We would assume that if everyone plays perfectly (and think smaller scale than the masters) one solo might win the whole thing. So in forming a stalemate, how much do you jostle over centres when you know that if you push it too far you maye have just thrown the tournament away.

Does that make any sense?

Masters scoring was fine but 8 rounds lasted way too long. By the end, the TD was really scraping for subs to replace the subs and the game quality went down IMO. The tournament lasted so long you probably could even have completed a two-round World Cup in that time.

Was there something weird in the way I worded my question up top?

I am asking about specifically a scoring system, nothing more, as I already have in mind what the tournament will be. I purposely did not say what the tournament was going to be because I didn't want what this is becoming, a list of suggestions of how I should run it.

If someone could provide some criticism on the scoring system I would appreciate it. The one outlined above, not whatever the masters did.

If there is even one solo then someone was being stupid, a few centers ain't worth it.

Right, but if the assumption is there will be no solos, then a few centres could easily be worth it, right?

I like a big incentive to stop a solo, it's my pet peeve when ppl are dumb and ignore the threat bc they are too focused on beating up on someone smaller that has out played them defensively.

But it's hard to analyze the scoring system when we don't know how many concurrent or consecutive games or other aspects that might influence it.

You are asking "what do you think of this engine?" but we don't know if you plan it for a sports car, an SUV, a monster truck, or a rice burner.

None of Draugnar's six posts in this thread even attempt to answer Lando's question. Stop posting please.

No. You are the forum cops, Frank. And I am trying to understand by what means we are to critique the scoring system when we don't have a basis for what will be scored.

You are *not* the forum cop, Frank...

LOL @ Draugnar

Draug, Lando made this thread to discuss something specific, and you decided to derail it by suggesting that he try something completely different and then blaming him when you were called out on it. Frank may not be the forum police, but the forum is self moderated, and the general consensus here is that you should probably provide something useful if you're going to keep posting.

Lando, it seems like a really interesting idea. I would suggest experimenting on some quality volunteers to see how it ends up working.

I did. I posited that we can't really critique the scoring system when we don't know how many total games and how many games each person will be in.

Well, counting only solos primarily makes it similar to the Masters, but I think adding adding the SC count tie-breaker creates a very interesting twist.

In the Masters (I've never played myself, so I'm only speaking as an external observer and conjecturing about the tournament dynamics), games that are bound to be drawn can be just summarily drawn without much regard for your SC count, or even if you wind up defeated to prevent the solo.
However, with this SC count tie-breaker, there's a new and strong incentive to squeeze out as many SCs as possible.

The importance of grabbing SCs is actually amplified by the WTA mindset of stopping solos. Assuming a good set of players, I would imagine that there will be relatively few solos. Depending on the structure of the tournaments (number of games/rounds etc.), we may see players fall into just a few bins of 0 solos, 1 solos, 2 solos, and maybe 3 solos (very unlikely unless many games are played or the participants are highly unbalanced in skill). I imagine that there will only be very few that actually get 2 or more solos, but everyone else will just be lumped together with only SC count to differentiate themselves for both ranking and to make the cut in each round. Even those with a solo or two will still need to bulk up on SCs in order to edge the other few that belong to that elite group.

I think it'll make for a very interesting tournament dynamic. The WTA "stop the solo" mindset would be very strong as giving anyone a relatively rare solo would give them a huge advantage, but that'll be heavily undercut by petty SC grabbing in order to edge others at your level.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but assumed that there are no SC tie breakers in the Masters, right? It's purely solo count, right?

Will you be counting actual SCs even for solos or will solos only get 18 SCs? This could encourage sandbagging to get the maximum SCs from the solo trying to top another soloist.

Draug does have a good point though. I agree that the effect of the scoring system would depend a lot on the total number of games involved, whether if there will be rounds with culling, and how many games are in each round.

I think that...

In one extreme, if it's simply just that every player plays a ton of games (>> 10) involving the entire player pool (random draws to fill games, or some sort of round robin scheme), then I think that players would be able to distinguish themselves more effectively by accumulating solos, and the effect of the SC count tie-breaker would be slightly diminished. Of course there will always be players that might not feel like they'll be able to pull themselves up through solos, and play to some degree to gain a high SC count in order to be among the best of the 0 solos or 1 solo group in order to get a reasonable overall ranking (assuming that the groups with more than one solo would be relatively small).

On the other extreme, if there are relatively few games (like < 5), or if there are relatively few games in each round, with a cut to determine who advances, then the SC count tie-breaker could have some very adverse effects on the motivations of the players. Picking up a solo is not something that one can simply guarantee. Given that there will be relatively few solos, you'd see in each round, a group advancing because they picked up a solo or two, and group that advances with 0 solos, but a large SC count. Someone could actually play for that second group, being willing to play for a strong second (PPSC style) by throwing a game just to maximize their own SC count. As long as not too many solos get thrown (and hence creating a large enough group that the only people that advance are those that had at least one solo), this might actually be a good strategy to maximize one's chances to advance to the next round, provided that one does not care about intermediate rankings or that results from each round do not carry over to the next round.

Good point. You could prevent that by making everyone get 0 SC's in a game that ends in a solo (except the winner, obviously)

@yebellz - no, there are no SC tie-breakers in the Masters

@Lando - I'm not preaching that the Masters does it best, but I think the solo counting system is the best way to run a competitive tournament, if the games are WTA, as that scoring system gives the biggest incentive for people to try and solo, which is what the game wants. The tie-breaker that is in place for the Masters is head-to-head. If you soloed against the person you tied with, then you win. The second tie-breaker is strength of schedule, so basically how many solos to the people you soloed against have? This overall shouldn't have any adverse affects.

If you're looking at a situation where there are relatively few solos happening, however, a good tie-breaker could be size of draws (instead of SC count). So, with low scores being best, if there was a 3-way draw you'd get 3 , 5-way 5 , solo one point, etc. Or you could put it on a logarithmic scale to give more of a reward for going from 5 to 4 than from 4 to 3 (or vice versa)

@THM - the World Cup looks to be going on just as long as the Masters did, just with less games -_- Quality did suffer in the end though (except for our game) which is something I'll be addressing when I start the next round (which won't be for *at least* 6 months). I'm thinking of putting a GR cap on it.

Thanks to yebellz and goldfinger for some really good analysis. I will be in touch with both of you to pick your brains a bit more and get some further suggestions. Hopefully you don't mind. In the case of yebellz, if I do go forward with this tournament would you be available to be the "mod on duty" for country switches and the like?

Also, as a question - say a tournament had 63 games played and 49 players, what kind of point reward would be allocated to the tournament?

Reminds me of playing Mario Party, star count matters most, tie-breaker to coin count. :)

A 9 game tournament then? I'd say its better to only count solos in that situation, as some are bound to happen