Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Mole5000]

Unless there is some interaction over tables that I don't see.

What is the chance that both tables play a game with Chapel in it?

Whether or not that is an actual problem I don't know.

[DStu]

Unless there is some interaction over tables that I don't see.

What is the chance that both tables play a game with Chapel in it?

Zero, but..

Whether or not that is an actual problem I don't know.

... I don't see why it should.

[Jive Junkie]

Sidenote - you do realize that in order for 200 people to compete in such a tournament, you'll need at least 100 new copies of the Base and each expansion, right?

You could just not have independent boards, but distribute the 170 cards (at which number are we at the moment) over all tables. That would give you random boards on each table, which just happen to not be independent over tables. But I don't see why this should matter. So you would only need about 1/2 (large) expansion per table, so ~50 boxes in total. +some Base cards. +maybe Ruins/Shelters, there probably aren't enough.  Don't want to calculate how many you will need.

Small problems with BlackMarket here, maybe just don't use it, or take an extra set per BM (so you have 10 extra of each card, which you can distirbute among the BMs.

But then you're not being purely random.  Also, there are currently 187 kingdom cards (192 if you count Promos).

This discussion is relevant for a realistic scenario but it is moot given the parameters of the scenario proposed by the OP.  The tournament is being financed by a billionaire and has a $10 million purse.  The billionaire can easily afford to procure all of the necessary sets.  Not to mention procuring the physical space to host the tournament.

This is indeed what I had in mind - I wanted the discussion to be focused on the tournament itself, not on the funding to make it happen.

That being said, one solution to the problem of needing at least 100 of each set: require each competitor to bring all the sets! Since this is a big money tourney with presumably top players, they should already have all or most of the sets in their possession, or at least access enough to borrow them. And even if they don't, they're playing for millions - you can think of owning the complete game as part of the of entrance fee.

[DWetzel]

2. While your point is possible, in such a case, the person who realized that their opponent is about to go off and decides to buy a province and lose 54-9 instead will be rewarded, relative to people with equal luck. 

That rewards suboptimal playing-for-second-place decks. A Big Money deck will always get a province or two before the engine takes off and buys the rest. Doesn't mean the BM deck was closer to winning than the engine deck which had zero points because it was building up to the mega-turn that the opponent got to first.

In a lot of games, the relevant measure is "winning by X turns" - not "winning by X points". If I'm one turn away from having my deck fire and buy everything when my opponent's deck fires and buys everything, that's a really close, really well-played game - we differed by only one turn, but that one-turn difference could be an arbitrarily number of points, anywhere from one point difference to MEGA-GOONS-TURN, where that point difference means little to nothing. Whereas in a deck where a BM+X strategy competes against a mega-turn engine, the BM+X will get a few provinces, making the score look close even if the engine was the optimal strategy by far.

Here's another example - Ambassador games! Whoever wins the ambassador war probably gives their opponent all 10 curses by the end of the game. Doesn't matter whether it was close or not close, whoever wins will give out all 10.

Oh, here's a BM+X example - duchy-dancing! I could buy the last province and lose by a point. OR, I could buy a duchy, with one province remaining, since that gives me a chance to win if on the next turn, my opponent buys an estate and I have a chance to grab the last province. The latter SHOULD be clearly the right play, since it gives you a chance to pull out a win. And yet, buying the province is likely to lead to "lose by 1", while playing to win is likely to have you lose by 10 (if the opponent buys the last province on the next turn). Rewards people who end the game with a loss as long as it's a loss by not very many points, rather than rewarding people that play for the chance to win.


...just don't do it. Points in Dominion are NOT  a valid indicator of quality of play; while they may seem to be such at first glance, it's not actually true.

Neither, really, are win/loss in a lot of cases either (see the "who happens to draw the KC/Bridge combo first in an otherwise mirrored match"), but we use that.  At least with this method you're more fundamentally comparing apples to apples.  I don't deny that it creates a somewhat different "winning" heuristic, I just deny that that's an inherently bad thing.

So the correct solution is to reject the idea that you can determine the 'quality' of a win and just accept that you only have win/lose/draw to work off rather than coming up with tournament rules that would totally distort play and in no way reflect the reality of the situation.

No, not really.  Win/lose/draw compares you directly to your OPPONENT, who faced a rather different situation than you (seating, if nothing else, which as we all know matters a fair amount).  Comparing to other seat2's (for instance) on the same kingdom who faced the same starting situation you did is a more valid comparison.  If P1 is winning 60% on a particular kingdom, is it the least bit fair to P2 to get, effectively, 20% of a "loss" merely by sitting in the wrong seat?  Remember, one of the stated goals here is to minimize the luck comparison without stretching the game out over a huge sample space.

A possible compromise: weight wins according to what the "field" does (I assume everyone's on board with "everyone plays the same kingdom sets" as a reasonable rule).  If P1 is winning 60% on a particular kingdom, reward the wins for P2 on that kingdom more heavily than you would the wins for P1.  Details left to the reader.

[antony]

Duplicate Dominion sounds like a cool idea but again I think that that would (in practice) be a huge mess to organize.  Still, if we do that then I would score it as follows.
Still organize a full Swiss (with some deep cut after day 1).  On each round, each player plays two games against his opponent, the two games are independent and scored separately (more data points :-)).  If I win a game then I score x points, and my opponent scores 2-x points, where x is (1 - the percentage of players in the same starting position as myself, not including myself, who won their game).  For example, if I won as P2 and nobody else did, I score 2 and my opponent 0.  If I won as P1 and everybody else did, then I score 1 and my opponent too (as there was no "merit" in winning this game).  If I won as P1 and 50% of the other P1's did, then I score 1.5 and my opponent 0.5.  You get the idea.

[gamesou]

Make it two player.

Contentious suggestion:  Goal: Try to eliminate mirror games where players execute the same obvious strategy.  These games are either decided either by the luck of the draw or tactics, but I think the tactical decisions aren't usually that hard or interesting, and so are not good player skill differentators.  Implementation:  Use rejection sampling on kingdom sets.  Both players see the randomly drawn kingdoms, get 5 (2, 3?) minutes to analyze it, and then privately write down a kingdom card that the opponent can't buy/gain.  If they write down the same card, start over.

I think that this is an awesome idea that could be pushed even further. Something like this: both players rank all cards from the supply (including treasures and victory cards) from "best" to "worst". We compare the lists and search for the highest disagreement ; your opponent cannot gain that card from your list on his turns. I just tried the idea on random kingdoms and that's quite exciting, especially where to rank Province on an engine board is a tough question !