Altador Cup XI

[Moni]

KRAWK ISLAND VS MARAQUA
KIKO LAKE VS ROO ISLAND
MERIDELL VS BRIGHTBALE
MERIDELL VS DARIGAN CITADEL
KRELUDOR VS VIRTUPETS
these possible match ups have always been amusing to me, and probably ones non-fans from the respective lands would rally around the most. xP I imagine Skarl and Hagan to make bets over which team wins like immature twin brothers do. xP

meanwhile
why aren't Sakhamet and Qasala different teams? Aren't they different kingdoms?

[Duke Pikachu]

Jun 4, 2016 12:12:34 GMT -5 Moni said:

KRAWK ISLAND VS MARAQUA
KIKO LAKE VS ROO ISLAND
MERIDELL VS BRIGHTBALE
MERIDELL VS DARIGAN CITADEL
KRELUDOR VS VIRTUPETS
these possible match ups have always been amusing to me, and probably ones non-fans from the respective lands would rally around the most. xP I imagine Skarl and Hagan to make bets over which team wins like immature twin brothers do. xP

meanwhile
why aren't Sakhamet and Qasala different teams? Aren't they different kingdoms?

Those are a big match-ups, though I can think of a few others:

Altador vs. Kreludor (sun vs moon)
Altador vs. Shenkuu (sun vs moon 2: celestial boogaloo)
Darigan Citadel vs. Haunted Woods vs. Krawk Island (battle of the pragmatists)
Faerieland vs. Haunted Woods (cutesy vs. creepy)
Faerieland vs. Virtupets (magic/faerie vs technology/Sloth)
Kreludor vs. Shenkuu (moon battle)
Krawk Island vs. Shenkuu (pirates vs. ninjas)
Krawk Island vs. Mystery Island (pirates vs. ninjas 2: the revengeance)
Krawk Island vs. Mystery Island vs. Roo Island (island battle)
Lost Desert vs. Maraqua (dry vs wet)
Lost Desert vs. Moltara (heat battle)
Maraqua vs. Kiko Lake (water battle)
Maraqua vs. Moltara (water vs. fire)
Terror Mountain vs. Tyrannia (neighbor match)
Terror Mountain vs. Moltara (cold vs. hot)

As for Lost Desert, if they want to keep it as one world than maybe the question should be why don't thy have a Qasalan player? Of course that is just one of many things I pointed out a few years ago.

[Zoey]

Oh shoot... Altador managed to win Faerieland across the board? o.O This is the most competent I've ever seen my team... -dances in toga-

[Jae]

Jun 5, 2016 9:22:34 GMT -5 Zoey said:

Oh shoot... Altador managed to win Faerieland across the board? o.O This is the most competent I've ever seen my team... -dances in toga-

Congrats on the sweep!

Moltara is still being a thorn in everyone's side at YYB but we're terrible at side games apparently. XD

[PFA]

*goes to check Altador Cup scores* Aaaannnddd Shenkuu wiped. ~Back to the bottom for Shenkuu yaaaay~

[Moni]

Jun 4, 2016 6:14:43 GMT -5 Azusa said:

The Editorial mentioned about sending the minimum score affecting the team rankings. If that's the case, my one-goal scores in ShSh would be considered bad, wouldn't it?
_{Or are they just motivating us to play better? I don't even know if they're tallying up game scores or game wins.}

They calculate everybody's gross scores sent for their teams, and then normalize them ('normalize' here basically means converting the dataset to a standard score for comparison to another set of data; in this case the data sets are the scores of the teams). This means SCORES matter for your team's standing.

For your personal standing, only WINS matter and scores don't mean anything. This is an intentional conundrum (or an oversight that made it into the game, there are a lot of badly-designed things on Neo) between player interest and team interest. Generally what this forces players to do is find a happy medium between sending a lot of scores and sending quality scores (in all games except Yooyuball, where sending high scores makes games go a lot faster).

[Azusa]

I see, thanks for the explanation (:
I personally care more about the team rankings rather than my own prize points (I wonder why haha) but I've been doing exceptionally bad at YYB.

Speaking of YYB, TY lost to MI soooooo ... well done, Mystery Island! Still glad that TY maintained a 7 for all 5 YYB matches so MI's seriously done a great job in getting an 8.

But the big news today is the scores of MQ and KD. It's so low ...
I believe TNT took action against the ACGs but BR's scores are still really high ...

TY's SS score yesterday was a little high too ...

I'm no expert at all in the AC though, so what do you guys think?

[Herdy]

There are two possibilities:

ACGs on both KD and MQ both colluded to send lots of minimum scores and YYB losses with high numbers of goals (since GPG averages continued to rise yesterday). Given that both ACGs dislike each other, this seems unlikely.

Or JS imposed some sort of handicap into the formula that works out team scores and applied the handicap to MQ and KD. They clearly didn't do so in terms of cheaters across the board - since all scores would have been lowered. Just specifically nerfed the MQ and KD scores.
This is good - just doesn't go far enough. BV has Stealth, a legit ASG, but it also has cheaters. It should be added to the nerf list as well. TY has SOTAC, it is suspected. Legit ASG, so can potentially be left alone. Though personally I'd say nerf TY as well so we can have an interesting Cup for once.

The problem, and it is a problem, is that the lack of a nerf for BV proves JS did this without analysis of the scores. Rather, they nerfed teams over what the consensus was where the cheaters were concentrated. That means witch hunts and trolls have the capacity to get a legit team's scores nerfed by accusing them of cheating. This is seriously dangerous territory to get into.

[Diana]

Wow, both KD and MQ took a fall. It does very much look like direct intervention.

The problem, and it is a problem, is that the lack of a nerf for BV proves JS did this without analysis of the scores. Rather, they nerfed teams over what the consensus was where the cheaters were concentrated. That means witch hunts and trolls have the capacity to get a legit team's scores nerfed by accusing them of cheating. This is seriously dangerous territory to get into.

Oh... dear. Yeah, you're right, that does have the potential to get downright nasty.

Also, I don't want Tyrannia to win. The paint brush prize is guaranteed awful. :B

[Jae]

An alternate explanation is that MQ and KD have the biggest, most organized ACGs from two of the biggest, most popular cheating sites. JS likely already knows these sites exist, and it's entirely possible that JS has 'sleeper agents' on those sites. Since the ACGers aren't likely sharing their bot-riddled dummy account names on the boards, JS might just be brute-forcing the scores down.

This is the first I've heard of BV having more cheaters than usual so maybe JS just doesn't know where their group congregate to verify it for sure? Also there comes a point where they may realize that every team has cheaters in some capacity and nerfing BV over a comparatively normal sized amount may lead to every team needing to get nerfed, which brings us back to square one.

All I'm saying is it's a bit early to hit the panic button and assume they are blindly listening to the Neoboard murmurings without doing any of their own research. Signups are closed. Let's see how things shake out with the players/accounts now signed up being the only ones to affect the Cup.

Edited to add: In the editorial, CQ said that the scores on the results page are somehow related to the brackets scores that they see. I added up KD and MQs scores in the 4 games and divided them by five (really unsophisticated math, I know, but it's all I care to do) and the average scores across the first round seem fairly normal for what you'd expect from KD and MQ on a normal year. Lots of 5s, 6s, and 7s with the occasional 8, 9, or 10 in one side game per team. Maybe the lowered results are from JS lowering their overall bracket score to where they feel it would be without the cheaters? Yeah those scores for yesterday were disheartening, but they're still 2nd and 3rd in their bracket and that's about where you'd expect them to be - KD and MQ have shown to be podium-quality teams on their own, after all.

[Herdy]

Signups don't close till midnight, however. Cheaters have time to rejoin on a different team. Sensible choice would be to join now with shells on both BV and another team doing well by themselves - likely LD, MI, KI, or TY (although TY has SOTAC, so they might try and get them knocked out as well). Use the shells on BV to force their scores up even higher - forcing JS to do the same to them and taking them out of the competition. Then you coast on the other team until the final bracket when you cheat all out and JS can do little about it.
Puts a lot up to the mercy of bracket choice, however.

[Jae]

Yes, but they had to do something today in order to fix the mess from the first round of brackets. Admittedly, this is still a bit too late for signups to end, I will agree with you there. Maybe in the future they'll know to end signups on day 3 or 4 or something.

JS is probably as aware as the rest of us that BV and the others you mentioned are the likely targets for ACG migration. And they'll have an entire bracket's worth of scores to work with rather than just one day's next round so the nerfs might not be as noticeable or crippling (then again, they might be. I don't know what JS is doing; I just don't think they're listening to the Neoboards and the Neoboards alone). It'll be interesting to follow the scores in coming days, that's for sure.

[Duke Pikachu]

Hmm, I maybe though of a way to make a more fair system, at least for Yooyuball, but it would involve a bit of work to implement:

Yooyuball: My idea is, first, wipe the board clean for every game (why is our score for playing against one team counting toward another? It just means a team who got a head start will probably be able to keep it).

Second, and here's where it gets complicated, since Yooyuball's cap is under 100 (and now under 50) I don't think it would be that much of a chore to split players into how many games they played. So add the scores for all the players who played one game into one group, all the scores for all the players who played two game into a second group, etc.. Then once you have you set of scores average it by how many users are in that that group. Once you have those scores, then add a "multiplier bonus" to them (like the one game played won't get a "multiplier bonus" (thus having a 1x), the who two games played would get a "multiplier bonus" of 1.02x, three games played would be 1.04x, etc.). Finally add it all up and you have your overall score for the team.

Albeit not a perfect system, but I think more fair than what we have now. It does what TNT always said, it had players who played one a few games have their score counted too.

Other Games: Honestly the other games need to be updated with versions that actually reflect how they're represented in prize points (and that also could use some adjusted too). However that's not going to happen so let's work with what we got:

Now we can't do what we did for Yooyuball as the other games you can play more of and they don't encourage you to play them all the way through. With those games I'd say first you need to have a score cutoff, if the player doesn't make this many points their scores just don't count. Harsh, but honestly it's the only way I see "fixing" this problem with the system we have now. And I don't mean the minimum being the cut off, like I'd say for SS the cutoff should be 500, MSN should be 4k, and SOSD should be 1k (which you can only get by doing all 5 goals). Heck, I'd actually even say increase the min to those amounts, if you're gonna play then play.

Anyway, now that was have our "core" players, next split players by a range of how many games they played. Similar idea to Yooyuball, but you're doing groups. For example:

SS: Group 1 be those who played 1-10 games, Group 2 would be 11-20, etc.
MSN & SOSD: Group 1 be those who played 1-25 games, Group 2 would be 25-50, etc.

Finally I think each player's score should be individually added up & divided by how many games they played so in essence that at the end of the day they're only sending in their average score for their group. Then their group receives a "multiplier bonus" (not sire how much, but it would be like with Yooyuball where it wouldn't be that big but still significant to make it count to those who played more games). Then the scores from each group are added up.

As I said, this isn't perfect but I think with what we have it could be the best way to go about doing things.

Sign-ups: I say give players like two weeks BEFORE the cup begins to make our decision of what team to join. When the game starts then close them. Why are we letting people join after it began?

[Zoey]

Jun 6, 2016 11:55:45 GMT -5 Duke Pikachu said:

Sign-ups: I say give players like two weeks BEFORE the cup begins to make our decision of what team to join. When the game starts then close them. Why are we letting people join after it began?

Pretty much what I thought. LOL! Because I know lots of people want to bandwagon on the team that looks like it's going to win the most, and I think that's pretty unfair. With the whole closing signups after the games begin, it gives the cheating groups more of a guessing game on which team to support (although, to be fair, the cheating groups can probably pick any team and take them to the top) and for the rest of the legit players, you'll actually support the team you like best in lieu of the one that's going to give you the cooler-looking trophy.

Side effect: altador cup subboard might turn into a battlefield of recruitment and numbers/goals, but worst comes to worst JS closes the subboard or something. Still better than having cheating groups rig the entire game.

[Diana]

While I'm fairly neutral about most of the things you said, Duke, I have to strongly disagree at making the min cap for SoSD 1k - because that means that if you miss once, unless you finished super quick (1003 or 1017), the score is invalid. Make it 700 or 800 or something.

Also, I'd prefer to see Slushie Slinger itself changed to be a quicker and less tedious game. Maybe make the first half of the game less of a nightmarish crawl.

Unrelated, but can you still rank up on down days like tody?