The entire point of the ID is that the set of outcome probabilities changes. If there’s even a 10% chance of a sweep that gets the 5th place player into a top-4 cut where a split holds serve, allowing intentional draw/split moves the set of possible outcomes from 90-10 to 100-0 against 
This all stems from the flat “payout” of the swiss rounds. The payout is advancement into the elimination rounds. While your position in the swiss has some effect on the elimination rounds there isn’t enough incentive to win after you know you’ve made the cut and if you’re on the edge the risk of missing by being swept is a far greater risk than the advantage of making the cut with an ID.
Here are some options I can see to add value to winning in the swiss:
- Smaller cut, forces you to place higher to make it
- A different cut structure, something along the lines of a wildcard playoff where say you have to top 4 get in. Then the next 8 play each other with 5-12, 6-11, 7-10 and 8-9. That way if you’re not in the top you have to play a little extra risking getting eliminated and being a bit more worn out.
- Don’t have a strict mathematical cut. Randomly select players with the better positions having a higher probability. Maybe with the top x getting in automatically.
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I guess I should have added “within the rules of the tournament” to that statement; it was written with that in mind.
It changes the likelihood of particular outcomes, but it doesn’t change the possible outcomes. I just meant that I didn’t see how it was a tournament structure issue, but it’s possible that I just misunderstood what you meant.
I thought the exact same the moment I saw that they changed the first tiebreaker. Bringing it up again since no-one has addressed the issue?Like you say this is very weird. Anyone ?
The order would be C, B, A.
You can’t break a tie on head to head unless all players involved in the tie have played all other players involved in the tie. In the scenario above, you’d fall back on Strength of Schedule.
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this is how I read it too, in which case Head to head is used as a tiebreaker if and only if all tied players played eachother. in a large tournament this is super unlikely so effectively head to head is only going to be a factor in the deciding the very top places in swiss (where spread of people on tied points is low and there is a high chance they played each other at some point on the top table).
Hm, you could argue like that and it mkaes some kind of sense, though it removes head to head as first TB again, which is explicitly the first TB. You could similarily argue that you have to break the tie firstly with head-to-head and then the other places fall in between.
It is quite plausible that in a large tournament multiple tied players in the top have played each other, Minh played almost everyone that made the cut last Worlds for example and a lot of the other players played multiple of the other that made the cut too.
No. It would be C, A, B. The 3 are tied, and as A and C didn’t played you look SoS and C is on top. Now there is a tie between A and B, but since A beat B, A is on top.
Nope, Nemamiah had it right. You can only use head-to-head tiebreaking if one player had played every other player with the same amount of prestige, and they swept them all.
to all intents and purposes then, where this really counts which is at the bubble, you usually have 5-10 players all tied for the same number of points. it is extremely unlikely they all played eachother, so SoS is the defacto tiebreaker, H2H makes no difference except at the very top of the tree where the number of players on tied points is very small.
My guess is that H2H is going to see more use in smaller tournaments where a “prestige group” might not be larger than 2 players.
It’s also relevant for seeding sometimes, but is almost never going to decide who gets into the cut in any meaningfully large event.
This is the most recent ‘general tournament structure’ thread I can find so I’m going to post this article here. CW: Gathering but many many echoed arguments from these threads
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As far as concessions go, I think it’s brilliant that you can concede a CLEARLY losing game. You could technically do this before by clicking for credits/drawing/running on archives repeatedly, but it was pretty obvious you were trying to lose, and it was simply illegal to do. This is much smarter, and I would wager many have had that one game where they just knew there was no point in continuing. I think especially of Corp games where the Corp is just going through the motions of winning the game, but you’re just waiting to draw cards or whatever.
As for intentional draws, I don’t know, as long as you can’t abuse it, I don’t see the problem. But I would never propose this in a tournament myself.
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0 points for going to time. Mwahahahah. I like it!
Judging by jnet recently, how many points is a rage quit worth?
Have you ever seen the smile of a child?
That plus all the good drugs in the world times a million dollars
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As a follow up to this article, the author suggests Magic moving to Netrunner rules! Very interesting reading.
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I definitely like systems that simply make winning every game optimal better than difficult to police stuff like banning draws.
@CodeDigger’s suggestion of players having a mathematical probability of being in the cut based on their placement gives the immediate feeling that “surely there’s a better answer than that out there”, but is vastly superior to both allowing strategic IDs and attempting to ban IDs right off the bat. Even though it’s a randomization, with the right X, the probability of the best player winning the tournament is higher than one in which strategic IDing is allowed (well, in MtG for sure, but probably in netrunner too), because strategic IDing itself reduces the “sample size” of the Swiss, so the extra game will outweigh the RNG.
Even if the RNG makes you feel cheated out of the cut (and for whatever reason you don’t have similar feelings towards the weak reasoning SoS uses to break the deluge of 12 way ties for 7th) at least you know that’s what happened: you know your standings were good, you know the other player had somewhat weaker standings than you, and he got in. On the other hand, if someone gets a good record and then IDs the last round, and you miss the cut because you have 1 fewer prestige than that player, you’ll never know whether they would have dropped both their games if they played every round of the tournament to win, like you did. You’ll just have to always wonder. Isn’t that worse?
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