Tournament Finals Structure Promotes Stalling

DJHedgehog wrote:

My hypothesis is: A majority of #1 seed players win tournaments. I believe the benefit of choosing your seat combined with the tie-breaking means an overwhelming advantage for the first seed. This advantage can be reduced and still benefit the best player without making 1st seed a much higher incidence of victory.

Becuase I had some free time today, I wrote some (very hack'ish) scripts to download and parse events from the vekn.net site to get some better data.

I've attached the parsed data for 2018 as a zipped csv file: . There may very well be missed events and parsing errors, but the events I spot checked are correct, so it's at least partially correct.

The scripts are at gitlab.com/drnlmza/VEKN-Archon-Stats if other people want to play with them.

For 2018, the file has 128 tournaments, and some brief stats from playing with the data:

The first wins 32% of the time, the second wins 25% of the time and the remaining wins are almost equally divided amongst seed 3-5.

74 % of the finals end with the winner having at least 2.5 VPs - in these, 1st seed wins 30% of the time, 2nd seed wins 23 % of the tournaments, and the other seeds are still about equal for the rest

82% ended with the winner having at least 2 vps.

Only 4 tournaments ended with the winner getting 0.5 vps. Obviously, the 1st seed won all of that.

I'm personally not seeing a lot of evidence of a significant stalling problem in those figures.

Thanks a lot for your work.

Continental Finals and other big tournament Finals usually have good players on them and more visibility.
Players are more careful and more suspicious.
It is not intentional slow play your cheating, imo.

drnlmza wrote:

82% ended with the winner having at least 2 vps.

Only 4 tournaments ended with the winner getting 0.5 vps. Obviously, the 1st seed won all of that.

I think this puts to bed the stalling issue with respect to finals. It sucks that some of the more high profile events don't have a winner, but in general, there appears to be little cause for alarm.

Thank you for taking the time to grab this data. I'll dig into it more as soon as I get the chance.

kschaefer wrote:

I think this puts to bed the stalling issue with respect to finals. It sucks that some of the more high profile events don't have a winner, but in general, there appears to be little cause for alarm.

I disagree.


This is the vitrine of the game, whether we like it or not. How can we have better games on Youtube? Smaller tournaments being more fun is not going to help if people cannot see it.

Non-existant user wrote:

This is the vitrine of the game, whether we like it or not.

So, that was 1 of 4 games that ended in 0.5 VP timeout, according to the number of timeouts above. We're supposed to change the entire tournaments structure for statistically insignificant outcomes? Talk about the tail wagging the dog.

Non-existant user wrote:

How can we have better games on Youtube? Smaller tournaments being more fun is not going to help if people cannot see it.

I think you answered your own question. Put the smaller tournaments on YouTube.