#BGE2020 Elimination Round Format

[This Old Neon]

2690 games were nominated by the end of the opening round of pools.

2310 games got at least one vote to survive the opening round of pools (380 games got no votes across both rounds and were eliminated).

Our multi-layered tie-breaker criteria have meant that the are very minimal ties, so the seeding is quite fair.

In order to create even brackets, the top 1786 games will get byes into the second round. The first round will be fought between the games ranked 1787–2310 (524 games, 262 brackets). The second round will then have 2048 games, the third 1024 games, the fourth 512 games, the fifth 256 games, the sixth 128 games, the seventh 64 games, the eighth 32 games, the ninth 16 games, the tenth 8 games, the eleventh 4 games, and the dozenth will be the finals. This is NOT INCLUDING the numbers of games that will be grinding through the lower bracket at the same time.

In these elimination brackets, since they're 1-on-1, there won't be anything fancy with vote numbers and ranks—you get one vote per bracket. Choose the game you want to win.

If there's a tie, the higher-seeded game will win. We don't have the time or space to fuss around with tie-breakers; furthermore, tie-breakers don't really make sense for our context, since we have a limited number of voters—extending the length of the polls won't generate more votes out of thin air.

This is a lot of polls. We're going to look at expanding the BGE subforum to 50 threads per page and then try to fill the entire 1st page with polls every week. Once a poll concludes and results are tallied, we'll move them to the Archives so they don't get in the way. You should still be able to comment on posts in the Archive. When the lower losers bracket starts up in a few weeks, we may consider making a whole separate subforum specifically for those polls, so we can have something like 45-50 upper bracket polls and 50 lower bracket polls running simultaneously each week.

(Either that or we can keep the number of polls per week low, but the elimination round will last much longer that way.)

[Kong Wen]

Feedback welcome.

[SkyPikachu]

1v1 for games like this really sucks I've played like 2 of the 80+ games here. Put that aside and having to click 40+ different discussion threads was very time consuming.

[Kong Wen]

1v1 for games like this really sucks I've played like 2 of the 80+ games here. Put that aside and having to click 40+ different discussion threads was very time consuming.

I think I've played about 60-70% of this batch.

The conceit of this instance of the Project has always been absurdly comprehensive—hence why we had two full rounds of round-robins, lasting over a year, just to seed the brackets. Unfortunately, if we don't give these games a fair shake in 1v1 matchs-ups, then it's not a proper double-elimination tournament—we'd just be consigning some games to get swamped in a group elimination while other games get to ride the high horse and face no such hardship.

If you wanted to break up the 40 threads you could do 10 per day. Or you could also completely skip this round. There are a few ways to tackle them. But I think posting a LOT of threads at the outset is preferable to having the first round of eliminations take over a year to get through, before we even see a single lower bracket poll.

Tip for people voting on PC:

If you load the last poll posted in a given week (look at the posted date/time immediately under the poll title, but I'll usually post either the first or last one last) and look at the URL in the address bar, you'll see the thread number at the end:

h t t p s : / / thisoldneon.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1691

When you're done voting, you can click there and change the number to be one less (e.g. 1690) and it'll take you to the next poll. This saves you from clicking back to the subforum, finding the next poll, clicking it, etc. I don't think this is as convenient on mobile because it takes a bit more action to get into an editable address bar, but at least you know this is a thing.

[Ouenben]

1v1 for games like this really sucks I've played like 2 of the 80+ games here. Put that aside and having to click 40+ different discussion threads was very time consuming.

Sounds like someone should expand their gaming horizons then.

[Kong Wen]

1v1 for games like this really sucks I've played like 2 of the 80+ games here. Put that aside and having to click 40+ different discussion threads was very time consuming.

Sounds like someone should expand their gaming horizons then.

tbh it's not surprising a lot of people won't have played a lot of low-seeded games, many of which will have been seeded this low because they didn't get many votes because many people didn't play them.

So I'm expecting this round to be a double-edged sword of a lot of people skipping a lot of brackets because they don't know the games, but being excited and happy to vote for the games they do know and love (in some cases when they're up against a better game they simply haven't played, #BGERIP).

[This Old Neon]

So, for example, the latest bracket posted in this week's batch is #91, with the url:

viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1742

That 1742 is the thread number. If you iterate that backwards in the address bar, you can jump directly between polls. Changing 1742 to 1741 will take you to bracket #90, 1740 will take you to bracket #89, etc.

[Kong Wen]

The previous round was the first round that resulted in full doubly-eliminated lower-bracket games. Now that lower-bracket games are surviving to face off against newly-defeated games from the upper bracket, we actually have more games in the lower, which means more polls.

To put it simply, we have 512 upper-bracket games left, and 1024 lower bracket games (512 new additions moving down from the upper bracket, and 512 survivors from the previous round).

IMO the best way to tackle this is to rotate between one week of upper bracket polls and two weeks of lower bracket polls.

• PRO: Faster (24 weeks till next round)
• CON: Less frequent engagement with top games (every 3 weeks)

Still, the higher-ranked games in the lower brackets are starting to get better, so this should still give us some interesting matchups.

[MerlinDrazziw]

Go for it!