Westtown MAR District Won on Eliminations Tiebreaker Rules

[Karibou]

Originally Posted by AWoL

...but I did get a lot of negative opinions from people who thought that was unfair, cheap, or just dumb, and that a tie in elims should always just be decided by another match. Of course, you can't change the manual, but do you think the manual should include tiebreaker rules, or should it always be a replay?

I hope that for every negative comment you heard, you received at least a dozen positive comments and praises. Your alliance was incredible to play against and you deserve every bit of that win - those matches were won fair and square, by the book. Nobody deserves to feel even remotely slighted for a fair and well-earned victory. Congratulations to 225, 1640, and 1391 - see you at MAR champs!

I'm okay with tiebreakers. They exist for a good reason, and prevent the event from potentially dragging on forever. Remember, when the rules are written, the GDC has no idea how close match scores will be, has no way of knowing how prevalent ties will be, and has no control over when ties will occur. They can make some educated guesses (in a game with so many different ways to score and several differing point values, I would predict a low occurrance rate for STRONGHOLD), but there has to be some provision. If a lot of replays occur in eliminations, the affected teams may also begin having match turnaround issues with battery cycling/availability, motors overheating, wear and tear, etc.

The win of the event was fair, but it sure was anticlimactic. My favorite part of every event (even when spectating) is when the final score is displayed: seeing the reactions of the winning alliance - the jumping, screaming, hugging, crying, overwhelmed reactions of teams who are celebrating taking home that blue banner, and feeling the outburst of energy from the crowd who just watched a slew of intense matches. It's a pretty standard reaction between all events, usually goes on for several minutes and the two groups just feed off each other until everyone is tired of clapping and screaming. I love it. At Westtown, we didn't get that - the winning alliance was celebrating, but the better part of the audience was stunned silent because surprisingly few people read the tournament section of the rulebook and understand that a tie match can win an event (I admittedly skipped that part of the rules too). It was an awkward, nonstandard feeling for the end of an event, and, in my opinion, no event should end that way. It also clearly does have some negative impact on the teams that just fairly won an event, as seen here. Again, no one should feel slighted for a fair win.

Imagine if this happened on Einstein - confetti is flying, teams are celebrating their win, the crowd is going crazy because the alliance they've been cheering for has just won, and someone has to try and calm down the crowd enough to explain the tiebreaker system to a crowd that also contains parents, sponsors, etc who were expecting a clear victory and will largely not understand what's going on. And because of the scale of the event, I think there would be even more "cheap win" reactions expressed. Kind of kills the mood.

Again, I understand why tiebreakers are there. But, I'd be in favor of them either not being in place or being slightly modified for finals. Maybe replay the first tie, and any ties thereafter would be determined by tiebreakers (giving a maxumum of 4 finals matches). This would give the MC/GA time in the field timeout after that first match to explain the tiebreaker rules to the crowd so they would know what the course of action is if another tie happens.