Modified Tournament Rules

FIRST General Forum
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The tournament section of the rulebook is one of my favorite parts of the game manual to look at each season. This section is largely season-independent, but is a very important part of the competition.

I’m curious if, as a part of the game design challenge, anyone has seriously looked at re-writing the tournament section of the rulebook. I know it’s not critical for the submission process, but it is always possible that it has come up in discussions. If anyone has created any materials for the tournament section, please do share.

Over the last few days, I have been tackling the tournament section of the rulebook myself, and modifying it in ways that I think would be beneficial to the competition experience every year. Here is the result of that effort: Calebs_Tournament_Rules.pdf (390.3 KB)

Change summary:

  • Removed surrogate teams
  • Foul timestamps and inputted referee panel are logged in the FMS
  • Yellow/Red cards awarded late in the competition have an associated point penalty
  • Qual Schedule changes:
    • Explicitly states the minimum match separation based on teams at event
    • Added a criterion for balance of number of times you see a team as a partner vs as an opponent
    • Added a criterion for balance of partner/opponent distributions based on age (or district points at district championship events)
    • Explicitly states schedules are pre-generated and are open to change if superior schedules are generated
  • All playoff matches are replayed once if the score is tied, and tiebreakers are only used on subsequent tied scores
  • Teams are permitted to decline captain-ship in alliance selections and still be selected by other teams
  • Captains may select stations for all alliance members in each match
  • Double elimination playoff bracket
  • Alliance captains use an app instead of coupons for timeouts/backup teams, app is also used for alliance selection and to select stations

Open to feedback. I have a few much much crazier ideas for tournament structure, but I kept my changes relatively tame. :wink: I’d love to see off-season events implement some of these, and I would be happy to create a new scheduler if I knew it would see usage.

I already have created an add-on to MatchMaker that improves station balance. Currently working with Tom Saxton from IdleLoop to get that incorporated into the official MatchMaker release by next season. I also have proven that color balance can be improved from the current algorithm, so that is also an excellent target for schedule improvement. Would really like to see MatchMaker use pre-generated schedules like Chezy Arena does, if I could pick one thing I want most from this list that would be it. We’ll see if I can get Tom Saxton and FIRST to go that route :slight_smile:

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I like all of these changes, though I am most interested in this one. If alliance captain 5, for example, declines captain-ship, are they given a rank (ie. moved to rank 9), or just removed from the rankings entirely but still eligible to be selected?

I see a situation where a given alliance captain wants to partner with an alliance captain lower than them, but would rather face off against the alliance the lower captain is facing off against than the alliance they are facing off against. In that case, they refuse to be a captain, let the team they wanted to pick pick them, and then get to face a different alliance.

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Not a bad idea–input panel already shows up in other places-- but needs work. Late-match penalties and adjustments are generally handled at the scorer’s table so you’ll want that input too. Not sure about how or if to make public.

Not sure I like this one as you’re changing the impact mid-event. Could work though.

Age is a big ol’ NOPE! See also “Algorithm of DOOM!” From 2007. District points is a better move here but you’ll need to pull that data from somewhere. Let’s call it from the last event. (Side note, this will likely force district points to be calculated for all events, thank you and thank you again.)

[quote=“Caleb_Sykes, post:1, topic:392432”]
All playoff matches are replayed once if the score is tied, and tiebreakers are only used on subsequent tied scores.[/quote]
Expand finals setup to semis. Works. Time might be a concern though.

Pre-made alliances are a massive concern here, on par with allowing “decline and still be selected”. It’s a lower impact, granted, but I’m not sure the risks outweightlnthe benefits.

Given the strategic moves, though… would allowing the combined alliance to select which of the two captains spots they take up work? I.e., 1 pick 3, the alliance plays out of the 3 spot instead of the 1 spot and move-ups bypass the 3 spot.

Already done at Champs. Minor adjustment for regionals I think.

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This is what I was envisioning. Your alternative seems like it would make things unnecessarily messy.

The intent of this change is to make it so that rank 8 is strictly better than rank 9. I know some teams would prefer to not be a captain in the hopes of getting on a good alliance on the back end of the draft. I think ranking higher should not automatically remove that possibility for you. It’s a very risky strategy for sure, and would only happen a handful of times or less per season, but I do think it should be an option

I don’t see anything wrong with this.

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Most of these make a lot of sense, really solid commonsense updates.

I didn’t dig into your rules, but do you mean “Add a match to make Best Of 4” or do you mean literally replay every tied match? Second option seems like a dangerous corner case for overall weekend schedules. To be fair, the reality is likely to be functionally identical: with scores targeted to >100 in playoffs the last few years, ties are unlikely to begin with.
I’d be onboard with a 1-0-2 record advancing through Quarters without the 4th match, though.

(Frankly, adding matches is always dangerous to the overall weekend schedule, which is why the current system leans on tiebreakers to keep everyone’s venue rental schedules closer to intact)

This introduces way too much political chaos into alliance selections. At typical lower-power events where the top 6 have already paired off, who would be incentivized to accept the Alliance 8 captainship from ~12th or ~14th rank?

Strong disagree with investing resources in coding up a team-facing interface to try to take the Scorekeeper out of the loop. 50 events * 8 team captains = 400 users is not a strong business case, without even getting into what hardware it would get hosted on. I’d rather see FIRST put development resources into the parts of the program that touch more teams.
In a world of infinite resources, sure, this would make for a smoother tournament function and potential better experience on certain axis.

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Neither do I, just making sure it is intended.

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Valid concern, I’d also support adding penalty values to cards throughout the entire tournament, but I’m most concerned with the end of the tournament. I feel like penalty values on cards has always been an easy change that has not been added, so I thought of this as an alternative route.

No arguments from me here, I just thought age would be more palatable for some.

Partner and opponent strength balancing is 100% implementable as the lowest priority schedule criterion (that is, can be done without affecting any other desirable schedule qualities). All we need is a metric to sort teams by and the collective desire to implement it.

Seems like your biggest concerns with my rule changes is that I didn’t go far enough with them :slight_smile:

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I like this idea, but would want to dry-run it a few times to get a real understanding of all the angles. I have sometimes told my students, the chance of winning some events goes up if you are appropriately ranked rather than over ranked.

Something to think about that will balance this out:
If you decline the caption ship, you can still be picked by the team that takes your place. You would still be bound to either accept that invitation or forfeit your eligibility in the elimination bracket. There will be a team that takes that position. In many cases, you may not be doing yourself a favor if you really are the 8th best team in the event. If you are the 12th best team, ranking lower is better for you and the 8th alliance as a whole. Also, district points, for those of us who have them will help to discourage this behavior.

Is there a condition where we play the eliminations with fewer than 8 alliances if no captain wants to step up? Alliance 1 through X gets a by round? That could be an interesting option at some events…

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Too far in some cases for my taste, not far enough in others. Some of it is almost done already but needs more details

Anybody suggesting team age as a measure of how good the team is gets the folks who were around in 2007 grabbing the tar, feathers, and other implements on general principles.

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I do believe team age is a crude measure of how good the team is. Yes, it’s an order of magnitude worse of a metric than district points. But it’s also an order of magnitude better than random which is what we have currently.

I was indeed not around for 2007, but I have studied the ALGORITHM OF DOOM quite a bit and it’s biggest issue had nothing to do with using age as a strength metric, but rather weighting the “strength balance” criteria above unique partners/opponents, and also trying to balance every match instead of trying to balance each team’s total schedule. I’m ready to be tarred and feathered :chicken: :grin:

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I like this thread there are some really cool ideas floating around here. I think everything is reasonable to some degree but I do want to drill into this one.

Maybe I don’t fully understand the proposal I think this would be extremely unintuitive for audience members and would not be a good change in practice. My first thought was that every team that thinks they have a chance at playing in the elimination rounds, but sees themselves as like the 12-14th best team would decline captainship if they are in the 7th and 8th seeded spots. Because of this I think it would lead to even more lopsided matchups as the pool for the second pick of top seeded teams would improve and the alliances would be lead by weaker teams. Also the audience experience of a parade of students coming out and declining captainship seems like it would be a negative viewing experience.

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I always appreciate seeing your thoughts on ways to shake up the tournament structure!

Just to be clear, this just means that different teams may have different denominators in their Ranking Score calculations, right? I think I may have speculated about this tweak in one of your prior posts; have you done any analysis on how much it affects rankings or anything?

Is this the current separation that FMS/Matchmaker uses? That is, are you intending to make changes to the current match separation, or are you just saying that it’s a part of the current algorithm that really just ought to be documented in the manual?

It’s been a long time since I took a class involving probability & combinatorics, but now you’ve got me curious just how infeasible is it to brute-force every possible schedule and find the best, or write some sort of constraint-satisfaction algorithm that finds an optimal solution? Are we talking about something like tens-of-thousands-of-dollars-in-cloud-computation-cost level, or something like not-feasible-in-the-universe’s-lifetime level? What about just limiting it to typical district size (say, 24 to 42 teams) rather than the whole gamut up to 100?

Surprised this didn’t bring up more discussion, as this is a big change! I thought that people kind of liked the dynamic of facing the same alliance more than once, where if you get beat the first time you can (and I suppose need to) tweak your strategy based on what you saw in order to try to beat them in game 2 (leading to the always-exciting game 3). Is your goal here to make the tournament structure more accessible to the audience, lead to more accurate determination of a winner (and 2nd/3rd/4th/etc. place?), make a more consistent number of matches for scheduling purposes, or any/all of those and/or something else? While I’m all in favor of exploring other options than the best-of-3-single-elim that has been the mainstay of playoffs (with a couple exceptions) since at least the alliance era started in 1999 (or was it used even earlier?), I’d really like to know why you’d prefer this over other the other formats (round-robin in groups, some ranking-point-like structure, or something else) that you could have chosen.

Yikes this scares me. Perhaps this is in part because I’m the last remaining human being on the planet without a smartphone, but I wouldn’t want to count on wireless Internet access at all venues everywhere being reliable enough that you could use it to reliably determine whether someone submitted a timeout coupon within the allowed 2-minute window, or meant to click on timeout and clicked the backup button instead, or lent the phone to someone else who got a little trigger happy but wasn’t really the authorized captain in charge of deciding things. FMS itself doesn’t always have a 100% reliable Internet connection. I can just picture a last-minute “We need to use the timeout after all” leading to someone frantically trying to unlock their phone and connect to venue wi-fi, rather than the much simpler (at least at the district venues I’ve been at) approach of the captain walking over to talk to the head ref. (And then what, someone needs to start looking through logs if they say they submitted it in time but FMS didn’t acknowledge it in time?)

If you really want to make it a button (since the idea of paper coupons at an event to celebrate technology just has too much irony for you), having something on a panel (or just a physical button like the e-stops are) in the alliance station, or maybe using the ref tablets somehow, makes more sense to me, though then you still have the problem of authenticating that the person is actually the alliance captain authorized to click the button.

The current system also allows for the case where if both alliances want a timeout, only the first alliance to come up the head ref actually needs to redeem their coupon. I’m not sure how your approach is designed to handle that case, and maybe it’s more “fair” to have both coupons used if both alliances want a timeout, but it seems a little weird to me but maybe it’s just because it’s different.

Yeah, there’s probably other things I might have tweaked but I can see not wanting to change everything at once. Certainly if I was going to try to reform timeouts somehow, the method of submitting the timeout coupon isn’t where I’d start. :slight_smile: I’m also curious if anybody was adventurous in their game design challenge submission to really need (or want) a revamp of the tournament structure too.

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Some reason this reminded me about my thought they should have a pit announcer app. Maybe some of the same challenges, but also potentially easier to make sure you aren’t missing announcements.

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Thank you all very much for the kind words! I expect there to be some agreement and some disagreement of course. But I’m just happy to have a discussion going. I’m not responding to everything directly because I don’t want to come off as too defensive. If you have a question/comment you would like my direct input on, just @ me or make the question clearly directed to me. I’m not afraid to defend my thoughts.

My playoff structure is a Bo1 double elimination, so I do mean every tied match. I’d have to reconsider what my ideal replay rules would be in the current Bo3 single elimination bracket.

Correct

I have not, it’s on my very long todo list. Keep bugging me about it and I’ll get there eventually. :slight_smile:

This is roughly what is currently used, but probably a bit off. The biggest thing I want is the documentation, because only once that is available is it straightforward to have discussions about what we think it should be. I’m not really looking to change this much from whatever it is set at currently, and while I could just write a script to parse all the 2019 schedules to estimate, I’d rather just have match separation documented since it is a pretty important piece of information. It also ties into my pre-generated schedule addition, right now I don’t know exactly what the criteria for a “better” schedule are. And the more public the criteria become the more people like me can help improve the set of schedules.

It depends exactly how you define a valid schedule, but at the most basic level, for an event of 42 teams and 12 matches per team, there are 7-match rounds which each contain 42 team slots. So you get 42! ~= 10^50 possible arrangements of teams per 7-match round, and since there are 12 of those rounds, there exist (42!)^12 ~= 10^600 possible schedules for this event. Crudely the number is (teams!)^rounds although it ends up being a bit different for events where team count is not divisible by 6. I’ll let you figure out what to do with that big of a number, but it’s high enough that I’m not going to try to brute force it.

There do exist algorithmic ways to improve on the current scheduler though, as I’ve said above I have one built for alliance station balance and have a proof of concept for red/blue balance. Some of these algorithmic solutions may end up being time/computationally expensive though, so I’d prefer to only do them once for pre-generated schedules rather than have to re-run them at every event for no good reason.

I think this structure is about equally complicated to the current structure.

I absolutely believe this would lead to more accurate determination of lower places, it’s probably about the same for the winner.

This is a very nice plus of my system

It’s a host of reasons. You mentioned some above. I think this system is just a much fairer tournament structure overall. An unfortunate side effect of the single elimination bracket is that someone has to go up against (and probably lose to) the 1 seed. If someone has to be sacrificed, the 8 seed is definitely the best choice, but it still sucks for them. It would be better if the 8 seed had at least one more chance to prove they are at least adequate. Relatedly, I think there would be way less “gaming” of seeds if there was a double elimination bracket, because even if you are scheduled for an awful winners bracket, you still have a second chance in the losers bracket.

I understand this would lose the new strategy development against the same alliance, but I think it also gains a lot in facing multiple teams. Long losers runs are one of the hypest things that can happen in a tournament in my opinion. Also if you survive long enough and the team you lost to survives long enough, you will get your rematch with them, but you both have to earn it, and I think that builds a much better storyline.

Yeah it is a bit ironic isn’t it. Guess I wasn’t the only one who noticed. :upside_down_face: Not a super high priority of mine. I do think alliances should be able to choose their stations for every match, and in some ways an app is easier for that. It is an investment though and comes with its own set of issues I do acknowledge.

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Sure; though I suspect that adding pick-alliance-station functionality to the head ref tablet or just handling it by the scorekeeper in FMS wouldn’t be too much of a volunteer burden, especially if it was just set once at the start of the tournament (sometime in the break before the first playoff match) or there were otherwise some limits on how often an alliance could change positions. (Hey I know; how about an “Update Alliance Positions” paper coupon to use once during the playoffs! :wink: )

The real technology-driven solution to selecting alliance stations would just have FMS update automatically based on which station the drivers plugged in to, but that’s probably way too much to hope for. :smile:

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I love alternative tournament formats for use in off-seasons. If they pilot well enough, some of them could be considered for official play, as well. But having a variety of tournament structures in off-seasons can keep things interesting.

This one, in particular, would function dramatically differently in districts and regional competition. In districts, forfeiting all your ranking points from your qualifying standings in order to be selected later in the draft would be a “Hail Mary” play, and very unlikely. In regional play, there would be tremendous incentive to give up a 7 or 8 alliance captaincy in order to be selected by a later alliance as one of the final selections. Ranking points aren’t a concern there.

You removed surrogate teams, but opened up the possibility that some teams play one more match than another. Seems like six of one, half dozen of another. A better solution would be to push towards standardization of a 12 match/team format, in which surrogate teams are never required (since the total team-matches is divisible by 6).

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I’ll give you a pass since your first season in FMA got derailed due to COVID, but once you see the cell reception in half of our district venues you’ll take this one back. :laughing:

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Interesting thread Caleb!

I assume the value of double elimination is to mitigate bad side of brackets. I’m not sure resolving that is worth bo1 issues with dead robot/broken robots/lots of fouls/one bad ref call that can knock out an alliance in lowers. Personally I prefer the bo3 format even though you may run into a strong alliance early. Definitely more of an issue for regional systems for teams looking to qualify off of wildcard.

Maybe an unpopular opinion but I actually enjoy the randomness of seeding to some extent. It’s a fine balance between being predictable enough that good teams seed well, and too predictable. Personally this is opening a can of worms for marginal at best improvement in the scheduling system to provide fair match schedules to all teams.

Perhaps you can say that the schedules are currently not fair enough, however generally I think there are huge negatives of a schedule that is too fair

Honestly why do the pieces of paper even exist? Why doesn’t the FMS track this already. Need a timeout? talk to the HR, scorer tells fms to go into a timeout if you haven’t used one yet. Why complicate something that doesn’t need to be complicated? Why bother keeping up an app updated/functional. Lots of extra work for no benefit.

Why is this useful? It doesn’t hurt, just maybe i’m missing the use case.

What is the goal of this? To prevent teams from intentionally breaking rules for advantages? Other thought: Make cards persist throughout the entire event, and remove cards for trivial rule breaks.

How is this possible without regulating # of matches? What was the method to do so?

Big big problem with this… Who in their right mind would accept being alliance captain 8? rather take my chances getting picked somewhere else. It’s possible that every team at the event declines the invite.

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For the last few years (at least?), the primary ranking in qualifications is (sum of ranking points) divided by (number of matches played). If the number of matches per team times the number of teams isn’t a multiple of 6, some teams play an extra match. These teams would have, say, 9 as the denominator instead of 8. So each match counts for them, though for those teams each match “counts less” than for the other teams.

Kinda weird, but in many ways not really any weirder than having a match that doesn’t count for them at all. And most tournament structures have weirdness around needing to give byes here and there to make brackets come out even somehow if the number of participants isn’t ideal for the tournament structure.

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They kind of do already… cards only clear at playoff start. And even then I’m not sure the safety cards clear. And FIRST has been removing the trivial cards where they can (or adding warnings before use).

Probably at least partly to make sure that a) the right person submits it and b) they know what they’re doing. Incidentally, the backup coupon also tells the scorekeeper which team comes out.

The problem with an app (aside from connecting it wirelessly) is controlling who has it and is using it.

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If this is the case, is this better than surrogates? The main “fairness” issue with surrogates is theoretically the surrogate has no stake in the match, and doesn’t care about ranking points/winning/losing much, therefore they may not try as hard or perhaps intentionally try to lose. By having more matches that count you are diluting the importance of all the team’s matches. Not only that you are potentially hurting them/helping them significantly with that additional match.

I’m not sure the advantage is clear with this kind of no-surrogate method is good. Generally I think changes should be clearly good if we want to make a change, and change for the sake of change is not ideal.

Right, I was specifically talking about not clearing into playoffs. There are some obvious downsides to this with teams being very harshly punished for not knowing the rules, but it may be a better method to prevent (what I assume this is meant to prevent) intentional card taking to seed. Not really sold either way, just an interesting question.

To some degree isn’t that the purpose of other verification methods? See alliance captain armbands/hats/bibs etc, or are these methods of identifications not used at all? If they aren’t used, why do we use them? Even the drivers button for an alliance captain used as a verification. Ref checks button to see if they are a captain to solve those hurdles mentioned.