2014 May International Challenge Retrospective

The dust has settled on the first Wi-Fi tournament with something at stake and sign-ups for the next are already open. After the debacle that was last year’s Wi-Fi system, it was pretty clear that adjustments needed to be made in order to continue distributing Championship Points using Wi-Fi tournaments. I’m pleased to say that the adjustments were made, and for the most part, results were positive! Of course, a new system brings new lessons, and I’ll examine some of the new aspects of this year’s Wi-Fi tournament structure.

The Battle Limit

For me personally, this is the greatest change. Previous tournament winners were more or less determined by who could play the most games with a certain amount of consistency. With the battle cap, this is taken out of the equation. This encourages more players to partake in a competition that otherwise would not, for fear of not being able to play enough games.  To illustrate my point, I’ll cite some figures provided by AlphaZealot from last June’s International Challenge:

As you can see, the average top five player battled in almost three times as many games as players in the top 500 group.  More practice does generally result in a better player, but it’s difficult to say a player is so much better than another when playing so many games is necessary to achieve a good placing.  At that point, winners seem to be determined by who sets apart more time for Pokémon more than actual skill. (Please note: This is not to detract from our top five players’ successes by any means).  For that reason, I really like what TPCi is attempting to do with the battle limit.

However I would be remiss if I did not discuss the drawbacks of this system. With 60 battles, randomness (and not just the “hax” variety) becomes more noticeable. Of course, if you get a bad stroke of luck, you just used up one of your precious 60 games on a loss you might usually win. However, we also need to consider the opponent matchmaking system, which I will expand on in another section. If you get paired up with someone >50 points below you, you have less to gain and more to lose. If you win, you use up one of your 60 games for a 5-10 point boost. If you lose, you just lost 20 points and one of your games. Of course if you just get matched up with players who are roughly around your rating, then you’ll probably just lose more anyway, so the matchmaking system, at least probably, won’t skew results too far from what they would have been otherwise. Overall, I think AlphaZealot and TPCi should take pride in introducing the battle limit. Perhaps some fine tuning may need to be made, but the system largely works.

Kangaskhan / Smeargle: Autolosses in Wi-Fi

Once again, I’m going to stress that there are only 60 games to achieve a rating with.  Now let’s suppose you managed to build a team that takes on the entirety of the metagame with a reasonable matchup save for one combination – Kangaskhan and Smeargle.  I’m going to take it a step further and assume that your team automatically loses to this combination, just for the sake of debate.  This duo can probably trigger an automatic loss faster than anything else in the metagame if the opposing team is not prepared in advance, which is why I use it as an example.  If you were unfortunate enough to have such a bad matchup against this combo, expect your Wi-Fi performance to take a serious hit.

It’s not so much a statement about Kangaskhan-Smeargle in particular as it is about automatic losses. I will beat this into your head.  You have only 60 games to finish in good standing.  If you go into team preview and see a combination that you cannot win against, you just burned up one of your precious games and suffered a rating hit.  Worse yet if it’s a remotely common matchup like Kangaskhan-Smeargle.  In that case, you can reasonably expect to see any common combination 2-3 times in a single tournament. For the sake of argument, let’s assume you lose an average of 20 points for every loss.  This means that you’re giving up 40-60 points for free in a given tournament.

I think that this feature of this year’s Wi-Fi tournaments separates it from last year’s.  I’m going to arbitrarily and hypothetically say that a 90 percent win-loss ratio is necessary to reach into the top 4.  In 2013, you could (again, hypothetically) build a team that matches up well with 90 percent of the metagame, but absolutely cannot win against the remaining ten percent.  After all, if you ran into one of your autolosses, you could just get back on the ladder and most likely win enough matches to cover up the team shortcoming.  If you were unlucky enough to hit the same bad matchup within a short time span, it still wasn’t a big deal if you could play enough matches to cover both of these losses.

In 2014, we don’t have that luxury, or at least not to the same extent.  If we use the same hypothetical ratio as the 2013 example, you need to win 9 games to cover up an autoloss.  The difficulty appears if you happen to get the same bad matchup in a short duration.  For instance, say you lose game one on a bad matchup.  You follow up with wins in games 2 through 5, but you grind your teeth as your autoloss stares you in the face during game 6′s team preview.  Now you have two losses due to teambuilding, and now you need to win the rest of your 20 games that day to maintain the 90 percent ratio.  Assuming that future tournaments use the 20 battle per day limit, that’s a whole day spent recovering from one matchup you overlooked!

Personally speaking, I think this is one shortcoming I had in the May International Challenge.  In my particular case, the Kangaskhan-Smeargle combination was not an autoloss strictly speaking, but it was a matchup that I had to steer very carefully at the beginning with a very specific lead combination or else I would lose the game by turn 3.  Overall, I went 2-2 against Kangaskhan-Smeargle.  Considering that one of my losses was to a player over 100 points below me, I believe that these two losses had a significant impact on my rating.  Had I prepared better, perhaps I could have finished higher. Maybe in your case, you might find that you can’t beat Amoonguss alongside a setup Pokemon like Tyranitar, Kangaskhan, or Azumarill.  Whatever your autoloss is, I highly suggest addressing it, because it may end up costing your rating dearly.

Rating Matchups

I think one of the more intimidating things for someone at a Pokémon event with Swiss is the prospect of being paired down. Since it’s very easy to lose a single game of Pokémon, the penalties for losing are much scarier. Fortunately, pair downs at live Swiss events only occur when all other options have been exhausted. This means the relative frequency of pair downs make them a necessary but tolerable evil. Strictly speaking, pair downs don’t happen in Wi-Fi tournaments where an Elo system is used rather than a Swiss record. However, the situation is similar. Losing a matchup causes your rating to tank. Winning results in a lesser reward. In a Swiss system, a win in a pair down still holds significant reward as it goes toward record, which is the primary seeding mechanism in Swiss. The problem with Wi-Fi tournaments is that the frequency of pair downs is really, really high. In addition, the magnitude of the pair down can be pretty large. I’ve said before that if you lose, you take a large penalty. If you win, you don’t gain as much. With the inherent volatility of Pokémon, it’s very easy to drop a game or two to someone of much lower rating over the course of 60 games. On top of that, you’re using your 60 battles to beat up on lesser rated players. If someone else’s luck of the draw yields higher rated opponents, they may finish with a significantly higher rating. The solution to this is to tune up the pairing criteria of the system. There should be no reason that players with a rating disparity greater than 100 points should be playing each other. Putting in a rating difference limit would reduce the frequency of these matchup. This has the additional benefit of pairing up players of similar skill level, which makes everyone happier. Of course, a rating difference limit falls apart at the extreme ends of the rating spectrum, but these extremes can be accounted for in the formula. Really, I just don’t want to see players sitting around 1750 flipping tables because they had a streak of unlucky rolls against a 1600 player, and I don’t think anyone wants to see that either.

Time Limits

This isn’t really new nor is it exclusive to Wi-Fi tournaments, but it does deserve a brief mention. 15 minute game timer with a 45 second turn timer can result in a timeout.  However, this isn’t to the same extent as 2012, so if my experiences of this tournament are indicative, the timer will do its job in discouraging stall strategies such as Minimize and Stockpile. It also allows for two players to run fairly defensive teams and finish most matches in time. I think moving forward, players should be mindful of how long it takes for them to win. Any win condition that takes longer than a Leech Seed checkmate should be considered too slow, and even Leech Seed needs to be executed within a certain time limit. In short, play to knock out your opponent and you should be fine.

The Disconnection System

I started this article on a positive point, and I’m going to send you off on a positive point. I’m going to be dramatic and say that disconnections were a huge blight on the legitimacy of last year’s Wi-Fi tournaments.  For those not familiar, the old system could not discern who disconnected, so wins nor losses were awarded. Instead, the disconnection rate of both parties was increased, and those above a certain threshold were deemed frequent disconnectors and disqualified. Naturally, there was a possibility of taking out innocent parties, and I’m inclined to believe that this happened at least once. The improved technology behind the Wi-Fi system of the sixth generation has largely eliminated this problem. Connection stability seems greatly improved over last generation, albeit not perfect for everyone. Disconnections usually result in appropriate rewards and penalties for both parties. This makes the results much more reflective of what actually happened during the tournament, and that can only be a good thing. I take my hat off to everyone who made the new system possible. Of course, there are some minor issues to be handled. Rumors, and I do emphasize that they are rumors, of disconnects without reward or penalty have been circulating. Similar stories have proven true for past Nintendo Wi-Fi games such as Mario Kart DS and Metroid Prime: Hunters, both of which penalized disconnections. However, do note that all stories are so far hearsay. Of course, I encourage anyone who had this happen to them to speak up, but only if proof can be shown. I’d hate to have a good old fifth generation disconnection witch hunt.

Closing out, I think I’m justified in saying that May International Challenge was a success, and it convinced me that Wi-Fi tournaments can work for CP distribution.  In the meantime, feel free to post your thoughts in the discussion, and we’ll see you for the next International Challenge!

The post 2014 May International Challenge Retrospective appeared first on Nugget Bridge.