Awarding the top prizes. An idea by Zarkov.

[Kedjyar]

En parlant d'award, les prochains updates sont prévus pour quand sur le site gp?

[Zarkov1]

I think one day we should round every local up from La Suze, walk them into the venue and ask them to do a 1try on every track. Then Sami would have to pay £10000. And we would all laugh heartily.

Jokes aside, I think this CDM served to prove a point about the original post I made when making this thread. Jey straight up deserved one of the top prizes with his performance. I dont think anyone could argue he shouldnt of won the Prix de Merite award.

Sami on the other hand (and I dont mean this post to be an attack on him lol) underperformed by quite a margin. Finishing 5th after 6 years of finishing in the top 2. He got a top prize, and Jey didnt.

Maybe as an idea, the Prix de Merite award can be the first announced in the closing ceremony thus allowing that person one of the top prizes.

[KVD]

In all honesty though, not taking anything away from Jey's performance, but the fact Sami was 5th instead of his usual 2nd or 3rd place was also because of the single elimination format. With double elimination I'm reasonably confident that Sami would have ended above Jey in both tournaments.

In MR he was knocked out in quarters because of 1 match where his opponent overperformed. In GP quarters he had to face ScouB, 1 of the favourites for the GP overall gold (and the current GP NBT #1). With a slightly more skill rewarding system, Sami would have been inside both top-4s easily.

[tif]

LOL Sami got knocked out in MR because he screwed up against players who were better than him not because of some weird alien forces that made him lose (have we seen the same matches at all?). If it had anything to do with the system something like that would have happened to him way sooner but we've been using single elimination since 2002 and -save for 2008 at a time Sami barely knew other modes than TT even existed- he's always got at least a medal in every racing multiplayer racing mode.
The system rewarded Jey for improving sufficiently to be a threat to the big dogs (which was obvious to anyone who has seen his matches) though it still placed Sami above him for being more consistent overall (better group stage performances, managed to make it at least to the quarters in every mode he played etc). Not sure what there is to argue there.

Besides double elimination would have us play till 7 am unless we remove Group Stage which is like completely out of the question (or we might as well tell all middle-players & newbies to fuck off and have the CDM lose its soul).

As for the top prizes I was in favor of all of them to be awarded to tif for being the rockstar organizer that he is but noone listens to my brilliant ideas.

[KVD]

Of course I've seen the match, I wouldn't be talking about it otherwise. Jey played very well and was also helped by luck (double  ). Sami didn't even play that badly, but he didn't quite reach his normal lvl either.
Sami qualified as #1 in the group stage, therefore it stands to reason that he would normally end up in the top 4. However, he had one match where he slipped.
Let me ask you this, do you honestly believe that if Sami and Jey played their match 10 times that Jey would win more than half of the encounters?

Obviously a player needs to have the skill to threathen someone like Sami to begin with. Jey has that. When the skill levels of two players are somewhat overlapping, the better player does not automatically win each and every match. It's fairly basic game theory (and has nothing to do with vague alien forces I assure you). Variance can have a big impact, especially in single elimination format. I once knocked out Neo in MR; he got me back 7-0 the next year. Had our skill levels significantly changed? Not really. Just the dynamics of the matches that were very different. To buffer a little for the variance, I would favour a double elimination system. We only meet up like this once a year, so why not make the pecking-order a little more accurate?

EVO (biggest SF community event worldwide) has been using double elimination since its conception. Try telling SF players that EVO has no soul and see how they will react. They will probably punch you in the face or think of you as a talking bag of nonsense.
As for double elim @ CDM, of course it can be done, it's just a matter of making a clever system and not being stuck in conservative thinking patterns.

[ScouB]

Of course I've seen the match, I wouldn't be talking about it otherwise. Jey played very well and was also helped by luck (double  ). Sami didn't even play that badly, but he didn't quite reach his normal lvl either.
Sami qualified as #1 in the group stage, therefore it stands to reason that he would normally end up in the top 4. However, he had one match where he slipped.
Let me ask you this, do you honestly believe that if Sami and Jey played their match 10 times that Jey would win more than half of the encounters?

Obviously a player needs to have the skill to threathen someone like Sami to begin with. Jey has that. When the skill levels of two players are somewhat overlapping, the better player does not automatically win each and every match. It's fairly basic game theory (and has nothing to do with vague alien forces I assure you). Variance can have a big impact, especially in single elimination format. I once knocked out Neo in MR; he got me back 7-0 the next year. Had our skill levels significantly changed? Not really. Just the dynamics of the matches that were very different. To buffer a little for the variance, I would favour a double elimination system. We only meet up like this once a year, so why not make the pecking-order a little more accurate?

EVO (biggest SF community event worldwide) has been using double elimination since it's conception. Try telling SF players that EVO has no soul and see how they will react. They will probably punch you in the face or think of you as a talking bag of nonsense.
As for double elim @ CDM, of course it can be done, it's just a matter of making a clever system and not being stuck in conservative thinking patterns.

Sami was not at his "usual" level during the whole championship, so why giving him another chance ? You say he was unlucky to face me in GP, but I assure you that if he played like previous years he would have beaten me 3-0. I kind of agree with Tif on this.

As for EVO you can't really compare with CDM since there is no group stage at EVO. And also coz CDM is the whole thing as far as we are concerned, while EVO has qualifying tournaments during the whole year, which we havent.
We already have TT/GP record site to know who is the better driver. CDM combine driving skill, dealing with pressure, strategy and a bit of luck also (but Sami had his share of luck in the past (and a lot !))
No system will get rid of the Luck factor in SMK. You just have to play in a way luck will have less impact on the result, it's up to you to try and get the luck on your side more than trying to delete luck from smk with a different system.
Also, "luck" factor is decreased the more you go far in the competition as the number of round required is increasing at each playoff step.
And, I can give you a lot of other competitions which are not using double elimination format, are their results not reliable though ?

[KVD]

Perhaps we should one day have qualification tournaments throughout the year. Why not? The game would need to be sufficiently popular among competitors first tough (we're talking at least 100+).

Of course you can't eliminate luck from the game, but that doesn't justify having a system that is very susceptible to luck swings on top of all that. Contrarily, the game has enough of that on its own, so a good system should buffer against that to a slightly bigger extent than what is happening currently. Either that or get rid of the overall rankings completely. It's a bit of a farce to generate a league-style ranking based on a composition of knock-out tournaments. By its very design it simply does not work (e.g. are all quarter final knock-outs the same level? Rarely, yet they have the same result because of the single elim design).

As for other tournaments that have single elimination not having reliable results...I actually think they don't, indeed. Take football for example. Are the top-4 of a world cup the best 4 countries worldwide? I would say, almost never. Again that's a good excuse not to use the format.

[ScouB]

As for other tournaments that have single elimination not having reliable results...I actually think they don't, indeed. Take football for example. Are the top-4 of a world cup the best 4 countries worldwide? I would say, almost never. Again that's a good excuse not to use the format.

Football world cup doen't reward the best team in the world, it rewards the best team in the world during the world cup.
If you want to know the best team in the world you have FIFA rankings (that was not the best example though  )
Same applies with Tennis tournaments, olympic games, and so on.

[ZTI]

yes also it is a world cup, not a world championship

that's why in national championships the champion is more expected than in cups

=> so let's rename it Mario kart championcup (championship group + cup playoffs)

but anyway, as i mentionned the group results (+ VND total ratio) were almost reliable.
Then if only playoffs can disturb a little the hegemonia, let's all reduce it to a bit less rounds in finals (but bit more in 1/4 finals).

also why decide to make a mess of every "apparent" problem without waiting to see if it is not only an accident and see if it happens again next year

but more important, if we decide to make a championship let's get rid of the playoffs (and then play all the group matches to be relevant enough), but maybe all players won't like to play that much matches.

if people want to do playoffs that's because they admit and accept they can be beaten in it, if no let's do championship format only

But i can smell some people also rejecting the group-only matches because it would be long and one random result or accident would easily arrive, and change the pattern of the final champion. But heh there is no perfect format there will still be someone complaining though. So let's be fair play and continue with what fits best for most of the people.

[KVD]

Football world cup doen't reward the best team in the world, it rewards the best team in the world during the world cup.

The problem is with the word best. You're right that this is what the world cup does. CDM is doing something more though, it's also deciding a pecking order between the players that did not become world champion in the respective game mode. This is where it gets hazy. Ascribing the same level to all the knocked-out quarter finalists at the football world cup 2014 would mean --> Colombia, France, Costa Rica and Belgium all had the same performance. Clearly something is amiss here. 
Of course at the football world cup this is ok, as it's all about who is the best.
CDM does decide pecking order exactly like this though and I really, really think it's wrong. 

To me the overall rankings are indeed close to invalid with the current set-up; like at the football world cup, it's all about who wins (each of the game modes), as at least this is usually correct.

[ScouB]

Football world cup doen't reward the best team in the world, it rewards the best team in the world during the world cup.

The problem is with the word best. You're right that this is what the world cup does. CDM is doing something more though, it's also deciding a pecking order between the players that did not become world champion in the respective game mode. This is where it gets hazy. Ascribing the same level to all the knocked-out quarter finalists at the football world cup 2014 would mean --> Colombia, France, Costa Rica and Belgium all had the same performance. Clearly something is amiss here. 
Of course at the football world cup this is ok, as it's all about who is the best.
CDM does decide pecking order exactly like this though and I really, really think it's wrong. 

To me the overall rankings are indeed close to invalid with the current set-up; like at the football world cup, it's all about who wins (each of the game modes), as at least this is usually correct.

Though Double elimination format won't change anything in that....
Like Seb suggested, if we want a clear ranking, a league would be the best option. But obviously we have not enough time to do so.

[KVD]

But it does. For example, it decides a pecking order between those guys that got knocked out during the quarter finals.

[ScouB]

But it does. For example, it decides a better pecking order between those guys that got knocked out during the quarter finals.

So does the group stage.

[KVD]

Hardly. 4 races and even ties are possible.

[ScouB]

Hardly. 64 races and even ties are possible.

Fixed