LegendoftheStars End-of-the-Year 2020 Championship

A final thing to ruin the tone of the last few messages, but I need paypal addresses to hand out the prizepool. If you cannot use paypal, then you need to PM me so that we can work something out.

Currently I do not have any payment information from:
Blast_Chilled
Blin
Bullydozer

Coincidence that they all begin with B? I don't know. Anyway, just writing this here because sometimes FAF pms get lost so I can't be sure whether they messaged me or not.

Prizes should be given out by the end of the year.

first of all, thanks to ftx for organizing all of this. It requires quite a lot of work and time.

here some feedback from me :

The faction ban : I would require more feedback from players, to see how much it impact/restrict the strategy they wanted to use. But i think it overall achieved its goal, which was to reduce the quantity of mirror matches. I will remind you that mirror matches were one of the biggest issues of the last LOTS.

In that LOTS, several rules/change were introduce that induce needless harm :

• First requiring participant to display on the leader board.
• Second decision was to give money of winning the qualification tournament on showing up to the group stage. This induce several players to just show up to the tourney to get the money, but they didn't want to participate in it. While there was players that were motivated, and couldn't play the tourney.

About casting/streaming :

• The quality of the stream could certainly be improved. Better microphone, sync tools when watching games from the vault. The delay to prevent stream sniping reduced the interaction with the viewers.
• More streamers could have shown up to not have the same streamers most of the time. I know there was high rated players willing to cast. Although i understand that 1 recurrent streamer with good internet needs to be here to actually host the stream. I'm also disappointed that "famous" caster weren't there to stream part of the tourney, it could have boosted the viewers amount, and changed the way game are being casted.
• Didn't watch the stream in its integrality yet, but I think it was missing interview of players after matches (when they lost in the tourney for example)

About the play :
I had the feeling the skill displayed was lower than in previous LOTS (maybe I'm wrong). I saw the benefit of removing snipe mod in this one, compared to the previous LOTS. I feel like we miss opportunities to create innovative gameplay (maybe due to balance/map design, maybe players just want to play safe) or at least we lack of bold/surprising/cheezy move/BO/gameplay.

@keyser said in LegendoftheStars End-of-the-Year 2020 Championship:

The quality of the stream could certainly be improved. Better microphone, sync tools when watching games from the vault. The delay to prevent stream sniping reduced the interaction with the viewers.

Regarding delay and sync. I think the best Solution for it would be to fix the live replays and introduce smth like a 20s delay for the casters. (I think this feature was already a thing at one point) This would prevent streamsniping, which in my opinion is only a matter of time to happen when the stakes are high, and would make caster-chat ineraction possible. Replaysyncing would also be great if it worked again.

I was thinking of casting games as well on our twitch. For this it would be nice to reduce redundancy in the games casted by different channels. It is very hard for me to keep track of which games got casted by one channel while casting myself by just looking at the stream. Some sort of organization tool would help a lot in that regard. It would also require for each caster to commit to some sort of a casting plan, maybe plan out one or two games in advance of what you are going to cast then "claim" these games in the shared tool so the other casters can adapt. It would also improve viewer experience if it was visible to see which channel is currently casting which game. I don't think challonge has such a feature but maybe new map banning site that is being tested out atm supports smth like that.

@harzer99 Not sure what you are talking about with delay in live game. Streamer were sometime observing directly in the game, thus stream sniping is possible, and that's why delay in the stream was introduced.
You can obviously cast from live games or replay vault, but then streamers aren't synced and we need to use the sync tool (i heard from JA that it was still working iirc)

Ftx wanted only 1 stream to be available to cater all the viewers. So i don't get your 2nd point.

Also if anyone that played in the tournament is interested in doing some sort of interview "going through their games" and their mindset during the tournament, PM me and we can try to organize something during the coming days. It would probably be an hour or two at most I would imagine.

Would anyone mind a nice list of links to watch vods from the final day tourney? If not, no big deal I'll figure it out!

@sasin said in LegendoftheStars End-of-the-Year 2020 Championship:

Would anyone mind a nice list of links to watch vods from the final day tourney? If not, no big deal I'll figure it out!

They are highlights on the FAFLive channel.

@FtXCommando

Nice thanks! Good job with the casting and organization, really cool to have this tournament.

GROUP-STAGE STATISTICS – ALL GROUPS
There were 54 total matches. None of the matches went to a draw.

How many times was each faction played?
UEF – 38 (35%)
Seraphim – 30 (28%)
Cybran – 24 (22%)
Aeon – 16 (15%)

How many mirror matchups were there?
Total – 11 (20%)
UEF – 5 (9.3%)
Seraphim – 4 (7.4%)
Cybran – 2 (3.7%)
Aeon – 0 (0.0%)

Particular Non-Mirror Matchups
UEF-Seraphim - 11 (20.4%)
UEF-Cybran - 9 (16.7%)
UEF-Aeon - 8 (14.8%)
Seraphim-Cybran - 7 (13.0%)
Seraphim-Aeon - 4 (7.4%)
Cybran-Aeon - 4 (7.4%)

Favorite Faction
archsimkat – Aeon (50%)
Blackheart – Seraphim (43%)
Blast_Chilled – Aeon/UEF (33%)
BlInChIk – Cybran/UEF (50%)
Blodir – Cybran/UEF (50%)
Bullydozer – No favorite
Espiranto – Seraphim (50%)
JaggedAppliance – Aeon/UEF (33%)
Nexus – Cybran (50%)
Paralon – No favorite
Petric – UEF (38%)
Swkoll – Seraphim (43%)
Tagada – UEF (67%)
TURBO2 – UEF (86%)
TurinTurambar – Cybran/Seraphim (33%)
ZLO – Seraphim (71%)

STATISTICS – GROUP B

Morax provided me with the faction choices and vetoes for each of the 12 matches played by Group B.

Veto Frequency:
Seraphim – 10 (42%)
UEF – 9 (38%)
Cybran – 3 (13%)
Aeon – 2 (8.3%)

Most-Vetoed Faction
archsimkat – none
Nexus – none
Paralon – UEF (66%)
TurinTurambar – Seraphim (66%)

How often was a player’s first choice vetoed?
Total – 18 out of 24 (75%)
Seraphim – 9 (37.5%)
UEF – 5 (20.8%)
Cybran – 3 (12.5%)
Aeon – 1 (4.2%)

by player - how often this player's first-choice faction was vetoed:
archsimkat – 5 (83%)
Nexus – 5 (83%)
Paralon – 4 (67%)
Turin – 4 (67%)

How often did a player veto their own first choice?
Only 4 out of 24 times (16.7%). Each of the players did this only 1 time.

How often did a player veto the same faction for the same opponent?
Each player in Group B played 2 games against each other player.
Paralon vetoed UEF twice against Nexus
Turin vetoed Seraphim twice against Paralon and against Nexus
Turin and archsimkat both vetoed UEF twice against each other

How often did both players make the same first choice?
8 out of 12 times (67%).

How often did both players make the same first- and second choices?
Only 1 out of 12 times. On desert arena, Nexus and Turin both chose Seraphim and UEF.

Impressions:

The veto system seems to be accomplishing its goals (reducing mirror matchups and increasing faction diversity). Two mirror matchups were very poorly-represented in the group stage (just two Cybran-vs-Cybran games, and no Aeon-vs-Aeon). Otherwise, every single possible faction matchup was represented at least 4 times.

Seraphim at the moment tends to be favored, at least in ladder matches, but it was not the most common faction in this tournament. There were a very small number of Seraphim-Seraphim mirror matchups, just 4. They took place on crazyrush (2 games), desert arena, and Loki. Based on information from Group B, this is apparently because of the veto system.

It is surprising to me how infrequently players vetoed their own first choice. Each of the four players in Group B played 6 matches and only did this 1 time. Also, it was less than half the time that players vetoed the same faction for the same opponent. Each player in Group B played 2 matches against each other player in Group B. Only 5 times out of 12 did the players veto the same faction in both matches.

These figures indicate that players look at both the map, and the other player’s skills with a particular faction, when deciding what to veto. It seems that players did not just decide “Swkoll likes UEF, I will ban that” or “UEF is best on crazyrush, I will ban that.” The exception is that everyone who played on Crossfire Canal (archsimkat, Nexus, and Paralon) chose Seraphim AND banned Seraphim.

Even though players rarely vetoed the own first choice, they frequently vetoed their opponent's first choice, 75% of the time. This suggests that the players have a good idea of which factions their opponents prefer to use on any particular map. If you know that your first choice will probably be vetoed (a 75% chance) and that your opponent's first choice will probably be vetoed (a 75% chance) this means there is a high chance you and your opponent will both get the second-choice faction. Of the 12 games, in 7 of them, both players got their second choice.

While players usually made the same first choice of faction (8 of the 12 games), they rarely also made the same second choice (only 1 out of the 12). While players may have some idea that a particular faction is best on a particular map, it seems players have more diverse opinions about which factions may be second-best. And they might be playing a meta-game along the lines of "when I ban Seraphim, my opponent's second choice will be Cybran, and if they're going to be Cybran, I would rather have UEF."

If players had the same idea about what the second-best faction is on a map, we would expect to see a lot of mirror matchups as a result. For example, if both chose sera-cybran then both would probably veto seraphim (because 75% of the time, players picked their opponent's first choice to veto) which would result in a mirror matchup. But we didn't see that very often, at least with the limited data we have (Group B only).

Comparison to LotS 2019

In 2019, out of 56 matches, 41 were mirror matchups (73%). Cybran was the most common (38%), followed by UEF (20%), Aeon (9%), and Seraphim (7%). The primary reason given for adopting the veto system was the prevalence of mirror matchups during LotS.

in 2019, few people wanted to play Seraphim. In 2019, only 10 out of 56 matches (18%) had any Seraphim. This time, people were largely prohibited from playing as Seraphim, and still 26 out of 54 matches (48%) had Seraphim.

In 2019, Aeon-Cybran and Seraphim-UEF only occurred once each. Aeon-Seraphim and Aeon-UEF did not happen at all. So those four matchups occurred only a total of 2 out of 56 times in 2019 (3.6%). But in 2020, those four matchups occurred a total of 27 times out of 54 (50%).

Clearly, the veto system has accomplished what it was intended to do, namely to promote faction diversity at the tournament and to discourage mirror matchups. Whether it is a good thing, or a bad thing, is a separate question--this analysis doesn't see any of the drawbacks to the veto system. Maybe players think it is clunky, or some players hate not getting to play their chosen faction. I can't say whether it is good or bad, but no one can say that it isn't working.

@arma473 I know of a good thread for that : https://forum.faforever.com/topic/705/faf-statistics-megathread