One one hand, this research failed to provide a realiable measure of what scoring system will most accurately reflect the difficulty of each round, due to not having a ton of contests to pick from (I could look at other contests, but then I'd have to make arbitrary adjustments for the different bracket sizes). On the other hand, I believe it gave us a great sense of scale: we can see that even in particularly unpredictable contests, the current system still gives way too much weight to late rounds compared to their actual prediction difficulty. A finals match, in order to be actually worth 64 points, should have a prediction rate of 1.56% (assuming Round 1 had 100%, otherwise it should be lower), the semifinals should have 3.13% on average, and so on. And what we usually see instead for later rounds are prediction %s in the double digits. And this is all taking in consideration the fact I'm using data for the overall brackets submitted, not just gurus or B8.
If I had to take a guess at an actual system, my instinct is to take GotD1 as the standard, since it's the one that looks the most neat. I'll then multiply all the numbers by 10 and do some rounding, to get more manageable numbers:
If you think the last two rounds are two high compared to the first one, then you should assume it's because Majora and Brawl getting to the finals is a crazier result than average. In that case, you could settle for something chalkier, and reduce those numbers a bit. I made that adjustment, and also did a little more rounding for early matches.
So, what do you think? Do you agree with this analysys? Do you have a better idea of that system would work best? Give me your opinions, and thanks for reading this!
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