Board 8 > Adjusting the contest scoring system based on prediction percentages

(+) Yeah! (+)

GildedFool posted...

People that don't like you will still talk about you behind your back when they have to deal with you, or perceive you saying something dumb on the board.

Which is a product of being an immature male. Like what grown adult with bills to pay, a family, and a career to worry about would even give a shit? You don't see guys like Nick and Icon acting like this, because they have families and kids and such. And Icon fucking detests me, so he's a perfect example here. The dude has long since stopped caring about anything I say or do, because he has real things to worry about, which I wish is something that would rub off on the rest of you. I don't like the guy, but I respect the hell out of him for being a real man. I'm almost 40 fucking years old. I have far more important things to worry about than a bunch of bitter dudes in a gaming chat room from a dead forum. If you claim not to like me but still hang on my every word, even though I am no where close to how I used to act by any standard, that is 100% a you problem. I absolve myself.

Grow. The fuck. Up.

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ShatteredElysium posted...

Some permutations

1 > 2 > 3 > 5 > 8 > 13 > 21
Perfect score = 295 points
Correct final 2 and winner = 85 points / 28.8% of possible points
Correct winner only = 53 points / 18% of possible points

1 > 2 > 3 > 4 > 5 > 6 > 7
Perfect score = 247 points
Correct final 2 and winner = 49 points / 19.8% of possible points
Correct winner only = 28 points / 11.3% of possible points

1 > 2 > 4 > 6 > 8 > 10 > 12
Perfect score = 304 points
Correct final 2 and winner = 74 points / 24.3% of possible points
Correct winner only = 43 points / 14.1% of possible points

1 > 2 > 4 > 8 > 8 > 8 > 8
Perfect score = 312 points
Correct final 2 and winner = 70 points / 22.4% of possible points
Correct winner only = 39 points / 12.5% of possible points

1 > 2 > 4 > 8 > 16 > 32 > 64
Perfect score = 448
Correct final 2 and winner = 200 points / 44.6% of possible points
Correct winner only = 127 points / 28.3% of possible points

How much of the max possible points do you want calling the winner to be worth?

I think there should be some acceleration between a round and the next one, so the first one is the best. Though it's still a lot higher than what all the prediction %s so far have shown. It does look smooth though, and maybe is a good concession.

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it's amazing that you claim to not act the way you are literally acting right now

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ZeldaTPLink posted...

Hmm I thought I could ban them from posting in my thread, but I can only ban them from seeing my thread it seems.

if you ignore them they can still see your topic. I don't remember if they can still post in it. If you block them they can't do either

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I think this entire topic is grossly unfair to Azuarc, which is the reason I'm upset. I know this isn't the intention at all, but this all reads to me like a big "fuck that guy, he didn't deserve it".

Of course he deserves it. He called Xenoblade's path. He picked Dark Souls > Last of Us. He picked Witcher 3 > Skyrim. He had the foresight to know GTA5's division was screwed up.

And he's supposed to lose this contest behind someone who picked Last of Us > Dark Souls because he didn't pick a round 1 match (Undertale/Octopath) correct? No offense to Jona here, but that is just wrong.

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JoshuaAstray posted...

If you block them they can't do either

not strictly true - they can't see it, but if they're already in it they can post

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Steiner posted...

not strictly true - they can't see it, but if they're already in it they can post

oh wild

I think I remember trying to post in one topic somebody had linked to and being unable to post and assumed that the person blocked me to prevent it. maybe I'll test this later

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PostContestUlti posted...

Which is a product of being an immature male. Like what grown adult with bills to pay, a family, and a career to worry about would even give a shit? You don't see guys like Nick and Icon acting like this, because they have families and kids and such. And Icon fucking detests me, so he's a perfect example here. The dude has long since stopped caring about anything I say or do, because he has real things to worry about, which I wish is something that would rub off on the rest of you. I don't like the guy, but I respect the hell out of him for being a real man. I'm almost 40 fucking years old. I have far more important things to worry about than a bunch of bitter dudes in a gaming chat room from a dead forum. If you claim not to like me but still hang on my every word, even though I am no where close to how I used to act by any standard, that is 100% a you problem. I absolve myself.

Grow. The fuck. Up.

PostContestUlti posted...

Which is a product of being an immature male. Like what grown adult with bills to pay, a family, and a career to worry about would even give a shit? You don't see guys like Nick and Icon acting like this, because they have families and kids and such. And Icon fucking detests me, so he's a perfect example here. The dude has long since stopped caring about anything I say or do, because he has real things to worry about, which I wish is something that would rub off on the rest of you. I don't like the guy, but I respect the hell out of him for being a real man. I'm almost 40 fucking years old. I have far more important things to worry about than a bunch of bitter dudes in a gaming chat room from a dead forum. If you claim not to like me but still hang on my every word, even though I am no where close to how I used to act by any standard, that is 100% a you problem. I absolve myself.

Grow. The fuck. Up.

PostContestUlti posted...

Which is a product of being an immature male. Like what grown adult with bills to pay, a family, and a career to worry about would even give a shit? You don't see guys like Nick and Icon acting like this, because they have families and kids and such.

I mean Nick is literally shit talking you right now.


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JoshuaAstray posted...

if you ignore them they can still see your topic. I don't remember if they can still post in it. If you block them they can't do either

lmao, like a member of the Discord clique will block any other member regardless of how awful they act. He'll block me, and no one else, and pretend only I did anything wrong here despite the years of harassment I've seen from those goofs without really saying much in my own defense. If they want to be miserable and prove my point, good for them. There is a reason most are not successful in life as of yet, and they know full well this is the truth in their most private moments. They can troll all they want. I see right through them, and they don't like it. That's where all this comes from.

It is as hilarious as it is predictable.

GildedFool posted...

I mean Nick is literally shit talking you right now.

As a joke to fit in, because you're a cult. It doesn't define his entire life like it does for guys like you and Steiner ;)

Steiner posted...

not strictly true - they can't see it, but if they're already in it they can post

That's not right either. You can access the topic if you have the URL, but if you try to post, you'll get an error message.

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swirIdude posted...

You can access the topic if you have the URL, but if you try to post, you'll get an error message.

oh didn't know this.

yeah in that case, just block everyone if you want to end this fight, zelda.

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swirIdude posted...

That's not right either. You can access the topic if you have the URL, but if you try to post, you'll get an error message.

i was listening to lasa! never again!

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Common_Sense posted...

lmao, like a member of the Discord clique will block any other member regardless of how awful they act. He'll block me, and no one else, and pretend only I did anything wrong here despite the years of harassment I've seen from those goofs without really saying much in my own defense. If they want to be miserable and prove my point, good for them. There is a reason most are not successful in life as of yet, and they know full well this is the truth in their most private moments. They can troll all they want. I see right through them, and they don't like it. That's where all this comes from.

It is as hilarious as it is predictable.

No, I'll just block you, and respectfully ask others to stop arguing with you, because I know they can listen to reason.

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Common_Sense posted...

He'll block me, and no one else, and pretend only I did anything wrong here

read the topic again then leave the board forever, get medical help, and never talk to any of us again

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Hey TPLink. I know it's a huge amount of work. Is there any way you could go back and see who wins the guru in past years with different scoring systems?

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RPGlord95 posted...

Hey TPLink. I know it's a huge amount of work. Is there any way you could go back and see who wins the guru in past years with different scoring systems?

I can try, but I'm not sure it will work because I don't have a decent way to automatize it. I have to manually look at each match, check who winned it, and pick which one was the winning %.

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Oh if you have to manually don't bother. I have no idea about scripts for that kind of stuff and assumed you could make one.

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RPGlord95 posted...

Oh if you have to manually don't bother. I have no idea about scripts for that kind of stuff and assumed you could make one.

I don't either, lol. I'm just using spreadsheets.

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That Fibonacci sequence idea with the semi-final and final reduced a little bit looks good.

E.g. 1 - 2 - 3 - 5 - 8 - 12 - 15
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I calculated scores for some of the brackets from this contest's guru, using the adjusted point scheme from the second post. I took the top 15, the five highest Skyrim brackets, the cookie, and a couple I remembered having strong early rounds.

2 JONAELEON1 - 2010 (428)
1 azuarc - 1985 (429)
6 Ngamer64 - 1945 (412)
3 fpce666 - 1930 (421)
4 Furious Fura - 1930 (417)
12 Glenn_And_Toad - 1930 (410)
7 Hbthebattle - 1925 (412)
5 Seanchan - 1915 (414)
9 foxhead84 - 1915 (411)
10 DpObliVion - 1915 (411)
11 MetalmindStats - 1915 (410)
26 Advokaiser - 1915 (394)
14 Keltiq - 1900 (407)
22 yoblazer - 1900 (397)
13 XIII_Rocks - 1895 (408)
28 TAFKAHurricane - 1895 (390)
8 Lightning Strikes - 1890 (411)
15 davidponte - 1885 (400)
29 Camden - 1885 (390)
27 DoctorJimmy133 - 1885 (391)
32 The Guru Cookie - 1880 (388
51 bossman_coolguy - 1830 (379)
55 Paratroopa1 - 1815 (380)

Most notable to me is that the brackets I selected for their good early rounds were still much lower than the rest - bossman had the best round 1 (and witcher) but a very messy middle contest, while Para is held back almost entirely by his bad round 3 (and not having witcher). Also Advokaiser going up like 14 places - in the original scoring system, he lost more points from Skyrim than he did in the entire rest of his bracket (32 out of 54), whereas in this system it was only about a third of his lost points (75 out of 215).

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First I'm seeing this topic, and I'm glad someone's talking about it. I do honestly believe Jona was more deserving of winning than I was. His TLOU whiff opened the door just barely wide enough for one person to slip through, and I think he honestly should have held on for the win. IIRC, and I had an entire post written about this in the guru topic before I deleted it, the breakdown went something like this:

I missed:
5 R1 (5 pts)
5 R2 (10 pts)
1 R3 (4 pts)
0 R4 onward
----------------
-19 overall

Jona missed:
4 R1 (4 pts)
2 R2 (4 pts)
1 R3 (4 pts)
1 R4 (8 pts)
----------------
-20 overall

So basically I missed 11 matches and he missed 8. 7 of those were effectively the same, but instead of missing Rayman>Celeste, FFXV>Hollow Knight, HZD>Borderlands 2, and Shovel Knight>not-Undertale, he missed a single R4 match in Dark Souls>The Last of Us.

Should missing one R4 match be worth more than three in R2 and one in R1? Probably not. It's only two rounds deeper into the contest. Had he missed Witcher>Skyrim, yes, that's an important enough match to merit being worth more than 7 points, but I think the penalty here was a bit too extreme. Jona had an absolutely fantastic bracket in R1 and R2, and barely missed anything in the rounds that followed. This wasn't a case of someone blowing it later on, or of someone nailing the endgame but missing badly in the beginning. Jona was freaking consistent. If we reduce that R4 match's value by just 2 points, Jona wins.

Another issue with the extreme scaling is that it completely knocks people out of even looking reputable if they miss a late match. Going into the second semi, I was tied with yoblazer and LMS, and a point behind Mr Lasastryke. They all finished off the leaderboard entirely, despite a nearly 30 point spread from 1st to 50th, just for missing one match.

So is there a problem? Yes, I think so.

I don't agree with the fix ZTPL proposed, though. Point values should not be, strictly speaking, based on difficulty. Selecting an R4 match should inherently be more difficult than an average R1 match. Sure, there are some 8-9's that might be close in R1, but there's also 2-15 blowouts that are completely trivial. It's also natural that picking the correct champion in the contest is more significant than picking a match at the beginning of the contest. So I do believe incremental scaling is necessary, and I do believe that it ought to be geometric rather than arithmetic. I played with a 1-2-3-4-5-6-7 scale, and while it gets the job done, it doesn't feel satisfying.

If a game scales too slowly (or not at all,) then someone who gets ahead can clinch victory well before the end and have it be anticlimactic. This happens frequently in Jeopardy, even with the possibility to double up at the end. It's also the case in most sports, where the team that's ahead just runs out the clock. However, if a game scales too quickly, as I've often seen in many game shows and home-made trivia contests (like in school,) the ending carries so much weight as to render the rest of the proceedings irrelevant. An extreme case of this is Quidditch, where the golden snitch is worth 150 points, and no team ever scores more than 15 goals in the meanwhile to outweigh the capture of the snitch. Yes, Rowling wrote an exception, just to have there be one, but let's not derail here, please.

My hypothesis is that each round should be worth more than the round before, but not twice as much.

As such, the scale factor that I propose is r=1.71 -- which is to say, the cube root of 5. An odd choice, perhaps, but let's look at how the numbers look.

R1 - 1
R2 - 2 (1.7)
R3 - 3 (2.9)
R4 - 5
R5 - 8 (8.5)
R6 - 15 (14.6)
R7 - 25

This is very close to Fibonacci scaling, but the numbers are a little more pleasant than 13 and 21. Under this system, Jona would have won the bracket with me in second, the folks who bombed in the semi would be punished far less, but the contest still has a feeling of ramping up toward an exciting conclusion where the ending does indeed matter.

There is a beautiful elegance to the doubling per round, and so I understand its defense. It also has historical precedent with March Madness and the like. However, if we're truly being interested in "fairness" while maintaining contest excitement levels to the end, I feel like this is the optimal balance.

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PostContestUlti posted...

The prediction percentage on Octopath Traveler > Undertale is almost identical to picking Witcher 3 to make the final.

As someone who picked the first and missed the second one, it's patently absurd to suggest I deserve the same credit as people who picked the most important match of the contest right.

And no one suggested that they should! I clearly said that in my post.

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The early posts from the OP implied that points should be based on how difficult it was to predict the match.

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But they also considered that prediction percentages would naturally decay and made suggestions that had you getting more points per match every round.

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I'd actually be somewhat interested in seeing the meta-game of the contests change with something like this.

For example, we know that prediction percentages tend to be higher for mainstream hits like GTA, Red Dead, Overwatch, previous rally benefactors, etc. Meanwhile, things like non-FF RPGs tend to be undervalued by the casual bracketmaker. So, does this incentivize Board 8ers to seek out potential upsets based on potentially lucrative payoffs? Most of us knew better that Cuphead wasn't likely to take down GTA V pre-contest, but imagine the traction the "Cupset" would have had knowing you could get a possible 15% prediction bonus as early as Round 2? To say nothing of the 15% bonus that you would have got when P4G got when it did take down GTA, which was still a Guru upset in our timeline, but probably not a Guru upset in this timeline.

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Mr Lasastryke posted...

i wish vlado had shared this knowledge of witcher 3 > skyrim being super obvious before the contest. if i'd known that, i would have won!

No, you probably simply wouldn't have listened. With the Netflix show converting into thousands of new purchases, and Bethesda games naturally fading with time, it couldn't have possibly lost. That's not some super unusual logic. I bet the "gurus" simply managed to convince themselves it'd somehow lose based on results from 5 years ago.

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this is all interesting, but in the end i think that "each round is the same" is just a lot more intuitive. having your score go down because others picked the same as you isn't fun.

i think it'd be a fun variant for the guru contest since it encourages you to take risks, but since guru brackets are open, it puts you at a disadvantage to submit early, which i also don't like! i'm in favor of more frequent/aggressive second chance brackets, though, because that was interesting.
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Vlado posted...

No, you probably simply wouldn't have listened.

probably not, yeah.

but my point was that anyone can say the result of a debated match was SUPER OBVIOUS when it's over. hindsight is 20/20. it's a lot more impressive when you say this before the match.

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Hey azuarc. Nice post.

For the record I don't actually think you shouldn't have won, or anything like that. Let's put this way: if you know the contest has the scoring system it has, then you can pick late round upsets as an strategy to win it. That's a viable strategy that reflects skill, and if you took it, you deserve to win. Likewise, taking the more cookie picks in late rounds because you think crazy upsets are going to kill your opponents is equally viable. You beat Jona fair and square.

It's just that this kind of meta is pretty swingy and puts a lot of weight on a small number of decisions, rather than evaluating a higher number of matches. I prefer a competition to be more consistent and evaluate performance across all rounds, not just the finals ones. I think it would be more fun that way.

azuarc posted...

I don't agree with the fix ZTPL proposed, though. Point values should not be, strictly speaking, based on difficulty. Selecting an R4 match should inherently be more difficult than an average R1 match. Sure, there are some 8-9's that might be close in R1, but there's also 2-15 blowouts that are completely trivial. It's also natural that picking the correct champion in the contest is more significant than picking a match at the beginning of the contest. So I do believe incremental scaling is necessary, and I do believe that it ought to be geometric rather than arithmetic. I played with a 1-2-3-4-5-6-7 scale, and while it gets the job done, it doesn't feel satisfying.

I'm not sure if this is relevant, though. The idea of taking the average predictions for each round means I'm considering both the easy blowouts and the debated matches, in every round. Even late rounds have your Link matches that are very easy and award a lot of points, just like early rounds do.

azuarc posted...

If a game scales too slowly (or not at all,) then someone who gets ahead can clinch victory well before the end and have it be anticlimactic. This happens frequently in Jeopardy, even with the possibility to double up at the end. It's also the case in most sports, where the team that's ahead just runs out the clock. However, if a game scales too quickly, as I've often seen in many game shows and home-made trivia contests (like in school,) the ending carries so much weight as to render the rest of the proceedings irrelevant. An extreme case of this is Quidditch, where the golden snitch is worth 150 points, and no team ever scores more than 15 goals in the meanwhile to outweigh the capture of the snitch. Yes, Rowling wrote an exception, just to have there be one, but let's not derail here, please.

This I agree is relevant. Fun factor is the most important thing about these contests, so if we can have the winner undefined even towards the end, I believe we'll all enjoy it more.

And yeah nice Golden Snitch comparison.

azuarc posted...

My hypothesis is that each round should be worth more than the round before, but not twice as much.

As such, the scale factor that I propose is r=1.71 -- which is to say, the cube root of 5. An odd choice, perhaps, but let's look at how the numbers look.

R1 - 1
R2 - 2 (1.7)
R3 - 3 (2.9)
R4 - 5
R5 - 8 (8.5)
R6 - 15 (14.6)
R7 - 25

This is very close to Fibonacci scaling, but the numbers are a little more pleasant than 13 and 21. Under this system, Jona would have won the bracket with me in second, the folks who bombed in the semi would be punished far less, but the contest still has a feeling of ramping up toward an exciting conclusion where the ending does indeed matter.

There is a beautiful elegance to the doubling per round, and so I understand its defense. It also has historical precedent with March Madness and the like. However, if we're truly being interested in "fairness" while maintaining contest excitement levels to the end, I feel like this is the optimal balance.

I like this system.

I'll continue to analyse previous contests, though, to give us a baseline of data to make more comparisons.

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I'm going to skip 4-ways for the time being. That 4/2 point system is kind of complicated with each match having 4 different prediction %s and I don't have an idea of how to translate it into a linear scoring system. Also the way the scoring is written into the page means it doesn't copypaste smoothly into Excel, so it will take some extra work to datamine. Let's move on to those ancient eras before 4-ways existed.

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Oh hey I remember this contest! It was the first one I submitted a bracket for. Good times.

The first 5 rounds are rather chalky, which I suspect is the effect of the female bracket. The finals show a number much higher thn the average though (6). Still not even close to the 32 it actually awarded, though. This is probably due to the sheer difficulty in picking Samus over Snake or maybe Crono, I don't think she was the favorite here.

The champions bracket does not have its prediction %s listed, even though I think it also awarded points? At least I know it did for the Guru, based on that other analysys I made a few months ago.

Moving on.



Holy shit what a chalky contest! Every round except for the last one is about as hard at the first, and only the last one is really worth something due to Zelda's upset against Final Fantasy (and it's not that huge of an upset anyway, it's Zelda). Eh... are you people sure you want another Series contest?


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Ok, let's get this over with.



The first 5 matches show a pretty smooth progression, albeit this bracket is a little more chalky than the usual. The finals jump to 6 points though (same scoring as the finals of the 2006 contest). I guess not many people expected Mario to win here? If so, who was the favorite?

The Champions bracket goes back to having a very low scoring, which makes sense because it's when Clinkeroth came back. I don't know how many points these matches were worth though, but since the ones from 2006 were worth 8 points (according to the Guru site), I put that number there. Not that this matters, since they should have been worth 2 points at most, it seems!



Got villains? I got villains, and the most predictable bracket ever.

Okay, this kind of ties with Series, another mega predictable bracket, but at least that one had a debatable finals. Here, Sephiroth's win is so obvious it's the only round so far that manages to be even easier than the first one (excluding the Years wildcards). Everything else is pretty obvious, too. You could award the same scoring for every round and it would be fair.



This one is kind of all over the place, except for the finals. I guess at this point of history, Link's domination was still not set in stone.

Well, only 3 brackets left. Next update, I'll cover them all, starting with Games 2004!

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Alright, final update.



So rounds 1 to 4 follow the usual progression.

Then in the semi-finals, it just stalls. I figure this is because once you sort out trickier match-ups like FF7 beating Ocarina and CT beating LttP, all that is left is to take square to the win, so this round won't be any harder.

The finals see the usual predictionpercent in the 30-40%, similar to most finals that were won by Zelda games. Only here, it happened during Cloud's era. It's still easier to predict this match than the previous two rounds are on average, which suggests the 32 points warded here were way too many.



If prediction FF7's dominance in Games 2004 was easy, here it wasn't really. The finals were 10 times harder to predict than the round 1 matches. Still less than 1/3 of what was awarded, though. The semi-finals aren't exactly a cakewalk, either.

The first 4 rounds are a chalkfest though, with round 4 only being 1.4x harder than round 1, and the first 3 rounds having the same difficulty. This means a character from the final 8 who goes past a difficult match in rounds 1-3 is not likely to have another difficult match in those first three rounds.



Finally, the original character battle. Rounds 1-4 show another progression similar to other contests, if a little bit chalkier. Round 5 doesn't deviate much. The finals is the big surprise though, with only 12.77% of the brackets predicting Link's win. It would be interesting to see a world where GameFAQs wasn't aware of Link's dominance yet.

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Lets drive away even more people from these things with complicated scoring systems

No reason a round 1 match should count more than a semi

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iiaattgg posted...

No reason a round 1 match should count more than a semi

I think you won't find a single post in this thread, mine or from someone else, defending that!

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I do wonder why people want this. They want to have a system which if you pick the correct winner of a match on like the 6th round you don't get massive points. Really? I mean I correctly predicted that this game/character would win 6 matches on a row yet I don't deserve a ton of points. Come on people.

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Safer_777 posted...

I do wonder why people want this.

Well I did write multiple paragraphs in the first post explaining the pros and cons to it.

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Yeah I get it. I get it that we usually know 1 game/character that will reach the final match without rally. But still the system is fine. Mostly.

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Safer_777 posted...

Yeah I get it. I get it that we usually know 1 game/character that will reach the final match without rally. But still the system is fine. Mostly.

Fine is fine. But this entire topic is an analysis of "does the current system work, could it be better and if so, how".

Clearly you don't agree. That's also fine.

I'm just not someone who agrees with tradition, i.e. always doing something a certain way because that's the way it's always been done. If there's a better, smarter way, I'm all for going down that path and trying. Maybe it doesn't work out in the end and that's okay.

I don't want to put words in your mouth so I'll ask a hypothetical question. If the scoring had always, since the first contest, been based on Fibonacci sequence (e.g. 1 - 2 - 3 - 5 - 8 - 12 - 15), would you still be as adamant (relatively speaking) about your stance that that's the "wrong" system? Or do you think you'd be fine with it because it would, at this point, be the "traditional" scoring system for our contests?

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Bump. I need to archive this some time.

It has been archived.

https://board8.fandom.com/wiki/Adjusting_the_contest_scoring_system_based_on_prediction_percentages

I'll send a message to the gameFAQs staff and ask them to check this out. Maybe they will consider it!

Ok I submitted it to the site and got this response:



I... don't get why they showed a table of prediction percentages to argue that the percentage does down, when my entire point is that it only goes down by 2x instead of 64x. Wonder if they actually read everything.

It is "filed" so I don't get to argue back.

Meh. It was worth the try.