Looking for input on potential Touhou contests

[amalgam]

Regarding your example:I think you might be misinterpreting what matching people up would mean? Since you'd need to mention your best attempt in your submission (not necessarily a replay, but at least an estimate), if you only sign up for categories no one's close in, then that's not maximizing your winning chances, that's maximizing your non-participation chances. Players would never be involuntarily matched up with someone who scores twice as high, though if for some reason you feel like doing that anyway, both players could specifically submit that they'd prefer to play each other.

(I don't see why not to allow predetermined pairings, regardless of balance, as long as both players agree to it. Players could sign up with the specific intent to play each other, or agree before the sign-ups are evaluated when they see someone else has signed up in the same category.)

If the other player signs up for DDC Easy but has a best score of, I don't know, ReimuA 600m, then they'd never play against me (unless they request to). If it turns out someone else is close to me, then it'd work out, but I don't think anyone else in the English-speaking community is close right now?

I genuinely think our ideas for people's category submissions are pretty similar. My thought was that each participant makes an ordered list of the categories they would be willing to play, combined with the idea of an estimated current best result. So, I imagine my category submissions might look something like the following:

1. IN Normal Survival (NM8B / 7MNB)
2. IN Normal Score (2.2B)
3. SA Normal Survival (NM / 6MNB) etc.

So under this system, you'd be right in that only  picking categories no-one is close in would reduce your chance of participating. However, there's absolutely no reason why (to use your example) you shouldn't put DDC Easy Scoring as preference 1, and then put other more 'open' categories lower than it. If nobody else wishes to play DDC Easy Scoring, then they can always agree to play a match with you in something else. Of course, there's nothing wrong with that at all - I'm just trying to make the point that specialised people have an incentive to put their specialised category as their first preference if they wish to maximise points, as there's room for 'contingency categories'. I think this is something that would be present unless you only allow people to submit a limited number of categories - but I genuinely don't see it to be a problem.

I suppose after the initial pairings, the remaining players would have a period of time either to find someone they agree to play against, or withdraw. Agreements could take various forms-- aside from one player choosing a category another remaining player signed up for, there might be the option of categories neither player has seriously attempted so they both start on equal footing, for instance. Or in the case of a noticeable mismatch in skill by players interested in the same game, deliberately imbalance the categories (for example, Normal against Hard for survival, or prevent the better scoring player from using the highest-scoring shot type).

I think this is where I may have misinterpreted what you meant. I had restricted myself into thinking of a 'binding' pairing system based on an algorithm that factors in players' preferences in their category submissions. The reason why I was thinking of such a system was because I thought it would minimise the 'arbitrary' nature of matchups. I guess I was worried that because this is a 'contest', some people might feel that matchups by personal agreement might not be completely fair, especially if the difficulties/conditions on both players are different. However, I now see that this could be an unnecessarily closed-minded way of thought. I'm more than happy to have a system where people mutually agree to a match. I would really welcome opinions on this!

I'd rather prioritize encouraging participation specifically with other players, over encouraging players to continue playing their specialty when they'd probably play it anyway. I'd say it encourages more discussion, since you know there will be one other person with a similar goal.

Edit: I don't know, maybe I'm biased since I'd be content playing a variety of categories, and other players might not necessarily. Anyone else have any thoughts?

Fair enough - I only play three Windows Touhou games at the moment, but would not mind playing in any category in any of them in a contest, if it means participation is improved. I'm not specialised in anything, so I'm basically going off a hypothetical standpoint here - it would probably be good to have more opinions from specialised players!

As for weighting the result: That's a good point, that a purely relative system wouldn't have meaning until both players submit. Also, while I would like to rank based on the difference between players' scores in some way (or difference in resources spent, for survival), it's possible unexpected circumstances prevent someone from submitting at all. So the ranking system might need to be predetermined for each match-up after all.

Perhaps it'd be scaled so that everyone would be expected to end up in the range of, say, 100 +/- 50 points for the team, averaged around their existing skill level. (Or maybe with higher numbers, so even minor improvements have a benefit. 1 million +/- 500,000?) I think that might give incentive to improve regardless of how you pair up, but also allow everyone to make a reasonably similar contribution to the team, and not be as impractical as scaling every single category in advance.

I was thinking more along the lines of a standalone scoring mechanism for when one person in a match is unable to submit. I'm guessing that we would like to encourage people to submit rather than not submit, no matter the quality of their run. For survival, I guess this standalone mechanism could also be used when one player is unable to 1cc (or alternatively, the match score would be scaled based on the stage that they reached). I have very limited experience with high-level play in both scoring and survival though, so I'll leave details of balancing to those who do.

[Karisa]

I genuinely think our ideas for people's category submissions are pretty similar. My thought was that each participant makes an ordered list of the categories they would be willing to play, combined with the idea of an estimated current best result. So, I imagine my category submissions might look something like the following:

1. IN Normal Survival (NM8B / 7MNB)
2. IN Normal Score (2.2B)
3. SA Normal Survival (NM / 6MNB) etc.

So under this system, you'd be right in that only  picking categories no-one is close in would reduce your chance of participating. However, there's absolutely no reason why (to use your example) you shouldn't put DDC Easy Scoring as preference 1, and then put other more 'open' categories lower than it. If nobody else wishes to play DDC Easy Scoring, then they can always agree to play a match with you in something else. Of course, there's nothing wrong with that at all - I'm just trying to make the point that specialised people have an incentive to put their specialised category as their first preference if they wish to maximise points, as there's room for 'contingency categories'. I think this is something that would be present unless you only allow people to submit a limited number of categories - but I genuinely don't see it to be a problem.

I suppose you're right that our ideas are similar-- that's pretty much what I was expecting too. I'm sure I would list DDC Easy as my first preference if I were to sign up, maybe with a note that the other player may choose any shot type (because having no predetermined shot type is equivalent to declaring SakuyaB).

Posting a large number of categories should be highly encouraged, in order to increase the chances of being matched up in the first round.

I think this is where I may have misinterpreted what you meant. I had restricted myself into thinking of a 'binding' pairing system based on an algorithm that factors in players' preferences in their category submissions. The reason why I was thinking of such a system was because I thought it would minimise the 'arbitrary' nature of matchups. I guess I was worried that because this is a 'contest', some people might feel that matchups by personal agreement might not be completely fair, especially if the difficulties/conditions on both players are different. However, I now see that this could be an unnecessarily closed-minded way of thought. I'm more than happy to have a system where people mutually agree to a match. I would really welcome opinions on this!

While an algorithm would be nice as something neutral-- there'd still be the arbitrary definition of choosing whose submissions are sufficiently "close". Maybe someone will be able to write a program for it sometime, but I wouldn't expect one to exist the first time around.

If people think someone else's agreed match-up (or for that matter, someone's assigned match-up) is unfair... that's a point I haven't considered. I thought agreed match-ups would be a good way to differentiate this from DRC. Anyone else have any thoughts?

Though if anyone's found to have deliberately agreed to a one-sided match-up to "fix" the results, then they'd be disqualified. There would be little incentive to try to fix the results if it's randomly determined who's on what team, though, so I don't expect it to be an issue.

I was thinking more along the lines of a standalone scoring mechanism for when one person in a match is unable to submit. I'm guessing that we would like to encourage people to submit rather than not submit, no matter the quality of their run. For survival, I guess this standalone mechanism could also be used when one player is unable to 1cc (or alternatively, the match score would be scaled based on the stage that they reached). I have very limited experience with high-level play in both scoring and survival though, so I'll leave details of balancing to those who do.

If someone doesn't clear in a survival run, it would probably be scaled by stage, maybe with number of deaths also having an impact (since clears would already be ranked by resources used). I'm trying to keep category options as open as I can-- if people feel like signing up in a category where they can barely/can't 1cc, fine with me as long as there's someone else in a similar position for them to play against.

Having each run's value centered on a certain amount (whether a relative or absolute calculation) would certainly encourage submitting over not submitting-- even if you're far below your average, you might gain, say, 50-60 points for your team (on a scale centered on 100 as the estimate) rather than none.

I suppose that would be more incentive toward not having a relative scale, since with a relative scale the worse-than-average run might favor the opposing team over not submitting...