Peasant Card Hunter Tournament w/ Prizes!

*watches Flaxative attempt to herd cats*

 

Message from Flaxative: The last slot has been filled.

 

Alright everyone, thanks for cooperating. I'll try to get the Round 1 bracket and match times posted within the next hour or two. The earliest match time will be at least 24 hours after the time of my announcement. If participants have any questions, you can ask them here or PM me. Otherwise, let's leave this thread alone.

 

Round 1 pairings are up.

 

Oops, I was late with my build. Oh well, next tourney then.

 

Quick question: can we sideboard before a match?

 

No, sideboard is only for games 2 and 3.

 

what's the logic behind that?

 

To make same chances for everybody. As some games are played before others and could be watched, so you know what deck your opponent will run. If you knew that ahead of time, you would have prepared a party with more chances to win, but your rival would not be able to do that.

 

In case anyone is still following this thread,
• Round 1 is complete.
• Round 2 is complete.
• Round 3 pairings are up.

 

Feedback 1:
I propose that Grundyup's Bridge is removed immediately from available maps based on this discussion. I just fought a tournament game in the grass side, and would have been pretty pissed had I lost the match because of the faulty map.

Feedback 2:
I propose that in the future Peasant tournament (or some other community tournament) uses custom made PvP maps designed by the community members. This would be a great way to differentiate the tournament from regular MP, and also show the devs what our map designers can do (give them ideas etc.). We could maybe have a competition from where the tournament maps are picked.

That is all.

 

Good feedback, regarding #1, though—

 

Here's my response.

I'm hoping we are not going to keep a map that we know for a fact to be flawed just because the advantage doesn't seem to be that big. Why would we use a map like that when there are other replacement maps available?

 

Yes, this is about the Peasant tournament. In MP a loss here and there is not a big deal but in Peasant there is pizza involved.

 

What you say about sample sizes makes sense but basically all complaints about the map are armchair complaints until we see an actual imbalance in the data. I have a solution to hated maps for the next event, so I'm not too worried either way.

 

This is not an armchair complaint. The map is asymmetrical and one team has shorter distance to victory squares. We do not need 1000 hours of scientific testing to realize that it's not a balanced map. This is a case of simple common sense.

I really don't get it. Why couldn't we just change the map? Why do we have to hold on to it at all costs when there are other maps available that are 100% symmetrical? Makes absolutely zero logical sense to me. But fine. I give up. Lets keep the map and continue to observe the statistical data.

 

What if being a square closer to the victory squares isn't actually an advantage? Say the map is balanced? We're making some assumptions based on common sense, which is how most armchair theorycrafting happens based on my experience monitoring Pathfinder playtests. But common sense and actual game balance aren't the same, and we should hold our premises in doubt when what data we have shows there is no imbalance. The insufficient sample size of games you mentioned has now increased by almost 10x (from 100 to almost 900) and the map's player1-player2 win balance is closer to 50% than that balance is on the other maps in the current rotation. Of course, there are a gazillion factors and 1000 games is probably still too small a sample size to come to any conclusions... but if the data continues to come in in the way in which it has, I can't help but question the common sense premise for the complaints about the map. I mean, the assumption makes sense. It made sense to me and when I saw the two threads about how terrible the asymmetry was, I agreed somewhat blindly—provoked, no doubt, by the appeal to common sense—and was ready to see the map struck from the history of Card Hunter. But now I find myself doubting the basis for the complaints.

Illogical? :\

 

I took another look at the map and I think I know why the win balance is as is.
The distance between the tiles that provide cover to the VP's is equal and since most builds have at least one wiz there will usually be a turn or two of mucking around behind cover before trying to capture the vp (usually by a character who has more than one move card or a team that drew it's team move).
I think that having the asymmetry from the cover to the VP's would have made the win balance more noticeable, alternatively I would be interested in the win balance stats from all-melee builds going head to head since they don't care about cover, I think we might see that the current asymmetry has more of a say in that particular match-up.
On a side note, I really hate the fact the river is impassable.

 

Yeah, I can definitely see the logic in that but I think you have one major flaw in your reasoning. The problem is that you are looking at the win balance stats as a whole instead of looking at individual matches.

Lets say we have a 1000 random matches in that map. Lets say the win balance is exactly 50%. It's a perfectly balanced and fair map, right? Wrong. There could be many matches where the map helped the other player to win. The problem is that since it doesn't seem to happen very often, it gets lost in the statistics. But getting lost in the stats does not mean the unfairness didn't happen.

The issue is not those 999 matches where the map didn't have much effect, the issue is that one match where it did.

What I find really strange is that instead of simply fixing this problem and removing the map from available Peasant maps, we are wasting time having these discussions about statistics and symmetry. Usually when something is broken it gets fixed. Here we have a map that is proven to be broken, devs have admitted the map is broken, and the fix is coming soon. But for some unknown reason we still have this broken map in Peasant tournament, while we are given "scientific" reasons why we cannot change the map. Is there something I'm missing here? Is there some other reason why the map cannot be changed?

This map thing is of course a very small problem and wouldn't have much of an effect no matter what we do. It basically doesn't even matter (I'm not posting because the map is evil). But I think this is closely related to the problem of inflexibility in Peasant rules. Even when there is a clear issue that would be easily to fixed without there being any downsides to it, it's simply not happening. This time it was the map, next time it could be something else that has a huge effect. And what's gonna happen then, back to stats?

While it's sometimes good to stick to original rules even though better ones come up during the event, when there are things that are clearly broken, like human-error flaw in the map that the devs have admitted happened by mistake, organizers should act swiftly, fix the problem, and just move on.

And that's what I'm doing now, moving on from this subject.