Scoring riders over 4th place in battles
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This question popped up at Unicon 20. Simply going with preliminary results for these riders does not do justice, as if someone made it further along the bracket, that should be rewarded. Ian worked out a very good and fair system for scoring these riders, which I think could be adapted to the rulebook.
If I am correct the further a rider made it along the bracket gave them higher position, and if they had a tie then the preliminary score decided the order? @Ian please correct me if I'm wrong.
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I like the idea
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I also think it would be nice to publish the bracket as it gives a better picture
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So the system goes like this.
Winning riders always advance so we need to look at the losing riders.
If a rider loses a battle against a higher seated rider they keep their position from prelims. Easy.
If a rider loses a battle against a lower seated rider they will get their opponents prelim position. This means, losing against a higher seated rider will not lose you anything, but losing against a (supposedly worse) lower seated rider will lose you positions, the greater the distance between you and them, the higher the penalty.
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Could you give examples of how this works in practice?
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So basically you can imagine it as this: riders go into the battles with their prelim position. If they win against a lower seated rider they keep their 'number', if they win against a higher seated rider they take their 'number'.
And obviously the other way around: if riders lose against a higher seated rider, they keep 'their' number (and therefore final placement, because they just lost), if they lose against a lower seated rider, they take that riders 'number' (and therefore have a lower final placement)
Or a third way to think about it. The winner of a battle always takes the higher of the two seats, the loser always takes the lower of the two seats.
Rider A (seated 15) vs. Rider B (seated 6) -> Winner takes seat 6 along, loser gets to be position 15 as his final placement.
I can't include any pictures in here so see the link below. It shows all riders with their currently assigned placements for Unicon Male Finals.
Unicon20 Flatland Male Bracket
Let's handle this bracket practically. First four places are easy. Done.
Then you would check the last 8, so quarter finals. In this case: Nicolas lost against Adrien who was seated higher, so Nicolas keeps position 8.
Dao lost against Stephane who was seated lower, so Dao gets Stephane placement which is 5, his final placement.
Alexis lost against Mimo who was seated lower, so he gets Mimos placement of 6 -> his final placement.
Clement lost against Jelle who was seated higher, so his current position of 7 is his finale placement.
We automatically have all places 5 through 8.
Then we go to eight finals.
August (8) lost against Adrien (1) -> final placement 8
Kevin (9) lost against Nicolas (8) -> final placement 9
Dale (12) lost against Stephane (5) -> final placement 12
Mario (13) lost against Dao (4) -> final placement 13
Jan (14) lost against Alexis (3) -> final placement 14
Eddie (11) lost against Mimo (6) -> final placement 11
Tim (10) lost against Clement (7) -> final placement 10
Milos (15) lost against Jelle (2) -> final placement 15
So in this case noone lost against a lower seated rider. But let's pretend they did. Let's say Milos qualified 2nd and Jelle 15th.
Then Milos (2) would have lost against Jelle (15), he therefore gets Jelles position -> final placement again 15. A much lower place as a penalty for losing against a supposedly much worse because lower seated rider.
I think this is the best at explaining this system. I really hope you get the idea.
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Oh okay, so this is opposite to what Mark suggested above.
I don't know how I feel about losing a battle against a much worse rider as penalty. In my mind, it would make more sense to use the preliminary scores like Mark suggested above for ranking riders who lost at the same stage. Or literally giving them all the same position?
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Using this system riders who advance further will get better placements.
Everyone who gets into quarter finals will have at least a placement of 8 in the end.
Determining if its position 5, 6, 7 or 8 is then who you lost against.
If it's a rider will a higher current number (because they qualified high or won against a higher seated rider in the previous round) you will be placed higher than a rider who then lost against a rider with a lower current number.
It is impossible to make it to quarter finals and then get a final placement lower than 8.
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Same in the one that Mark and I proposed.
It goes bracket level first and then prelim results.
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Mark never said that. He said in the initial post that prelim results should only be used in case of ties (which are impossible by the way)
I just think losing a battle against a stronger opponent should be less penalizing than losing a battle against a weaker opponent, don't you think?
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Oh I interpreted ties as level of bracket so, 4 people for 5th place.
Not sure, it depends on whether you want to give a stronger emphasis on the bad performance in the battle or the good performance in the prelims. I don't either of them is fairer. Personally, I think the fairest would be to keep the ties. So four 5th places.
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I don't understand the necessity of scoring people when using a bracket system?
You made it to eight finals, quarter finals, semi, etc.
Trying to find a way to then place some people above others seems completely arbitrary.
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There can be scenarios where it might be interesting or needed.
As an example we are holding the German Championships as an open competition so international riders can enter.
But if there are less than 3 german riders in the top 4 places we cannot know who will go onto the german podium.
In this case we need a way to determine an order for the remaining riders.
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I think in such a particular case you might just have to hold another battle if people progress equally far along the bracket ("a tie").
The reason being is that there is no way to determine who was doing better in a fair way. The two riders will not have been compared to each other in a measurable way on final day.
In your description, you are giving a disadvantage to the rider who placed higher in the prelims because they will take the lower placing point if they lose against someone who was placed lower initially (and might have just had a bad day).
In the one that I thought Mark was proposing you are bound by your prelim results and not your performance on final day.
In something as important as German Championships, I think it might be nice to have an additional battle to sort those ties.
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And otherwise I agree with Emile, no need to dissolve the ties.
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Agreed with Marie that a situation such as that one definitely requires more battles if you want to be fair.
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@Emile: the necessity of scoring those riders was that when we enter the results, we have to give a rank to all finalists, we can't just enter "made it into top 8" - @Ian please confirm this, as I wasn't entering the results. And of course the scenario that Ian brought up, but I agree that in that case it is best to have another battle.
IF it wasn't required by the UDA system to give a full rank of all 8 or 16 finalists, I agree that we would not need to discuss this, and it would not be needed to give an individual ranking. So we could consult with Connie and Robin if it would be possible to adjust the system for welcoming results in such way.
But at the moment it is required, if you click on the Flatland results from U20, you will see that we had to create a full rank for all finalists.
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I just checked how it was done at U19. I see that over 4th place everyone is ranked 5th:
https://unicon2018.reg.unicycling-software.com/results
There were 3 finalists in Jr. Expert Male and 4 in Expert Female, so it was not an issue for those categories.
This could be one way to go around with it - although I believe that it should be somehow valued if someone made it further along the bracket. On this results list everyone over 4th place got the same rank, so riders who won at least one battle (and made it into top 8 from top 16) got the same score as top 16 riders who did not made their way into the top 8.
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Of course an easy was to do it then is to have 1st, 2nd 3rd and 4th placed riders, then 4 riders placed 5th and then 8 riders placed 9th if there are 16 finalists.
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So why are we discussing this. Let's have a chat with Robin to see if coding can be changed for flatland result and a PNG JPG or PDF of the bracket could be uploaded with the only riders actually ranked being #1 through 4?
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Yes, if we can publish results like that, I think that would be the best!
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It would beb great to have a feedback from @Connie if this would be possible.
The question is if we can manage to publish Flatland results as a Bracket (PDF, PNG or JPG) instead of a numbered list?