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Response to The MARP battles

from Ben Jos Walbeehm (walbeehm@walbeehm.com)
OK. I'm going to try to keep this brief, which, for me, in itself is quite an accomplishment. :-)

I am vehemently opposed to this idea. Here's a sketch of my thoughts:

(1) Tournaments are more fun the more people participate. (2) Tournaments yield higher scores the more people participate on more than one game. (3) Are we interested in who wins or are we interested in seeing great performances? Under the current rules, we are MUCH more likely to see great performances. (4) Aren't the tournaments supposed to measure overall skill? Wouldn't someone who beats everyone else on 9 games be the best, regardless of what he'd do on the 10th? Combined with (1): A tournament using only Pac variants is not nearly as interesting as a tournament with a wide variety of types/styles of games.

Examples: (1) BBH is the easiest example since he holds the most number one scores on MARP. Take Jr. PacMan as the first game of the knockout system, then take nine games BBH easily beats everyone else at. Result: BBH is out in the first round and so won't win the tournament, even though he easily is the best overal on the 10 games in this tournament.

(2) More concrete: Renzo Vignola will beat me in T4. Of that I have no doubt. Yet, his current Pnickies score is something I can beat while drunk, and while using only one hand, so to speak. So... make Pnickies the first game of the tournament, and Renzo will be eliminated. Is that fair? I don't think so.

People want to see great performances. Eliminating people who could have given us great scores and great new tricks and world standard skills in later rounds, but never got there because they were eliminated early on severely brings down the overall quality of the scores.

Some people learn games quite fast. Others take longer. But those others could well surpass the scores of the fast ones. I'd rather see a world class performance than a bunch of mediocre scores.

Bottom line: In my opinion, a knock-out system is even worse than a percentage system.

Cheers, Ben Jos.

(posted 8922 days ago)

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