The Problem With Small Top Cuts in VGC
We love competitive Pokémon here at Nugget Bridge. We largely think that TPCi has done a great job of improving the tournament system this season by making thoughtful changes such as adding a top cut to North American Regionals, changing the format of the European National tournaments to mirror North American Nationals, and applying a Championship Point system to the Video Game Championships (VGC). Pokémon is never going to get the type of support for competitive play that games like League of Legends, Starcraft, or most fighting games get because competitive players aren’t the primary audience in this case, but I think the changes made to the Play! Pokémon system this year make it pretty clear that the people running Pokémon’s tournament system want our circuit to be as competitive as possible.
One thing that differentiates Pokémon from those other competitive games is that no one is going to make any real money off of Pokémon’s prizes. We play this game in spite of it not having the type of monetary appeal many other games do because we care about it. We like the people we compete with and against, a fairly large group of committed players — in spite of Pokémon’s relatively small VGC playerbase — that has become very chummy. We like the strategy, prediction, and creativity involved in competitive Pokémon, in spite of the game involving more luck than any of us would prefer. Perhaps most of all, we enjoy competing, and a big part of what makes that competition fun is the format of the events. It is part of why Regionals has always felt like a chore on the way to Nationals and, for the best players, on the way to Worlds. Regardless of how much we enjoy the game, the competition part of the game can only be as good of an experience as the format allows it to be. With Pokémon mostly heading in the right direction from a competitive standpoint, one of the most important things to most of the players is ironing out the format of the game’s most important events. With prizes not being a major factor in Pokémon, getting the players to the place in the standings they deserve to be at while letting everyone play a reasonable number of games is the most important part of our tournaments.
In spite of the significant progress TPCi has made this year, it seems that every year there are a handful of needed improvements made to the system that get overshadowed by one or two strange decisions. Once again, all of the positive changes TPCi has made made this year are being overshadowed as we approach the penultimate events of the season by one huge mistake: the decision to force small top cut caps on United States Regionals (8) and, most importantly, on European and North American Nationals (16). Frustratingly, Pokémon VGC endures these smaller top cuts even as Pokémon TCG events, who have had many more years to iron out their qualification system, use the same Swiss system but transition into top cuts that are double our size or larger for the same number of players.
The top cut problem is fundamentally a Swiss problem. Swiss qualification rounds are a colossal improvement over the dark days of full single elimination, but Swiss has two major flaws when applied to Pokémon that require a sizable top cut to mitigate: the vast differences in the difficulty of opponents each player faces and the inherent randomness of a game with as much probability as Pokémon. Small top cuts accent these weaknesses of the Swiss system, greatly reducing the odds of the best players at each event getting to the much more reliable best-of-three rounds. I expect that the reasons for these small top cuts are a combination of TPCi trying to do the most it can with limited time at events while trying to make sure only the best players in tournaments are getting to the end. However, the small top cut sizes right now are often having the opposite impact and are preventing some of the best players from getting the chance to perform in the best-of-three stage that vastly improves the validity of results in a luck-heavy game like Pokémon.
The Role of Swiss in Pokémon
Once the format of only Worlds and then US Nationals, Swiss has expanded to include every live VGC tournament for good reason. Swiss creates a dramatically better experience for players than single elimination did: everyone who attends the event gets to play at least six to eight games and a single strange loss doesn’t eliminate anyone from the event on its own. Pokémon should absolutely continue running the Swiss stage very similarly to how they have in the past, as it is working beautifully and events in 2012 and 2013 are much more enjoyable than they were in 2011 and 2010. Hopefully, the improved format leads to more players coming back to tournaments and buying games. VGC tournaments need to help the game grow first, and the Swiss format helps make growth happen. The need for that growth causes some potential tournament formats other competitive video games use not to be viable, such as truly invitation only events (see US Nationals becoming open to everyone and Worlds inexplicably having a Last Chance Qualifier), but I think as long as events maintain the 6-8 rounds of Swiss that goal is being adequately achieved.
However, Swiss has a job to do for the event beyond just letting everyone play more games. Like the group or pools stage in most other competitive games, the Swiss stage in Pokémon is the qualification system that needs to find a way to send the best players to the bracket stage (top cut). The Swiss system already had a pretty extensive history of failing at this goal, and the top cuts this year being so much smaller than the system is designed for is causing problems to be much more frequent than in the past. The current format for National tournaments is likely going to create even stranger situations than the format for US Regionals did in that regard. Simply put, for a variety of reasons the best players aren’t winding up in the limited top cut slots with enough regularity. US Nationals was already an event that didn’t have enough top cut slots, and mirroring the new, downsized format in Europe with reduced top cut slots rather than increased slots is going to exacerbate that problem. Pokémon tournaments are more fun and competitive for players when more players get a chance to prove their skill in the main event rather than hoping they get through Swiss on what often comes down to an arbitrary tiebreaker like opponent win % or a couple of unfortunate early pairings with other skilled players.
Unlike most other video games, and even Pokémon’s own TCG, we only get to play in four to five official tournaments per year. With so few tournaments per year to draw points from, it is extremely important that each event is organized in a way that allows the best players to come out on top if the results of our circuit are to be reflective of our game’s best players in a each year. Currently, the impact of the random number generator and tournament-induced randomness of match-up difficulty is causing the system itself to have far more impact on the results of the tournament than the players themselves.
The Failings of Swiss: Un Golpe Crítico!
Pokémon is a video game that involves a lot of probability. I want to emphasize all losses to “luck” are not equal, and that a large part of the skill element of Pokémon is executing thoughtful probability management to avoid unnecessary risks. It is fair to say that one of the biggest parts of both battling and team building is doing everything you can to put the odds in your favor. However, Pokémon is also a game where the best you can do most of the time is just that: putting the odds in your favor.No matter how carefully you manage your odds in a tournament, if your opponents are close to your skill level, situations will occur where your opponent can get that timely Rock Slide flinch, Heat Wave burn, Sand Veil activation, Draco Meteor dodge, dreaded fully paralyzed/confused off of Prankster Thunder Wave/Swagger, or any number of other fantastic low probability rolls and change the path of a match — sometimes by too much for the otherwise superior player to recover from. We spend all year trying to dodge bullets, but it is a reality in the game we play that sometimes the bad numbers will come up and the RNG will take a weird game from us; something anyone who has played in a Wi-Fi tournament knows all too well. The luck in Pokémon is something every honest trainer knows is going to be a major factor in each of their tournament runs.
As competitive players, what we want from tournaments is a format that mitigates the impact of this sort of ridiculousness as much as possible. No one wants to be winning or losing all tournaments on this sort of (im)probability, so it is important that the format of tournaments has some cushion room to make it less likely players get “Pokémoned”, as we often say. Mitigating the impact of randomness and giving players more of a chance to fight against it is the single most important reason we want a higher percentage of players top cutting our events and getting into the best of three stage where they have more wiggle room to outplay their opponents. It is also the same reason single elimination best-of-1 in the past was a terrible format players hated.
While the current format of events is much improved, more progress still needs to be made for the final results of events to include the most deserving players. Players are much more likely to pick up two losses from these sort of RNG-influenced shenanigans during 8 rounds of Swiss than they are twice in three games of a top cut match. As such, the heads-up games usually produce the more deserving winner. Best-of-one Swiss tries to adjust for luck a little bit by not immediately eliminating players for losing one game to strangeness, but it fails to do an adequate job, especially with only one X-2 cutting at most events. With only one undefeated player going into the last round of Swiss at most events, for instance, strange luck in the last round of Swiss will almost always eliminate players from contention a round away from a best-of-three scenario. It is important for the validity of a tournament’s results to get as many players as possible into the top cut stage while still offering a tangible reward for doing well in the Swiss stage of the tournament.
With all of the probability in Pokémon, some of us tend to compare Pokémon more to other games of combined chance and skill (such as poker) rather than to most other video games, and I think the parallel works pretty well here. You have more control over your fate in Pokémon than in poker, but winning only 6/8 hands of heads-up in poker instead of 7/8 wouldn’t be something anyone would expect to end their days in a Poker tournament — yet in Pokémon it will be season ending if TPCi doesn’t expand the top cut for the remaining National tournaments. I don’t want to beat the idea of luck in the game over the head too much as we all know it is an obnoxious but inseparable part of our game. Luck is something the players have to do their best to mitigate, but for tournaments to be everything they can be, luck is something the tournament organizers have to help mitigate, too.
The Failings of Swiss: Strength of Schedule
I think the pairing system is by leaps and bounds the biggest problem with using Swiss and a small top cut. While the more conventional type of luck is easy to notice — it’s pretty hard to miss getting ravaged by a critical hit or not being able to move because you’re frozen — the impact of random pairings creating vastly different schedules for each player is harder to notice. Pokémon’s Swiss pairings system is based on a faulty assumption: that every player with the same record has the same skill. This assumption is used both to determine pairings, since you are (usually) randomly paired with someone who has the same record as you, as well as to determine the first tiebreaker of opponent win %, which includes only the win percentage of players at the event in question, rather than a more accurate sample size like the season. I don’t think I need to rip too hard at why a player’s record in a single tournament isn’t very reflective of their overall ability, but I’ll showcase some tournaments where the Swiss placement system did a poor job of placing players based on the skill they’ve shown in other events, which is usually caused by a wonky schedule of opponents.
Somewhat famously, VG Tournament Organizer AlphaZealot has said he doesn’t think players who go X-2 in Swiss events should be top cutting. I think in other types of games’ pool stages, such as in a MOBA or fighting game, not losing more than twice throughout the tournament is often a reasonable expectation for championship teams. However, the Swiss format has some qualities that pool stages in most other games do not. One big one is that Swiss ensures that there is no more than one undefeated player going into the second tier of play, unlike most other games where players or teams are separated into many more groups that can each have an undefeated player or team. Another is that those groups are usually broken up with some sort of seeding system so that the most successful players or teams don’t have to worry about knocking each other out early. Since our format forces most players to take one loss by pairing players with equal records, a tough match-up late in a tournament ensures one of two deserving players is eliminated. While some X-2s cut the European Nationals, in North America with a 16 player top cut, only 8 players cut per flight can cut. This means that if we have a tournament the same size as last year’s US Nationals tournament no more than one 6-2 per flight will cut. Even events that are cutting a decent chunk of 6-2 players, such as the Italian National tournament, have been failing to cut players who have proven that they are among the best in the world in the more reliable best-of-three format in the past because of the small top cut caps.
Milan
While Milan cut enough big name players that no one seems to care, I think it’s actually a really fantastic example of why the capped top cut is bad for the game. The 18th and 19th place finishers wound up being Fransesco Pardini and Guillermo Castilla (Kasty), who you may remember from their top 8 finishes in the 2011 and 2012 World Championships respectively. Given how well Matty (4-2 Swiss/2nd Place Worlds 2011, 3-3 Worlds 2012, 1st Place Milan) and Sekiam (3-3 Worlds 2012, lost top 8 to Matty in Milan) did in the event, I’d say that it is pretty reasonable to extrapolate that Fransesco (4-2 Worlds 2011, top 8) and Guillermo (4-2 Worlds 2012, top 8) would have at least been contenders in the top cut given their similar performances in the tougher Worlds fields in the past. If the top cut had included them, like it would have if the TCG top cut numbers were used instead of the arbitrary VGC cut-off, we might be looking at a somewhat different set of tournament results. All four of those players proved their skill in the vastly superior best-of-3 Swiss stage at Worlds, which tends to be a much better metric of ability than the highly volatile best-of-1 Swiss format National tournaments use. The best-of-1 Swiss format puts players roughly where they should be, but not even close to definitively where they belong, and being a couple spots off here cost these players the chance to continue on. A more precise mechanism like the head-to-head top cut is needed to clean up Swiss’ mistakes, which wasn’t allowed to happen here. While many of the big names did manage to make the top 16 in Milan, it shouldn’t be overlooked that the 17-32 range also included players like Ravi Vazirani (who also went 3-3 at Worlds last year), Lati (who wouldn’t have had to deal with that spirit crushing removal from the top cut due to the TO’s error if it was 32 like it should have been), Billa, and Osirus.
2012 US Nationals
It is strange to see US Nationals’ top cut being reduced given that it is a tournament that has perhaps been the flagship example of Swiss not seeding top cut very well. While 2011 Nationals is perhaps an even better example, with a field of about 60 players leading to a 14 seed (Wolfey) defeating a 16 seed (Dan) in the finals, both of whom were 5-2 in the Swiss rounds, last year has some pretty fantastic ridiculousness to add to it.
The shallower 2012 flight B, which sent some of the best players like Crow, Wolfey, sandman, and Zach forward, also managed to send some players that should not have been in the top cut like CaptKirby, who essentially had never played VGC before, but cut because he had a particularly easy Swiss schedule. That flight left some strong players on the outside who would have been included if Nationals had cut to 64. Cut players in that flight include 2013 #3 CP seed Stephen (6-2) and a former National Champion in OmegaDonut (6-2). The highest seeded 5-3 was 2013 Regional Champion cmoeller22, who had an almost 70% opponent win percentage in spite of not having bye inflation helping him out and is one of the tournament’s best examples of a slanted strength of schedule knocking out a player who deserved to continue.
The deeper, less top-heavy, and bye-filled flight A had a massive amount of cannibalism among the more established players. Without a lot of good match-up data to pull from for other players, on my own I played four people who won Regionals in 2012 or 2013, four people who top cut, and one who got top 4 in Nationals the previous year, which accounted for seven of my eight opponents with some overlap. While I think my experience was probably the most slanted, every round there were a few people who are in the top 50 CP or so this year or who won Regionals last year taking each other out. The result was a top 16 cut from that flight where, looking back at the standings, I don’t even know who a couple of those players are. I think it’s somewhat telling that very few players from those 16 are doing well in 2013 (even the known players, actually): only OneEyedWonderWeasel (14th) and Shiloh (23rd) are currently in this year’s top 32, and if you continue to the top 100, only MangoSol (86th) and Branflakes (91st) are added to the list. We were left with some bigger names getting snubbed at 6-2, with myself at 17th in the flight, Tyler, BadIntent, and HagridTwin all missing, as well as a host of 5-3 players who probably could have beaten most of the players in the top cut if they had more reasonable Swiss schedules including Regional winners JiveTime (who I played round 7 in a game that had to eliminate one of us) and Alaka, TheGr8, 2013 Regionals runner-up Calm Lava, and 2010-11 Worlds participant Metabou. It’s also worth noting neither Huy nor I managed to cut Nationals but ended up qualifying for Worlds through the best-of-three LCQ and finishing a couple more opponent wins from cutting Worlds (9th and 10th, respectively), so we must have been doing something right that year in spite of how Nationals’ Swiss stage played out.
It’s probably worth noting that if it was only 16 players cut last year, we’d have lost the following players to the cut:
- sandman, who finished 2nd at Nationals and proved that finish was no fluke by following it up with a top 4 finish at Worlds.
- TTS, who finished top 4, qualifying for Worlds from US Nationals for the third year in a row.
- theamericandream38, who ended up being some shenanigans in top 8 away from making it to Worlds himself, and who finished 19th at Worlds the year before.
Nationals 2012’s top 32 cut started with the top seed from one flight being paired up with the other flight’s 16 seed, the 2nd with the 15th, etc. Flight 1 ended up getting completely crushed in spite of starting with a much deeper roster of high-end players by a final total of 4 wins to 12 wins in the round of 32. A big part of why I think this happened (beyond people like Wolfe, sandman, Crow, and Zach being likely to have beaten anyone they played against) was the Swiss system being the Swiss system. The pairings are completely random and players don’t face schedules of opponents with even remotely the same level of difficulty, the results of which are painfully evident in flight A in 2012 Nationals. There is a reason most other competitive games use systems like round robin group stages to determine who qualifies for the second stage of events when they aren’t going to cut many players: it is to avoid situations like last year’s Nationals, where scheduling helped contribute to good players having bad records and helped some players who probably finished a bit above their ability making it into top cut. The situation with which 6-2s made it in is also a good example of the Swiss problem with Opponent Win % being based on a single event rather than the entire season, as a bunch of players playing difficult schedules whiffed even when they made it to X-2 while weaker players floated to the top, avoiding the established players as they took each other out.
2013 Virginia Regionals
The worst example from Regionals by far was the Virgina Regional, which is pretty much the most ridiculous example that I can imagine of why we need to expand top cuts. While the top 8 was still better than most Regionals’ top cuts were, as even the lesser known guys here are probably better than their reputations, it left some awfully strong players out who would have outclassed some of the top cut. I’d wager most people who clicked the link already noticed, but three of the four Americans who cut Worlds in 2012 finished in that 9th-16th range which would have been top cut spots in TCG but aren’t in VGC because of our arbitrary top cut cap. Also featured in that range is ryuzaki, who finished 9th at Worlds in 2011 and ended up making it to the finals of the next Regional she attended. While it’s almost too easy to use him as an example, Ray missing a cut anywhere is pretty crazy, but his schedule is among the toughest I can recall at a Regional: he hit three players who are currently in Worlds positions in Cybertron (5-3), Nightblade7000 (6-2), and ryuzaki (6-2), as well as some tough rounds against jio (5-3) and AP Frank (6-2). Once again, the players he faced had much lower than normal overall records because of the battling against each other, and Ray only got a 70% Opponent Win % from the five opponents I just mentioned even though three of them are currently ranked in the top 8 of the country rather than a Regional.
I think it’s pretty obvious that all four of those players deserved to be in the top cut if top cut is supposed to reflect the event’s most skilled players. To be blunt, I think it’s also pretty obvious that if we played a round of 16, the lower seeds would have taken at least half of the games, even with some great players like TDS, Nightblade7000, JiveTime, and dtrain in the cut, but the cut-off cost them the chance to prove it. For Trista and Matt, it might even have cost them Worlds invites, as both of them are sitting pretty close to the edge right now at 8th and 14th, respectively. 5th place overall in CP Cybertron was also sitting at 5-3 in that event after a tough schedule that included an early visit with reigning champion Ray Rizzo. All five of those players (with Wolfe being the unmentioned Worlds player) have proven in a variety of events that they might be the five best players in North America, not just this Regional, but the format was working against them some here.
2012 Missouri Regionals
While not nearly as bad as Virginia, St. Louis was another tournament where I noticed some of the same things happening during as what happened at US Nationals, with a lot of good players facing off in Swiss leading to some weird results. I know I personally hit both eventual winner FonicFrog and Wisconsin winner cmoeller22 in the last two rounds of Swiss. I ended up going 1-1 in these games, but only two of us could cut because of how the pairings worked out. This was a frustrating experience given that FonicFrog’s powerful round 1 top cut opponent was using the always sound TerraCott strategy with a Scarf Blastoise in the back, which collapsed in top cut about as easily as it sounds like it would. Meanwhile, Cory’s day ended without a chance to prove he deserved to finish higher because he had some bad breaks with his opponents, even though I think it’s fairly obvious he’s a better player than some of the players who finished above him… which he proved by winning his next Regional. It is also notable that this was one of the many tournaments where the 8-0 from Swiss lost in the first round of top cut to a 6-2 in two quick and decisive games, showing again that Swiss isn’t doing a very precise job of placing players. There were several other strong players like Shiloh, Smith, and Captain Falcon watching top cut instead of playing in it for a variety of factors in spite of the wonky top cut.
Pokémon isn’t a game where we have a lot of live events, so when we do have tournaments it is important that they get results that reflect the skill level of the players who competed accurately. That didn’t happen well enough at any of these events.
Why The Best Players Need To Get To The Best of Three Stage
The best-of-three stage is an essential part of getting the right results in Pokémon tournaments. It vastly reduces the impact of one game’s worth of luck or gimmickry on the results of a tournament and helps ensure the best player is winning matches. A big part of why Worlds is considered the best tournament of the year by the players isn’t just the prizes it awards or the spectacle of being an international event, it is the best-of-three Swiss format ensuring that the right players are winning most of the matches. While we understand it isn’t always viable to use best-of-three Swiss due to time, getting the top fourth of players into the best-of-three stage so they can battle it out like the TCG players do is a necessary improvement for our tournaments. Players are much less likely to pick up two losses from bad luck during two games of a three game set than during eight rounds of Swiss, and those rounds with the reduced impact of luck are what should be deciding whether or not players are eliminated, not the heavily luck-influenced Swiss stage. While players don’t face opponents of equal difficulty in the top cut stage either, at that point if you’re going to win a tournament you have to be able to beat anyone in a best-of-three anyway, and it is much easier to avoid losing a series than a single game.
As the top cut of Nationals 2012 showed, once we get to the best-of-3 stage the players who overachieved a little during the Swiss stages of the tournament get knocked out pretty quickly. However, the standings still wind up being pretty messed up if that cut is too small. After last year’s Nationals, we’d expected this year we would probably be facing an increase from a 32-player top cut to a 64-player top cut to match the TCG system for a tournament the size of US Nationals. Instead, TPCi is planning on going the other direction and dropping the top cut to 16 for some reason. Unless they plan on seeding Swiss rounds and/or using best-of-three Swiss to mitigate Swiss’ two big problems — which isn’t very feasible, presumably — a reduction in top cut participants is a pretty big mistake because the Swiss qualification stage needs much more error correction than it’s currently being given as a result.
Swiss performs a function as well as it can. It gets lots of players lots of games and gets players closer to where they belong in the standings than single elimination on its own ever did. However, the TCG is right to have a more inclusive top cut stage in a game that has as much probability as Pokémon does, especially when using a qualification system that creates as many anomalies as Swiss does. We want the best players getting to top cut so they can show what they can do, not hoping they get there through arbitrary tiebreakers, in-game luck, the Russian roulette that is Swiss pairings, or to have them miss the cut in spite of having pretty strong tournaments because the organizers have a view on what makes a good top cut that doesn’t coincide with the players’ view. The players who deserve to win will prove it in the top cut even if they have to play an extra round or two of best-of-three, but they can’t win if they aren’t allowed to play.
If you have strong opinion on this, please, post in the thread. Like this post, like the Facebook post about the article, share the Facebook post, retweet the tweet about the article, whatever. This is the sort of thing we need to get as many eyes on as we can because it is important to our community. I’d love to hear more about other people’s experiences with the top cut, too — I tried to keep my personal experience to only a couple mentions here, but I’ve had quite a few tournaments where I felt like people were getting the short end of the stick because of strange pairings or strange incidents of Pokémon occurring during Swiss and I’m sure the rest of you have, too. I hope this doesn’t come off as too hostile to TPCi, but this is a big deal to the players as anything with the game could be, as I imagine will be obvious once this has been around the web for a while. The changes this year have been pretty great for the most part but this, this is a big red mark on an otherwise improved system.
Photo Credits: Robbie M. (Biff). Check out more of his event coverage on his YouTube channel.
About the Author
Scott started playing VGC in 2011. He finished 17th at US Nationals, then lost in the final round of 2011 Worlds LCQ. He finished 10th in the 2012 World Championships and qualified for Worlds again in 2013 after going into US Nationals second in CP. Instead of playing, he commentated at US Nationals and the World Championships in 2013 and 2014. Follow him on Twitter @NBNostrom!
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As someone who plays both the TCG and video game, I agree completely with what you’ve written. I think it’s important to account for the volatility of the best-of-one swiss rounds with an appropriate top cut.
Aside from ensuring the better player wins, I think a generous top cut also enables more players to feel a sense of accomplishment as I mentioned in an earlier post. Players like yourself, Ray, or Wolfe likely aren’t content with just a Top Cut placement. You want to win. However, there are a lot of players who could use goals that are more attainable to them. Top Cut is often that goal. When it is restricted to 5% of the attendees, even many of the best players are often unable to reach that goal. However, if you expand it to the 25% it should be, it can encompass the best players as well as allow a few upper-mid level players to squeak in as the bottom seeds. It doesn’t hurt the legitimacy of the tournament any. Those players will likely be knocked out in the first round if faced with a more competent player. However, achieving top cut is an accomplishment in itself and that drive to reach it again (or reach it again and get past a round) is important for a player to keep playing. Speaking as a lower level player, if the top cut feels unattainable, it makes it much less encouraging to keep playing. Right now, with Regionals of hundreds cutting to 8 and Nationals cutting to 16, that’s what top cut feels like: unattainable.
A larger top cut is also important for the spectator side of things. Swiss rounds aren’t as interesting to watch as best-of-three single elimination. I don’t really care for the NHL regular season. The playoffs on the other hand are much more interesting — especially when a team is on the brink of elimination. If there’s a stream or a screen at the event, I want to spend more time watching these top cut matches — not less. I especially don’t want to have to miss watching exciting players like Ray or Wolfe in a top cut scenario because they were arbitrarily cut off!
The Video Game Championships have come a long way since 2008 and I’m excited for the changes in store for next season (CP threshold rather than Top 12 should be great). The top cut issue is one I hope is looked at very closely and hopefully changed for Nationals. Top 16 per flight wasn’t ideal last year. If it turns into Top 8 per flight it would be very unfortunate.
Sorry this is pretty tl;dr btw, tried to cut some stuff but that’s always been the part of writing I’m worst at… most of you are used to this by now.
Also thanks to evan for helping me re-organize some of this, it’s still too lengthy but he helped cut some stuff for me here and focus the argument a little.
Since this topic came up back in February or whenever it was, had some good discussions with Sapphire Birch and Owlfred (who are on opposite ends of the spectrum) about this- I think fixing how the Swiss pairings are done would immensely help. This wouldn’t be a terribly hard fix, it’d take a bit of coding and parsing from updated results to get a program that works, but it could be done. I’m on the quality > quantity side here- make sure you’re getting the right people playing each other at the right time.
How do you do that? Easy, in theory. You simply take the current Elo or CP standings (likely over the past two seasons, for more accuracy in early season events) and factor those into Swiss pairings. For example, someone walking into their first VGC event wouldn’t be boosted up early on by playing a bunch of bad opponents and winning (Terracott + Scarf Blastoise example.) Also, two very successful players wouldn’t face off in the first few rounds. It’d pair high seed with low seed (like any bracket does) in each tier- the 1-0 with the highest Elo would play the 1-0 with the lowest Elo. You’d still be playing people of the same record, but you’d simply have less of a chance of having a BIG matchup early in the Swiss rounds.
This proposed system takes care of a couple problems:
1) Players wouldn’t need to have 100% resistance byes anymore. You simply get an opponent with significantly less Elo / CP the first couple rounds.
2) You don’t get early round matchups often at all against big-name players.
3) You decrease the number of “cannibal” matches Scott pointed out in the article, thus creating a better chance for the most consistently good players to have a chance in top cut.
There are a few drawbacks, but they’re more benign than the ones that are created now:
1) Well, this isn’t an incredibly friendly idea to brand new players, but on the bright side, it gives them an instant chance to prove they’re worth talking about.
2) If someone like TTS shows up and has 0CP (like nationals last year) and gets paired with some good players, that’s an issue that can happen. But not too many top-tier players skip that many events and continually produce.
Simply making Swiss more accurate would alleviate the whole “we don’t have enough time for top cut” problem that seems to be pushing the whole top 16 thing this year at Nationals. I’m all for a Top 32 cut, maybe even Top 64 at an event so large as Nationals. Regardless of top cut size, though, it’s worth considering adding this to the Swiss part of events just for more accurate seedings, and less chance of a good player getting a schedule like Cory’s last year at nationals and having to sift through mostly you wouldn’t usually see until late Swiss in a good system.
I don’t if it is possible but I’d still love to see a top 32 cut this weekend in Bochum. There are easily more than 16 players who would deserve top cutting.
way too long for such a simple answer
Oh snap, non-sarcastic props from Scott *and* Zach in this article/thread. Washed up TTS is ready to start practicing for Nats now that school’s out~
i know it’s kind of pretentious to use myself as an example, but when i saw my name at 10th place in georgia this year i was elated at finally top cutting again, but then someone pointed out that it’s only top 8, and that definitely soured my mood for the rest of the day. it wouldn’t even take that much to bring back top 16’s at regionals, (at least citing our great experience at the georgia reg) since it’s gotten to be a lot more efficient time wise. nats should def be top 32 or something since it’s such a big event and people usually plan to spend more time there especially since it’s in the summer.
ps, bring back regionals tvs and eye of the tiger
Great article Scott! I was glad I got to talk to you about this waaay before hand and let you know what AZ had said to a few of us at Massachusetts. I really wish it wasn’t top 16 for Nationals, it’s going to be a very tough tournament, with the amount of solid players going with 16 less spots for top cut, I really thought it would increase to top 64 but hopefully this issue will be fixed next season!
I have nothing but utmost agreement with this article. Gonna promote this via all my social media things. Might even make a condensed argument and make a YT video, considering I do have a decent amount of viewers, not all of which go to NB.
tl;dr I don’t care, this article is divine. I should be sleeping and nothing else but it wouldn’t feel right to go to Bochum without, well, having devoured it… (It doesn’t whip up nightmares at least, because I already have a maximum of them after that weird weekend in Italy…)
I also highly agree with Firestorm’s post. For this year, I’m fine with accepting the ability to play a bulk of matches as a suitable reward simply because of “the dark ages of single elimination” (love that metaphor, haha) but once that gets the rule not the exception, it will do no good for so many deserving players returning home empty-handed, symbolically put. Going back to Milan and not trying to sound too wretched, I really dislike what this tournament has done to me personally… With my measly 5-3 performance and the losses not even being caused by the RNG (yet still other randomness), I’m all right with not top cutting that day. Then, my opponents gave me tiebreakers so bad that I’ve bubbled out of the CP limit, which was top 32 for that event, by only two places and losing my bye simply because of not reaching top 32. Not that I want to attest to the GBU marathons’ “legitimacy” in any way, but it feels just wrong how a single bad day can ruin a whole season’s hard-earned position. (As for real legitimacy, we want a circuit equal to America’s, of course, not just 3 tournaments clustered together in 4 weeks with dead silence for most of the other year!) And then, it will forever remain a mystery to me with what logic an Italian national championship should affect a German national championship in any way, and so on, but this is obviously no issue of the swiss system and thus off-topic…
On Zach’s idea: A sound concept overall, but thinking about it, it makes me question the meaningfulness or validity of tiebreakers even more. When the system already forces players to have what are supposed to be fair schedules, drawing opponents’ win % out of that is, well, pretty much absolute luck. With slanted schedules, we can theoretically expect harder schedules to yield better tiebreakers, but I really don’t know if this assumption is even true.
Another point coming from myself, though only minor and highly theoretical as well: I find it intriguing how 6-2 (75%) people are entitled to heading home empty-handed whereas 2-1 (66.7%) per round suffices to eventually take the crown. We may also have a look at the world championships here, where not all but at least some of the 66.7% swiss players are getting a chance at battling for the ultimate victory!
4:26 in the morning, good night folks…
As someone who normally serves as a Tournament Organizer (Head Judge of Masters in Philadelphia Fall 2012) but was not staffing in Virginia, it’s really frustrating to play the games against a really tough field and come away feeling so unfulfilled. I’ve played both TCG and VGC in the past, and I’ve got to say that in the TCG, the system is far from perfect. A lot of people aren’t happy with the way Swiss works, and they’re the ones who champion for ideas like Bo3 Swiss to help bond ideas like the ones AlphaZealot has pushed for in the past with the concept that people ultimately want to play the game.
I’ve posted in the past about how I think that at the very least, VGC should return to the Top Cut guidelines that are established by the TCG, if for no other reason than this – If you move from T8 to T16, the tournament runs 1 hour later and 100% more participants get a chance to be a part of Top Cut and get a chance to play for a title. I’m aware that there have been a lot of problems with events ending on time, but I also know that unlike in TCG where 30+3 can play a role, in the VGC, we should be able to have a quality staff and TO that can run events smoothly and transition between rounds effectively.
I’ll be around at Nationals if anyone wants to bounce ideas about this or anything else related to the game, and I’d love to meet more members of this great community. Until then, GLHF, and don’t forget to keep having fun!
Think this is a really good thought. I had a chat with Chalkey after I lost to Kamaal in top 4 in St Louis that I think kinda represented the difference in mindset there to me, with him being congratulatory about T4 and me being pretty irritated with it (and in retrospect I was kinda rude there, so sorry about that if you read this). I kinda didn’t grasp how big of a jerk I was being by being so ungrateful in the moment because I was irritated I lost but I think that idea of players playing for different things is big. I think I have a hard time empathizing with that line of thought just because I hate losing so much so much more than I like winning, but I definitely agree with what you’re saying here: making or not making the top cut is binary and one of the best ways to try to make meaningful progress in Pokemon, it would be a good thing for it to be more attainable for more people(as long as the value of making it doesn’t dilute too much, obviously).
Definitely agree with the spectator end, too. I’ve only been a spectator during Swiss twice — 2010 Nationals and 2011 Worlds. I think in the case of Nats it was still interesting to me because I didn’t understand VGC yet, so it was cool just to try to figure out what was going on (and we got some cool stuff on TV that year like Skarm vs Rory in the last round of Swiss), but in Worlds, after I understood the game better, I pretty much wanted to shoot myself during the Swiss stages and left a couple times to take a walk. I’m sure being bitter didn’t help me there, but I was back to being really into it the next day for top cut, so I’m not sure that’s really the case… there just isn’t the same drama during Swiss.
Definitely think this would help. I don’t think it would create an ideal solution on its own without best-of-three Swiss to help with the RNG part — it’s only treating one problem — but it’d probably help enough in practice. Think this is a well thought out idea.
Kon… dense…?
For reference, I brought up this issue in a thread http://nuggetbridge.com/forums/topic/893-opinions-on-larger-top-cuts/#entry16924 after winter Regionals this past January.
Zach offers an interesting solution but I really haven’t seen any effort by TCPi to improve their software for the entire time I have played both TCG and VGC, dating all the way back to 2007. The software has a lot of simple fixes that I think need to be made before implementing something like this, and quite honestly, I can’t really see it ever happening.
I still think the easiest solution to this is to just increase Nationals cut to 64 and Regionals cut to 16.
RE Regionals:
I understand that it’s slightly unreasonable right now with larger Regionals, but proper organization is a huge factor in how quickly a tournament runs. I made it to the finals of both PA and MA Regionals, and we finished PA at around 7:30 (which IMO is a fantastic time considering the size of the tournament) and 10:30 in MA, which is understandable but at that point pretty much everyone wanted to leave. There were of course various factors affecting MA (byes being the main one, and larger attendance), but it just goes to show how much proper organization can affect the pace of the tournament. (Add 3+ hours when you have a 12:00 PM registration / 1:00 PM start time, issues with byes, etc.)
I’d still like to push for Top 16 when needed Top 32 would be ideal, but I can’t ever see that happening with our current circuit, we would literally get out of larger tournaments past midnight. I think for next year’s Regionals there needs to be an emphasis on proper organization, especially with registration. I know MA and VA were pretty terrible with registration this year, with lines running all over the place and poor communication (especially with MA’s pre-registration policy). Once TO’s start putting more effort into running the VG portion of the tournaments (in parallel in TCG), only then can I really see Top 16 being feasible. Of course it’s a lot more realistic in smaller Regionals (see Utah, which ended at around 5ish?), but it would kill me to see Top 16 at other Regionals while the North East is stuck at 8. Let’s hope the organizers get their stuff together so we can push for Top 16 next year.
RE Nationals:
I still think Top 16 is a really poor decision and I’m not sure if anything can be changed at this point but it would be such a disappointment for what has otherwise been a pretty great season. Rushan made a great point about how making top cut is an accomplishment in itself. TCG is great because it cuts to 128 players, and even though the prizes at that point are very minimal, it’s a bragging right in itself. With only a top 16, I am confident a good amount of those players will be well seasoned veterans who have been part of this community for a long time, along with a couple of break out players that have a really good run. By expanding to a top 64, all those players will still be in cut while players who might not be as dedicated to the game as we are or are just starting VGC get a shot of making it as well. For a lot of less competitive players, it’s not about winning the whole tournament. I know a ton of players who pride in just making top cut (and they should! Even placing in the top 25% of any tournament is impressive in itself), and a larger cut encourages players to play even more.
I know a good case of this is 8th seed at MA Regionals (CindarellaStory), who managed to make cut at 6-2 even without a bye. MA was his first competitive tournament ever, and he managed to cut in one of the most difficult tournaments this year. The result? He’s booked his flight to Nationals now. TCPi has made it clear that they are trying to get more players to attend their tournaments, and while their focus is on the lower divisions, this is exactly what they should like seeing – new players who are getting more dedicated into the game.
I really liked how Scott gave a couple of examples of how larger top cut results in players getting to prove themselves in a more stable environment. While the focus has been on Masters, let’s take a quick look at the Senior Division last two years and how cutting off at X-1 would be absolute bs:
This mentality of “X-2s do not deserve to make it” is pretty ridiculous, especially at such a large scale tournament at Nationals. It’s also pretty silly because it is only relevant to the Masters division — Juniors and Seniors will have a decent amount of X-2s making Top 16 (like I have the past two years). If AZ really believes in this logic it should stay constant for all divisions. Instead, because they will have lower numbers than we do, their cut will be more generous and allow X-2s in while the Masters are basically screwed.
Our game has grown a considerable amount since 2008. Making Nationals an open event was a great step forward, but the playing field is nearly triple what we had back in 2010 and 2011 and yet the top cut size has not changed. People have gotten a lot better at this game, and with resources like Nugget Bridge and RNG accessible to a lot more players today, teams and average skill level have risen as well. I managed to bubble out at 17th back in 2010, but I think I am a hundred times better today than I was then. Yet this year’s system punishes me more than 2010, where I nearly made it in as an X-3. If we really want to attract new people and get them to stick with the game, a larger top cut is the way to go. And yeah Rushan made a nice point about how top cut is so much more exciting to watch than swiss play is. It gains a lot less attention when big names like Ray, Wolfey, Enfuego, ryuzaki, etc. miss cut because people are a lot more interested in seeing how the best players in the world perform. I thought this was especially relevant in Milan this past weekend — I still followed the results closely, but was disappointed to see at least four players who were at Worlds in 2012 miss cut because it was 16 and not 32.
I think AZ has done a pretty great job with VGC this year, and while there are still kinks to be worked out, I really like the system we have implemented now. However, this is an issue that has a pretty clear solution and it’s clear that no one agrees with a smaller cut — I’m really hoping that this will have some influence for this year because there is still over a month until Nationals and I’m optimistic
sorry for ranting so much but this is a topic I feel really strongly about!!!!
Just hogging a spot for a first page post. I’ll edit this post tomorrow.
Guess I’ll join you.
Going to enjoy deleting their posts so much
As somebody who was against larger top cuts in the thread that Cybertron linked to, I feel obligated to mention that I took that stance after considering my expectations of the efficiency of different regionals, and not after musing on the issue competitively. Adding another round of top cut in regional tournaments would push the tournament back an hour, but if the tournaments would just start earlier, as I am also in favor of, this would be a non-issue.
Much of what I would like to say on the issue has already been detailed by other users, but I would like to add, if at all possible, to the towering consensus argument. First of all, if this is your first time hearing about this, or if you’re surprised by this article and overwhelming consensus that it holds on this website, then you must not really have your finger on the pulse of this competitive community. After we all got over the high of having top cuts in regionals, we all started to consider why the top cut field was so small in proportion to the player base. It hasn’t been discussed on the forums in as great detail, perhaps for fear of sounding bratty after just receiving a brand, new-and-improved format, but there is very little dissent to be found from the serious competitors and casual players alike. Scott and Firestorm, respectively, describe how both sets of players would enjoy a greater top cut field, but these are not solely their opinions- they represent not just our website, but a larger community of a lot of people who feel exactly the same way. On the IRC channels, I have heard numerous people express a desire for larger top cut field, some of whom I’m sure will post and some of whom probably won’t. Simply put, understand that if you disagree with this article, for better or worse, you are in the minority. We’ve been anticipating this article for a long time.
Also, I’d really like to stress how badly “matchup hax” plays into the swiss format. Back when many of the seniors graduated into masters and we were still reeling at Ray’s impressive Worlds three-peat, many of us considered that perhaps the only person who could beat Ray would be Cybertron, who was widely regarded to be the best in his age group and who had proven he could hold his own against the best of the masters division. That match-up, which would certainly not surprise me in the finals of the 2013 US National or World Championship tournament, happened round 2 of the Virginia regional. Round 2 of my Texas regional, I have written in my notes only “4 fire types- 3-0”. The skill difference between Ray and the girl with 4 fire types is more than significant. If we were to actually seed swiss rounds, I would feel a lot less strongly about this, but as it is, the difficulty of the path to the top cut varies way too much for me to be happy with how exclusive it is.
As long as Pokemon/VGC has random elements like critical hits, confusion, paralysis, etc. I refuse to accept the small top cuts where only X-1 players make it. While Pokemon has a large measure of skill (results have been pretty consistent for a long time), it in no way can compare to the popular 2 losses and you’re out e-sports mantra. Street Fighter is almost, if not entirely, skill-based, there are no random 6% chances to totally swing a match in the other player’s favor. There are no damage rolls that may allow a fighter to survive with 1 health. A player will win entirely on his skill and matchup versus his opponent. If he drops combos he likely won’t win and that was something that the player could control, not a random chance occurrence in the game. This is true for every e-sports game I have watched, from Dota2 to Street Fighter to Starcraft. The player is in full control of his destiny and does not have to play around random elements that could lead to a loss where he likely could have won.
Since Pokemon will never get rid of these random elements, I feel we need to open the top cut to what TCG has been using for quite some time now. I see very little reason to not apply TCG elements to VGC in this instance. The way tournaments are run should be pretty even across the board here and the small top cut sizes for VGC with our limited opportunities to begin with is absolutely baffling.
support.pokemon.com
This is Pokemon’s support page, under the option “ask a question” and Play! Pokemon and Video Games, we could all ask them kindly to increase the top cut for VGC at national tournaments. If enough people ask them to do it, I think TPCi will take note of it in some way; this is a feedback mechanism that they implement for a reason, why not use it to press one of the biggest issues in VGC?
I love what everyone’s said, honestly don’t know what I can add to the argument here other than that I know I was pretty disappointed at my first regionals and second regionals at getting my first and second loss due to some chances that didn’t go my way or a really unfortunate critical or two, and knowing that at that point, two to four rounds before I was done playing, there was nothing left to play for. Allowing more x-2 players (and maybe even an X-3 player) to cut allows so many more people to keep hope alive and enjoy the tournament longer knowing that they aren’t already finished before the tournament is half over. It certainly would keep excitement alive a lot longer at the tournaments, it was palpable how much more energy there was in the beginning round or two when everyone still had a shot than during the fourth or fifth round when a lot of dedicated players had lost their second match.
On seeding swiss rounds, I personally really disagree with it from the point of view of TPCi wanting new players to come in and play. Walking into your first regional or with 0 CP, even if you’ve prepared a lot and know your team and getting matched up against a proven, experienced VGC player, one of the most experienced with the same record as you every round, is just conducive to new players getting knocked out earlier, while giving established players an easy road to top cut. I practiced my yams off to do well at Madison because I couldn’t make it to any other tourneys, and even though I didn’t do well, getting matched up against one of the better players with my record every round would have been even harder to deal with. If though, there were more effective seeding mechanisms like a complete sequential rating/ranking from wifi tournaments before each regional and using those rankings to deal with matchup hax, that might work well.
I guess the biggest problem with increasing top cut is that every round takes one more hour. This is probably more significant for tournament organizers than players; most players would gladly stick around an extra hour if that meant they could compete in a top cut competition for another round and spectators typically aren’t obligated to stick around.
I think support tickets would only be useful if the Organized Play guys needed to use them as evidence while appealing to people outside their department. I don’t think that’s the case here. I’m sure the same people who those tickets would make their way to would read this thread so I’d rather not clog up the support ticket queue with comments about this. We should leave those for people with actual problems that need to be fixed and documented (Player IDs, Championship Points, etc.).
Agreed with Firestorm. We have Twitters and facebooks. I suggest sending a very calmly and professionally worded tweet to AZ and PlayPokemon if you want to see things happen. Will you probably be ignored? Yeah, but it’s like writing a letter to your congressman. One doesn’t make a difference. One hundred (in this case) just might.
Oh my god I got mentioned in one of Scott’s articles, I’m a yamsing superstar
Echoing what everyone said so far about the smaller top cut. Also figured it’s relevant so I took down some data I found from TCG regarding the number of people with byes and compared it to VGC
TCG:
39 State Winners with 1 Byes
26 Regional Finalists with Round 1+Round 2 Byes
___________
=65 Players with at least 1 Bye for US Nationals (doesn’t count for players who have byes placing at multiple Regionals/State Championships)
VGC:
30 Regional Finalist with byes
Top 16 Players in NA with byes
____________
=46 Players with byes (though with people placing multiple times in the finals of Regionals and in Top 16 in NA it comes out to 30 players with byes for US NATS)
It just doesn’t seem logical to have a top 16 cut when you have 16+players with byes. And then when you compare that to TCG with 65 players who have byes and they have a top 128 for top cut it’s just absurd. I always thought that after what happened at last years nationals we would see a top 64 but with the way things are going against the players we will settle to just have our top 32 back.
Also since we are bringing up TCG (since Pokemon wants to mirror the VGC after TCG after all) here’s the document for determining the number of rounds for swiss and top cut:
External
A top 32 requires a minimum of 128 players (though I find funny they haven’t updated the document since they have been having a top 128 since 2009 for the TCG).
Other than this problem, I’m still happy to see the a lot of positive changes that have been made this season especially with a top cut for Regionals and a point system for Worlds invites. Look forward to seeing you all at Nationals!
This is basically a non-argument issue. It isn’t hard to see that every single player wants to have a larger top cut. So basically this is just a lot of effort to tell TPCI that they are ruining the best part of nationals. I am pretty sure they know that every single player wants a top 32, and they don’t care.
I would like to see an actually reason why they eliminated the top 32 round. TPCI lacks a lot of transperancy, so as of right now the reason is that one person, who is in his first year of competitive Pokemon, says he doesn’t think a top 32 is relevant. If we get an actually reason, we can atleast direct our efforts towards convincing the right people.
Scott really sums up every point I’d have made really well. I can only add to this that it was similar in 2010. I’ve gotten to Worlds twice (’10 and ’12). I wouldn’t have made it anywhere near Worlds in 2010, and, for that matter, neither would three time champion Ray Rizzo for that matter!
Why TCG is getting the accurate top cut and VGC is actually going the wrong direction is distressing, and not at all helpful to ensuring that the top cut is accurate or reflective of ability. Even if you look at other games most of them, such as in League of Legends, have best of threes in all key tournaments to qualify for Worlds. Fighting games are inherently best of 3/5 sets and then usually best 3/5 on top of that in terms of matches. Why Pokemon is going to be best of 1 swiss with a small top cut is beyond me.
I’ve ruined Scott’s predictions twice and am on the cover picture of this article, get on my level.
But seriously…
There’s a fair amount I could say about this. I’ve said before that I think it’s ridiculous that less that 5% of our players top cut. I think it’s a bit dumb that other countries Nationals have less players than some of our regionals (I know this happens in TCG too) and have larger cuts. But really all this has been said previously in this topic.
I think what I should be talking about here is the swiss system vs the pool system. As a fencer and a pokemon player I’m very familiar with each system. Since we’re all familiar with the swiss system, let me take a moment to explain the pool system for anyone who doesn’t know it. In the pool system players are distributed as equally as possible into groups where each member must play each other member. The groups are based on known skill level and are often a good indicator of the overall level of the tournament -ie if the tournament is of a very high level each pool will consist of mostly strong players; if it is a weaker tournament, each pool will consist of mostly weak players. Victories and defeats determine final seeding of the bracket and the bottom is cut (fencing National tournaments usually cut the bottom 20%, but that’s too small of a cut for us). What this means is that it, ideally, ensures that your strongest players will advance and not see each other until later elimination rounds and your weak players will get out early.
The big reasons why pools are better than swiss ever will be:
The downside of pools:
That’s what I’ve got. Not necessarily about larger top cuts, but could be.
Petition possibly? There is always a chance of us being able to pool together and work as a community. If so many of us feel strongly about this issue we can make one thing to send as a whole, sign our names on it, and each person involved with it spread our views on the issue. Twitter is a great thing and those involved in the decisions for such things as nationals (ie AZ) can just see the tweets to them directly instead of having to creep these forums to find discussion of this issue. The fact that this is a main article on the site is great and I could not agree with all of the points said more.
AlphaZealot comes from MLG where most of the tournaments run are bo3 Double Elimination. I believe that is why he stated that X-2s don’t deserve to cut. This is reasonable for MLG tournaments, which are best of 3 matches, and allow some room for error if you happen to have something unfortunate happen in any one given game. Pokemon swiss matches are one game. This is the difference between what AlphaZealot has run before and what he is running now. I personally would be fine with these smaller top cuts if swiss rounds were best of 3. That makes it more reasonable that if you lose 2 matches you are discluded. The time for matches would be increased, but VGC games only take 15 minutes, compare this to the TCG 30+3. A best of 3 VGC match at maximum would be 45 minutes. 30+3 lasts about 45 minutes especially if matches go to sudden death. This means that making VGC a bo3 in swiss would take about the same amount of time as one TCG game. The difference between a 5-3 and a 6-2 record, or a 6-2 and a 7-1 isn’t that much a difference when you are only playing single games. It is a bigger difference when that 6-2 record means you won at least 12 games. A bo3 with the smaller topcuts is closer to MLG style tournaments which I think is what we are headed for.
All about this; I only mentioned the support page because it’s a streamlined way of getting in contact with POP that would be pretty easy to do. If someone was willing to write it up (I’m not going to pretend I have the best ethos/logos about this issue to do so) and organize it, External
Petitions are pretty much the least effective way to get anyone to do anything on the internet, especially with how easy it is to forge signatures. AZ will read this thread like he does most threads on this forum, and we’ll e-mail TPCI if we think it’s necessary. Getting in contact with TPCI really isn’t an issue as they’ve been really accessible to us this season, so please, just focus on sharing your opinions on what you think should happen here rather than worrying about how to get them to TPCI. We’ll handle that part, but I’m sure the amount of response this post gets will be noticed by TPCI, so it definitely helps for you guys to keep posting. Thanks.