| NS Sports: Hosting, how it works, how to do it and the maths behind it; Osarius and San Jose Guayabal explains the process behind hosting on NS Sports, maths and suggestions for future NS Sporters | |
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| Topic Started: Dec 20 2014, 08:44 PM (798 Views) | |
| Guayabal | Dec 20 2014, 08:44 PM Post #1 |
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Hello and welcome to our essays and information, we are [nation]San Jose Guayabal[/nation] and [nation]Osarius[/nation], two NS Sporters from the regions of [region]Esportiva[/region] and [region]Atlantian Oceania[/region] today we are going to provide you all what you need to know about hosting in NS Sports and the mathematics involved behind it, SJG will explain about hosting, how it works, how to do it and suggestions and Osarius will explain about the mathematics behind the process. Hosting, how it works, how to do it Hello, today I will explain how is the process of hosting in NS Sports and need to do this, I hope this little essay to them very useful in the near future to any of you. NB: Sorry if this has any spelling fault, English isn't my native language (Spanish is my main one), but I did this pushed by my idea of helping people to know how is this. At first glance this might seem a very simple process, make a host bid, win the host bid voting, choose the dates of your convenience, have a scorinator, click in some randomly generated data, handle numbers of participants, etc. If you think this, you are very far from reality, but do not worry, it is not a process of suffering and nightmares; it can be easier if certain key procedures are followed, which I will detail below. - The Host Bid: This step is the beginning of the process, here you should present a description of your nation (IC) and data (OOC) which are important because they show in a small scale how will run the tournament, they are much more technical details here, the ranging from the format used. By this I mean how many teams or nations will participate in the tournament and also the scorinator, the latter is vital for the tournament, brings a couple of links where you can get and Osarius explain the math behind it, especially xkoranate, the most complete scorinator and most widely used. This is normally posed on the Sign Up Thread of any competition except for the World Cup, the bids are posted on separate threads and also for the Olympics, the bids are posted on the discussion thread. Links: http://forum.nationstates.net/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=55249&hilit=scorinators ← Scorinators http://forum.nationstates.net/viewtopic.php?p=21400936#p21400936 ← Bid Example - Answering questions about your bid and voting time: After posting the relevant information about the bid, now comes the part to answer questions (if other users ask you about the information), it is highly recommended that you answer with details in order to resolve all doubts, which will certainly help in the election process. At the time of election, it’s just matter of waiting for the voting results. If you win, congratulations, because here it comes the main point of the essay, how this is done? How this is done? This is the next step after winning the vote, now you're in command of the organization; the first case analyzed how many participants there so far and establish how many need to meet the appropriate format to host the tournament. After completing the required number of participants, registration is closed and the thread where information is posting becomes the discussion thread where users ask and where you advertise if you have unexpected changes in the schedule due to personal reasons (Remember: RL> NS). After that you have to create the Everything Thread, where other users will post their rosters and RP's, you also have to reserve a post for information IC, which is done after creating the Everything Thread, the information IC is vital for each bid because you have to detail aspects of your nation, in addition to reporting which will be hosting venues, etc. Normally rankings are provided in tournaments, so you should contact the manager rankings for the next step, which is to make the tournament pots and groups. In pots, registered nations are arranged in descending order of ranking, must have each pot the same number of nations, this number must be the same number of groups to be in competition, and the number of pots will be determined by the number of teams will each tournament (for example, four pots of eight teams in a tournament of 32, using the format of eight groups of four). Then proceed to make the group draw, where random.com is the recommended tool you have to do there is to place the equipment in a pot and then open other tabs (according to the number of pots) and place the teams. The random process is made and the order of the teams which will set the group, being the first member of the group A and so on. Link: https://www.random.org/lists/ ← Pot randomizer After performing this process is important, what is behind the process? After this is done, you have to create the file scorinator; here I focus on xkoranate, which is the most complete scorinator. You open xkoranate and then you click on the plus green on the bottom, then you see the tab for sports and choose the sport to scorinate, then the tab command, where the name of the equipment is placed is opened, the style modifier (indicates the aggressiveness of the team, being the most defensive -5 and +5 most offensive and may vary according to the sport - are not used in certain sports) in the added equipment tab, place the computer name in the first column, skill, place the team ranking and RP bonus, which is what every team wins during each Matchday (an evaluation scale used) and the section of style mod, the style modifier is placed . Then you go to the tab of format control, which is where you should put details about the tournament if ties will avail, and how many rounds will the group stage (Usually a round robin or two legs are chosen) and then the following section is the ordering of teams, where groups and the number of teams per group are set. Then you go to the next stage, where you scorinate by clicking on the dice and then "ok". - RP Grading: This works like an evaluation tool for RP's and rosters, this activity can be done during your free time or after you post the "cut-off" alert, which means that any RP posted after that will be graded for the next matchday, it can be used different scales, being the most used the 0 - 1.5 or 0 - 3 for the hosts, the bonus given to the participant should go directly on the skill (ranking) of the nation/participant. - Scorination: This is how the scorinator generates the results, this is the next step after the RP Grading, you copy paste the scores generated by the scorinator and you post it on the Everything Thread as a separated post. This are the main elements involved during the process of scorination, though I want give some tips in order to make the experience more easy. First and foremost: Don't bid just because you can or you arrived on NS Sports, you need to see how things work around for some time, then start bidding for small competitions, try to do your best and build a solid hosting reputation, then try to host for events like regional championships or medium size tournaments. Try to go step by step. Second: Answer any questions made about your bid, this is key in order to try and win the bid. Third: Don't try to send TG's or convince players to vote for you, that's considered as spam and will do a negative impact to your hosting career. Fourth: Try to do your best and enjoy. |
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| Osarius | Dec 21 2014, 12:30 AM Post #2 |
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Introduction One of the key aspects of sports roleplaying in NSSports is the use of a scorinator. Scorinators are, essentially, random number generators. But to reduce them to that function alone would be gross oversimplification. They typically produce scores via a combination of multiple calculations, which take multiple factors into consideration. For example, association football scorinators typically consider team strength, playing style, home advantage and a user's roleplaying as well as random. Without getting too deep into it, I intend to explain the basic challenges in devising a reliable scorination system. While much of the work is already done for an event host -- i.e. the scorinators have already been made -- sometimes a new user might want to introduce a new sport, and will thus need a new method of scorination. The Three Rs The first thing to note is that a common trait through any widely used scorinator -- or scorination formula -- is the balance of the "three Rs". That is, rank, roleplay bonus and random. Naturally, there needs to be some randomness, otherwise it would be a pretty poor analog for any sport's real life equivalent. The other two constructs are perhaps loosely equivalent to form and skill. In fact, the "rank" component is often called skill. In order to make things mirror reality reasonably closely, a scorinator should provide some method to increase the chance of victory for a team with a better rank (nominally, the better team), and this needs to be scaled; there is no point in saying the best team in a competition and the second worst team both have an equal chance of beating the worst team. To compare to a real life scenario, would Chelsea and Burnley have an equal chance of beating Leicester City? Bookmakers would certainly argue not, and given they rely on fairly accurate prediction of results to make money, I'm inclined to trust their judgment. The roleplay bonus could be considered to reflect the real life perception of "form". There are several ways to calculate a team's RP bonus (and apply it) but on a base level, all it says is "the user controlling this nation has roleplayed, and they are being given a bonus to their rank/skill in order to increase their chances of winning". This correlates to form in the same way that a team playing well in real life might be considered more likely to win their next game; a team with a good RP bonus has a better chance of winning their next game. The final component, randomness, is exactly as it sounds. At some point, a randomly generated number -- I won't go into the details of how random is random here, that's an entirely different lecture, I think -- will affect the outcome of any contest. In NSSports, randomness is often personified as a "neutral" deity, Margaret. Countless rubber chickens have been sacrificed in Her name, in attempts to win Her favour, yet She will inevitably favour your opponent some day. She must, she is bound by probability, after all. Building a scorinator - the basics So, you want to build a scorinator? Okay, let's take a look at the basics. I'm going to use a hypothetical sport, called OsariBall. The details of how the game is played are not relevant right now, but we know scores typically range between 0-30 points per team. A simple RAND() function will get us base score values.
Now we need to integrate Rank and RP bonus. We have a ranking system in which rank points can vary between 0-10. We might include that in the formula like so:
A similar thing can be done with RP bonus, which can be 0-5, and we get a very basic system:
This system works, providing scores from 0-45. Theoretically, a team with max rank and RP bonus will lose to an unranked, non-RPing team roughly once every six or seven games. This isn't a major problem, though it's perhaps a little high for what we had in mind. We also have no provision to deal with giving a home team an advantage, and scores don't fall within our reasonable scoring range. We need to tweak this system to produce a serviceable formula. Building a scorinator - intermediate steps To address the inconsistencies in the basic system we just built, we need to look at what kind of probability would be acceptable for unranked teams to beat the best teams. Let's go for somewhere around one in thirty.
Lowering the RANDBETWEEN boundary to twenty makes it less likely that an unranked team will top the in-form, top team. The latter already has a base of fifteen, so to calculate the probability of them losing we need to know how many combinations of RAND would align the scores the right way. We know that the unranked team needs to score 16, 17, 18, 19 or 20 to even have a chance. That's 5/21 already, if we extrapolate the possibilities, depending on the higher ranked team's RAND result, we find that only 15 of 441 possible combinations would result in the unranked side winning. This is a probability of a little under 3.5%, or roughly one in thirty games. Excellent. What about home team advantage? Let's say that, in a situation where all other factors are equal, we want the home team to have a slight advantage, say 5% or so.
...where HOMEADV is 1 for the home team This should result in a 52% win rate for the home team (231 of 441). Increasing the home team advantage modifier to 2 makes the win rate 57%, which is perhaps too high. What about the middle ground? Well, because we're using integers, it won't make a difference to the initial 52% rate. If we want a middle value, we need to change the way we generate RAND, but that's advanced scorinator construction and a topic for another day perhaps. Other factors to consider Of course, generating realistic scores is not going to be so simple. This introductory explanation just covers how tricky it could be to find a balance between the "three Rs" just for a simple system. The more complex scorinators, like Commerce Heights' xkoranate, might use many more variables, and compare ranks in ratio based algorithms. There are modifiers to alter scores based on a team's style of play, so more defensive teams allow less points or goals for example. There are options to disable the home team advantage, or in some cases change the way the style modifiers affect scores. If you were so inclined, you might edit the constituent files of a scorinator that complex and change other things. For example, in the association football configuration file for the SQIS method, you can see a variable called "attacks", which dictates how many times the scorinator will simulate an attack process. Increasing this will increase the number of goals scored by all teams on average. Other scorinators might simulate match events in more detail, for example, simulation programs used on NSSports in the past for boxing and mixed martial arts have come with descriptive outputs. Aside from all these considerations, the host of an event needs to understand the implications of using an RP bonus that might be too generous or not generous enough -- How long is the event? Assuming maximum bonus, how does that affect a mid-ranked team's chances of beating a non-RPing max-ranked team? This is just a glimpse at the math behind hosting an event in NSSports, and perhaps sheds some light on why those who develop reliable scorinators are so respected. It also highlights why those who host are selected carefully; while on the surface it's a simple task, there is a lot more to it than meets the eye. |
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| Unibot | Dec 21 2014, 07:38 AM Post #3 |
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Oh wow! A second part! It only got more interesting. Thank you.
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8:37 AM Jul 11