Myth of the Machine Summer Discord Mirror - 7/18/20

[Mike Bentley]

I will be running a mirror of my latest technology tournament, The Myth of the Machine, this summer over Discord. The tournament will take place on Saturday, July 18th, 2020 starting at 12 PM EDT. We will be using Discord's video chat features for this tournament. A camera will be required.

Registration

There's a team formation sheet here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing. Once you've formed your team, please send me an email confirming your roster at [email protected] to officially register. Also use this spreadsheet to sign up to staff (thanks in advance!).

Teams are up to 4 people. Remember, each player needs a camera to play. The initial field cap is 8 teams but I'll expand this if there's interest and we have enough moderators.

The tournament will be $10 per player, with all proceeds going to PACE. I'll accept payment via Venmo or Paypal.

Format

There are 11 rounds of 20 tossups each (1 more round than I previously reported). Depending on field size most teams will hopefully get between 9 and 11 games.

Other Mirrors

I'm hopeful we can also have in-person mirrors of this tournament in the fall, but who knows what the situation will be. I'm open to keeping this set unreleased until next summer for later in-person mirrors to take place. And if there's enough demand I can run a second Discord tournament in the fall/spring.

[Mike Bentley]

Remember to vote in the date poll before Sunday.

[Mike Bentley]

And to be clear, this will be a quads event (i.e. teams of up to 4 people).

[Mike Bentley]

Ok this tournament will take place on Saturday, July 18th. More details are in the first post.

[csheep]

Would love to find a team for this. I have sporadic knowledge but nothing consistent/coherent. Probably best on vaguely finance-y and business-y and related things with misc. other knowledge. Might neg a lot.

[Mike Bentley]

I'd like to propose two rule changes for this tournament:

First, I'll be enforcing my interpretation of the "should have been prompted" replacement rule for this tournament: any such upheld protests will be played off as a replacement tossup open to both teams.

Second, I'm going to go with a 20/15/10/-5 scoring structure. The 20 point super powers will be given up to where I put the regular powers in previous iterations of this set. The 15 point powers will always go until the end of "for 10 points," except for the rare question that's in power until the end. My thinking here is that this will add a bit more teamwork to a tossup-only event by making power vulching more deterministic. Since this is an online tournament and non-verbal conferring is difficult, I'm going to allow people to send messages like "claim," "you should power vulch," etc. in the chat. In practice, these messages already happen in Discord tournaments but I'd like to explicit allow this. If you have strong opinions about this scoring scheme let me know, otherwise I'm going to go with this.

Also, would be great to get more sign ups. I promise this tournament will be fun even if you don't think you know a lot of tech. Take a look at the previous sets and I'm sure you'll find a bunch of stuff you would have known.

[Mike Bentley]

I was checking the original post and saw that the distribution was a little ambiguous. Specifically, it may have implied there was more legitimate science in this set than there actually is (i.e. very little). This isn't to say your academic science knowledge won't ever help you in this tournament, but I don't want to get people's expectations up that there's going to be a boring tossup on, say, the Jones Oxidation. Instead, you're more likely to see a tossup on Ewart Jones if he had some colorful stories about him (which doesn't seem to be the case).

Here's the clearer distribution:

6 Science history and non-computer technology history
5 Computer-related things, although very little actual computer science
5 Business / consumer history related things
2 Misc. Academic usually at least somewhat in the spirit of science, business or tech
2 Misc. Pop Culture usually at least somewhat in the spirit of science, business or tech

And, of course, the best way to know what to expect is to check out one of the previous sets like this one: https://collegiate.quizbowlpackets.com/2219/

[Mike Bentley]

After playtesting today, I think this tournament is going to take more like 5 hours if we end up doing all 11 (or 12, see next paragraph) rounds. To avoid the tournament spilling over to dinner time on the East Coast, I'm moving the starting time up to 12 PM EDT.

If you haven't officially registered yet, please remember to do so by emailing me. Unless we get a surge of new players and staffers, it's looking like we'll have around 12 teams. I'll start pairing up free agents on my own next week if they remain. With 11 packets, it seems we could do:

a) Two brackets of 6. Then a top 4 / bottom 2 playoffs of 4 more games for the top bracket and 3 for the bottom bracket. Leaving 2 rounds for a final. Top bracket gets 9 guaranteed rounds, bottom gets 8 (or 11 if they want to do a double round robin in the playoffs).
b) Two brackets of 6. Then a top 3 / bottom 3 playoff where you do a second round robin, including against teams you've already played in your bracket. i.e.you'd play 2 teams from your original bracket twice. This gives 10 guaranteed games for all teams and 1 packet for a final.
c) A full round robin of 12 teams and no finals. This gives 11 guaranteed games for every team.

I'm personally leaning towards (b) as this gives the most number of games for everyone while still having 1 final packet. There's a chance I might be able to produce a 12th packet which would allow for an advantaged finals but no guarantees on that. If you have strong opinions about any of these options please post them here.

I could also use a few more staffers. I'll pay $50 to anyone who signs up to do so.

[Mike Bentley]

I've increased the field cap to 14 teams. 14 isn't the greatest number since one of the seven games will have to be either a cross-bracket game that doesn't count towards a final record or a bye. (Plan would be 6 prelim games with a bye, then top 3 / bottom 4 playoffs, with 2 packets left for the top bracket for finals.) Ideally there's either enough interest for 16 teams of we coalesce around 12 teams. But I don't want to lock anyone out of playing this tournament who wants to play. But I also will not be increasing the team size (i.e. we will not be having teams with more than 4 people playing at once). I'm going to lock the field on Tuesday. At that point I'll move any remaining free agents into teams to make the schedule work so pair up by then.

Edit: Oh, and I did end up writing a 12th packet.

[Mike Bentley]

I sent out a logistics mail to all teams, although the Discord server link will be coming a bit later.

There are still a few more spots for free agents. Contact the teams to sign up.

[Mike Bentley]

Discord link has been sent out. Your teammates should be forwarding the mail to you, but if you didn't receive it let me know.

Also I'm open to strong arguments why one bracket is stronger than the other and should be rebalanced. I won't necessarily act on your arguments but a good data-supported post might cause me to change my mind.

[Steeve Ho You Fat]

My team has a late opening, so if you're interested in playing this event and not on a team yet please reach out to me, Anderson, or Bhanodai!

[Steeve Ho You Fat]

As always, this tournament was a ton of fun and was full of cool, creative answers and clues. Thanks for writing and putting it together Mike!

[Mike Bentley]

Congrats to Plan Your Postwar Kitchen Now! who defeated Clusty the Clustering Engine in a one game final.

Prelim stats are here: https://hsquizbowl.org/db/tournaments/6517/. I'll get playoff stats posted tomorrow.

Thanks to everyone who helped moderate, the many playtesters, and Karan Gurazada and Alejandro Lopez-Lago who helped with some Discord bot stuff (I'll have a lot more to say about running Discord tournaments like this soon).

[Cheynem]

For stat purposes, I only played 2 prelim games (I did play 3, but one of them was the crossover game where stats aren't registered). I also only really played .25 of one of those games, but that might not be able to be registered.

[ThisIsMyUsername]

Thanks, Mike, for a very fun set. And a big thanks to everyone who staffed; I thought this tournament ran amazingly smoothly.

[Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone]

This was a really enjoyable tournament. The set was filled with fun and interesting ideas, and felt very highly polished as well. The logistics were really good as well from my perspective and I'm looking forward to reading your thoughts on running Discord tournaments - the only issue seemed to be the variability in different player's computers and internet connections coping with Discord itself.

[Cheynem]

My observations on Discord:

I thought the set up and matches worked great. I obviously missed numerous rounds because my Internet connection would not let me connect to Discord voice/video channels. I suspect this involves my slow Internet connection--while I use Discord on a regular basis for gaming and chatting, for some reason, my Internet speed tanked mightily this weekend (and remains that way now)--I noticed that when I tried to game after the tournament was done. Even now, it's very random--I can access some Discord voice channels and not others (indeed, yesterday I video chatted briefly with Mike Bentley in Discord with no issue). Discord has never done that to me before, and once I went somewhere else to use wifi, it worked fine. I do not know if services like Zoom or whatever are less punishing on bad Internet connections (i.e. they will let you connect and just give you a bad audio/visual experience).

I did notice that even with the steady audio connection on Discord when I switched networks, the usage of video slowed things pretty badly. Obviously using public wifi while standing in a parking lot isn't going to be the best experience, but I had no issue at all with audio and video was making things choppy/lagging. It did seem like I was in an extreme minority that had any problems, though.

The set was a lot of fun as usual.

[Auks Ran Ova]

This was a great set, as always. I was also perfectly happy with how things ran on Discord (other than my esteemed teammate Mike's technical issues, which seemed to be primarily client-side)!

Also, the private discussion forum for this set is now open; please request to join it through your User Control Panel.