Ultimate contest : the end.

[sourisdudesert]

Thank you everyone for your participation to the Ultimate Contest : Legendary Inventors! More than 6.500 games has been played by more than 4.000 players

We reviewed closely the games played by the 3 first players from "Legendary Inventors" (3 best ELO on November 6th at 20:00 CET), and we are happy to confirm that the following 3 players are the winners of the Ultimate Contest!



Congratulations to Domesticus (1st - Denmark), tomoyuki (2nd - Hungary) and Pneuma (3rd - USA)! You gain the most incredible prize a player can imagine : all the future board games that will be produced by Bombyx and Monolith, including "Legendary Inventors" and "Conan"

We'd like to give a special shout out to the 6 others players that manage to have a ranking over 1900 at this time : each of you would have been great winners :

DuVlad (4th - Brazil), braven (5th - USA), sprockitz (6th - USA), jratana1 (7th - USA), Rugh (8th - France), Toilax (9th - France).

If you appreciate this competition and this game, the best way to thanks the publisher and the game designer is of course to buy/offer a copy of "Legendary Inventors", which is going to be available in shops at the end of next week (you can already pre-order it).

Thank you to all participants!

[LSC]

Cheers

[makkuu]

Take as much time as you need, it's very important to check that no dispute is possible. Thank you for organizing this wonderful contest! Next time, maybe it's better to have also final tournament with the top N players instead. It's understandable that this time it was not possible, because once rules are published, they shouldn't be changed on the go. Well done, everyone!

[braven]

Congratulations to the winners. Hope everyone had fun, regardless of the results.

[Jer3my]

Congrats to the winners. I certainly had fun, what an awesome idea! I'm wondering if other publishers might take note of this. What a way to popularize your game for just the cost of giving away a few copies. Seems like something we could easily see more of.

[sprockitz]

Congrats to the winners!

I had a feeling my 1st place with 12 hours to go wouldn't hold up, but had more important things to attend to. Crazy how close everything ended up...6 points between rank 2-6. (though 1 clearly wasn't a qualifier based on <20 games played).

[braven]

Yeah, I know what you mean. I ended up only a single ELO point off from from being in the top 3. Even though I won my last hour game, it didn't matter because I didn't have time to wait for all expert-players to join.

With the ELO system, discriminating on who you play with (only playing near equal or high ranked) is more important then actually winning. You can gain points even coming in second place and lose much less with a loss. The idea of ELO is that it is supposed to be harder to win against higher ranked players. I have found that not to be true in this type of game and that it is actually more difficult to win if lower ranked players are in the game because they tend to play unpredictably, which in a 4/5 player game, is more likely to help your opponents. I have noticed that my win rate is much better if only playing against higher ranked players (and I gained far more ELO points that way)

A tournament system would make it so winning against and beating the top players actually matters. I came in 1st in all 4 games I played with the top ranked player, but with the ELO system, that does not matter.

[camillemayer]

This idea of publishing the game online before the actual edition seems really good, I hope the author will use all the data collected from the 6.5k games to identify and improve the few unbalances from the games (for example, teams being tougher to play or objectives being harder to reach).
Good job, anyway!

[sprockitz]

Yeah, I know what you mean. I ended up only a single ELO point off from from being in the top 3. Even though I won my last hour game, it didn't matter because I didn't have time to wait for all expert-players to join.

With the ELO system, discriminating on who you play with (only playing near equal or high ranked) is more important then actually winning. You can gain points even coming in second place and lose much less with a loss. The idea of ELO is that it is supposed to be harder to win against higher ranked players. I have found that not to be true in this type of game and that it is actually more difficult to win if lower ranked players are in the game because they tend to play unpredictably, which in a 4/5 player game, is more likely to help your oppenents. I have noticed that my win rate is much better if only playing against higher ranked players (and I gained far more ELO points that way).

This is definitely true about having to play games of people with a similar level, which is always something I hate doing...I prefer to leave tables open to anyone. This is true in multiplayer games where you have to rely on people doing something relatively smart instead of throwing the game (unintentionally) to another player..it essentially makes it a luck based game based on who is fortunate enough to benefit from the bad move. In two player games with a lot of luck (Can't Stop is the easy example), you want to do the same thing b/c if every game is 50/50 you expect to gain by playing people above you. In Can't Stop if nobody discriminated in who they played the best players would fluctuate between 1550-1750 based on the luck they had in their last few games...nobody would get close to 1900. Discrimination in opponent choice is definitely a big way to manipulate (legally) Elo...it's an imperfect system for multi-player and for luck based games, but better than nothing. I know the site owners are working on something else to rejuvenate the competition across all games.

[braven]

Yeah, I know what you mean. I ended up only a single ELO point off from from being in the top 3. Even though I won my last hour game, it didn't matter because I didn't have time to wait for all expert-players to join.

With the ELO system, discriminating on who you play with (only playing near equal or high ranked) is more important then actually winning. You can gain points even coming in second place and lose much less with a loss. The idea of ELO is that it is supposed to be harder to win against higher ranked players. I have found that not to be true in this type of game and that it is actually more difficult to win if lower ranked players are in the game because they tend to play unpredictably, which in a 4/5 player game, is more likely to help your oppenents. I have noticed that my win rate is much better if only playing against higher ranked players (and I gained far more ELO points that way).

This is definitely true about having to play games of people with a similar level, which is always something I hate doing...I prefer to leave tables open for anyone. This is true in multiplayer games where you have to rely on people doing something relatively smart instead of throwing the game (unintentionally) to another player..it essentially makes it a luck based game based on who is fortunate enough to benefit from the bad move. In two player games with a lot of luck (Can't Stop is the easy example), you want to do the same thing b/c if every game is 50/50 you expect to gain by playing people above you. In Can't Stop if nobody discriminated in who they played the best players would fluctuate between 1550-1750 based on the luck they had in their last few games...nobody would get close to 1900. Discrimination in opponent choice is definitely a big way to manipulate (legally) Elo...it's an imperfect system for multi-player and for luck based games, but better than nothing. I know the site owners are working on something else to rejuvenate the competition across all games.

I agree that playing lower ranked players makes the game much more luck-based which is not good for winning consistently. If you are a highly skilled player (one capable of winning a contest like this), you benefit from removing as much luck as possible. The issue is that "luck" helps everyone equally over time, which is not good when you have 3 or 4 opponents. In order to be a top ranked player, you need to win significantly more than average which is simply not possible if there is too much luck. Playing against high rated players reduces luck because you can count on them always making good, predictable moves that do not help your other opponents (without justification) and you can then use your superior skill to leverage that knowledge to your advantage and win using superior tactics.

The "only play against equal or higher rated players" strategy has four huge benefits: Less bad luck (as discussed above), far more points for winning, less points lost when losing, and second place is now acceptable (you gain points even if you don't even win). This means you can favor less risky options, further lowering your chances of coming in third or fourth and losing points.

I dislike limiting games to only good or expert players; it seems less friendly and against the spirit of a new game launch. However, you need to if you want to have any reasonable chance of having the highest ELO rating. I would have an ELO rating over 2000 if only games I played containing all "good" and "expert" players were considered in the rating. Additionally, it can be difficult finding only high-ranked players to join you in a game during the evening hours in the Americas (middle of the night in Europe) making it more difficult to properly compete. This effectively gives an advantage to players who's schedule allow them to be online during peak times in order to take advantage of the ELO meta game fully as they are able to play against higher rated players more consistently.

Please don't take my comments the wrong way. I don't mean to take anything away from the winners; they all played very good and are extremely talented and I wish them the best and my congratulations. I had a lot of fun participating, learning this new game, and being able to play so many games with so many different people. That is much more important than winning.