MOC Madness Tournament Update

[Staff]

The MOC Madness Tournament will advance to bracket play tonight. Congratulations to the top 32 bounty hunters! I tip my hat to you all for making it past the regionals.

The 32 shown in the thread above will be shuffled and pitted against each other in head to head polls. Each poll will last just 3 days. Winners of this round will advance to the Sweet Sixteen.
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Permalink: http://www.fbtb.net/2010/09/10/moc-madness-tournament-round-of-32-brackets/

[_nours]

Au revoir, or better adieu,
I just saw that I was against the Lionfish (beautiful & hyptonic one) in the bracket!
My poor little Nogre is done...
N.

[Nannan]

This is really exciting to see who gets paired up with whom. On second look, I noticed that all the top vote-getters from the regionals are on the left side, which means a lot of good entries have to go pretty early.

[ted @ndes]

I noticed that too. They might want to re-adjust so the top 4 are all in seperate bracket regions, then the next four, etc., through the top 16. The individual bracket parings in this first bracket round look fine.

Congrats to the 32. Good luck everyone.

[MrCRskater]

I noticed that too. They might want to re-adjust so the top 4 are all in seperate bracket regions, then the next four, etc., through the top 16.

I disagree. If they did this, they might as well jump straight to the "final 4" because we already know who the top-voted entries are. As the brackets are planned now, things will be much more interesting!

[Blackicep8ntball]

Wow. The bracket image is incredible, and it's fantastic seeing everything on one big sheet. Thanks for ALL the work you guys hosting this have put in - by far the most professional looking contest I've ever entered! Good luck to all entrants!

As for the outcome of the bracket pairings, it will be more interesting having high vote-earners face off, but then you do have the issue of some of the better entries getting eliminated early, as has been mentioned. That means that technically, the two ships that might otherwise end up at 1st and 2nd place are more likely to face off early, eliminating the "technical" 2nd best ship before it even gets to the sweet 16. Oh well- that's how brackets work! I'm excited to see the outcome.

[Solo]

Given the feedback in here we think we can balance this out to be fairer and more interesting for everyone, so Ace will be reseeding the bracket and resetting the polls tonight.

[Rook]

This is really exciting to see who gets paired up with whom. On second look, I noticed that all the top vote-getters from the regionals are on the left side, which means a lot of good entries have to go pretty early.

Ah I didn't look at it closely. That kind of sucks if all the top voted ones got put on one side.

[turtle]

It seemed a little unfair that the top 10 were originally paired against the bottom ten. Kind of seemed like a free pass to the next round for those entries. The best ship will survive the contest no matter which entry it gets paired against. But The top performing entries in these contests always seem to come from just a handful of members. Sure it's because they build the best looking stuff, but whats the use of a newbie entering one of these contests if they never stand a chance in the first place? Members here display a wide variety of skill levels, and it doesn't seem fair at all that some kid works real hard to build something with a limited part inventory, and then gets instantly knocked out of these contests by the same people over and over.

[Rook]

Agreed. Which is why a random draw of names to go head to head is the best way to do this. And from what the staff have posted earlier today, regarding putting up new polls, seems to be the route they're going.

[meeotch]

Don't forget, the top vote-earner was against a different pool than it is now. While it still has a very good chance of doing very well, there's also the possibility that it will lose in a head-to-head because it might not be preferred when the votes won't be split between multiple opponents.

[turtle]

Just an idea... But in the future it might work well to have the top 16 duke it out for first, the next 16 duke it out for second, and the next 16 duke it out for third. Seems fair that the "A" list builders would compete for a single prize, instead of sweeping the board.

@ Rook, I figured you see it the same way.

And I have to say to all the people who run this site, that you hit a homerun with this contest! Has any contest generated this much participation before? This was a simple amazing idea, and you all have done a very good job of putting this thing together. It's been a lot of fun just seeing all of the amazing entries people came up with. The minifigs by themselves were awesome.

[onions]

You've probably noticed by now that the bracket polls are up. So please visit each bracket and cast your vote.

My original seeding was an oversight on my part as I made pairings based on rank alone and didn't take into consideration pool. So I spent a good few hours tonight seeding the brackets in just about every combination of pool and rank. I finally gave in to the current bracket pairings. I merely looked at lines of code that had their pool number and rank and matched those up to opponents according to the schema I had settled on. It was about as random as it can get. In some cases, the pairings stayed the same, but their position in the tree is different. Those occurrences were completely coincidental. You'll have to trust me on this.

Allow me to explain the tournament format a bit more as it seems there is a little wishful thinking going on. If you haven't figured it out yet, the FBTB MOC Madness Tournament borrowed heavily from the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament format. A few things were adapted, such as having 4 regional pools with the top 8 from each pool advancing, some things were kept the same such as the bracket pairings based on rank. And just like March Madness, there is plenty of opportunity for the underdog to beat out a better ranked opponent. The only other major point of dissension is the prize payout. In March Madness, there can be only one champion. For MOC Madness, we modeled the prize payout after the Olympics. The winners of the FInal Four round will compete for 1st and 2nd. The losers of the Final Four round will compete for 3rd place and just like the Olympics, there is no medal for 4th.

For next year's tournament, I doubt we'll stray much from the current format as I feel that it is as good as it can get.

I hope this explanation sheds some light as to the logic behind the pairings as that seems to be the major point of contention.

If you have any other questions or concerns, please post. Feedback is always welcome.

[Nannan]

The new brackets look much better, thanks for putting your time into the readjustment.

[MrCRskater]

To echo everyone else's sentiments, kudos to the staff for putting this thing together. Everyone has obviously contributed a lot of time and effort into making this a really great tourney, Don with the entry slides, Onions with the bracket seeding, etc., not to mention all of the contestants.

I think I can speak for most everyone here when I say, thank you, staff-types, for all of your hard work!

[Blackninjatom]

I know I'm repeating a lot of people, but that doesn't mean the staff are less deserving of thanks. Thanks staff for all the work, answering questions and holding a great contest.

[MacLane]

Thanks for holding this great contest. Checking the numbers of votes compared to the first time the brackets were released, it seems that not everyone understands that you need to vote again.

[Solo]

Or they're only voting for their favorites, which isn't disallowed since we can't force everyone to vote in every poll... also, you only get to vote once per poll instead of up to four times which made the first polls seem inflated.

[Rook]

Yeah I heard several comments that people didn't vote for some brackets because they couldn't decide which to vote for. Seemed lame to me, but that's their choice. That and with 16 polls some people may have lost interest after the first few brackets since it looks like the first 4 or 5 brackets got a few more votes then the rest. With almost 100 votes though in each bracket I doubt that any will be tied.

[Blackicep8ntball]

Congratulations to the sweet 16! I'm excited to see how things progress from here - good luck all.