I thought it might be best to start a new thread regarding this concept. Basically this is where anyone who has ideas for variations on the standard pop vs. pop battle can contribute to a list. With any luck, the variations that end up proving most popular with readers could make it into future Pop-a-lympic tourneys!

To get things started, here are my ideas:

• Spam Spam Spam: Who is the biggest spammer? Both players pick the same pop and try to force each other out by spamming.
• Tex vs. Mini-T: Battles which consist only of the two pops with the most annoying powers (politeness goes right out the window here!)
• "Pure Pop": The opposite of "Spam Spam Spam". Players are forbidden from using their powers in battle.
• Endurance: Who can endure a battle in "easy" mode? The first person to pull out in frustration is the loser
• Instant Knock-out: Battles which consist of ONE round only, instead of the usual three. No room for slip-ups here!

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(This message has been edited by eccles (edited 08-16-2004).)

Quote

Originally posted by eccles:
**I thought it might be best to start a new thread regarding this concept. Basically this is where anyone who has ideas for variations on the standard pop vs. pop battle can contribute to a list. With any luck, the variations that end up proving most popular with readers could make it into future Pop-a-lympic tourneys!
**

It's just a shame nobody seems to have any ideas, or enough interest to respond. It is a shame, ne? For some other suggestions I made, please see this thread

I'll sum the rules though, since the post is a little long.
(EDIT)) moved the summing up to a different post

Quote

Originally posted by eccles:
*** Spam Spam Spam: Who is the biggest spammer? Both players pick the same pop and try to force each other out by spamming.
**

That's quite tricky - especially from my point of view ^^;; I much rather not since it does not suit my game-style. Except maybe with ducky ^^
If we are forcing players to spam, how do we decide how often they must, and how do you enforce it? Basically. I think it is an interesting idea but difficult to carry out in practice.

Quote

Originally posted by eccles:
*** Tex vs. Mini-T: Battles which consist only of the two pops with the most annoying powers (politeness goes right out the window here!):)
**

Again this is a matter of personal opinion. I am not overly convinced that mini-t is that annoying. Indeed, I think he is one of the easiest pops to go against since you cannot spam with him. I do find tex irritating, but this is only because so few people choose him that I get very little practice against him.

Quote

Originally posted by eccles:
*** "Pure Pop": The opposite of "Spam Spam Spam". Players are forbidden from using their powers in battle.
**

Suits me fine ^_^ - and easier to enforce too.

Quote

Originally posted by eccles:
*** Endurance: Who can endure a battle in "easy" mode? The first person to pull out in frustration is the loser:D
**

Not such a good idea. It is so unbelievably easy to clear on easy and the ball is capped at such a slow speed that there is no skill to it either. Whoever gets more up arrows will clear first.

Quote

Originally posted by eccles:
*** Instant Knock-out: Battles which consist of ONE round only, instead of the usual three. No room for slip-ups here!
**

interesting idea, and possibly of use for shortening overly long legacy tournament games. My only gripe is that so much of pop-pop is just luck that it could make those hanging-around down-arrows ever more infuriating ^_~

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(This message has been edited by Ryoko (edited 08-22-2004).)

Summary of rules from the other (url="http://"http://www.ambrosiasw.com/webboard/Forum67/HTML/000405.html#ryoko08-16-200404:55PM")thread(/url):

Pop-pop bumps league rules:
- You have a league of players who take part in the tournaments
- the league persists between tournaments
- a tournament is made up of a number of rounds described below:

Preparation:
- if the head of the league (and any people immediately below) is/are absent from the tournament, then the closest person to head who is around is immediately promoted to head before the tournament starts.
- decide on a number of rounds to play

Rounds:
- On each round, everybody plays the closest person on either side of them in the league who is present in the tournament (except obviously the head and tail of the league, who could play a 'friendly' if they really wanted to)
- based on the outcomes of those games, the league shuffles about a bit
- everyone then plays the next round as before

The rules for shuffling are:
1) protection form being bumped down:
if you beat the person behind you, you cannot go down in the league this round

2) bumping up
a - you must have beaten the person above you to move up, but just doing so does not guarantee it. Legal speak - it is necessary but not sufficient ^_~

b - if
you beat the person above you and the person below you
OR
you beat the person above you by a greater difference than you lost to the person below

THEN you can move up (swap places with them) if
you are currently in second place
OR
the person above you did not move up (see c below)

c - if you do not qualify for b above then:
if you beat the person below you then you stay in the same place (as stated in the first rule).
otherwise you may move down if the person below you qualifies for ( b above), otherwise you stay at the same position.

3) ties
in the case of a run of ties, (2 plus people who got exactly the same scores against the people above and below them) the highest person in the league who would be eligible to bump gets it. Thinking about it more, maybe the lowest person should, just to favour people lower down the league? Anyway, I said higher before so I'll stick with that.

4) over-bumping (jumping non-absent people)
This is special case and rare movement rule: if
you won against the person above you 3-0 and beat the person below you
AND
there is a group of people all losing to the people below them above you

then:
you can swap with the highest person to lose against the person below them (who did not move up) that would mean you jumped over an even number of players.

5) absentees:
If a player below an absentee bumps the player above, then the lower player moves up above the higher player they beat. This means the absentee(s) effectively gets bumped down too.

(This message has been edited by Ryoko (edited 08-22-2004).)

I think that would be worth trying, if it was possible from a website score tracking point of view. Like you said, encouraging more games between people of the same ability would be better. So less people get whooped and everyone has more challenging games. The one thing I'm not clear about, is how many games do you play in a tourney like this, at what point would you stop?

Quote

Originally posted by SHOES:
I think that would be worth trying, if it was possible from a website score tracking point of view.

I am just evaluating and testing an implementation of the bumprace into the system...

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Have a look on the inofficial tourney-system: (url="http://"http://pop-pop.webhop.net")http://pop-pop.webhop.net(/url)

Quote

Originally posted by Hyko:
I am just evaluating and testing an implementation of the bumprace into the system...

(/B)

The first version is now online. Many rules are working already but not all. Especially with tied results. Maybe Ryoko you want to test a little bit. There is a tourney with you as vicehost where you can check the rules. The new round is automatically calculated if all results have been entered and both sides reported the same... I will work further on on it...

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Have a look on the inofficial tourney-system: (url="http://"http://pop-pop.webhop.net")http://pop-pop.webhop.net(/url)

Quote

Originally posted by Hyko:
**The first version is now online. Many rules are working already but not all. Especially with tied results. Maybe Ryoko you want to test a little bit. There is a tourney with you as vicehost where you can check the rules. The new round is automatically calculated if all results have been entered and both sides reported the same... I will work further on on it...
**

Looks good Hyko.

Quote

Originally posted by SHOES:
Looks good Hyko.

Thanks Shoes. I just updated the rules again. It seems to work now

Ryoko can you please test it?

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Have a look on the inofficial tourney-system: (url="http://"http://pop-pop.webhop.net")http://pop-pop.webhop.net(/url)

I'm looking forward to trying this out for real Hyko, it could make tourneys a lot more interesting for all skill levels. I know you're still developing it, so you might all ready have this in mind, but when you 'View Results', wouldn't it be useful to see the league as it stands inbetween the rounds, so you can see and understand what's going on?

Good luck with your PHPing!

Quote

Originally posted by SHOES:
**I'm looking forward to trying this out for real Hyko, it could make tourneys a lot more interesting for all skill levels. I know you're still developing it, so you might all ready have this in mind, but when you 'View Results', wouldn't it be useful to see the league as it stands inbetween the rounds, so you can see and understand what's going on?

Good luck with your PHPing!**

You can see the results of each game of a round in that moment when both parties have entered their result and it does match. The calculation of the next round can only be done if all results are present because the function starts with the last rank of the current round and then recursively looks at all other ranks... so it would be very difficult and it even could be that it is impoossible due to overjumping etc... Or didn't I get your Question correctly?

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Have a look on the inofficial tourney-system: (url="http://"http://pop-pop.webhop.net")http://pop-pop.webhop.net(/url)

(This message has been edited by Hyko (edited 08-29-2004).)

I understand that it wouldn't be possible to display the league as it is during a round but wouldn't it be possible to display the league after each round? For example, during the fifth round you would see 4 different tables, one after each of the previous rounds. This way you can see how things are progressing, and who you might be up against in later rounds.

Quote

Originally posted by SHOES:
I understand that it wouldn't be possible to display the league as it is during a round but wouldn't it be possible to display the league after each round? For example, during the fifth round you would see 4 different tables, one after each of the previous rounds. This way you can see how things are progressing, and who you might be up against in later rounds.

This is already the case. but you have to read the league from left to right...

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Have a look on the inofficial tourney-system: (url="http://"http://pop-pop.webhop.net")http://pop-pop.webhop.net(/url)

This fictitious tourney appeals to me

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Enrico Enrco Enco Eno

Quote

Originally posted by Eno:
**This fictitious tourney appeals to me:)
**

To me it doesn't

But: Great Job, Hyko! I'd love to see this working. How about a bumprace tourney? How is September 19th, 19:30 GMT?

What about rules? How many rounds, who starts at what rank?
Proposal: Number of players = number of rounds. Maximum 8. Ranks should be assigned according to squibix' famous ranklist: (url="http://"http://www.squibix.net/users/pop/players/?who=top")http://www.squibix.n...layers/?who=top(/url) or we take the last tourney's ranks (wich would be more just from my point of view :)).

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Support the Pop-a-Lympic idea!

:redface: Ahh I see, beg your pardon. Very good.

Before we use this tourney type it would be a good idea to make it clear to everyone how it works, incase they haven't been reading. e.g. left to right equals top of table to bottom, you compete with the person either side of you, etc

I'm looking forward to a tourney using this. September 19th sounds good to me.

By the way, do people still think there should be semis and a final after this? I do.

Quote

Originally posted by SHOES:
**:redface: Ahh I see, beg your pardon. Very good.

Before we use this tourney type it would be a good idea to make it clear to everyone how it works, incase they haven't been reading. e.g. left to right equals top of table to bottom, you compete with the person either side of you, etc
**

Indeed, though there is a possibility of a different layout that was under discussion. IMHO it makes it a little easier to read, but that might just be me.

Quote

Originally posted by SHOES:
**I'm looking forward to a tourney using this. September 19th sounds good to me.

By the way, do people still think there should be semis and a final after this? I do.**

I probably cannot make that or any weekend unless it is particularly early in the morning. --;
As to semis/finals - the whole idea of this sort was that it would just role over from week to week or tournament to tournament. We could even make it a weekly event with just a couple of rounds each week - or go the other way depending on what people like (or even drop it completely if people do no ^^;; ) I think the main advantage though is everyone gets the same number of games, plus we can budget that a given number of rounds will always last roughly the same amount of time, regardless of the number of people playing.

Finally if there are enough players in the league, then it might well be impossible for some of them to make the top 4 or whatever for playoffs since you can normally only go up one place per round. This would probably be disheartening to say the least for new-comers.

Besides, we can always play plenty of 'Classic' tournaments (as Hyko has dubbed them on his site) with knockouts.

With regards to how many rounds, 5 sounds about right - since that would be 10 games a piece for each of the participants (5 a piece for head and tail unless they play friendlies). This is quite a few games all things considered!

@popeye
Where people start in the league is a good question though. I think that either going on squibix's site, or the last tournament are two fairly acceptable choice methods. I possibly prefer the latter since there may be (we can always hope, ne?) plenty of people who enter who were not in that tournament.

The other course of action is obviously just to do it entirely randomly and watch it evolve. I quite like that idea, myself ^_^

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Unbelievable: finally I found these (new) forum by accident again, while thinking it was down for several days. A short hint on the old page could have been useful, didn't it, Ambrosia? Or a mail to all registered users?

Back to the topic: The rules have been updated a few times meanwhile. It looks more stable/ correct now, but it still is in "testing". Anyway we should come back to the discussion, when we will have the first event?

Hyko, on Sep 7 2004, 03:14 AM, said:

Unbelievable: finally I found these (new) forum by accident again, while thinking it was down for several days.
View Post

You didn't miss much: the new boards have only been up for about a day. Still, a little more information would have been nice.

Danny, on Sep 7 2004, 06:49 AM, said:

You didn't miss much: the new boards have only been up for about a day. Still, a little more information would have been nice.
View Post

:huh: uuuuh...i don`t like it!!!

Guest, on Sep 12 2004, 05:21 PM, said:

:huh: uuuuh...i don`t like it!!!
View Post

:blink: totally agree with "guest"

btw, i hope to be playing tournaments again from now on...no matter what rules.