The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

[Date]

Saturday, May 1st, 2010


[Time]

Here (http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=5&day=1&year=2010&hour=06&min=0&sec=0&p1=64&sort=1) is how I found the various local times in case anyone's wondering.

* 4  AM Los Angeles
* 5  AM Denver
* 6  AM Chicago
* 7  AM New York
* 12 PM London
* 1  PM Amsterdam/Paris
* 2  PM Helsinki/Jerusalem
* 3  PM Moscow
* 9  PM Sydney
* 11 PM Auckland


[Place]

#UQM-Arena on irc://chat.freenode.net. If you don't know how any of this stuff works, this (http://gekko.frud.biz/uqmtutorial/) thing may be of use to you.


[Tournament Rules]

1) There is a maximum fleet size of 200 points for all players.
2) Do not use more than one of any ship type.
3) The Thraddash Torch is banned from play.
4) The "stalemate breaker" rule is in effect. There has been confusion regarding this numerous times, so here is the rule in its verbose entirety:


Stalemates

Rule: In the spirit of competition, both players should employ whatever tactics they consider most effective. This may result in a stalemate at some point. If so, the faster of the two ships becomes a designated attacker. The attacker does not necessarily have to make a bee-line directly for the defender, but they are required to take the initiative.

Explanation: Stalemates are bound to happen. We found this rule to be a relatively painless solution. The decision to use speed as a stalemate-breaker did not significantly reduce the effectiveness of Star Control's fastest ships. As it turned out, the most mobile combatants were best suited to withstand such a penalty.

5) Shofixti host advantage prevention rule is in effect. This is a highly trivial case, but seems to occur rather often:

Shofixti Host Advantage Prevention

Rule: In case the guest player uses the Shofixti's Glory Device against the player who is hosting the game and manages to destroy the opponent in his suicide attack, then that battle is considered as the Shofixti's victory. In case this happens the host player must tell what ship he is going to deploy next on the IRC, giving the upper hand to the guest player.

Explanation: The game forces the guest player to select a ship first. This causes the host player to get an advantage in the game of rock-paper-scissors by giving him an opportunity to pick a counter against the guest player. This has been discussed on the arena and it has been decided that the battle in question should be considered as Shofixti's victory.

[Tournament Structure]

Players will be paired against each other at random. The tournament will consist of three rounds using Swiss tournament rules (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss-system_tournament), meaning that you will play against other defeated players if you lose a match. There will be an additional final round between undefeated contestants if a clear winner has not emerged.

If the player turn-out is low, everyone will play against everyone else once (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round-robin_tournament).


What the heck are those times, Gekko?!

I'm sorry America, but the tournament is held so that Australians and Europeans are privileged. This is due to the most active players being in those continents. In earlier tournaments this was not the case as Cedric seemed to be the only player in that area of the world, but currently the activity is much higher in Australia and Europe than in America. If you are in a timezone which doesn't go well with this schedule and want to participate, then post in this thread and we can move the times by an hour or two.

The whole day (Saturday) is considered as a meet-up day and players are encouraged to join during that day.

Man, for once this is at a reasonable time. If it wasn't for the fact that we have guests on 1st of May i'd be there. Hopefully you're not counting on a lot of Finnish players the day after Vappu though  :P

Ah hell, Vappu? I completely forgot that. Luckily the Finns are most likely the only current players who are celebrating that pagan holiday. But hey, if you in your hangover feel like doing something productive for once...

This would be a good way for me to protest against a disgusting drinking-holiday, such as Vappu.

First of May can be pretty big in some countries though.


Heh, I'm too old, weak and wussy to get hangovers nowadays. But guests are guests and 1st of May is sort of big around here.

I guess I'm the only 'young one' in here, still getting hangovers on a regular basis :').

now I have to set my alarm clock on a saturday...  ::) :'( :'(

How can a drinking holiday be disgusting

How can a drinking holiday not be disgusting?

:D

Is there any point in advertising this on SCDB too? I'm not that old member here, but I have an impression about those guys not being interested in pvp.

There's quite a few new people there -so you might get someone

I kinda sorta of newsified you already, so both the SCDB and whoever uses the PNF RSS knows about this now.

EDIT: 7 views so far (http://star-control.com/), so that's something Iguess :)

I *might* be there. Oh, and I'm probably the worst player, so if anyone wishes to challenge me for that title, be my guest  8)

I'm down, but depends on what time the tourney begins. I'm probably the only one in Canada taking part.

Bumping this thread. Remember to arrive on Saturday! It's spring/autumn, so make sure that DST doesn't mess the schedule for you if that affects somehow. I never quite understood how it works outside Finland and in relation to UTC.

Touche  8)

Universal Time doesn't have DST, so it never jumps backwards or forwards. This is one of the reasons why it is a convenient fixed point. A time zone can be seen as UTC offset by a constant. Seen this way, DST is a switch between time zones separated by an hour. For example, in the European Union, DST is in effect from 01:00 UTC on the last Sunday in March until 01:00 UTC on the last Sunday in October each year. Without DST, Helsinki has UTC + 02:00. With DST, Helsinki has UTC + 03:00. Different countries switch to DST at different times (for example, DST in New Zealand is from the last Sunday in September until the first Sunday in April) or not at all (much of Africa and Asia), so the easiest way to convert is via UTC.

I probably won't be around until 1pm EST tomorrow, is that too late?

And I'll probably arrive in the afternoon, I got some things that came up suddenly, so sorry about that.

Alright. This was one heck of a mess, and it can be summarized with the following picture:

(http://sianleuka.ath.cx/~gekko/temp/pkunk_win.png)

In all seriousness I don't have a clue on who won. Probably Shiver. Might as well be Tiberian or me.

How we ended up to this mess? Well let me tell you.

Round 2 had begun a few minutes ago. I was playing my game against Sideways, but it turned out that Shiver and myc0n were both unable to host a game. I finished my game, marked the score and went to help them. Tiberian had also finished his game against mrcharmin. After some thinking we decided that both of them should play against Tiberian, who was the only player with 2 points at that time. A good plan, I thought. Alas, Tiberian was unable to host a game. We then decided to have a replacement match for Shiver and myc0n, but they should be "one-way -matches", meaning that only Shiver and myc0n could get scores. If their replacement opponent got a score from that match, they would then have played all their 3 games already - and this would have messed up the third round.

So we threw the players with the most score against these two players: Sideways played with Shiver, I played with myc0n. In the end I won my game, so that caused myc0n to get a 0 for his round 2 game (I naturally remained at my 1 point). Against all odds Sideways defeated Shiver. This caused Shiver to also have 0 for his round 2.

Managing to get the channel so confused that even the Melnorme would be amazed I started the third round based on the points: Tiberian had two, me, Shiver and myc0n had 1. Sideways and mrcharmin had 0. This meant that Sideways and mrcharmin were playing against each other and one of the 1 point players would have to play with Tiberian. A dice decided this player to be Shiver.

Eventually, at around 19:30 my time (tournament began on time at 14:00) we finally had the results from all games.

Tiberian: 2
Shiver: 2
Gekko: 2
Sideways: 1
Myc0n: 1
mrcharmin: 0

Now how do we rate this score? We could use the old good "points left" -method where we summarize the total amount of points left in our fleet after victories, and then remove the amount of points with what we lost to other players. This gave me the following scores:

Tiberian: 54
Gekko: 49
Shiver: 43

Sideways: 19
myc0n: -6

Using this system we could say that Tiberian won, but let's look at the games played:

Tiberian won Sideways
Tiberian won myc0n
Tiberian lost to Shiver

Shiver won Gekko
Shiver won Tiberian
Shiver lost to Sideways

Gekko won Sideways
Gekko won myc0n
Gekko lost to Shiver

From this information we can figure out the following:

Shiver has defeated both of the other 2 point players. However, he lost to an 1 point player.
Tiberian has the most score, but he was playing against two medium tier players - just like Gekko.

Using this reasoning, I declare the final ratings:

1. Shiver
2. Tiberian
3. Gekko
4. Sideways
5. myc0n
6. mrcharmin

And so ends the May net melee tournament. Thank you for all participants and special honors for Sideways for defeating a top tier player.