Posts Tagged ‘seeding’

Phase III Completed

Saturday, April 2nd, 2011

Congratulations to our final 18 Contestants who advance from the final phase of the Preliminaries. It has been very difficult to say goodbye to those who did not make it, but the space on our main roster is limited. Some characters may appear again in future Exhibition Matches, so their participation in ISML is not necessarily over for the year. However, we hope to see many of them get nominated again for a chance at the Tiara next year.

Thanks for voting in Phase III; we hope that the pick-3 format has been interesting, as it is new to ISML this year. Last year it was a pick-2 format.

Three more rounds remain in our Preseason, which make up the seeding tournament. These are a series of exhibition rounds featuring our 50 Contestants. Wins and losses do not count towards Regular Season statistics, but we do use this data to help seed our Contestants in the Regular Season schedule. Good seeding information allows us to balance the matchups of each Period (phase) of the Regular Season, so all our Contestants have a fair shot at Necklaces. Plus we can put some more exciting matchups on key days, and make the tournament a lot more fun for everyone.

Round 1 splits the 50 Contestants into five groups of ten. You will vote for up to two girls per group.
Round 2 changes it up to ten groups of five. Again, you will pick up to two girls.
Round 3 is seven groups of seven — pick two (the 50th seed coming out of the previous rounds does not participate).

More details are in our 2011 Charter.

Finally, the ISML team gives a thank you to amai-chan, who is our latest donor. Thank you for supporting our tournament and keeping our servers online for the year ahead. :)

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Charter update

Monday, March 28th, 2011

Our 2011 Charter must be amended to address the pools for Phase III.

“On 28 March 2011, clauses VI.B.1, VI.E.1, and VI.H.1 were removed because this was discovered to be very impractical, difficult, and potentially unfair to Candidates. Instead, Staff will do their best to minimize repeat opponents, but group balance takes higher priority.”

The original clauses state that each round of Phase III will match up Candidates that did not face each other in the previous round (or in Phase II in the case of Round 1). This sounded like a good idea when drafting the Charter, but as we have now observed in practice, this is very impractical … if not nearly impossible to do given the combinations available to us. Most importantly, it is potentially unfair if we have to force an unfavorable matchup for some Candidates just to meet this requirement. Our seeding throughout the Preliminaries has been based on performance in previous rounds and saimoe events, and that criteria should continue to take top priority in order to generate balanced groupings. We will still make adjustments to minimize repeated opponents or same-series opponents, but it cannot be guaranteed.

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Phase III under way

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

First off, a thank you to zmjhgvn for his fourth donation of the year!

Round 1 is now over in Phase III; we’ve had to say farewell to several (56) Candidates. We wish them luck next year, and perhaps some of them may make an appearance in exhibition matches throughout the season.

In the final round tomorrow, we’ve grouped the remaining 42 Candidates into groups of 7 again. Except this time you may select only one (1) character from each group. The winner of each group will continue into the Regular Season while the rest will be sent home. This may be one of the most challenging matches yet!

Also we hope you have enjoyed the extra Seeding rounds this week. We discovered that we don’t quite have enough data yet on our current Contestants, so these extra matches have been a great help to us. The final round tomorrow will feature two Seeding arenas instead of one; we appreciate your help!

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Phase II over

Saturday, February 27th, 2010

Congratulations to our 14 new Contestants! Our roster is nearly complete — only six more slots are left.

Phase III will begin on Sunday. The remaining Candidates have been placed into 14 groups of 7. Sunday will feature Groups 1-7 and Tuesday will feature Groups 8-14. You will be able to vote for up to two Candidates per group.

The top 3 winners in each group will advance to the second (and final) round on Thursday. Everybody else will be eliminated. Thursday’s round will consist of 6 groups of 7, and you will vote for just one Candidate in each group. The winners will be our final set of Contestants.

In addition to Phase III we need a little more seeding data for our 14 new Contestants. So the third and fourth round of Seeding will take place on Sunday and Tuesday in the form of an 8th arena on the ballot. Please vote for up to two Contestants in this arena as well. The data will help us write the schedule for the Regular Season.

Thanks for voting in ISML!

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End of seeding

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

And that concludes the seeding tournament; thank you to everyone who voted and helped us collect data.

There are no winners or losers in this event, necessarily; the final rankings on the front page simply provide a good estimate of Contestant strength, and we will use this to set up the Regular Season schedule for all our Contestants once the Preliminary Period concludes.

Preliminaries Phase II begins tomorrow, so more ISML action is ahead.

This week, we also thank our latest donor from Russia, who would like to be known as |/◕‿‿◕|x/.

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A brief confirmation error

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

Voters in the first 20 minutes or so of Seeding 2 experienced an error in the confirmation screen, which lit up the wrong character portraits after a ballot was submitted.

This was an error in the display only; your ballot was still recorded correctly as you intended on the voting screen. The code provided in the text boxes was still consistent with your votes.

Sorry for the confusion!

…And while I’m on the topic, Shana and Hinagiku will receive points equal to the highest % of votes received in this round by any one Contestant. Don’t worry too much if the final seeding results are not what you may have wanted; the purpose of this tournament is to give us a recent measure of relative Contestant strength, so we are able to build a balanced Regular Season schedule. The difference between, say, 1st and 5th place won’t be very large.

Thanks, everyone, for sticking with us through this. :)

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Phase I concludes; seeding tournament next

Sunday, February 14th, 2010

Congratulations to Holo, Nadeko, Mei, Konata, Minatsu, Rika, Ami, Ruiko, and Mikoto for advancing to the Regular Season!

Now they join the rest of the Phase I winners in a game with our 16 auto-qualified Contestants — the seeding tournament is coming up next. We need some pre-ranking data prior to the Regular Season, so this two-day event will help us figure that out. In Round 1, you will see the 30 Contestants split into five groups. Your job is to vote for up to 2 of them. Yes, two.

Round 2 will be the same way but with some of the girls shuffled around — and still two votes maximum per group/arena. The data we get will help us build a fair and balanced Regular Season schedule.

Our charter has been amended to include information about the seeding tournament. There are also extra things to be noted in the next news post.

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First winners

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

Congratulations to Mio, Nagi, Mafuyu, Kurimu, and Saber on their advancing to the Regular Season!

The Contestants page has been updated. The Phase I graph section of the preliminaries page has been updated, too, with a menu to view one group at a time (saving bandwidth as well as the length of the page).

Tomorrow is the last day of Phase I, where we will advance 9 more Candidates to the Regular Season.

The Seeding Tournament will start on Sunday. Rules will be properly added to the FAQ and Charter, soon, but I’ll give you an early heads-up of the process: the 14 Phase I winners plus the 16 auto-entrants will be organized into various groups. You will then vote for two (2) characters out of each group. Contestants gain points based on the results and then are shuffled again for the second (and last) day of the tournament. The important thing is that you vote for two girls instead of one; we’ll post another reminder as the event gets closer.

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Seeding tournament plus Updated voting form

Sunday, February 7th, 2010

We are announcing a seeding tournament to take place during the two previously blank days in our schedule this month. On 14 Feb and 16 Feb, we will have special matches involving our 16 automatically-qualified Contestants in order to determine seeding for the Regular Season.

The purpose of seeding is to balance and optimize the schedules of all our Contestants. Ranking the 34 that will make it via the preliminaries is easy, because we have a lot of recent match data. But the data is less clear for our 16 automatic entrants.

More details will be available next week. The FAQ page has been updated. The two matches will be used for seeding only; the results won’t impact the rest of prelims or any part of the Regular Season other than scheduling.

The second announcement is about some changes to the voting form. First, a 5-minute timer is now in place, meaning you are unable to submit your vote until 5 minutes have elapsed since you loaded the page. We have had a lot of issues with illegal, automated voting last week, so we are implementing this timer to curb such activity. The timer serves another positive purpose in keeping honest voters from accidentally rushing. Some of you have shared that you might have missed an arena while scrolling down the page too quickly … or forgetting to go back to an arena you skipped at first. The timer can help slow things down a bit to encourage you to review your ballot before submitting. While you can always send us an email to change your ballot if there are errors, making sure it’s correct the first time will help everyone. :)

Some people have also reported bugs with the abstain counter (i.e. it showing a negative number); I have adjusted the code, and the counter should be accurate now. Thanks for all the feedback on this issue.

And thank you, everyone, for your patience and cooperation overall! We’re committed to making sure that everybody plays fair in this tournament and that we have the most accurate results.

One last thing — we are grateful for SirWence, who is our most recent donor. Thank you!

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