Season 4 Finale Details

Hey everyone,

We have finalized the details for the Season 4 Global competition.
This post will discuss entry, tournament structure, eligibility, and rewards.
For anyone who was around for the previous Global competitions, this one is structured similarly.

Entry
On Sunday, January 12th at 11:59PM ET we will prevent further algos from entering or leaving the ‘Season Three’ environment, giving Rating time to stabilize on the leaderboard. You will still be able to see the leaderboard and your algo’s Rating and match history. Note that because of the glicko system, it should take a very short amount of time for Rating to stabilize.
On January 14th at 4:00 PM ET we will lock in the leaderboard. The top ten players at this point will be entered into the global competition finals. Season 4 algos will permanently stop playing ranked games at this point, and you will be able to remove them to make room for new Season 5 Algos.

Prizes and Competition Structure.
The total prize pool for this competition is 600$
There are 2 ways to win.

  1. Round Robin Groups
    Players will be broken up into two groups:
    5 players with odd rankings and 5 players with even rankings.
    All players will play against all other players in their group.
    Each win awards $25 for a total of $500
  2. Grand finale
    The player with the most wins in their group moves to the grand finale.
    In the case of a tie, the player who won the most matches among the tied players moves on.
    In the rare case this does not produce a single winner, rating will be used as a tiebreaker.
    The grand finale winner will earn an additional $100

Stream
We will be streaming the games Thursday, January 16th, at 6pm ET and run until around 8pm ET. As always, you can view the stream on our twitch channel .

Eligibility and Conflicts
Conflicts and issues will be resolved at C1’s discretion.

Season Five
We will be releasing a new config for Season 5
S5 ends in early May.

As always, please ask any questions or raise any concerns below!

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Why is the prize pool so much lower than past competitions?

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Maybe difficulty finding a corporate sponsor to actually pay for the rewards? Perhaps C1 doesn’t have as much funding allocated to pay for the competition rewards themselves? I wonder if sponsors have decided to focus on the live school events and have somewhat forgotten about the global competitions…

Overall, it seems the prize pool for global competitions has fallen somewhat each season. Just roughly speaking, season 1 got $200 per match, seasons 2 and 3 got $100 per match, and now 4 is down to $25, so I guess this is also a steeper decrease than we have seen before!

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Wow, that is just rude. I guess all the players were expecting a much bigger prize pool. How could it be so low? Compared to the previous session where the cash prizes were much less at 7000$ and today only 600$ of 200.000$ is left? This is not really helpful for a competition. You should definetly announce the total at the starting of a season. @RegularRyan?

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acshikh hit it on the head – so far, our live events have attracted many more players than our online competitions, and therefore the corporate sponsors (and prize $$$) have continued to skew towards live.

We have an amazing group of committed players online, but that group is relatively very small (many of our online competitions have single-digit entries). We’d love to develop a sustainable model for the online competitions, but we won’t be able to dish out thousands of dollars in prize money each season until the online player base grows significantly.

As always, we greatly appreciate everyone’s contribution to the community, and we will continue to experiment with new monetization strategies for our online competitions. Also – we know many of Terminal’s best contributions have come from the community, so we always welcome any new, creative ideas to help us grow.

C1Andrew

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Will the top 10 players choose which of their algos will complete in the tournament, or will it be whichever is highest rated at the time?

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Usually you can choose

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The top 10 players on the leaderboard can choose any of their active season 4 algos to compete - We always want everyone to come in on their A game for the most exciting event of the season.

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When will I be able to choose the algo for the finale? Or am I missing something?

Wait for all algos to stop playing and then if you want to change your algo (if you don’t, your top algo will be chosen) message the algo ID or something to @RegularRyan

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Thanks @IWannaWin

It looks like the leaderboard order posted has changed since 4:00pm EST. Are we locked in to the previous listing as of 4:00pm?

Correct me if I am wrong, it was:

  1. Owen - Wellness
  2. Acshi - Mazer
  3. Quincy - Rush
  4. Hamidwat - GG
  5. Felix - Eagle
  6. Paprikadobi - Zero
  7. Team Iconic/Ashley - Patience
  8. Max - Spinach
  9. Arnby - Genoracle
  10. IWannaWin - JustLetMeWinPlease
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I sure hope so, I was happy when I looked at 4 and it looks horrible for me now.

Usually they wait for the matches that have started before the deadline to finish
It can explain the little changes

Why?

It looks like they have continued playing matches up until now. The last match I have seen has a timestamp of 2020-01-14 22:44:04Z, which I think should be 5:44 EST (unless my utc conversion is off)

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The algo I was planning on running before it shifted doesn’t work against Spinach. Basically instead of guaranteed to get out of groups (based on previous matches) it would be dependent on which algos people decide to play.

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Can we get clarification on what the groups are? Which algo I use is highly group dependent. Acshikh’s list looks right to me and matches are definitely still happening. @RegularRyan

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I can confirm that matches have been running, sorry about that. We are increasing the cutoff time for the leaderboard snapshot to January 15th at 2:10pm ET (essentially now). The final games will resolve over the next 10 minutes or so. After this, I will list the 2 groups of 5 for the season finale here.

The two groups are as follow:
Group 1: 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th, 9th

  1. hamidwat
  2. Acshi H
  3. quincyc3
  4. Team: Iconic
  5. IWannaWin

Group 2: 2nd, 4th, 6th, 8th, 10th

  1. Owen
  2. Felix
  3. Paprikadobi
  4. arnby
  5. Max K

Note that while Owen and Hamidwat appear tied on the leaderboard, the glicko rating is tracked to 15 digits of precision, and Hamid comes out ahead by 0.18 rating points.

Please message me which algos you would like to compete before 11am ET tomorrow morning, at which point I will be setting up and running the final competition in preparation for the stream tomorrow afternoon at 6pm

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