This month, Atlantis was won by the Faceless, leaving the Legion and Swarm with a single zone a piece. The tie breaker logic went to the Swarm. I received a flurry of questions once people received their qredits asking how Legion got 3 place, despite having more total bots in all Atlantis zones.
I had to review the code twice to figure out how the tie breaker awarded 2 place to Swarm. Here is how the code works.
To calculate 1 place, the code does the following.
- Who has more zones
- If a tie, who controls prime (of those that tied in step 1)
- If a tie, who has the most bots in all zones (of those that tied in step 1)
To calculate 2 place, the code takes out all the zones controlled by the winning team and runs the logic again.
The problem is, that Legion had half their total bots in a Faceless zone, and that zone was thrown out when calculating the tie breaker between 2 place.
I’m sure the code has been this way for at least 5 years, probably longer. That doesn’t mean this is the best way to calculate a final tie breaker between 2 place.
I’m going to manually award more qredits to 3 place payout. Even I misunderstood the calculation of the tie breaker, and had to look at the code a second time to figure out how the tie breaker didn’t follow the rules we’ve been sharing with people for years.
I didn’t realize the logic for the last tiebreaker was throwing out the winning team’s zones until I went back and looked again. I will fix this “bug” for the next Atlantis. If I’m going in there to mess with the logic anyway, what do you think the tie breaker should be? Maybe it is as simple as using bots in all zones, maybe there is something better.