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.

First of all, I want to congratulate Faceless with a supreme win. Good job on the effort! Looks like you had a solid player base participating ^_^.

Second of all, I want to give thanks to you Silver for being a good sport and manually add more credits to us in Legion.

Thirdly, I am just curious if number of launches should be apart of the tie braker calculations. Have not personally given this much thought, so I am just putting it out there to hear peoples opinion.

I like the "Overall bots in Atlantis" option.

That does put the strategy in some odd places, like backstacking under the 1st place faction where the other team can't hit them. But that only counts if you're trying to get 2nd.

I think that for second place one should use the number of bots of the two remaining factions, but counted only on the zones not owned by the winning faction.

I do not consider number of launches to be an interesting metric, as it makes a lot of difference if you launch, for example, hl and absorbers that have a higher survivability, but usually make you perform less total launches.

For this reason I would also try to compute the leader board of each faction based not only on total number of launches, but also on total number of bots that are present in Atlantis. Maybe with a 50/50 ratio.

Or at least split the additional bonus based also on that.

There can be huge discrepancies, even if this is not always true, between total number of survived bots and ranking based only on number of launches.

I also like the number of launches approach. as part of the tie breaking logic. that way if two factions basically just go after eachother and it comes down to having enough zones flipping back and forth at the last minute the faction who was left alone but also dint really participate wouldn't be gifted a second place over the faction that actually tried to win.

I’ve given this some thought. I agree with Rayndel because I think that allows more strategic possibilities than the current rules (as clarified above).

However I have another idea for a change to the first tiebreaker (Prime). The idea is that it shouldn’t just/automatically/always be Prime that is the tiebreaker zone. I have two suggestions for how that could be implemented. 1) This is the simpler of the two: decide the tiebreaker zone as the one which has the narrowest bot count margin of victory out of all zones at the end of Atlantis. 2) Slightly more complicated: each day of Atlantis assign a random zone as “if Atlantis ends today this zone would be the tiebreaker, if Atlantis doesn’t end today this zone is eliminated from contention as being the tiebreaker zone”. This option would add an extra little tracking/subgame that could impact strategies in interesting ways. You’d still know the tiebreaker zone on the last day, giving some time to react, and the possible zones that it could be would narrow somewhat as Atlantis proceeds.

I also agree with Rayndel, to me the overall bot count is the most intuitive solution, counting bots in all zones. Just because bots are in an enemy zone doesn´t mean they´re not there or don´t matter, anyone who has been on either side of a beachhead will know that.

JBo, my problem with your idea is that the tie breaker wouldn´t be on neutral ground. You might not know what zone it´s gonna be before the last day, but giving a random faction an advantage would cause a lot of frustration in a close battle. I like where you´re going, but with the current atlantis layout I´d hate to see that implemented.

It´d be a different story if Atlantis had multiple neutral core zones though, if there was a tournament type that featured three core zones (Legion, Swarm and Faceless Prime) or an entire upside down 6er triangle of neutral zones with special rules I´d love to see your idea implemented.