Should fewer tournaments be tiered?

[Jayward]

I'm a relative newcomer to the tournament scene, getting involved towards the end of 2019, and as such I've only really known tiered tournaments. I think they're a great idea in principle; over time, certain teams had proven to be better than others and so the 'also-rans' got a boost to bring them up a little bit in competitive level. (As I understand it; this was all before my time)

Now we have a whole new edition and pretty much no team made it through untouched. Even relatively small changes will impact win rates, however minorly, which in turn would affect tiering.

But the original tiers were based on a huge amount of tournament results over many years when tiering wasn't a thing, right? That definitely doesn't exist for Season 2 at the moment; based on Sann's data at time of writing (https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/ ... ournaments) there are ~850 games untiered compared to over 3,000 tiered.

Much as I love tiering, I don't think we know enough about Season 2 for people to accurately judge which teams should be in which tiers. Especially not in rulepacks that have 6 or more tiers! You're essentially trying to make fine adjustments to win rate without having any idea of the base number.

And untiered tournaments help with a secondary factor; where do new teams go? It's fair enough to look at the minor changes to Dwarves and say 'yep, still tier 1' based on experience. But I'd argue that there's 7 new teams: Imperial Nobility, Black Orcs, Snotlings, Khorne, Old World Alliance, Underworld, Vampires. (I think the gameplay of the last two has fundamentally changed, so I'm happy to call them new). That's a quarter of the teams with no prior experience to draw upon, and it seems like GW is going to keep mixing things up.

So I think that there needs to be a significant uptick in the number of untiered tournaments, which in turn should make tiered tournaments better.

Thanks for reading my ramble about how tiering is ruining tiering! I'd be interested to hear what you all think.

[lunchmoney]

I agree that more un tiered events would be good, as the tiering still feels like it's a little hung over from pre2020. However it's up the to the players as much as the TOs. If more people go to non tiered events maybe more TOs will run non tiered events etc.

[Jayward]

Blood Bowl tournaments aren't free-market, though. If there's a tournament in my travel range on a weekend I have free, that will be my only option. The NAF sanctioning guidelines prevent other tournaments in the area getting sanctioned.

So my choice on any given weekend will never be tiered/untiered, it will be blood bowl/no blood bowl.

I could choose 'no blood bowl' on the weekends with tiered, but given that almost every tournament sells out it seems there's plenty of demand to take up any slack I could induce.

It really does have to come from the TOs

EDIT: Well, and players via indirect methods such as forum posts

[Lyracian]

I agree it is going to take a while for a new meta to settle and what levels teams should be at. Part of the question is though without Tiers do you just restrict the meta as less of the 29, or what ever it is now, teams will be taken to that event? To me I would be more interested in No Stars rather than no Tiers. Is it Hakflem that is warping the meta or extra skills on teams?

So my choice on any given weekend will never be tiered/untiered, it will be blood bowl/no blood bowl.

That is not the same for everyone though. Sure some events I go to are based on distance. If there is two events within a month of each other and I can only do one, but get to pick which one, then factors like price and rules set come into effect. I might also pick the "no Blood Bowl" option some weekends as I do have other stuff I like to do (shocking I know).

[Mystic Force]

For some of us who do not (anymore) live in the lush hills of England, opportunities for bloodbowl are more like I can either attend this tournament within a 5hr drive or wait 3 months. Regardless of weather a tournament is tiered I would still attend as Bloodbowl is Bloodbowl. It might effect what I take. I am not a good enough player to be doing this because I know how to exploit each rule set to its maximum, but rather I look at a roster and say that looks a bit crap, I do not want to get my butt kicked to hard all day because I don't have enough block on this roster for example.

The whole point of tiering was to increase the variety of teams taken so you are not rocking up to a tournament and playing 4 mirror matches in a day. The issue is now that with the increased availability, reduced cost and increased effectiveness the same stars are showing up across multiple teams and diluting the experience. Different races feel more similar opponents when they all sport the same two stars, and some of the less good teams are now more successful under certain rules packs because the cheap bad players give you cash for stars and then get the bonus of extra goodies.

So with these issues the use of tiering as a diversifier is no longer working as well as in the past. The data is also clearly indicating that some races are in a different place than before (underworld!) We will have to reexamine what we have been doing. But like I said I am not a sufficiently good coach to know how to do that right. With the tournament I held I simply adopted the GW tiers and gave an extra skill, so not really a huge nudge of the playing field. I did not have enough people to see if that really made the difference.

Its funny to see all the ink spilt over the underworld changes and now see just how good they have become makes me think that maybe we are not really that good as guessing how thing will actually work in practice.

[EastCoast]

Not a tourney player, are you all saying that the tiered tournaments are based on the old LRB Tiers?

Wouldn't the NAF be expected to adopt the current GW assigned tiers if they were going to do any tier based tournaments?

I'm not sure how I would feel about that, It seems that some times like the Necromantic Horror team should be considered Tier 1 but GW has them as Tier 2.

[lunchmoney]

Not a tourney player, are you all saying that the tiered tournaments are based on the old LRB Tiers?

Yes, and that's the issue - using old data in the new world.

Wouldn't the NAF be expected to adopt the current GW assigned tiers if they were going to do any tier based tournaments?

The NAF doesn't write people's rulesets.

[besters]

I think tiering is changing in the current ruleset, my next tournament has Chaos tier 4, Wood Elves tier 3. Tiering 1 to 4, 1 being lowest additional skills.

Not sure if this is a response to the new rules or if someone just likes Chaos and Woodies!

[Lyracian]

I think tiering is changing in the current ruleset, my next tournament has Chaos tier 4, Wood Elves tier 3. Tiering 1 to 4, 1 being lowest additional skills.

Not sure if this is a response to the new rules or if someone just likes Chaos and Woodies!

Interesting. Have you got a full list or link for where the different teams have been placed?

[Mystic Force]

NAF do not do the tiering, that is up to each individual tournament to decide, although if you did something too out there there might be some questioned asked before you get a NAF approved. And you do not have to have NAF approval for a tournament, there are ones run with non standard rule sets (like all stunty, mixed teams, secret league from FMBBL) It is just the results of these don't go in the database of results.

As it is an individual choice of where to put stuff by each organizer we will be some shifting around of team, and eventually some sort of consensus will be arrived at where a lot of tournaments will pick the same basic structure because that's the easiest thing to do.

The example of necro is one of the classics that at tier 1 they were weaker than the other tier 1 teams and at tier 2 they were better than all the other tier 2 choices. Obviously that depends on what benefit is gained at each tier. Its seem that a game should not dramatically break one way or other based on an addition of a single skill on a team.

I find the relative improvement of HE an interesting thing from the data, although one of the lesser played in the dataset. I think its because in the era of more bashing, HE are the most armoured elves and can therefore take a punch better, while also being the only ones who can really throw it. I will probably take HE to the next tournament I have to submit a roster for (depending on roster criteria) to test this out but if you see above I am not a great coach not sure that I am the one to prove this theory!

[lunchmoney]

there are ones run with non standard rule sets (like all stunty, mixed teams, secret league from FMBBL) It is just the results of these don't go in the database of results.

They do. We added a Specialist category for events like those.

[Mystic Force]

Ah yes I forgot about that! Just a power grab by that shadowy cabal of corrupt administrators!

[Lyracian]

I find the relative improvement of HE an interesting thing from the data, although one of the lesser played in the dataset. I think its because in the era of more bashing, HE are the most armoured elves and can therefore take a punch better, while also being the only ones who can really throw it. I will probably take HE to the next tournament I have to submit a roster for (depending on roster criteria) to test this out but if you see above I am not a great coach not sure that I am the one to prove this theory!

I find the High Elf interesting as well. People seem to be focusing on them and lots of people saying lets take then. When I look at the numbers Elven Union seems be at 54% and High at 56% (as best as I can tell from the link). Given the data set seems to barley have 100 games with each team that does not appear to be a significant advantage in a dice game. For me it needs a much bigger data set before deciding that High Elves are the best Elven race.

[Jayward]

In statistical terms, the number of games needed to have 95% confidence in something like a win rate range is roughly N = 4/(range^2). So +-5% is a range of 10%, which is 0.1. Therefore you need 4/(0.1^2) = 400 games for 95% confidence in a +-5% range.

But this is less accurate for Blood Bowl, where the win rate is influenced by matchups, coach skill, and tiering bonuses. And a +-5% range isn't that handy for Blood Bowl because historically that's as broad as the 45-55% range for basically all the non-stunty teams.

So High Elves, with their 172 games, would have such a wide range at the moment that you can't really draw conclusions. Even if they had 5 times as many games and still kept that high win rate it wouldn't actually mean much; it seems that almost no-one take them to untiered tournaments, so we would be unable to distinguish between 'this team is good' and 'this team is being given too many tier bonuses'

Another possible wrinkle is that the majority of people are likely to pick a race that they think will do well. So if the tier bonuses are generous to High Elves people will take them and presumably do well. If the bonuses aren't good enough, you won't find that people take them and do poorly so much as people just won't take them.

And this is kind of my point; we can't really use data from tiered tournaments to determine tiers (unless they're standardised) because there's just too many variables. We could probably figure out which teams are T1 by seeing which ones have the smallest change between tiered and untiered, but even for that we would need more untiered data.

[nonumber]

I've removed tiers from my tournaments and I'll probably leave them off even when the folks that can see the matrix figure out what they should be. The last two of mine have been won by Undead and Khemri respectively, two teams that have traditionally been at the opposite end of any tiering system. He didn't win but a handy Elf Union player was also running amok with the new sneaky git / dirty player wombo combo last time out.

It's seems (and this is a statement with absolutely no data analysis) like giving pretty much everyone the toys they need brings out a varied field, and we're still at a relatively low-mid "TV". A couple of secondary skills and allowing stacking in the mix means that you can build your Chaos Warriors as well as your Necro Warewolves. I only allow stunties on the star players at the moment maxed at 1 so that takes care of that.

I'm really satisfied with how it's gone for the last few events so the likelihood is I'll maintain it for the foreseeable.