Delaclava/Ceni bid for Cup of Harmony 84

[Ceni]

The Football Associations of Ceni and Delaclava present...

About Delaclava
Delaclava is a large democratic republic, formerly of southeastern Atlantian Oceania before recently undergoing a groundbreaking terraformation onto the planet of Sonnel. The nation prides itself on education and scientific development, culture and music, a well-developed public transportation system, and active lifestyles with an emphasis on recreation and sport. Internationally, the nation is particularly notable for its advanced education and research, high quality of life, greater than average disposable income, strong community and family structures, and vibrant music and nightlife from the larger cities to the smaller niches. Delaclava is home to the National Athletic Complex, situated in Catherina, the former national capital and to this day an entertainment hotspot. The Complex has hosted a portion of every major championship that Delaclava has organized, across multiple sports. The move to Sonnel has also inspired a new wave of technological and physical innovations, including the development of the Mainframe.

The soccer Phoenixes have historically enjoyed some success and finally returned to its former glory by qualifying for its seventh World Cup in World Cup 91, winning their playoff in dramatic comeback fashion. If the Phoenixes aren’t able to make it two in a row, they would certainly be a viable contender in this very Cup of Harmony.

In addition to the 44th and 46th editions of this tournament, Delaclava has hosted World Cup 55, Baptism of Fire 72, AOCAF 31, four World Bowls, two International Basketball Championships, and numerous other smaller competitions.

About Ceni
Ceni is a small island country of around 5500 km2 located in the eastern parts of the Rushmori region of Terranea. Although it has no land borders, the nearest countries are Electrum, from which it is separated in the west by a narrow strait, and the Isles of Avon, a small republic located to the east in the same island chain. With a population of just over 13 million, this makes Ceni one of the densest countries in Rushmore, at around 2360 people per sq km. Ceni is also one of the most urbanized countries in Rushmore, with the three major cities, Cenial, the capital, City Centre, and New Oxford, forming one large urban agglomeration, with the city petering out around the edges of the metropolis. Cenians enjoy a high standard of living as well as a large social welfare net and free education, courtesy of a Scandinavian-style liberal government.

Ceni has hosted events as five nations - Racao, Kel Assuk, Costa de Ouro, New Gelderland, and this one. As Racao, he has hosted the Port Louis Rugby Sevens events. As Kel Assuk, he hosted the 3rd Independents Cup with Spaam. As Costa de Ouro, he has hosted the 13th Handball World Cup, the 6th Volleyball World Expo, 1st Fencing Grand Prix, and 3 Astyrian Series of tennis. As New Gelderland, he has co-hosted the Games of the X Olympiad with Electrum and the 23rd Copa Rushmori. Finally, as Ceni, he hosted World Cup 76 with Electrum, World Cup 79 with Drawkland, the 63rd Cup of Harmony with San Jose Guayabal, the 61st Baptism of Fire with Red Blackiland, the 20th International Basketball Championships, 7 editions of the Cenian Open, and 3 editions of the International Tennis Trophy. He has also hosted numerous smaller tennis tournaments with both Costa de Ouro and Ceni.

Invitations and Format
At this point, we will aim for an 8 groups of X format. Based on Tumbra's postmortem of CoH 83, 56 seems to have been too much of a stretch for this tournament: We will therefore aim for either 40 or 48 invitations to the Cup of Harmony. With either format, we will aim for a straight Round of 16 with no playoffs, out of the belief that a four- or five-match group stage with both RP bonus and RP bonus carryover (see below) will be determinative enough.

Given that we have not yet reached the halfway point of qualifiers, we are reluctant to assign a quantitative value to the number and quality of RPs that will be required to secure an invitation at this point; however, we hope to make a decision on invitations in conjunction with RP bonus data from the World Cup Qualifying hosts, should they be so generous as to provide that to us. At this point, we would tend to prioritize quality contributions rather than consistent but mediocre contributions; we will decide edge cases as the circumstances allow. For instance, if we had 44 nations that we absolutely wanted to have in the tournament, we would likely head up to 48 to be more inclusive; if we only had 36 nations in that case, we would probably not try and fill the full 48. But again, this is dependent on how the remaining qualifying MDs play out.

However, we will definitely require the posting of a roster in WCQs to be considered, therefore we will not require roster-to-signup since we can refer to rosters posted in WCQs. Therefore, a TG confirmation will be all that is needed to confirm a signup.

Ceni and Delaclava are both in positions where they could conceivably qualify for either the World Cup or the Cup of Harmony; voters concerned about nepotism in their invitation to the Cup of Harmony should root for their qualifications to the World Cup, but in any case, both cohosts aim to meet the highest standards for RP participation in World Cup qualifications to be invited to the Cup of Harmony on their own merit. For our puppets, World Cup qualification is less likely; New Gelderland and Talannua will be considered on the merits of their RP contributions as if they were their own independent nations. We will not commit to explicitly inviting or not inviting them at this point. (That is to say, they will not receive additional consideration merely for being our puppets.)

As for timeframe, we aim to host at roughly the same time as the World Cup, with scorinations every 48 hours and on World Cup off days. We may need to start a little earlier than the World Cup finals to accommodate the longer tournament length, although the timing is still in flux and of course dependent on the hosts' IRL circumstances.

Scorination and RP Bonus Details
We plan to use xkoranate 0.3.3 with additive mods ranging from -5 to +5, and the SQIS formula. Although the World Cup will be using NSFS to "better distinguish between the top teams," the Cup of Harmony has more of a variation in team quality on paper, and we want to ensure that this is a tournament to reward RPing and not simply a coronation of the highest-ranked non-qualifier. Concomitantly, RP bonus will be generous and cumulative; quality writing is preferred over quantity, both in terms of wordcount and/or number of posts. Pending sharing of RP bonus data from the World Cup qualifiers, we will aim for a RP bonus carryover equivalent to two MDs, consisting of the best RP score and average RP score from qualifying normalized to the CoH bonus scale.

If competing in the Cup of Harmony, Ceni and Delaclava would both receive a host bonus (likely around one MD's worth of bonus); if invited, neither New Gelderland nor Talannua will receive this bonus additionally. Any and all of Ceni, New Gelderland, Delaclava, or Talannua's matches would be scorinated by the respective other cohost (i.e. not by their owner/master).

We will use group stage tiebreakers as follows:

Points
Overall goal difference
Head-to-head points
Head-to-head goal difference
Coin flip (OOCly: Match scorinated with RP bonus as only inputs)

Of course, we welcome any questions that the community might have.

[Delaclava]

I am Delaclava and I approve this message.

[Independent Athletes from Quebec]

Great bidders, and their bid covers every base well. I also know that both bidders will be prompt with whatever adjustments that may need to be made, and communicate them promptly with the members of NSS public. So please consider this as an endorsement.

I do have a couple of questions though:

1) What's the expected cutoff window for both cobidders?

2) Will we see possible RP prompts (or events that may or may not affect the matches!) over the course of this CoH? I know this may sound a bit repetitive coming from me - see: past precedents with past BoF bidders who have been asked this - but it's something that has been out there more often on BoFs, CoHs
and of course Eagles Cups lately, so I wanted to hear your guys' thoughts on this.

3) What do you mean 'generous' in this case? Everybody knows what the rough idea of 'generous and cumulative RP bonus' is but it's been said the same on 50 times without exactly clarifying anything. Can you give us a bit clearer idea of this?

[Delaclava]

1) What's the expected cutoff window for both cobidders?

I plan to cutoff around 8pm Eastern time; Ceni is planning a window of 9pm-11pm Eastern time. We are cognizant of the end of Daylight Savings coming up in a few weeks and will be sure to communicate any shifts in cutoff time as a result.

2) Will we see possible RP prompts (or events that may or may not affect the matches!) over the course of this CoH?

We don't have any in mind at this time.

3) What do you mean 'generous' in this case? Everybody knows what the rough idea of 'generous and cumulative RP bonus' is but it's been said the same on 50 times without exactly clarifying anything. Can you give us a bit clearer idea of this?

Without the field finalized, we anticipate that the RP bonus, by the end of the group stage, will allow a strong RPer out of Pot 8 to catch up with a Pot 1 team who does not RP during the CoH.

[Independent Athletes from Quebec]

Thank you.

[Legalese]

Question and a comment.

Question: Given the roster-in-qualifying requirement to be invited, should I take that as meaning there won't be a roster bonus?

Comment (warning, numbers):

Without the field finalized, we anticipate that the RP bonus, by the end of the group stage, will allow a strong RPer out of Pot 8 to catch up with a Pot 1 team who does not RP during the CoH.

For those who might find it useful, some rankings info:

Highest-ranked side in Pot 1 (Turori): 51.08
Lowest-ranked side in Pot 1 (Zwangzug): 32.57
Highest-ranked side in Pot 8 (Darkmania): 6.57
Lowest-ranked side in Pot 8(Reçueçn): 3.79

Minimum rankings gap between Pot 1 and Pot 8: 26.00. 26/4 = 6.5; 26/5 = 5.2

[Ceni]

Question: Given the roster-in-qualifying requirement to be invited, should I take that as meaning there won't be a roster bonus?

No. We do anticipate there being a roster bonus for rosters posted directly into the CoH thread, although we will probably look askance at rosters that are obviously copied and pasted from the World Cup thread (e.g. rosters that include home stadium information, for instance). However, the roster bonus will not be inflated compared to a normal matchday's RP bonus.

For those who might find it useful, some rankings info:

Highest-ranked side in Pot 1 (Turori): 51.08
Lowest-ranked side in Pot 1 (Zwangzug): 32.57
Highest-ranked side in Pot 8 (Darkmania): 6.57
Lowest-ranked side in Pot 8(Reçueçn): 3.79

Minimum rankings gap between Pot 1 and Pot 8: 26.00. 26/4 = 6.5; 26/5 = 5.2

Thank you for the comment; to clarify, we did not mean WCQ pots, but CoH pots. The last few CoH Pot 1s have tended to have a larger range of KPBs, and a lower bottom cutoff, and we had based our mental heuristic on a somewhat lower value of KPB than the lowest-ranked WCQ Pot 1 side. For example, the value for this calculation would have been 2.75 KPBs for CoH 82 and 2.08 KPBs for CoH 83. That being said, when the field is confirmed, we will reevaluate our RP bonus scale, and it has not been definitely decided at one value or another.

As an additional aside (not wanting to turn this bid thread into a debate on the community norms surrounding this, and certainly not wanting to imply that I speak for Delaclava on the following), I do wish that we could discuss our intended bonuses in a more open manner without having to skulk around with vague terminology that means different things to different people. I believe this was the premise of Quebec's question, and I think we were reluctant to name a specific figure in part because of community norms against the revelation of specific RP bonus scaling (and also because, as I mentioned before, we have not settled on a firm value yet, and merely wished to give a more specific idea that gave a closer quantification of "generous").

[Independent Athletes from Quebec]

As an additional aside (not wanting to turn this bid thread into a debate on the community norms surrounding this, and certainly not wanting to imply that I speak for Delaclava on the following), I do wish that we could discuss our intended bonuses in a more open manner without having to skulk around with vague terminology that means different things to different people. I believe this was the premise of Quebec's question, and I think we were reluctant to name a specific figure in part because of community norms against the revelation of specific RP bonus scaling (and also because, as I mentioned before, we have not settled on a firm value yet, and merely wished to give a more specific idea that gave a closer quantification of "generous").

This is the correct assessment of what I had originally intended with my question regarding the 'generous' part of the wording.

My intention to ask comes from my personal experience where over the years I have been in both situations where I was more generous, or a bit stricter than my cohost(s)'. I have applied different standards and scales, not to mention what to prioritise when grading the specifics. I would be grading the Olympics different than let's say, a WJHC or IBS, because of the number of scores offered, the tournament's nature and the rough timeline.

In recent cycles I've seen some hosts giving very specific figures, such as Mr. Green Mountain's IBC-36 bid that was just posted, and that seems to be a bit more commonplace in recent cycles. While I do think that's a good thing, asking extremely specific information regarding host bonuses was not something that I had in mind, especially with the level of faith and trust I have for both Ceni and Delaclava, and also with how we are still on the very early phase of the CoH bids process. So a rough scale, one that suggests positive intent and the very range they wish to go forward with it, works for me.

[West Barack and East Obama]

Sonnel bid

[Tumbra]

Good bid. Full support

[PotatoFarmers]

Any rationale for prioritising GD as tiebreaker over H2H?

[Delaclava]

Any rationale for prioritising GD as tiebreaker over H2H?

Placing GD first prioritizes the overall group stage performance of each team; this is what we chose to emphasize.

[Legalese]

So above, you guys said:

We will therefore aim for either 40 or 48 invitations to the Cup of Harmony.

However, looking at your thread, it seems that number's tightened a little:

Format

There will be eight groups of either four or five teams, for a total of 32 or 40 teams.

Looking through the WC92 RP thread, there's eighty nations who RPed at least once (and posted a roster) who did not qualify for the World Cup. That means we're looking at a CoH open only to the top half of that group. Even if we agree that posting a single RP does not grant you the right to a CoH bid, that's still a pretty significant winnowing, especially as one recurring issue that comes up all of the time is the RP arms race and "quality vs. quantity" -- noting that the stats given for the typical WCC competition puts most RPs closer to the full bonus available than not. All to say that this is (IMO) leading to a much larger field being left out of the CoH than I would typically think would be wise -- and admittedly had I realized the way the numbers were looking beforehand, I think it would have given me more pause than it did when voting.

Can you give us a bit more insight into your thinking about all of this, and why the decision to narrow downward, in terms of entries?

[PotatoFarmers]

Some quick note:
I had a count of the number of posts each of the 165 entrants (excluding the hosts) made, and this was what I got:

# of RPs	DNQ	Qualified
>=1	81	30
>=3	66	30
>=6	45	26
>=9	28	24
>=13	8	7

When I counted the post breakdown; I did not take into account that multiple posts may be made at 1 cutoff; and multiple posts may have been made after the Playoff 2 cutoff. These are raw post counts. Full breakdown can be found here.

While I think I may have figured out why the format was chosen as yet, I am still interested in the answer to Legal's question as above.

[Delaclava]

A few initial notes as Ceni and I observe initial returns on invitations and plan accordingly. (Thanks to Poaf for providing the data and certainly raw post data doesn't deviate significantly from number of cutoffs RPed, as only a select few are RPing multiple times in a cutoff.)

We mentioned that 40 teams would be a possibility in the bid; 40 teams is still a significant possibility (especially as it appears almost all of the initial batch will accept).

We agree that a single RP does not provide a right to a CoH bid. To go a bit further down the line, it drops off to 66 nations who have posted three RPs. Query whether three RPs entitles a nation to a CoH invite. (Yes, at some point, it would have; now, I would say it does not, given we are in a much more active RPing community). And that's not beginning to consider whether those RPs were of the quality or effort that merit invitation, as Poaf observed.

Which leads to this from our bid: "we would tend to prioritize quality contributions rather than consistent but mediocre contributions." We are still early in the process of sending invitations, so we don't have any final conclusions on any particular user's contributions, but Ceni and I are conscientious of this (striking an emphasis of quality over quantity) and constructing a CoH field that includes as many active (and still active) RPers as possible and contribute to a lively competition. To the extent that anyone "deserves" a CoH bid, we haven't narrowed down in terms of what we believe warrants an invitation.

[Ceni]

I echo what Delaclava said in the post above, especially the part about quality > consistency for its own sake. However, I wanted to also post my own thoughts separately.

Even if we agree that posting a single RP does not grant you the right to a CoH bid, that's still a pretty significant winnowing, especially as one recurring issue that comes up all of the time is the RP arms race and "quality vs. quantity" -- noting that the stats given for the typical WCC competition puts most RPs closer to the full bonus available than not. All to say that this is (IMO) leading to a much larger field being left out of the CoH than I would typically think would be wise...

I want to respond explicitly to this discussion before launching into my thoughts on tournament sizing more explicitly, in that I disagree with your characterization of the "RP arms race." To me, this "arms race" had been primarily driven by users who have consistently posted novellas and creating the presumption that a high word count is necessary for a full bonus. In my perception, that presumption has been rebutted, and I hope that nobody believes that they had to have posted a full novel over the course of WC Qualifying to earn a CoH invitation from us.

I'm also not sure that the "RP arms race" encompasses users who post for every single window. To be fair, we are certainly not expecting users to have RPed for every window to receive an invitation; that would be patently ridiculous. Indeed, we have already invited several users who only posted on half of the available windows (not counting playoffs). While there might have been more lenient expectations for the sheer number of RPs in the 1/24 era, I don't think that expecting a higher percentage of a smaller number of opportunities is bad on its face.

Frankly, I think the quality and quantity of recent RP is an argument to expand the size of the World Cup proper. Personally, I would rather see a larger WC than a larger Cup of Harmony to accommodate that, but I recognize that this has been a hot potato as of late. I'm consequently reluctant to spill more ink on the topic in a bid thread.

Can you give us a bit more insight into your thinking about all of this, and why the decision to narrow downward, in terms of entries?

Looking at the RP bonus data provided by Vilita and Electrum, it seemed to me that there was a strong top tier of RPers that we were happy to invite, and then a weaker tier of users who either posted consistent but below average RPs (average here being the average RP in the tournament according to the VilRum bonus grading, which we don't necessarily endorse or censure) or medium- to high-quality RPs but only sporadically.

Going back to the bid itself, we said this:

For instance, if we had 44 nations that we absolutely wanted to have in the tournament, we would likely head up to 48 to be more inclusive; if we only had 36 nations in that case, we would probably not try and fill the full 48. But again, this is dependent on how the remaining qualifying MDs play out.

I think we are finding that the latter case is playing out; I would say that we are aiming for a 40-team tournament, but wanted to signal that if a number of invitations are declined, we believe a 32-team tournament is also going to be feasible. (36 definite invites and 4 declines = a 32-team-tournament, although I'm just mirroring the language used in the bid and not suggesting that those are the numbers we're working off of at the moment.)