The World Cup Discussion Thread (OOC, Version IV)

[Blaneu]

Sorry for the lack of RPing to those in my group, I've been abroad, I might still be fairly intermittent as I'm moving next week.

[Union of Socialist Alpine Republics]

Someone needs to explain me why a team ranked 59th who posted a roster and RP almost everyday (the only time I didn't RP was when I had to go out of town last tuesday) lose 2 times against teams ranked 200 and lower who never poster a roster and a RP?

Nature of the beast, upsets happen all the time. I couldn't rp for the first few games and won them all. I RP-ed ahead of the most recent matchday and immediately lost at home to an unranked side. It's just how it works. Hang in there though, the upsets tend to lessen as you keep adding to that RP bonus the deeper into the campaign you go. Plus, if you hang around long enough, the luck tends to even itself out.

Kita-Hinode keeps winning on the road against high ranked team and I don't.

Kita-Hinode are the second ranked side. They won't beat a higher ranked team until tomorrow, when they will absolutely beat a higher ranked team.

I meant K-Hinode beat on the road high ranked teams that are still lower than them (me and Siovanija and Teusland) but I can't beat teams ranked 200th and lower. I really thought I had a chance to qualify this time. I think I'm gonna stick to my domestic leagues, I don't wanna put an effort in an international competition anymore only to lose all the time.

[Kita-Hinode]

Nature of the beast, upsets happen all the time. I couldn't rp for the first few games and won them all. I RP-ed ahead of the most recent matchday and immediately lost at home to an unranked side. It's just how it works. Hang in there though, the upsets tend to lessen as you keep adding to that RP bonus the deeper into the campaign you go. Plus, if you hang around long enough, the luck tends to even itself out.


Kita-Hinode are the second ranked side. They won't beat a higher ranked team until tomorrow, when they will absolutely beat a higher ranked team.

I meant K-Hinode beat on the road high ranked teams that are still lower than them (me and Siovanija and Teusland) but I can't beat teams ranked 200th and lower. I really thought I had a chance to qualify this time. I think I'm gonna stick to my domestic leagues, I don't wanna put an effort in an international competition anymore only to lose all the time.

I've also posted every day, plus put up the time to edit a PES 2018 save, made sure most of the players I featured looked like the inspirations behind them and kind of didn't bother with the results lately.

Sounded really fun when nobody batted an eye.

[Mattijana]

As we always say in this kind of scenario, the fun of writing should outweigh the results. Of course it's nice to see your side win as vindication for your effort, but I actually find it more fun to write about when my team performs diabolically and everything's falling apart.

I can understand the frustration having been on the end of several unprecedented losses and draws to much lower-ranked teams over the last few cycles, but I would encourage anyone to not just stick with it, but enjoy writing about all the dramas that accompany a rough run of form.

I'm aware I've just regurgitated the standard stuff, but it's important for everyone to remember.

[Union of Socialist Alpine Republics]

I meant K-Hinode beat on the road high ranked teams that are still lower than them (me and Siovanija and Teusland) but I can't beat teams ranked 200th and lower. I really thought I had a chance to qualify this time. I think I'm gonna stick to my domestic leagues, I don't wanna put an effort in an international competition anymore only to lose all the time.

I've also posted every day, plus put up the time to edit a PES 2018 save, made sure most of the players I featured looked like the inspirations behind them and kind of didn't bother with the results lately.

Sounded really fun when nobody batted an eye.

Sorry for my rant. You get the results for your hard work and I don't, it frustrates me. Maybe I'm playing this wrong, maybe I should enjoy writing without caring about the results, but I actually care about them.

[Kita-Hinode]

I've also posted every day, plus put up the time to edit a PES 2018 save, made sure most of the players I featured looked like the inspirations behind them and kind of didn't bother with the results lately.

Sounded really fun when nobody batted an eye.

Sorry for my rant. You get the results for your hard work and I don't, it frustrates me. Maybe I'm playing this wrong, maybe I should enjoy writing without caring about the results, but I actually care about them.

Try to not care about them, just have fun typing them. At least, I'm actually putting effort there. It's way worse when it's against someone that hasn't put an inch of effort, I say it from experience.

[Nephara]

Defeat is a narrative opportunity. If you're getting pulped, switch things up, sack the manager, have a tactical reshuffle, drop an old favourite. Then write about it.

[Farfadillis]

It's completely fine to care about the results. Whoever pretends they don't are most likely lying. The important thing is accepting that, much like the important things in life, the results are not under your complete control.

[Eura]

Defeat is a narrative opportunity. If you're getting pulped, switch things up, sack the manager, have a tactical reshuffle, drop an old favourite. Then write about it.

You could also invade your opponent.

Not that I'm trying to plant any ideas in your head of course. None at all.

do it

[Krytenia]

Defeat is a narrative opportunity. If you're getting pulped, switch things up, sack the manager, have a tactical reshuffle, drop an old favourite. Then write about it.

You could also invade your opponent.

Not that I'm trying to plant any ideas in your head of course. None at all.

do it

For an extra change of pace, feel free to announce said invasion with an artillery barrage of custard pies.

Oh good gravy, I've given Bos ideas now...

[Kita-Hinode]

Defeat is a narrative opportunity. If you're getting pulped, switch things up, sack the manager, have a tactical reshuffle, drop an old favourite. Then write about it.

You could also invade your opponent.

Not that I'm trying to plant any ideas in your head of course. None at all.

do it

Typical Rushmori answer to anything.

[Mytanija]

Typical Rushmori answer to anything.

A letter bomb is in the post, mate.

Lots of love,
Myt x

This is a joke pls don't kill me xxxx

[95X]

Sorry for my rant. You get the results for your hard work and I don't, it frustrates me. Maybe I'm playing this wrong, maybe I should enjoy writing without caring about the results, but I actually care about them.

I also don't like losing and in the past have posted in this very thread to vent my frustrations.

I know it's easy to say 'don't take the results personally' but it's true. And there are so many participating nations this time around but only 30 will qualify.

Also know that the results are not necessarily reflective of your RPs or writing style. The results are also subject to a random number generator, so it's entirely possible someone who consistently writes excellent RPs gets strings of zeroes while a lower-ranked opponent gets strings of numbers above zero. It happens.

[Qusmo]

When I was writing my mid-qualifiers "predictions for the eventual qualifiers" RP, I realized just how difficult it is to qualify. I think that there are more than thirty-two teams deserving of a berth in the World Cup; not qualifying shouldn't be a message that someone has been RPing poorly or that they should stop trying. After all, no one has qualified every time they've tried (except, y'know, Drawkland & Baker Park, but that's beside the point).

[Adab]

I've also posted every day, plus put up the time to edit a PES 2018 save, made sure most of the players I featured looked like the inspirations behind them and kind of didn't bother with the results lately.

Sounded really fun when nobody batted an eye.

Sorry for my rant. You get the results for your hard work and I don't, it frustrates me. Maybe I'm playing this wrong, maybe I should enjoy writing without caring about the results, but I actually care about them.

I think I know how you feel. I care about my results. I want my team to win every match, which is a bit unrealistic given my low ranking for now, and occasionally I do feel aggrieved when I lose, especially when I've put much effort into the RP.

But then again, as others have noted here, luck is still a factor. Sometimes you have this lowly, non-roleplaying nation beating or drawing a higher-ranked nation which does RP. It just happens, and it has happened to me before.

So. my humble advice: when you lose, just go with the flow and have fun with it. I lost 1-3 to Starblaydia even after I had RPed - not completely unexpected, given the disparity in our rankings - so I made this match report featuring the Starblaydi keeper scoring, a protester on the pitch, four yellow cards, and the assistant manager going off the rails, insulting the Starblaydis, and getting kicked off the pitch. An absolute farce. Sure I lost, but I enjoyed doing the match report. In fact, I think that's the most fun I've ever had writing a sports RP.

[Free Republics]

When I was writing my mid-qualifiers "predictions for the eventual qualifiers" RP, I realized just how difficult it is to qualify. I think that there are more than thirty-two teams deserving of a berth in the World Cup; not qualifying shouldn't be a message that someone has been RPing poorly or that they should stop trying. After all, no one has qualified every time they've tried (except, y'know, Drawkland & Baker Park, but that's beside the point).

I think the fact that it is so difficult to get a World Cup berth and that it isn't guaranteed for anybody (when I hosted the CoH, we actually had the #2 ranked nation in it) is part of what makes the World Cup so prestigious and qualifying for a spot in the World Cup so meaningful.

The World Cup traditionally emphasizes rank to a greater extent than other tournaments so unless you get extremely lucky you will need several cycles of consistent RP before you can have a reasonable expectation of qualifying. Even then, you will still need to get lucky in a WC finals before you'll have a reasonable shot at contending for a WC title. Until the nations that built Esportiva into a major region started winning WCs a few cycles ago, the list of World Cup winners was dominated by nations founded in the 2000s (with Wight being the sole exception for a long time).

At one time, I reached two World Cup semi-finals and finished 2nd and 3rd. Then, I watched as my rank collapsed from top 5 to mid-30s after several bad cycles in a row even though I was RPing regularly and likely earning quite substantial RP bonuses. Then I managed to come back on the equivalent of a BoF rank and qualify on my 2nd cycle back while only RPing part of the time. While this isn't typical by any means, it shows that luck can go both ways over the long term.

[Starblaydia]

I lost 1-3 to Starblaydia even after I had RPed - not completely unexpected, given the disparity in our rankings - so I made this match report featuring the Starblaydi keeper scoring, a protester on the pitch, four yellow cards, and the assistant manager going off the rails, insulting the Starblaydis, and getting kicked off the pitch. An absolute farce. Sure I lost, but I enjoyed doing the match report. In fact, I think that's the most fun I've ever had writing a sports RP.

That was a great article to read, and the best part is it gave me exactly the inspiration for a counterpoint RP about the match (I've just not had time to write it yet, hopefully later today when I have some time). I can take all the facts you've written and put them from the Starblaydi perspective.

Also, congratulations on giving a Starblaydi goalkeeper a goal to their name for the first time since the time of World Cup 30 (Paola Mendez, the 5th in a 5-0 win against Milchama in the 4th Draggonnii Inviyatii) and only the third in our 264 year history ("Crazy" Corominas being the first, scoring the winner in Extra Time against Vilita in the Semi-Final of the 10th AOCAF, that Starblaydia went on to win). This boy's going down in history.

And inshallah there'll be less fouls and a higher quality of play when we meet on the penultimate Matchday in the Stadii Di Bradini. I really don't want that to be a 'six-pointer' match, but you never know.

I lost 1-3 to Starblaydia even after I had RPed - not completely unexpected, given the disparity in our ranking

I think this bit, bold emphasis mine, highlights the major, and fairly common misunderstanding about how RP bonus works from the wider community of NS Sports and the WC. So, for an elucidation of that, it's story time from MD3 of this Cup.

I was furious when, as a Pot 1 team, I drew 2-2 with Unranked Andwell on MD3, right after I'd written what I consider to have been one of my better RPs about the Audioslavia match the MD before. It was a decent length, it had comedy, it had drama, it had historical callbacks, it had a freshly photoshopped image created just for this match rather than hotlinking to some real life news article and overall took me around 4 hours of effort to create.

I had a massive rank advantage, I had a the bonus that comes from an RP advantage from my roster and few MDs of RP, and Andwell had (and still has) literally nothing to their name. Zero Rank. Zero RP bonus.

But that time Random was on their side and the scorinator churned out draw. That's literally all it was. I rolled my D20 and got a 3, they rolled and got a 17. Add in the ranking difference and it's a tie.

But why does having the RP bonus make it a worse feeling? I'd argue it's the fact that we feel like RP Bonus has more of an effect than it actually does.

All RP bonus does is increase your KPB ranking for the duration of the Qualifiers. The current hosts haven't (and also shouldn't) released how much RP bonus is available per Matchday, onyl that it is "generous, cumulative and fair to all styles of RP". Guessing based on that and previous experience with a Cup of this length, there's likely 1 or 1.5 KPBs available per Matchday - this is just an educated guess and may not remotely match what the hosts are using. So, looking at pre-Cup rankings, an unranked nation would have to Max out the bonus literally every MD for 15-20 MDs in order to match Starblaydia's pre-Cup ranking points of 30.57.

Or Andwell could do literally none of that and still manage to take 2 points off me when I even have home bloody advantage, too.

Ahem.

We RP for the fun of it - I know I had a lot of fun coming up with posts, reading and responding to others - and we have the RP bonus as a little bit of encouragement/reward to help you along the way. It's certainly the reason (along with 'luck', or more accurately 'a lack of bad luck') why Adab has climbed to 3rd in Group 5 and really separated itself from the non-RPing nations with three digit ranks over the 10 MDs played as of this writing. Until you've really played around with how xkoranate's results look over a period of Matchdays when you're adding RP bonus in each day per nation, it's kinda difficult to realise just how much, or how little, a role RP Bonus plays in our tournaments.

As others have said, if it was a writing competition we'd collectively have pretty good ideas of who'd be making the Finals each time. The balance of Rank, Randomness and RP is always up for debate, and often feels like it is skewed too far in one direction - often it's the branch that you don't have a lot of that's the problem, funnily enough.

[Commonwealth of Baker Park]

I've said this before and I'll say it again, I always get the little twinge of anticipation when scrolling down through results, because I think about how I'm going to feel if I lose. And when I don't care about that anymore, I'll be out of NS Sports. That being said, I don't let not winning affect me for too long. I start thinking of ways to frame why I lose. Like RL World Cup, there aren't that many countries who have actually won the WC, and we are all aware of the types of hand wringing, recriminations, slagging, etc. goes on in the media and among everyday fans when their team doesn't qualify, performs poorly or doesn't live up to expectations.

Including the DBC and the SWC, I estimate I've won something like 2 out of every three matches I've been involved in. I don't for a second think that is anything but dumb luck. Adversity is a better storyline than success a lot of the time.

[Tinhampton]

Oscioru 2–1 Tinhampton

Let's just say that my plans are all starting to come nicely together...

[South Toronto]

I am very sorry for not RPing as much as I would like to, my school has really upped its game when it comes to homework, and sometimes I have to stay up until 11:00 to do the homework. I will try to RP as much as possible, but I won't guarantee an RP every matchday.

[Union of Socialist Alpine Republics]

I already did most of your suggestions, except invading my opponent.

So. my humble advice: when you lose, just go with the flow and have fun with it. I lost 1-3 to Starblaydia even after I had RPed - not completely unexpected, given the disparity in our rankings - so I made this match report featuring the Starblaydi keeper scoring, a protester on the pitch, four yellow cards, and the assistant manager going off the rails, insulting the Starblaydis, and getting kicked off the pitch. An absolute farce. Sure I lost, but I enjoyed doing the match report. In fact, I think that's the most fun I've ever had writing a sports RP.

My first match was a 0-0 draw against a 300th ranked team, I wrote a match report saying the referree from the Free Republics doesn't likes socialist nations and he denied 2 goals for my team pretending offsides and gave red cards to all my coaching staff but my physiotherapist. It was kinda fun to write it but on MD 7 (I think) I lost again against a low ranked team. I lost 5 easy points which takes me out of contention and that's what frustrates me. I don't think I want to write another match report like that.


edit: Well, finally you all convinced me to write a RP today, which I just did.

[Geisenfried]

I would be careful about narratives like that. When you do roleplays that basically say "we would've won except for external circumstances that were blatantly unfair to us", it comes across as basically a temper tantrum. And while that's not to say you can never lose to a controversial call - those games happen, and I think just about everybody does it at some point, consistently crediting your wins to your team and your losses to things outside your control, it becomes very old to read very fast.

Trust me, I remember one time back in the WC 30s era where one of my World Cup group opponents was like that, and when I won handedly on the last matchday of groups to eliminate them, I basically rushed after the scores were posted to make sure I had a match report that had me winning convincingly and humiliatingly so they couldn't handwave it away. (It was basically a Germany-Brazil years before Germany-Brazil actually happened. Lucking into a 5-2 scoreline helped with that, admittedly.) And to this day, it's still one of my favorite RPs, even if it is a bit mean-spirited.

[Squornshelan Remnant States]

I would be careful about narratives like that. When you do roleplays that basically say "we would've won except for external circumstances that were blatantly unfair to us", it comes across as basically a temper tantrum.

*snip*

I will always remember when a particularly annoyed opponent of mine RPed that their team didn't make it to the match and that the 4-0 result was due to my players kicking the ball into an empty net. It was a bit annoying. That day also saw the nickname "Stupidheads" coined, which had some staying power, particularly in the Audioslavian and Insanian press. Not that I was always posting super high effort RP's mind you, but that one sticks out in my mind.

[Geisenfried]

I would be careful about narratives like that. When you do roleplays that basically say "we would've won except for external circumstances that were blatantly unfair to us", it comes across as basically a temper tantrum.

*snip*

I will always remember when a particularly annoyed opponent of mine RPed that their team didn't make it to the match and that the 4-0 result was due to my players kicking the ball into an empty net. It was a bit annoying. That day also saw the nickname "Stupidheads" coined, which had some staying power, particularly in the Audioslavian and Insanian press. Not that I was always posting super high effort RP's mind you, but that one sticks out in my mind.

To be fair, one game I had against the Archregimancy where I lost particularly badly and was stumped on how supposedly humble monks would run up the score, I roleplayed it as the monks retiring for prayer after the first half and scrimmaging against myself for the second and consequently having the goals scored in the scrimmage count as own goals, so it's not like everybody's immune to doing silly, ludicrous things every now and again. The point is that you make it sound fun and not like you're whining about it.

[Krytenia]

I would be careful about narratives like that. When you do roleplays that basically say "we would've won except for external circumstances that were blatantly unfair to us", it comes across as basically a temper tantrum. And while that's not to say you can never lose to a controversial call - those games happen, and I think just about everybody does it at some point, consistently crediting your wins to your team and your losses to things outside your control, it becomes very old to read very fast.

Trust me, I remember one time back in the WC 30s era where one of my World Cup group opponents was like that, and when I won handedly on the last matchday of groups to eliminate them, I basically rushed after the scores were posted to make sure I had a match report that had me winning convincingly and humiliatingly so they couldn't handwave it away. (It was basically a Germany-Brazil years before Germany-Brazil actually happened. Lucking into a 5-2 scoreline helped with that, admittedly.) And to this day, it's still one of my favorite RPs, even if it is a bit mean-spirited.

That being said, of course, controversial calls can be RPed well, too. Relating somewhat to Star's gushing praise of Adab, myself and the Mauve One met in the QFs of WC29. At the time, we just happened to be IC ideological enemies so of course a highly charged match fit into the narrative. The game was won on a blatantly offside goal with the referee from "neutral" Casari obviously favouring the Kryties. Star posted first, bemoaning the injustice of it all, and I took that ball and ran with it. "The Casaran Job" is still my favourite purely football related RP.