[CRICKET] GCF ODI World Trophy II – OOC

[Liventia]

Signups updated to this point (23).

[Barunia]

Blues are in

[Gruenberg]

Couple of small addenda to the bid:

On reconsideration, I decided there was no reason to make a new super over file. There's no reason why scoring would be any different just because it happens after a 50 over match, so reusing the T20 super over file (created? by Liventia, and used by Grearia and myself during the recent T20) is perfectly fine.

We have 24 signups at present so the format would be as follows: 4 groups of 6 play SRR -> top 2 from each group progress to Super Eights -> top 4 from Super Eights progress to finals. If we get a 25th signup, I'll drop Uncertainty to make room for them. If we get 26, I'll drop Uncertainty and we'll play 5 groups of 5 -> Super Tens -> finals. If we get 27... I'll hold out for 28 (including a puppet if needed) and do 4 groups of 7. 29, drop Uncertainty, 4 groups of 7. 30, 5 groups of 6. 31, drop Uncertainty, 5 groups of 6. You get the picture. Basically: groups of 5-6, Super Groups of 8/10, are the precise numbers I'm looking at.

[NS Global Cricket Federation]

Apologies for missing the deadline for host bids. We have one bid, from Gruenberg.

The options are to:
1) Accept the bid;
2) Re-open bidding

The following nations/users are eligible to vote:
Liventia
Ethane
Sylestone
The Plough Islands
Kriegiersien
Darmen
Krytenia
Lisander
Baggieland
The Grearish Union
The Sarian
Pratapgadh
Sajnur
Ko-oren
Barunia

Please telegram your votes to THIS ACCOUNT by Friday, 29 January, 21:30 UTC – 72 hours' time.

[NS Global Cricket Federation]

With 9 of the 15 eligible voters having approved the bid, the vote is being called ahead of time.

Gruenberg shall host the ODI World Trophy.

[Gruenberg]

Thank you. Signups are closed. The IC thread is here. If possible, this thread can become the OOC thread.

[Barunia]

What do the various colours in the tables mean? I see VTE in the corner, but I don’t know what it means.

[Ko-oren]

What do the various colours in the tables mean? I see VTE in the corner, but I don’t know what it means.

Seems to be View - Talk - Edit from the/a wiki template. Not sure about the colours other than 'currently on view', 'talk link doesn't exist', and 'edit link previously used' (and blue links being 'link exists, but you never clicked on it')

[Gruenberg]

I'm just screenshotting the tables from the wiki, which is perhaps a bit lazy, but cuts down on having to space everything out with pre tags.

What do the various colours in the tables mean? I see VTE in the corner, but I don’t know what it means.

VTE means View/Talk/Edit and is just a standard tag included in all templates. The team names are in red because they're uncreated links to national cricket team pages; the blue ones (Darmen/Sylestone/Grearia) are where people have actually created those pages. Darmen's is a bit darker because I must have clicked on it, Plough's a bit lighter as it's an external link (to his NS.net factbook). Basically it's all indigenous to the wiki and doesn't have any meaning in our context.

The only colour that matters is the top two bars being blue, which means the two qualifying spots from each group.

Sorry for the confusion. I'd frankly rather keep screenshotting the tables as it's far easier, but if it's too confusing I guess I can manually code the tables in pre tags.

[Gruenberg]

It's been pointed out to me I made an error in Group C's NRR calculations. It doesn't affect the current standings, but is obviously important to get right. It's been corrected now, and tomorrow I'll run a check through all the groups to make sure they're all right. Very sorry.

[Land of everyone]

I'm in
Just signing

[Gruenberg]

Sorry mate, signups are closed.

---

A spectacularly dull Super Bowl gave me more time than I'd anticipated to get to the NRR. As it turns out, the NRR of both of the users who contacted me with concerns were accurate after all - phew!

I'm going to copy over the explanation of why they're correct:

A quirk of Net Run Rate is that if a team is bowled out losing all 10 wickets, they are debited with the full 50 over allotment. Equally, a team that bowls another side out is credited with 50 overs bowled. This is to prevent a situation where a team, knowing they are losing, deliberately loses their last wickets quickly. Imagine you're 120/8, chasing 320, with 20 overs left. Why bat out those 20 overs in a hopeless cause, and drag down your net run rate? If you get bowled out now your run rate is 120/30 = 4 - if you bat the whole 50, scoring maybe 30 extra runs, it's 150/50 = 3. To remove this perverse incentive, NRR penalises any team that gets bowled out with the full 50 over allotment.

I went manually through and checked all of the groups, and in the process discovered there were two small errors for other teams, though, both fat-finger errors on my part. Liventia and Barunia were the affected teams. Here is the corrected Emerald Group standings:

[Gruenberg]

I've put up the full schedule.

If you see any problems or are not clear on your schedule please let me know.

[Land of everyone]

OK,can you make me sign in next world cup?

[Liventia]

OK,can you make me sign in next world cup?

No. You'll have to sign up for it when it opens.

[Gruenberg]

I will be announcing the Team of the Tournament along with the Final results, so try to get any tournament wrap-up posts in before then, please.

[The Sarian]

Thank you so much Gruenberg for an excellent tournament!

[The Plough Islands]

Congratulations to The Sarian (and commiserations to Krytenia ) on a well-deserved victory; I think it's fair to say the World Trophy is proving to be one of those events where everyone has a good shot at the title, at least on the basis of the two editions we've had, and it goes to show that if you RP well and consistently - which there's been a lot of in this tournament from everyone, and it's been enjoyable to be part of! - you can go pretty deep into the event.
I've mentioned this in my RPs as well, but thanks again to Gruenberg for doing such a good job with hosting - it's absolutely the smoothest run tournament I've ever taken part in, with rich, lavish IC information to work with, easy-to-understand fixtures (especially in the Super Eight stage), and reliable cutoffs, and as a participant it gets full marks from me even if the Foxes didn't always enjoy the experience!

I think to the extent there's been any negatives in this tournament, it's been around the scorination; not in terms of fairness (although that bloke doing the third party scorination for the knockouts looks dodgy), but in that the generated results too often range from lopsided to absurd; teams are plodding along at less than four runs an over chasing 350+ totals, the number of wickets that fall is all over the place, and when you end up getting so many single-wicket victories or defeats you become a bit blasé about RPing them all the time.
This is something we've been grumbling about as a community for a while, and is fundamentally the fault of the xkoranate paradigm, which can't be fixed by fiddling with the xml - so going forward (further development can probably move to the cricket or scorinator discussion threads) I do think it is worth renewing the quest for something better, and I'd be happy to help out however I can.

[Gruenberg]

Thanks everyone for participating. I hope you enjoyed it, I'm sorry to those who didn't get the results they wanted, and I'm willing to take on board any criticisms or comments. My own thoughts as host:

This was a very well RPed tournament, much better than I'd expected. 21/24 rosters is a fantastic turnout. Thank you everyone.

The format was an experiment. It was designed fearing what's happened in some cricket tournaments in the past, where rosterless nations progressed quite far. As it turns out that concern was completely moot and the format ended up being very harsh on solid RPers such as Saint-Domingues, Garbelia, TJUN-ia, Pratapgadh... That said, I wouldn't say the format was a mistake. It did lead to 4 consistent RPers making the finals (and one or two, such as The Plough Islands, having very bad luck; Ko-oren, I assume, made some kind of bet involving a cursed monkey paw in order to get the football WC final that had unfortunate consequences for their luck in this tournament!), and a good level of RP throughout.

The RL WC changes format every time. This one was based loosely on the 2007 version. In that edition, India and Pakistan were eliminated early, with unfortunate financial consequences; happily in NS we're free of such considerations, that though being scant consolation for the likes of Liventia or Grearia. I don't think future hosts should be bound by the format I used here, and I think this is a tournament where some experiments in format are for the good, especially given our rankings system is based on just one - or will be, next time, on two - tournaments.

The results were a little screwy at times. There was more randomness than I would have liked but it's just what we have. The way xkoranate generates results leads to some unfortunate outcomes. Too many 250/2 chasing 400, too many 161/9 off 20 chasing 160, far too many 1- or 2-wicket wins. The attack-based model of Redballer is to blame. That said, for years on NS there was zero cricket because we didn't have a reliable scorinator. The Babbage Islands's creation of Redballer was a massive boon for cricket RPers and we should be eternally thankful to them for that. Even if, as I feel, we should investigate alternatives that will produce more reasonable outcomes in the future. In terms of my own modification to the file, I need to tone down the STDEV: the mean net run rate was fine but at the extremes it produced some unreasonably rapid chases. There were a couple of 400+ scores but I wouldn't say overall the run rate was disproportionate. It's unfortunate we got no very low scores (except for the teams that would have affected, I guess) for variety's sake, but otherwise I'd say playing around with the net run rate worked.

A couple people asked about RP grading. I don't believe in public RP bonuses, though I'm happy to give feedback in general terms. That said, something I wanted to clarify is that you don't have to make a scorecard to get a good RP bonus. Making accurate scorecards is complex and time consuming, though, so if you do make one, especially if there's some clear flourishes involved in making them look good or contain details, you can earn a high RP bonus. But I don't want a situation where one person RPs and makes a scorecard and the other is left with nothing to do, so match reports, articles, interviews, profiles, any other kind of RP can equally earn good RP bonus too. Our final featured someone who mainly earned RP bonus through scorecards v someone who mainly earned RP bonus through non-scoreboard RPs, interestingly.

In terms of hosting, a couple of things I did were, I think, worth it, and a couple weren't. Interpreting the results ("Team A beat Team B by 100 runs") was worth it, because it reduces confusion for those not too familiar with cricket or unaware of how xkoranate incorrectly outputs results. I would, though, only recommend this for a host willing to put in a bit of time (at the group stage it took me a few extra minutes each day to do this, less so later on) and who's very familiar with cricket results; otherwise we risk extra errors and confusion. Style modifiers seemed to have more bite this time than at the T20 as I pushed them to higher limits. I'm not really sold on team-based modifiers though so I probably wouldn't use them in future. The weather modifier probably doesn't make sense for a nation the size of Gruenberg, too.

I want to thank Grearia for adding the NRR code to the NSwiki. It made inputting the results significantly easier and I recommend any future host use this function. I'm sorry I made a couple small NRR errors early on but fortunately caught them.

Thanks to Plough for being a third-party scorinator, Garbelia for making a nice logo, and all of you for participating. I look forward to the Test season and a healthy future for cricket on NS. As ever my own participation may swing through wild extremes but I think we have a solid base here!

[Liventia]

ODI World Rankings

1	Krytenia		32.515
2	The Sarian		28.919
3	The Plough Islands	26.991
4	Sylestone		24.506
5	Gruenberg		22.950
6	Ko-oren			22.176
7	Darmen			20.902
8	New Lunenburg		17.792
9	Barunia			17.192
10	Liventia		16.475
11	The Grearish Union	12.710
12	Martune			10.967
13	Eastfield Lodge		 9.042
14	Sajnur			 8.335
15	Baggieland		 8.308
16	Jeckland		 8.283
=	Teusland		 8.283
18	Samrakstivu		 8.225
19	Lisander		 7.689
20	Ethane			 7.584
21	Mattijana		 7.583
22	Serriel			 7.058
23	Pratapgadh		 6.473
24	Kriegiersien		 5.387
25	Damukuni		 5.367
26	Corridor of Uncertainty 5.100
=	Garbelia		 5.100
=	Saint-Domingue		 5.100
=	TJUN-ia			 5.100
30	Elejamie		 3.792
31	Northwest Kalactin	 3.220
32	Kohnhead		 3.150
33	Drew Durrnil		 2.392
34	Hebitaka		 2.354
=	Silvedania		 2.354
36	Anserisa		 2.217
=	Bolgano			 2.217
=	Holy Land of Burtander	 2.217
=	New Maxwellia		 2.217
=	Notum Ahom		 2.217
=	Ricardos7qm		 2.217
=	The Jovannic		 2.217
=	Waisnor			 2.217
44	Subramani		 1.400
=	The Booter		 1.400
=	Virtual Nerdania	 1.400
47	Indusse			 0.981
=	Sannyamathland		 0.981

[Garbelia]

Congratulations to The Sarian on an excellent victory, and many thanks to Gruenberg for a tournament well run. I know your plot. You only put one of my players in your team of the tourament so you could do the 12th Otter joke...

May cricket on NationStates live on in prosperity, and good luck for the start of the season! Or the end. Or the middle.

[Liventia]

My apologies, there was a small error in calculating the rankings at first. They have been updated.