World Cup 91 bid

[Graintfjall]

This is a Vilitan plan bid between Græntfjall, Farfadillis, Zwangzug, and Turori. Græntfjall and Farfadillis will be the WC hosts and Zwangzug and Turori provide assistance. Scorination will be divided so that each person is grading approximately one half of the groups for one half of qualifying, and all RP grading shared across a common spreadsheet.

World Cup qualifying

We will aim for 152 (or 137) signups, to give 15 groups of 10 (or 9). If a number divisible by 15 is not possible, then we will proceed with a slightly adjusted version of the below, with group sizes of 8 to 10, and not all third placed teams advancing to the playoffs.

Assuming we do have 15 groups, all group winners (plus 2 hosts) will automatically qualify. Group 2nd and 3rd place finishers will proceed to a two-legged playoff (seeded, no group stage repeats). Winners will qualify.

Scorination will be with the SQIS formula. RP bonus will be cumulative, not degrading. There will be a roster bonus. There will also be a roster penalty of 50%, which will be removed upon the posting of a roster.

Scorination will be every 48 hours, beginning and ending with single games, and otherwise with 2 games per scorination.

General principles of RP grading

Enough is as good as a feast. You do not need to write hugely long RPs in order to gain a high RP bonus. Taking these numbers as somewhat approximate and inexact, 3 - 5 paragraphs, totaling 400 - 600 words, should, if written well, be enough to earn a good RP bonus.

Rosters can contain admirable amounts of detail. That said, the main purpose of a roster is to provide information for opponents, and secondarily, for hosts to be able to check details. Extravagantly large rosters are counterproductive.

We request, though will not enforce through any particular penalty, that individual RP posts do not exceed approximately 2000 words. Similarly, we request that roster posts contain within the first 2000 words or so enough information that an opponent can clearly work out players and permissions.

These numbers are not intended to be absolute!

In general, qualities that help earn a good RP bonus are: interactivity (showing you have read others’ RPs and rosters); salience (it is fine to write your own storylines or pursue non-football stories, but if there is no sense at all in your RP that a football World Cup is even happening, it may be difficult to justify absolute max bonus); and good RP etiquette (respecting permissions, respecting hosts, taking bad results in reasonable grace).

You do not need to be a great writer, a skilled graphic artist, or a knowledgeable football expert; what’s more important is that it’s clear you’ve made some kind of effort. Allowances are always made for the fact that not everyone is a native English speaker.

RPs do not have to be humorous, and humor is very subjective anyway, but NS is a satirical game, so a light hearted approach can always be welcome.

Here is an example of an RP that is both concise and really good. Here is an example of an RP that earned a very high RP bonus during a tournament I hosted: though not strictly about football, it still manages to work in a connection to the ongoing tournament. These are just examples, and obviously YMMV across four different RP graders.

We will try to publish general RP data every scorination, with median and STDEV of all RP bonuses awarded, similar to done during CoH82. We will not disclose hard RP bonus numbers to individuals either publicly or privately.

Tiebreakers will be: points, goal difference, head-to-head record, head-to-head goal difference, IC coin flip (OOC: game scorinated without ranks using only RP bonus as input). In the event of a multiple team tie, the tiebreakers will be applied in order until one team is eliminated, and then again from the top until the next team is eliminated, until all teams are ranked.

World Cup finals

Græntfjall and Farfadillis will host the World Cup finals, splitting groups and playoffs evenly. Hosts will be seeded in the first pot and scorinate the opposite halves, with a third party sought should they end up playing against one another. The format will be standard 8 groups of 4, with A1vD2, B1vC2, etc., unseeded playoffs. Teams will not swap host country until the final/3PPO.

RP carryover will be the single highest RP bonus earned during qualifying + the average RP bonus earned during qualifying. (E.g., if the highest RP bonus you earned was 2, and the total RP bonus you earned was 16 over 10 scorinations, you would carryover 3.6 points; if you earned 1.8 points for every RP you posted across 10 scorinations, you would carryover 3.6 points.)

The finals will be scorinated with NSFS.

Cup of Harmony

Zwangzug and Turori will of course have to bid, and win, separately in order to host the Cup of Harmony, and will spell out any details in such a future bid. In the event they do not win the bid, we would nonetheless be willing to share RP bonus data with whomever does host the CoH.

Experience

Farf, Zwang, and Vil are all extremely experienced hosts. I have never hosted a WC, but I have hosted 2 Cups of Harmony and 3 Baptisms of Fire (including both tournaments in the last cycle), plus 4 regional tournaments.

Please note

All World Cup finalists are strongly advised to take out insurance against fire, kraken, and excessive diacritical marks.

[Tumbra]

A very big fan of these aspects:
a. Cutting off at 152, giving a more manageable number of teams
b. 2v3 playoffs, giving more teams a chance to be involved until the end
c. Roster penalty, as established in previous WCs
d. SQIS in the qualifiers; but I must ask why this does not carry over to the WCF proper

But otherwise, this bid for the WC is excellent and should receive my support.

[Cassadaigua]

Can I have a statement of absolute confirmation that there will be no penalty, not even of .0000000001, for going over 2000 words in anything?

I will never, ever, ever, ever run a word count on any RP I do. Ever. I'm probably not that type that goes over 2000, but I honestly don't like the mention of that in a bid. So please provide an absolute, foolproof statement, that there will not even be the slightest penalty.

Otherwise, no issues.

[Legalese]

Because of course I'll have questions:

- Why do you plan to use SQIS durring qualifying and NSFS during the World Cup Finals? What advantages do you think this brings versus sticking to the same scorinator for both parts of the competition?

- What will be the max RP bonus per scorination? Why do you think that's the right value to balance between the three R's?

- You mentioned both a roster bonus and a roster penalty. On the former, how much is said bonus relative to a single MD? On the latter: right to assume it starts with the first scorination?

- When mentioning the RP word maximum suggestion, why make it a suggestion that either won't be enforced/is softly suggested in a way that makes it easy for one to question if it is actually being shadow-enfoced (generating questions like what Cass has raised). Did you consider just setting a hard limit with enforcement like, say, counting just the first 2,000 words for bonus purposes?

- If your bid were a hot dog, would it be a sandwich as well?

[Arjunnagar]

when will the signups start?

[PotatoFarmers]

when will the signups start?

Signups are done independently of any host vote, and can be found here: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=517042

I think the bid is interesting, but I will probably prepare some follow-up questions dependant on how Legal's questions are answered

[Sarzonia]

I'm not a fan of the Vilitan bid system at all. That said, that's not something I would treat as an absolute disqualifier.

What I DO have a problem with is the suggestion of a penalty for too many words. I know I don't typically write super-long RPs nowadays, but suggesting 2,000 words as an arbitrary benchmark gives me a vision of someone copying and pasting a lengthy RP into MS Word and running a word/character count and penalising accordingly.

"Damn that Sarz! Two-thousand one words! Let's dock him!" Again, I don't think I'd be anywhere near that threshold, but still, even the suggestion that the crazy scenario might be in play is disqualifying for this bid.

Also, I'm opposed to the idea of changing the scorinators used between qualifying and the finals proper.

I also hate the every 48 hour/two matchday scorination thing, but it seems obvious that ship has sailed.

[Hapilopper]

I have two issues.

- You mention that "Extravagantly large rosters are counterproductive." Does this mean that a roster like mine, with bios for each player, is going to be penalized? I don't want to go to the effort of writing a World Cup roster if it's going to be penalized for being too long. I do these rosters to serve as both a guide for myself and for other players of what these guys are like and what their personalities are so I have some kind of idea of how I want them RP'd. For instance, Nathan Ellis and Jerold Dickman RP'd as moral paragons of virtue would be so out of their character.

- A lot of people touched on this, but I have an issue with an idea of a word count limit. My RP's typically range between 800-1500 words but if I need to get something more from them, I will go past 2000 words if I need to, and I did on a few occasions during the last World Cup. In my opinion, since this is the most prestigious competition on NS Sports, there shouldn't be any kind of limit implemented.

[Tinhampton]

In a WC91 playoff tie that finishes

Mont Vert 2–1 Montana Verde
Montana Verde 1–0 Mont Vert

after 180 minutes, who progresses to the World Cup Finals and how?

[Farfadillis]

This post is meant to address the points brought up regarding any potential penalties to RP length, as it appears we have failed to make ourselves clear on that point. We will get to answering the other questions soon enough, but this particular thing I want to put to rest as quickly as possible because it appears to have caused a lot of commotion.

No penalties of any sort will be applied when it comes to RP length. No ifs or buts. We won't be running your RP by wordcounter.net or anything like that. You need not worry yourselves with whether you're about to hit any particular number of words: just write whatever feels natural. If what feels natural is a 5000-word behemoth, so be it. To further drive this point home: if in the future a World Cup bid proposes a limit of the sort you guys are worried about, I would personally break my personal "I don't vote for the WC" rule purely to vote against said bid.

Now, as for my (and therefore, not necessarily Zwang's, Vil's or Graint's) personal opinion regarding RP length, in case anyone is interested in a more nuanced take from one of the prospective hosts:

When I judge a piece of writing, I generally consider length to be irrelevant once you get past the point where the number of words you've written has allowed you to fully express the quality of your writing. In that sense, five words will probably never be enough to get full bonus. However, remarkably few words can theoretically net you a full bonus from me, just as ten thousand words could merely net you an okay bonus if the writing in it is, well, just okay.

This comes with an added catch, however: I, and again I emphasize this is potentially just me, don't really judge RPs based purely on what I think of them as pieces of writing. I also take into account the effort the user has put into the RP. A good example of that has been mentioned in the bid: I take into account whether someone doesn't have a perfect grasp of the English language, for example. Similarly, a mediocre 200-word RP will get you a worse bonus than a mediocre 2000-word RP. More importantly, however: writing more, if I am the one grading, will never substract from your RP bonus, even though it would if I were to judge your RPs purely as pieces of writing. Sometimes less is more, but I don't like penalizing people for making an effort.

The reason we recommend not writing very long RPs is that sometimes this is a conscious effort to inflate your RP bonus which will, in all likelihood, fail miserably. When a roleplay has been artificially inflated it is usually fairly obvious; I don't reward that kind of thing. If your RP naturally came out very long, that's fine and dandy and chances are you'll get a very good RP bonus if you're any good at writing, with the added caveat that you probably didn't need to write that many words but hey, who cares, you did it because it came out that way and you had fun. For example, last WC at one point Vil told me one of my RPs had probably accrued max RP bonus about halfway through and that in a sense I had wasted my efforts; I told him I did not really mind because I'd had a lot of fun writing the RP and it just came out that way.

So, to sum up and add a few more points:
- Write at your heart's content. If that means I have to read a novella, so be it, but please at least have fun while doing it.
- Your best bet to maximize your RP bonus, if you're specifically aiming for that, is probably to revise your RP rather than write more and more. This will, to boot, probably make you improve as a writer much more than aiming for a specific word count.
- In my opinion, this is a genuine problem that exists. Some users really do appear to try to inflate their word counts. In fact, I used to do it on occasion back when I was newer and somehow even less mature than now. This is who we're trying to give advice to.
- I take effort into account, so in a sense you're safe even if you overwrite; this is not necessarily the case with Zwang, Vil and Graint and has been explicitly stated to not be the case with other graders.

- You mention that "Extravagantly large rosters are counterproductive." Does this mean that a roster like mine, with bios for each player, is going to be penalized? I don't want to go to the effort of writing a World Cup roster if it's going to be penalized for being too long. I do these rosters to serve as both a guide for myself and for other players of what these guys are like and what their personalities are so I have some kind of idea of how I want them RP'd. For instance, Nathan Ellis and Jerold Dickman RP'd as moral paragons of virtue would be so out of their character.

Also going out of my way to reply to this because it is a question in the same vein:

I'm in the same camp as you when it comes to rosters: I like making them very long and detailed, with pretty graphics and all. Same goes for Vil. Graint's rosters of late have been similarly detailed as well. These rosters can be counterproductive in the sense that maybe our opponent doesn't particularly care whether Faragó rue Cazade's hair is red, blue or purple, and we might be wasting their time. This can be rather easily fixed: just provide a shorter version of the roster at the beginning in a spoiler and that should circumvent the problem entirely. Even if you don't do that, a roster like yours would still get full bonus, but it's still worth keeping this in mind because we're doing collaborative writing after all, and in some sense a roster can be long enough to take away from its collaborativeness.

[Hapilopper]

So what I'm getting from this is that maybe a tl;dr version of the roster at the top of my roster post?

If that's the case, I'm more than OK with it and my question has been answered. Thank you!

[Farfadillis]

So what I'm getting from this is that maybe a tl;dr version of the roster at the top of my roster post?

Yes; it would help other users and as such we recommend it. I should get around to doing the same thing myself, in fact.

[Graintfjall]

d. SQIS in the qualifiers; but I must ask why this does not carry over to the WCF proper

Why do you plan to use SQIS durring qualifying and NSFS during the World Cup Finals? What advantages do you think this brings versus sticking to the same scorinator for both parts of the competition?

I'm going to ask Farf to explain this a bit more as he's better at explaining Big Number Thonk than I am, but essentially:

I want to use SQIS for the qualifiers because it implements home advantage correctly, which NSFS does not in xkoranate. I think home advantage is an important part of home-and-away qualifiers.

For the WC proper, home advantage is irrelevant, and thus NSFS can be used, which handles better the difference between two highly ranked teams (which largely does not come up in qualifiers, on account of group seeding).

Can I have a statement of absolute confirmation that there will be no penalty, not even of .0000000001, for going over 2000 words in anything?

There will absolutely definitely 100% be no penalty of any kind for exceeding any particular word count.

What will be the max RP bonus per scorination? Why do you think that's the right value to balance between the three R's?

I'm not going to disclose the specific number, but we would aim to weight it such that an unranked team consistently RPing could be competitive with the top 32 by the final MD.

You mentioned both a roster bonus and a roster penalty. On the former, how much is said bonus relative to a single MD?

Again without getting too specific, worth up to about 1.5MD max.

The justification for this is: if an unranked team (to whom a roster penalty is irrelevant) only has time to write one thing before MD1 and is choosing between an RP and a roster, I would rather they wrote the roster, as it will almost certainly be more helpful for their opponent. As such, we would weight the RP bonus for that roster a bit higher than for an RP.

On the latter: right to assume it starts with the first scorination?

Yes.

When mentioning the RP word maximum suggestion, why make it a suggestion that either won't be enforced/is softly suggested in a way that makes it easy for one to question if it is actually being shadow-enfoced (generating questions like what Cass has raised).

I didn't think that interpretation would be arrived at. Clearly, my wording was at fault. IANAL. I apologize.

Did you consider just setting a hard limit with enforcement like, say, counting just the first 2,000 words for bonus purposes?

No.

Does this mean that a roster like mine, with bios for each player, is going to be penalized?

As Farf says, no.

A lot of people touched on this, but I have an issue with an idea of a word count limit.

So do I. There is no word count limit.

In a WC91 playoff tie that finishes

Mont Vert 2–1 Montana Verde
Montana Verde 1–0 Mont Vert

after 180 minutes, who progresses to the World Cup Finals and how?

Neither, they are both ejected for breaking the rule on puppets.

Are you asking "are you using the away goals rule for the playoffs"? If so, the answer is no, away goals will not be used as a tiebreaker. The higher ranked team (#2) will be home team for the second match and if the scores are tied there will be extra time, then penalties.

If that is not what you are asking, please can you clarify your question, with no San Marino flags.

No penalties of any sort will be applied when it comes to RP length. No ifs or buts. We won't be running your RP by wordcounter.net or anything like that. You need not worry yourselves with whether you're about to hit any particular number of words: just write whatever feels natural. If what feels natural is a 5000-word behemoth, so be it. To further drive this point home: if in the future a World Cup bid proposes a limit of the sort you guys are worried about, I would personally break my personal "I don't vote for the WC" rule purely to vote against said bid.

I want to echo and endorse everything Farf said here.

For my own personal reflection on marking, I don't attach great significance to RP length, and I have no particular opinion whether a 500 or 5000 word RP is more likely to earn a higher bonus. I have just seen multiple players express worries that they feel they need to produce great tomes, and I absolutely don't think it's true. A smart, or funny, or emotional RP that is quite short can easily be a great read worthy of max bonus.

I cannot imagine any situation where someone writing more would lose RP bonus in my grading eyes, unless once they reach the 2000 word mark they decide it's time to start padding out their post with racial slurs and questionable imprecations about my mother.

So what I'm getting from this is that maybe a tl;dr version of the roster at the top of my roster post?

As a host, I would absolutely not give you any penalty for not doing so, and consider your WC90 roster (for example) an excellent roster fully worthy of the max bonus.

As a player, I would probably appreciate a TL;DR playing XI or something, yeah, but it's not a big deal. I've started to include a TL;DR in my own rosters as I was wary of how long and self-indulgent they were becoming, but I think yours is pretty straightforward really.

[Hapilopper]

Thank you very much. I think, with that, my questions have been answered and I am in full support. Thank you!

[Farfadillis]

d. SQIS in the qualifiers; but I must ask why this does not carry over to the WCF proper

Why do you plan to use SQIS durring qualifying and NSFS during the World Cup Finals? What advantages do you think this brings versus sticking to the same scorinator for both parts of the competition?

I'm going to ask Farf to explain this a bit more as he's better at explaining Big Number Thonk than I am, but essentially:

I want to use SQIS for the qualifiers because it implements home advantage correctly, which NSFS does not in xkoranate. I think home advantage is an important part of home-and-away qualifiers.

For the WC proper, home advantage is irrelevant, and thus NSFS can be used, which handles better the difference between two highly ranked teams (which largely does not come up in qualifiers, on account of group seeding)

I don't actually have much to add beyond a few more thoughts that went into my personal reasoning:

I've been quite vocally pro-NSFS, anti-SQIS for the better part of a decade now. After Audio ran the numbers on how the two influence qualifiers a month or six ago (I don't know, time's fuzzy, ok?), I became reasonably convinced that the two are not fundamentally too different when it comes to qualifiers, to the point that SQIS being able to implement home advantage correctly gives it enough of an edge in my mind. For the World Cup proper, however, I prefer the flexibility that NSFS offers by allowing you to have greater (though far from perfect) control over the randomness of results; I feel its ability to distinguish between top teams better if one so desires is a big plus. It is an admittedly delicate balance, however, and I promise to carefully run the numbers to see what kind of max rank will likely get us a World Cup that more or less "feels right", subjective as that notion might be. My guiding principle (which would need to be run by the rest of the team, mind) would be to aim for a World Cup where randomness is more or less the randomness of the average (NS) World Cup of the past ten or so years.

I understand that switching formulas is unorthodox. To my understanding it would be a first, though I have not checked. However, I don't think there's really any reason why this would be wrong on a fundamental level.

- If your bid were a hot dog, would it be a sandwich as well?

The answer is trivially yes, because a hot dog is already a sandwich. I am structure rebel, ingredient neutral in this regard.

[Nephara]

I feel it's a very strong bid and I appreciate how you've worked to alleviate peoples' concerns, though I myself had zero issue with any of the mentions of wordcount in the OP.

[PotatoFarmers]

Some technical & procedural questions I want to get out of the way:

1) During the World Cup qualifiers/group stage, if 3 or more teams are level on Points, Head-to-head, and goal difference, what is the procedure in terms of scoring & ranking the IC coin flip (as well as any subsequent follow-ups, should there be a draw even after coin flips)
2) I understand raw RP grades will not be provided, but will it be possible for any participant to enquire any information about how their RPs are recieved across the various hosts?
3) How would the grading duties for the Qualifiers be split up?
4) Can I assume that regardless of the team format, only qualification group winners will be allowed to qualify directly for the World Cup? (Ie. Runners up and some, preferrably all, third-placed teams will play in the playoffs.)
5) How would extra time & penalties be scored for the playoffs?

[Graintfjall]

1. All three (or more) teams will be placed in a group and a single round robin, no home advantage group stage played using RP bonus as rank. The tiebreakers will then be applied. And re-run if needed to break the tie. The procedure will be treated as having been a three-way coin flip (or straw pull, or however participants wish to RP it).

2. I can't speak to what extend each grader is going to be willing to provide feedback, but in general I'm open to discussing RPs but not handing out hard numbers. I dislike the idea of someone thinking they need to game the system, "my match report got a 2.4 but my narrative post got a 1.8, better only write match reports!" when it may have been other factors like detail or humor or quality of writing that affected the grade.

3. We are thinking probably that if Farf wins the BoF vote, he and Zwang will take the 2nd half, and Turori and I the first half, to give Farf and Zwang a breather post-BoF/WBC. However, we all have individual schedules and commitments so we will divide it up in whatever way works best, while having each person do about 1/4 of the grading, and without messing participants about with too many time grading window changes.

4. That's our preference but it will depend on the specific number of groups.

5. Scorinate two matches, one home, one away. If tied on aggregate, scorinate subsequent matches at the correct venue until one goes to extra time. Once one does, add the extra time score (plus, potentially, the penalty score) to the original aggregate, ignoring the score in regular time.

[Farfadillis]

2) I understand raw RP grades will not be provided, but will it be possible for any participant to enquire any information about how their RPs are recieved across the various hosts?

Speaking only for myself, I am open to giving relatively well thought-out feedback to anyone who asks for it, time permitting. In fact, that's been my approach before, though I've never made it explicit and as a result I can only recall one instance of it happening.

Obviously, this approach wouldn't scale, as I can't give a thorough review of each of the hundreds (I think?) of RPs I'd be grading. I can only say I'll do my best if people want my honest opinion on their writing.

[Independent Athletes from Quebec]

I have chosen to vote RON on this bid.

There are multiple reasons behind this, and I cannot state all of them. It is a bid that has lots of very good ideas proposed, those that I endorse and would love to see in more competitions, whether NSWC or elsewhere, down the line. Even the accidental opening of the can of worms were understandable.

That said, I have a clear lack of faith towards one of the cobidders on this bid. As someone who remembers things for very long time, it has been a critical factor whenever I telegram my votes, and remains so. While I cannot specify the reasons, I do not think their stance had changed in recent months, therefore my doubts.

I hope this will not affect people's ability to determine whether if this bid is a good one from technical standpoint, because it is. But that's all from me.

[Astograth]

I am strongly in favour of this bid.

I hope this will not affect people's ability to determine whether if this bid is a good one from technical standpoint, because it is. But that's all from me.

I find this post strange and in bad faith. If there is no interest in influencing other people's opinions then there is no reason to post it. Everyone is entitled to vote what they like for any reason, but to air an accusation as serious as a "clear lack of faith" in a host while being mysterious and vague regarding the reasons for it makes it hard to believe there aren't ulterior motives involved.

[Independent Athletes from Quebec]

I am strongly in favour of this bid.

I hope this will not affect people's ability to determine whether if this bid is a good one from technical standpoint, because it is. But that's all from me.

I find this post strange and in bad faith. If there is no interest in influencing other people's opinions then there is no reason to post it. Everyone is entitled to vote what they like for any reason, but to air an accusation as serious as a "clear lack of faith" in a host while being mysterious and vage regarding the reasons for it makes it hard to believe there aren't ulterior motives involved.

.....And I ain't denying that I have clear opinions and sometimes work in my personal faith that may not be most reliable or agreeable.

But that's how it goes. I am someone whose RP participation has started to drop off in recent cycles of NSWC, and has no intention to bid for a NSWC event ever again so there isn't a motive along those lines.

Also, people express their opposition to host bids more often than not - this isn't that different. I recall this to be the case in past tournaments and find myself not really an exception here.

---

Now to go on more technical, important side of things because 1) this is lot more important, 2) it has taken me forever to type down these questions after putting them on backburner for few days lol...

It is a bid that is technically swift and solid. Like I've said in past, I agree with a lot of things said in the bid. If the bid passes the votes, World Cup 91 will carry on fine.

In past I have been opposed to 'recommended to limit yourself to ~2000 words' aspect because I felt that it could open up a chain of worms. But that part has since been clarified and I am viewing the 'General Principles' section as more of advisory section than an enforcement one.

In past, I have been part of several non-football competitions the OP has hosted in several cycles and they also had something similar (ofc with lot less details) come up. It made sense back then wording-wise, it makes sense now...maybe the confusion may have been due to the tensions generated by the debates about RP quality and sustainability over last 12 months or so.

Two questions:

- Why this style of RP carryover? I am curious about the rationale than whether I like it or not - it's certainly interesting and would translate well into this day and age of NSWC where almost everybody who qualified have RP'd their asses off. This can certainly be used well into future competitions too. But why?

- We have reached 152 signups some time ago and with World Cup qualifying still weeks away, it is absolutely possible that we could go a bit over 152. I do not have the exact maths with me right now, but if we are somewhere close like 164-165, will we be aiming for 167 or still go for a slightly adjusted version of the below>

[Sarzonia]

I find this post strange and in bad faith. If there is no interest in influencing other people's opinions then there is no reason to post it. Everyone is entitled to vote what they like for any reason, but to air an accusation as serious as a "clear lack of faith" in a host while being mysterious and vague regarding the reasons for it makes it hard to believe there aren't ulterior motives involved.

I find it rather odd that you'd call a post from Quebec that looks fairly innocuous to my eyes "in bad faith."

Rather than inflame tensions any further, I'll leave my commentary about it there.

I'm fairly satisfied with the answer to my concerns about the 2,000-word "limit." I'm more concerned with disclosure of RP bonus, whether public or private. In my case, when Farf co-hosted an AOCAF, he publicly posted RP bonuses for each player so everyone could readily see how they did. That really pissed me the fuck off and I sincerely hope no host ever considers doing that for even a yoctosecond.

[Independent Athletes from Quebec]

I'm fairly satisfied with the answer to my concerns about the 2,000-word "limit." I'm more concerned with disclosure of RP bonus, whether public or private. In my case, when Farf co-hosted an AOCAF, he publicly posted RP bonuses for each player so everyone could readily see how they did. That really pissed me the fuck off and I sincerely hope no host ever considers doing that for even a yoctosecond.

I am slightly confused here, Sarz:

When it comes to raising concerns, are you thinking something more along the lines of more specific analysis done on a major non-footballing competition just few days ago? Or are you more concerned about disclosure in any shape and form?

If it's done something similar to last CoH's standard deviation and average, I don't see why that would be an issue on a World Cup Qualifying stage where you'd see hundreds of RPs per cutoff (whether correct or hyperbolic is not the point here). And even if it's done along the cited example above, would that really be a problem? Even if this happens to be the case with more extensive analysis for the public benefit, I doubt it'd really be an issue in WCQ setting for same reasons mentioned.

[Farfadillis]

- Why this style of RP carryover? I am curious about the rationale than whether I like it or not - it's certainly interesting and would translate well into this day and age of NSWC where almost everybody who qualified have RP'd their asses off. This can certainly be used well into future competitions too. But why?

- We have reached 152 signups some time ago and with World Cup qualifying still weeks away, it is absolutely possible that we could go a bit over 152. I do not have the exact maths with me right now, but if we are somewhere close like 164-165, will we be aiming for 167 or still go for a slightly adjusted version of the below>

1) I'll explain the "carry over your best RP" half because the other half is just the standard get-rewarded-for-RPing-consistently type of bonus we're all used to. Not speaking for Graint (or Vil, or Zwang) here, but I personally think it's a good incentive for people who are maybe phoning it in MD-in-MD-out to focus on seeing if they can write something they can be proud of. We've met halfway with the usual method because we thought just carrying over everybody's best RP could open the door for a few inconvenient scenarios like someone posting just one great RP and calling it a day. At the end of the day, we'd still rather you post ten nine-out-of-tens than one ten-out-of-ten, and the carryover method has to reflect that.

2) Not going to fully, 100% commit to an answer here (mostly because I just haven't considered the full breadth of possible formats) but it does look like we'll have to aim for 167 sign-ups.

I'm more concerned with disclosure of RP bonus, whether public or private. In my case, when Farf co-hosted an AOCAF, he publicly posted RP bonuses for each player so everyone could readily see how they did. That really pissed me the fuck off and I sincerely hope no host ever considers doing that for even a yoctosecond.

To be clear, the proposed system here is a far cry from AOCAF Cup 60's: there will be no individual RP bonus revealed, privately or publicly. What we will reveal is some fancy-schmancy statistics so people can more or less have a rough idea of how RP grading works (or, at least, worked for this particular edition). The idea here is that with so many people RPing anonymity will be fully preserved, as it's very hard to pick out anything too specific with over fifty roleplays per day, especially if you're just looking at a distribution of scores. At any rate, as a general principle, our intention is to reveal as much information as possible, but only so long as it can be reliably be kept fully anonymous.

In the interest of transparency: this is not to say I would not do something similar to AOCAF Cup 60 a few cycles down the line if given the chance (obviously, I would state my intentions very explicitly in any future bid, though). I still like the idea of public RP bonus, but I realize it is at best very contentious and am more than happy to meet halfway with other people's ideas, as is the case here.