'Not A Villain' Webcomic - the Game Trials is a double elimination tournament.

‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 84

Or in other words, it's a double elimination tournament. Danni doesn't know this since she's never played sports and ballet/dance rarely (if ever) do that type of a tournament.

And I received another fan art!! From Legomaestro and it's symbolic! Yay! Find it in the Fan Art section.

For the vote incentive, I re-did panel 1's dialogue plus another panel from an earlier page!

Click to check it out!

16 Comments

Not sure whether it was intentional or not, but a tournament as described (I’m a tournament-math buff, among other things) will normally result in SEVEN survivors (each having less than two losses), essentially turning 64 into 7. After that point, you’d normally enter a post-tournament stage where you try to turn 7 into 1 in some sort of elimination format…

However, since you’re looking to get FIVE survivors out of seven (out of 64), it actually comes out looking weird. If you only needed 4 out of 64, or 5 out of 32, things would be much easier. In fact, there’s multiple kinds of post-tourney setups, some quite exotic, most of which JUST miss the kind of numbers you’re looking for.

I’ll be interested in seeing how you end up handling it, I wouldn’t be surprised if you just threw the math out the window and pulled some sort of writer’s loophole to gloss over the details. Not that it SHOULDN’T be done (stories would be waaaay too tedious if authors had to be accountable for every little detail of their world), but things like that still need to be handled skillfully in order to still make a believable impression.

I’m a fan of your work so I’m sure I’ll end up pleasantly surprised at every turn of your plot, as usual. I just wanted to add my piece since it touches on something that I’m more than familiar with. 🙂

Ha ha. I knew 5 was going to be messy (yay for conflict!), but I thought it was coming out of 6, not 7. Where did you get the 7th one?

The bracket in the comic will give a clean top 4: Winner, loser of the finals, person eliminated in the finals of the loser’s bracket, person eliminated in the semifinals of the loser’s bracket (there is only one loser’s bracket semifinal because the other loser-finalist got knocked out of the winner’s bracket in the last round).

However, there are two people eliminated in the loser’s quarterfinals, who place 5th and 6th with no distinguishing feature. Traditionally they are both assigned 5th place.

Yep, that’s how I saw it. Except there will be a slight twist with the ‘traditional’ double 5th place.

Ah i think i figured out your problem. For a while i was stuck with how you got the numbers you said… (“are they using extraction instead of injection?””is the isolation factor greater than the filter constant?””did they forget about the step balance?”, etc.) I think I have it now, though.

If my guess is correct, you designed your tournament by a HEAVILY flawed (but easy to find and refer to) double-elimination tourney, where Losers from the W-Bracket are not added to the L-Bracket UNTIL the L-Bracket shrinks down to the same number of entries that the W-Bracket wants to move over.

Sure, some of the numbers come out okay that way, but it is a horrible system, ESPECIALLY for the context of this story. The point of a double-elimination tournament is to allow teams to still have a legitimate shot of victory, even if they lost some time earlier. In fact, it doesn’t really matter WHEN you lost, so long as you KEEP winning (the only advantage losing later, rather than earlier, gives is a better seeding in the L-Bracket, but otherwise doesn’t affect outcome). In fact, under normal seeding it would force ALL current members of the L-Bracket to be GONE by the time that the next influx of losers from the W-Bracket arrives (the span of 2 matches) meaning that winning sooner has almost infinitely better odds of survival than if you don’t (Win-Loss trumps Loss-Win every time).

However, a “pack the box” style L-Bracket FORCES out players way too early, makes them work twice as hard, over-biases towards those who won FIRST, provides situations where being mis-seeded can cause a team to win where they would not have normally (no tournament should do this), provides unfair sequencing order, ENCOURAGES dozens of rematches (where the last winner always wins, despite 1-1 tradeoff), and several other logical fallacies… think of it like trying to walk where you have to take two right steps for every left step you take. It’d be really difficult to do, wouldn’t take you in the right direction (circles), you’d look funny, you could trip easier, and you’d have to constantly think about taking your steps in the correct order. Rather unnecessary, right?

Basically, the person who came up with that particular system of double-elimination, didn’t know what they were doing. They just drew it up that way because it was easy to do, despite being incredibly unfair.

A comparable analogy would be if you had a 64-member single-elimination tournament, where the PLACING of each candidate is done randomly. Sometimes in that situation, people suggest that whoever lost to the champion in the final match is “second place”. However, by virtue of victory the champion is the 1 seed, meaning they would’ve beaten the 2 seed REGARDLESS of where they were seeded. So, if the two best players faced off in the very first round, i would think that the loser would be mad if someone said that the runner-up should be considered “second-place”.

The key thing here though is, that a “pack-the-box” style tournament requires the L-Bracket to play 2 rounds, for the W-Bracket to be able to play another 1 round. This means that in your story, EVERYONE still in the W-Bracket will get a decent rest period after every match, while they kick back, cover strategy with teammates and rivals, and watch the L-Bracket matches… meaning that even if they do lose, they enter the L-Bracket both more knowledgable and more energized.

I do have an alternate method on hand (i draw a lot of this stuff heh) that i refer to as the “half-and-half” style of double-elimination. It works very similarly but doesn’t have any of the problems that that one does in regard to time, fairness, bias, or placing process. It’s actually even simpler in concept, believe it or not, and that’s the one i spoke of before about there being “7 survivors”. What I meant was, every surviving player would always play every round, for a total of 6 matches. Only 7 players can remain with less than 2 losses under that system.

In that situation, the 1st and 2nd places could be declared immediately. However, two members would tie for 3rd, and three for 5th. In that case, you could just use whatever post-tournament process you want to decide who wins those tiebreakers. It would also allow Danni to be more successful if Kleya gives her a new Special, since nobody would be able to see it coming beforehand (and I’m sure Kleya would appreciate not having other contestants over-study her handmade Specials).

/rant

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tl;dr version: i think i get what you mean now. thats not really fair and i didnt expect you to use that way since it conflicts with your plot. if knowing that changes things, i can help you use a better way, but as the author its up to you. good luck and thanks for the comic 🙂

Wow! I can see you really like fiddling with this stuff. Unfortunately, I’m not sure what you have in mind for my plot, but the Game Trials was never meant to be fair. The Game preliminaries (the DeatchMatch and then the Game Trials) are designed with a reality tv show mindset, not with ‘may the best and rightful person win’ like normal tournaments. So this apparently flawed version I’m using works just fine.

Thanks for pointing this all out, though. If I ever need a fair and balanced tournament, I’ll keep yours in mind 🙂 And I hope you’ll continue to enjoy the story!

Absolutely. I apologize for rocketing your comment section depth down to vernian proportions, I had just finished drinking about 150 oz of Mountain Dew while pulling an all-nighter for school. I try to keep my ranting to a minimum usually, sometimes though i forget to re-edit my messages when I’m all… hyper.

Really enjoying the story so far, and I’ll likely continue to do so for months and months to come. I’m impressed with your talent as a storyteller to be able to pack so much plot density within so few pages, while still making each individual page come across as balanced and well-paced. Neither the dialogue nor the artwork overpower the other, and the page breaks (which can sometimes come across as cliffhanger moments in the short term) translate very smoothly into fluid, archival reading.

I’m also enheartened by the effort you’ve put into trying to convey the nuances of the characters’ world (or within L.i.F.e, at least) by pacing back and forth between adding depth to the setting, and having your characters respond to the circumstances created by your setting. The premise is not so new as to be groundbreaking, yet you manage to keep the world fresh and interesting every page, so that it avoids cliche.

I’ll be interested in seeing how you handle each character’s emotional growth from here on out, now that you’re starting to break out of the initial story foundation and into the “meat” of the story.

Kleya was rewarded for her continued attempts to do things the RIGHT way (well, not really, but at least not as wrong as before) by being able to retain her friendships with Mina and Danni, as well as being given an opportunity to realistically bust them out of their financial woes (some of which she caused, though :/). Mina chose to support her friend instead of deserting her when she had a right to, and Danni handled her feelings of betrayal not by becoming depressed, but by taking charge and forcing herself to find a solution.

Your characters are believably dynamic and wonderfully flawed, and provide an interesting spin on the id-ego-superego combination. There’s plenty of room for all kinds of development with any/each of them, and that means we’re in for some great stories. I for one will be heartily anticipating your next moves. 🙂

P.S. I hope this arc means more Mina, we haven’t seen enough of her lately! You can tell she’s really good friends with Kleya, and the kind of person that people naturally feel comfortable talking to. Maybe we’ll get to hear more about her family as well?

Oh, all-nighters – those always killed me. lol

Thank so much for such an in-depth comment! It just blows me away so thanks!! I’m really glad you’re still enjoying my story!

And yes, the next arc will have more Mina in it. Originally, we were going to meet Mina’s family before the DeathMatch, but it bogged down the pacing so I ended up moving it to afterwards. I can’t wait to introduce them, though!

wow thats a lengthy theory lol but hey i like it, i wonder y danni needs to win so badly? the tournament sounds crazy

So does anyone else see that Danni and Kleya will meet up for that final and 5th spot? Since as described a ‘double’ fifth place will exist…Though there’s a good chance even if they do somehow both will make it. At least, that’s how I see it going down.

Barring some plot device, I doubt Kleya would seriously fight Danni for the fifth spot. If the are to fight for the 5th seat, Kleya would probably just throw the fight or forfeit as she wants to avoid attention, and knows Danni’s position. She is trying to be good after all.

perhaps…but Kleya does hate to lose…that would likely be her intent should they meet up, but it also has to look like she didn’t purposely throw the fight, especially with all eyes on her(being sponsored, having I’m sure another interesting avatar, and obviously she’s being watched by the Bandit’s people). And Kleya could win by ‘accident’ because Danni uses up her fireball, draining her stats, which means even a ‘light’ attack from Kleya could finish her unintentionally….it will be interesting to see. Too bad I’m guessing we won’t get to see most of the tournament. Of course we mostly are only interested in Kleya’s and Danni’s fights, but it would be interesting to see a few colorful characters facing off in other matches. Ultimately totally unnecessary to plot though lol.

Wow complicated theorem indeed. I better reread what Ixam said i can’t make heads or tails of it.

One has to wonder… Who’s “Bloody Mary”? Did I miss a page or something?

Go check out page #31 (I think). It is right after the black and white practice round that you learn about “Bloody Mary”. She killed her entire team so there are 5 empty slots instead of just 1.

Wow, Ixam, your tourney math rants rival mine on Sumeria. I say this as I glance over at massive stacks of research and notes…it truly is great to be a geek, isn’t it?

Not A Villain Webcomic

Webcomic of a semi- reformed hacker trying to redeem herself in a post- apocalyptic world she may have created.

‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 84