Yeon and RvW,
Would it be somewhat simpler if we did the following:

1. For each of the last ten turns, find the slowest player on each turn.
2. On each turn, the slowest player's team is penalized for every hour over 24 hours that player took to move. No penalty is applied that turn if everyone on both teams moved within 24 hours.
3. Add up the penalties for both teams over the ten turns and take the difference to get the total penalty for the slower team. Let that number be P.
4. If P > 48 hours (the grace period, equal to a team using the entire three days once during the last ten turns), then that team's score in the adjudication is (1 - (P-48)/432)*(income*2 + number of total armies). For the faster team it's simply the unadjusted formula: (income*2 + number of total armies). If P < 48 hours then no penalty is applied to either team.

For example, let's say a game was created on Aug. 1, everyone joined by Aug. 2, and slower team used the full three days for every turn, so that by the end of Aug. 31 exactly ten turns had been played. Then P = 10*48 = 480 so the slower team's score would be divided by half: 1 - (480-48)/864 = 0.5. Is that reasonable?

Sorry, screwed up the formula the first time! (It's correct in the example.) #4 should read:

4. If P > 48 hours (the grace period, equal to a team using the entire three days once during the last ten turns), then that team's score in the adjudication is (1 - (P-48)/864)*(income*2 + number of total armies). For the faster team it's simply the unadjusted formula: (income*2 + number of total armies). If P < 48 hours then no penalty is applied to either team.

I am pretty happy that the several guys now are helping me considerably,
I am likeing this discussion, it takes out the weight in my shoulders a little bit.

I am 100% ok with the formula and criteria you guys end up realizing is the best way to do it.

Aziridine: I think most of what you said is reasonable, but I don't think it fair if slowest player on team A uses 37 hours and slowest player on team B uses 38 hours, and then team B is punished for delaying the game by 14 hours. Don't you think the fair emount would be one hour?

i'm not part of the nations cup, but i think ( the first post by dunga) is a bad idead

warlight is just a game, and people are meant to have fun, this will be forcing people to play at least once a day, which definitely isn't fair because people like to socialize and do other things on holidays, rather then just sit at home and play wl

But let's say team A committed orders 24 hours ago but team B still hasn't moved yet, and now team A has thought things through a little more and wants to change their orders. If they do so I don't think the penalty for the team B should go from 24 hours to 0. What do others think?
Nike, would the 48-hour grace period over the last 10 turns be enough to satisfy your concern? Or how much longer do you think it should be?

I definitely think the advantage should be reset to zero if they send revised orders, since new orders are indiscernible from revised orders. And I think it'd be very ugly if one team can bank lots of hours over theoretically being one second faster.

As I see it we're trying to punish teams that drag games out on purpose. What the other team does while it waits for the slower team shouldn't change how the slower team is punished. Also I think this is slightly easier to calculate than your alternative. But all in all it's a minor point and I'll concede it for the sake of having a rule in place by Monday. So replace my #1 and #2 with your original formula.

Is the rest of my formula acceptable, including the 48-hour grace period? I think the original example I gave was pretty extreme (one team taking 20 days longer than the other team over a 30-day period) which led to the drastic point reduction. If a team uses only 48 hours beyond the grace period (so they used 96 hours or 4 days more than the other team) then the multiplier becomes 1 - (96-48)/864 = 0.944, which seems fair enough to me.

I was also looking at taking the maximum, but unfortunately there's a (solvable, but still) practical problem with it:
WL only lists turns actually taken, so if player A and player B have been playing at "the same speed", until player B suddenly stopped committing orders, the list will look like this:

Player A    Player B
65          36
23          65
24          23
64          24
13          64
 2          13
 4           2
12           4
18          12

So when we process these stats, we'd have to be very careful about which turns match up. And, how do we factor in the time we've been waiting for player B? In the example it could be anything from 18 hours (since it must be longer than player A; the turn starts at the same time for everyone) and 72 hours (since autoboot would've kicked player B at that moment).

Proposal:

• Add the "we have been waiting for x hours" timer as an extra data point to the playing speeds of all players who have not committed orders for the "current" turn when the round ends (both for fairness and to make it more difficult to forget "lining stuff up").
  
• Only look at the most recent eight turns. This is to prevent things from getting messed up (data "going missing") if the last player commits orders between the round ending and someone (Dunga?) having time to look it up and write it down.
  
• Of course, the "we have been waiting for x hours" value has to be corrected as well for the amount of time between the round ending and values being checked.
  
• This also buys some extra time in case teams disagree; more time before data disappears which is needed to verify the rules were applied correctly.
  
• It looks like you already have an idea how to process this "normalized" data further; terribly sorry, don't have time today to look into the details. :(

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warlight is just a game, and people are meant to have fun, this will be forcing people to play at least once a day, which definitely isn't fair because people like to socialize and do other things on holidays, rather then just sit at home and play wl

In all fairness, this rule only applies to the Nations Cup; people knew what they were getting into before signing up...

Excellent points RvW - I like all your ideas.
But honestly, the more complicated this gets the more I dread actually doing the adjudications. Are we going to apply this to the elimination rounds as well? If vacations aren't going to be honoured at that point I think it would be better to just play the games out - there will be fewer results to wait on anyway.

Once we've decided on a system, it's easy to make a spreadsheet that does it all automatically. You'd only have to manually copy the numbers (nothing can be done about that, I think) and the result just magically appears. Besides, I didn't make it that complicated, did I...? :s

In my view, penalties make no sense. Autoboot is there for a reason, if this isn't adequate then include timebanking, or make suggestions for added features to Fizzer, as the current system is quite lacking. However, creating a warning system for rounds that have already begun is unfair to those in the rounds. For example, had I known it would work this way I'd not have joined the tournament.

If you want things to move along quickly and simply, then make it 1d1h auto for future rounds, at least in the 1v1s (though the 7v7s will be slowest). Also, future rounds could conceivably be started before the previous one is finished. You want to encourage people to play, not turn them off of it and not make things overly complicated for no good reason. If people aren't getting booted then they should be considered as playing within the rules.

I agree with all you (RvW and Aziridine) said in your last posts. As far as I'm concerned, I think the only thing we need to finish it up is to adjust the divisor in Aziridine's formula so that it is for 8 turns and not for 10 turns (it's just multiplying the divisor by 0.8, isn't it?).

The rules appear a lot more complicated than they are, it's actually pretty simple to make a spreadsheet as RvW says. That would take ten minutes tops. But yes, there's a copying-of-information to be done for the games that do not finish on time.

In either case, I think the main points are:
1) Encourage players to finish the games rather than game the delay system
2) Not overly punish teams who aren't trying to delay games

So that basically, as much as possible, we'll be playing Warlight, not the delay system. And I think we're a lot closer to that now than we were initially.

Kruel: I do share your sentiments to a point, but the case is that if we don't have these rules, some people will delay the games on purpose for so long that the tournament may take two years or more to finish. Personally I think the end date for the group stage is a bit short (could finish more games, especially in round 3, by adding a couple weeks), but that was decided on early on and as far as I know it's not on the table. So what we're discussing is what to do with the games that are still running the 31st of August, not whether there will be a deadline.

I'm sorry Dunga but what the heck is this? You're changing the rules to the tournament AFTER it's begun? You're asking us to play team games but you're forcing us to move within 24 hours? I live in a timezone 9 hours behind most of my teammates. How are we supposed to communicate and plan our moves and strategy within 24 hours if I'm awake while they're asleep and vice versa?

I never would've joined this tournament under this new rule.

its the same problem we faced with the manager league

I want to make it clear that my suggestion was already voted out. IT WILL NOT BE DONE.
So far nobody is suffering no penalties for no reason, and nobody is being forced to be faster either. SO FAR.
I like to remember I made it clear about the deadlines, and that this would be discussed eventually.

We are discussing it in this thread.

I liked to see this discussion to see how we all together feel about how things should work out to have a tournament with schedule.

we can also see the peoples preference:

you all prefere:
1) force finish with deadlines and formulas with speedbased score system? (1 month/round)

2) wait everything to finish in its own pace and wait to see how long it will take?

And also, we are all learning as a community to sort out this problems when they appear, as myhand said, this happens a lot.

I would still prefere option 1 with a speed-based formula because i want to make a second tournament. Maintaining interest is the key here.

I am now open discussion in this subject, the deadlines can be changed.

If deadline can be changed, I propose that group stage ends 30th of September, with games not finished by then going into adjudication as per the ideas RvW, Aziridine and I discussed. :) But we'll see what people think.

Personally, I'm trying to move (a bit) faster in these games as to not ruin a great idea similarly to what happened in the manager league.

Stopping games earlier should be posssible and I actually do agree on a penalty if one team plays particularly slow towards the end.

However, penalties should always be small in my opinion. Let's not forget that to win a player needs to have an advantage anyway. Maybe this particular player wouldn't have won if the game was played out, but he/she did have at least early advantage. Most templates are low-luck as far as I know, which means that a strong start implies skill.
Similar to sports, it would be nice if there were some neutral judges who could decide in close situations.

Lol for France 2 we did not even start the game vs GB1, so the deadline we'll never meet, mostly as the wrong player was invited in the game...