The locations of Minesweeper World Champsionships

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qqwref
Posts: 125
Joined: Thu Sep 23, 2010 4:17 pm

The locations of Minesweeper World Champsionships

Post by qqwref »

I suggest that all future "world championships" allow online participation.The last World Championship had a separate online event for people who couldn't make the real one, but why do we need to separate them? People who can afford the time and money to travel to a certain place in Europe are not in any way better than others. It's blatantly unfair to not allow someone like Kamil the right to be the "real" world champion when we have the ability to give him a fair chance simply by comparing all participants together.

EWQ suggests that I'm jealous that they have more tournaments in Europe, and that I haven't been to a tournament and don't know what it's like, and that tournament play and offline 5+5/3h are very different. Maybe these are true. But I'm not against all tournaments - in fact, I think it's great that people can meet up and compare their skills in a tournament environment. I think we should hold even more tournaments. But when you call something the WORLD Championship, and then set it up specifically so that people from around the world don't have an equal chance to attend, you are being unfair and nationalistic. If you are a top sweeper living near Munich or Zurich, try putting yourself in others' shoes - what if every WCH was held in Guangzhou or Los Angeles, and you couldn't attend? I would never say I got 1st or even 5th at the Minesweeper World Championship if I knew that many top players could not get there because of their location in the world.

We can easily make it fair, we just have to want to. Just treat all scoreganizer participants as equals, and think of the Europe tournament as a fun WCH-centered meetup. We could even have multiple meetups around the world at the same time. But holding a single competition in Europe is not the optimal solution.
NF player. Best scores 1-10-39.
EWQMinesweeper
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Joined: Sun Nov 30, 2008 11:50 pm

Re: The locations of Minesweeper World Champsionships

Post by EWQMinesweeper »

what keeps us from having 2 different events? i mentioned several times to qq that munich'12 would be the wch of real tournaments and that we could have an online wch on another date. in fact, it's the only tournament in '12 that is currently announced and in the planning. considering that 41 of the all-time top100 sweepers are based in europe and that european sweepers have already proven to be willing to travel a fair bit for tournaments (whereas american sweepers have not yet been able to organize a tournament in the states (this is meant to be a motivational challenge!) ), this tournament should allow many of the best active players to take part.

an entirely online tournament is in my opinion the best solution. the current 5+5/3h mode in its current state does not quite seem to fit for that. but that's content for another topic. in this thread i will probably have to defend the name of my tourny ;).

yes, i did ask qq if he was jealous. sometimes irc-debates go a bit too far. having been around hre for nearly 5 years and having been to 4 tournaments just seem to have gotten me used to a fluffy comfort zone. but those meetup tournaments are just so incredibly awesome and fun. it sure would be great to have sponsors that would allow intercontinental meetups, but let's be honest, we're still not yet at that point. currently we can be happy to have ~20 irc-more-or-less-regualrs.

the inactivity in this community has gotten so far that the only chance to get something done is by taking actions yourself (which you did by making this thread). if there is no chance to get the name through, i can cancel all plans for the tourny too. the only tournament this year would the the annual russian champioship. i actually even had planned to host a german championship later this year. the main reason i coined the tournament in june wch is the lack of other international meetup tournaments. the reason to call them wchs is primarily to make getting a location easier as well as potentially making it easier for possible participants to find sponsors for their travels (tjips participations for example and finding a location in munich and zurich). the title wch doesn't mean much. at least not to me. i myself have never bragged with it, which doesn't keep my friends from using it to get conversation started at parties and clubs though.

all wchs so far were definetely not held in europe with the intention to disallow sweepers from other continents. they were there because there weren't any other rivaling tournaments. my suggestion is that the meetup tournaments are considered as their own kind of thing. obviously they are not about finding out who is the best sweeper in the world. they are about having fun, playing some ms, meeting other sweepers and having a good time. you don't attend them with the intention to 'win'. you know most of the outcome beforehand. you know who is about as fast as you and you try to compete with these people. if the wch was always held on other continents, i sure wouldn't be happy. but notheless i would try to host my own tournaments and try to reach a situation in which the wch being held on my continent would become possible. there being meetup tournaments on other continents is possible and would be really nice to have. but i myself can do very little about that. when sweepers from munich talk about their position at munich'10, they always refer to it as eg "12th out of 16, this means i was the 12th best at the event but definetely not in the world". it's sort of similar with the world ranking. if you know what times the people ranked around you usually get, you can compare your position much better.

my objection is - actually it's not an objection, it's more of a suggestion - is that i don't see why we can't have a solely online wch, which will need to have a better mode than 5+5/3h and which will be as representative as it can be and still have meetup tournaments which can have whatever name we want. maybe i was mistaken, but for me it was just blatantly obvious, that the name is just a tag. munich'12 will be mostly a fun competition like the previous tournaments. if it's considered an entirely different event (at an online tournament all participants would likely do 10-20s better), it should be fine to call it "wch" (of meetup tournaments). i do in no way intend to exclude online participants, with the meatspace mode such participations should work, but one more, imho strong, argument for having the online wch on a different date is that such one could be used to generate much more online activity, as then all ppotential participants could play from their best setup and would be able to actively communicate with all other participants.

i hope i made my point clear. there are good reasons for what was suggested and i see that we have some common ground. at best we already have something we can agree on.
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Arsen
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Joined: Fri Jan 09, 2009 9:08 am

Re: The locations of Minesweeper World Champsionships

Post by Arsen »

Ok, Frtiz's post took a while to read through and I'm sure has taken time to be actually written, so I decided to login to state that I fully agree with each and every word he's saying. I like the idea of a separate online tournament and i would like to see more people at offline championships for which Europe is the best chance.
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Tommy
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Re: The locations of Minesweeper World Champsionships

Post by Tommy »

In my opinion, both of you make very good points.

Online and offline tournaments each have an attribute that only they have, and that make them very desirable for a world championship.

Online championships are open to everyone, regardless of geographic location or income, given a computer and an internet connection, which are a prerequisite for participation in the community anyway.

Offline tournaments have the benefit that cheating can be effectively eliminated. Also, there is the aspect that sweepers can actually meet in meatspace and socialize. Having experienced that, I can only say that it is awesome - I made real-life friends that way.

In a perfect world, we'd have sponsors/some other way to pay for trips to a world championship even for sweepers living far away. Then we'd have a situation analogous to conventional sports.

But unless the community grows quite a bit, that is not going to happen any time soon.

So, the verdict seems to be that we need to decide which of the two attributes we want to have - meatspace to eliminate cheating, or online to eliminate "geographic advantages".

I don't think that this is the case.

Something I have been thinking about for a while is a decentralized meatspace event. This has actually happened before - see http://www.minesweeper.info/tournaments/Moscow2008.html.

There is absolutely no reason why this could not be done worldwide. Players wouldn't have to travel as far, making it affordable for at least many more people to attend tournaments.

Or, we can have both - two separate tournaments, both world championships, one online and one meatspace, both with their respective benefits and drawbacks.

Or... Something else. Be creative. Scoreganizer gives us many more options, if I may say so. And it is not done, I am happy to implement realistic suggestions.
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