Link to the original announcement from May 14th
TPCI recently announced a players cup, their first foray into large scale first-party online Pokemon TCG tournaments. In order to qualify, players must be among the top players according to the Tournament Rep leaderboards in standard during the month of June. Players have been instructed to enter 8-person PTCGO tournaments, which require 8 tournament tickets to play in. These tickets are untradable, unpurchasable, and are only available though in-game play. Many players have a large stockpile of these already, while others frequently use them to win packs in tournaments. Still more players do not use the ladder or tournament systems, opting for direct challenges or in-person play. This appears to have put players of different types at varying levels of advantage if their goal is to qualify for this tournament. This article is a mathematical breakdown of what you as a player can so starting today to maximize the number of tournaments you can enter during the month of June.
There are 18 calendar days before June starts. For example, I currently have 9 tournament tickets and have completed the ladder currently ending with an FA Bonnie, but have not played any games today. A new ladder starts on Monday, May 18.
For completing the ladder, players will get:
2 (Track 1) + 5 (Track 2) + 10 (Track 3) = 17 tickets, or enough for 2 tournament entries.
Realistically, the player only needs 1170 VS points, rather than the full 2000 to realize their max tickets.
Each day, your 9th win on the ladder gets you 1 ticket.
14 Days of getting 9 wins = 14 tickets.
So far we're at 31 tickets, which is almost 4 buyins.
Each day, users get up to 5 boxes from their ladder wins (Available at wins 1,2,4,7, and 11)
Reddit user slugisen tracked his rewards a year ago over a sample of mystery boxes at https://www.reddit.com/r/ptcgo/comments/9awzsq/mystery_box_statistics_part_2_200_boxes/.
Assuming that the distribution rates have not changes (fairly likely IMO), we can use this data to help make some guesses about box EV.
Yes, this is a "small" sample size and 100% is not necessarily a statistically valid sample, so don't treat this as any sort of guarantee.
If we take slugisen's data at face value, a box has the following probabilities:
1 ticket = 21.5%
2 tickets = 7%
4 tickets = 1.5%
From this data we can say that:
Box EV = 0.215 + 2*0.07 + 4*0.015 = 0.415 tickets per box
So if we assume this value is close enough to accurate:
A player getting the following number of wins per day for the remaining 18 days of May might expect these corresponding ticket returns.
| Wins | EV per Day | EV over 18 days | # of Buyins |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0.415 | 7.47 | <1 |
| 2 | 0.93 | 16.74 | 2 |
| 4 | 1.245 | 22.41 | 2 |
| 7 | 1.66 | 29.88 | 3 |
| 11 | 2.075 | 37.35 | 4 |
So if a player gets 11 ladder wins a day and completes the ladder during the month of May, they might expect 68.35 tickets, which is 8 buyins.
Okay, this is actually not so bad (as someone who works a full time job and didn't miss a day of getting 11 wins throughout the entire double-rewards period in April).
However, there are a few sources of additional tickets we can factor in.
When you win a tournament match (I legitimately forget if you get one when you lose) you get a wheel spin, that has prizes like tickets and/or boxes.
So when you start playing the tournaments in June, you will recoup some small number of tickets as you play. I can't find actual data on this wheel, especially since ptcgo used to use a "wheel" for vs rewards that is messing with my search results.
In addition, obviously players can, will, and should continue to accrue tickets throughout the month of June while the tournaments are ongoing.
The ladder that starts on may 18th will end on Monday, June 8th.
The subsequent ladder will go from June 8th to June 29th.
For the purposes of this math, I'm not going to make any assumptions about an individual's ability to complete a nontrivial potion of the ladder on June 29th/30th while also being able to leverage the tickets gained. If you can, bonus points for you!
So we start June with 68.35 Tickets.
Then another full ladder gives us another 17 tickets for a total of 85.35 tickets.
To play nicely with our earlier assumption about not grinding the ladder on June 29th or 30th, let's say that "June" has 28 days.
From the 9th win on the ladder in each of those 28 days, you'll get another 28 tickets, making our total 113.35 (or 14 buyins).
Now let's do the same Mystery Box math we did above:
A player getting the following number of wins per day for the remaining 18 days of May might expect these corresponding ticket returns.
| Wins | EV per Day | EV over 28 days | # of Buyins |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0.415 | 11.62 | 2 (combined with May) |
| 2 | 0.93 | 26.04 | 3 |
| 4 | 1.245 | 34.86 | 5 (combined with May) |
| 7 | 1.66 | 46.48 | 6 (combined with May) |
| 11 | 2.075 | 58.1 | 7 |
TLDR:
So if again, we assume that we do the 11 wins per day, plus we get EV on mystery boxes roughly equivalent to our data set, we end up with 171.45 tickets, or about 21 buyins throughout the months of May and June.
We also have some extra room from any extra tickets we get from the wheel spins in tournaments, plus any additional buyins from existing tickets.
So now the question becomes, is 21 buyins (or less depending on how "dedicated" we expect players to be) sufficient to give one's self a fair shot at qualifying.
And the answer is that we can't know. We would need to know how the tournament rep algorithm works, and also what cutoff TPCI is going to be using. This is all of course in addition to the further unknowable factors of how much more people will be playing these tournaments due to the new incentives. This is just an "economic" breakdown if you will.
SPECULATION SECTION
If I was designing a system and I wanted to make sure people had a good participation rate and win % would qualify to my event, I do believe that ~20 events sounds pretty reasonable. This is 100% me being subjective, and other people are certainly free to continue the discussion on how we should best be evaluating player skill + dedication (if indeed those are the axes we want to measure).
This is not the conclusion I expected to come to when writing this to be quite honest, and I'm much less "sky is falling" than I was this morning.
That said, this could all go out the window if, say TPCI decides you need 30 or 40 events worth of data in order to be in contention, or if they decide to put no upper bound on how much meaningful Rep one can aquire. So realistically all we can do is grind the ladder, learn the standard format, play our best, and have some good games. Also, it should go without saying that further communication from TPCI can (and hopefully will) change the validity of this breakdown to make it slightly more fair for everyone.
No comments:
Post a Comment