10th-11th Place Ties?

peanut_gallery
peanut_gallery Posts: 119 Tile Toppler
Just curious. How are ties that bridge a reward brackets handled? If two players are tied with the same score and one shows 10th and the other shows 11th, do they both get the 10th place reward? If not, what is the deciding factor? The one who got to that score first?

Comments

  • mohio
    mohio Posts: 1,690 Chairperson of the Boards
    Just curious. How are ties that bridge a reward brackets handled? If two players are tied with the same score and one shows 10th and the other shows 11th, do they both get the 10th place reward? If not, what is the deciding factor? The one who got to that score first?
    I thought I saw somewhere on the forums before that it's the person who had the score most recently, but I could very well be wrong, and didn't bother searching the forums for the answer first. I'm sure someone will let us know eventually. Either way I'm 99.9% sure they don't give top 10 (or whatever the higher tier is) to both players in these cases.
  • Spoit
    Spoit Posts: 3,441 Chairperson of the Boards
    mohio wrote:
    Just curious. How are ties that bridge a reward brackets handled? If two players are tied with the same score and one shows 10th and the other shows 11th, do they both get the 10th place reward? If not, what is the deciding factor? The one who got to that score first?
    I thought I saw somewhere on the forums before that it's the person who had the score most recently, but I could very well be wrong, and didn't bother searching the forums for the answer first. I'm sure someone will let us know eventually. Either way I'm 99.9% sure they don't give top 10 (or whatever the higher tier is) to both players in these cases.
    It used to be that way, but they fixed it so whoever got there first was higher. Not sure how that works with points from win/losses and race conditions
  • Spoit wrote:
    mohio wrote:
    Just curious. How are ties that bridge a reward brackets handled? If two players are tied with the same score and one shows 10th and the other shows 11th, do they both get the 10th place reward? If not, what is the deciding factor? The one who got to that score first?
    I thought I saw somewhere on the forums before that it's the person who had the score most recently, but I could very well be wrong, and didn't bother searching the forums for the answer first. I'm sure someone will let us know eventually. Either way I'm 99.9% sure they don't give top 10 (or whatever the higher tier is) to both players in these cases.
    It used to be that way, but they fixed it so whoever got there first was higher. Not sure how that works with points from win/losses and race conditions

    Why would it matter? Someone has to have a score first. If I have 500 points and you have 498 and later you got a defensive win for 2, I still had 500 before you so that should give me the tiebreaker. I don't know how precise they store their time, but I'd think the chance of two people getting the same score on the same second must be astronomically low, and if that happens and they flip a coin to decide to wins, we can live with such a rare occurence.
  • mohio
    mohio Posts: 1,690 Chairperson of the Boards
    Phantron wrote:
    Spoit wrote:
    mohio wrote:
    Just curious. How are ties that bridge a reward brackets handled? If two players are tied with the same score and one shows 10th and the other shows 11th, do they both get the 10th place reward? If not, what is the deciding factor? The one who got to that score first?
    I thought I saw somewhere on the forums before that it's the person who had the score most recently, but I could very well be wrong, and didn't bother searching the forums for the answer first. I'm sure someone will let us know eventually. Either way I'm 99.9% sure they don't give top 10 (or whatever the higher tier is) to both players in these cases.
    It used to be that way, but they fixed it so whoever got there first was higher. Not sure how that works with points from win/losses and race conditions

    Why would it matter? Someone has to have a score first. If I have 500 points and you have 498 and later you got a defensive win for 2, I still had 500 before you so that should give me the tiebreaker. I don't know how precise they store their time, but I'd think the chance of two people getting the same score on the same second must be astronomically low, and if that happens and they flip a coin to decide to wins, we can live with such a rare occurence.
    The way the servers have been acting lately "same time" could be minutes apart icon_razz.gif. Although even then SOMETHING gets processed first, it just might not be what actually happened first.

    edit: also thanks for clearing that up for me. I guess I didn't realize or notice it was changed.
  • mohio wrote:

    The way the servers have been acting lately "same time" could be minutes apart icon_razz.gif. Although even then SOMETHING gets processed first, it just might not be what actually happened first.

    edit: also thanks for clearing that up for me. I guess I didn't realize or notice it was changed.

    It doesn't matter if the server is receiving the result at a weird time because it's the only authority. Let's say it decided I have a score of 500 now, and an hour later it somehow received information that you got 500 points 2 hour before. I don't know how it's programmed but either the server takes that information, and in that case you'd have the tiebreaker, or it may decide to use the time it received the information instead, in that case I have the tiebreaker. No matter what process the server uses to determine when this happens, there is still only one possible result from the server's point of view. Sure, to one of us it'd look very weird when we suddenly drop from 10th to 11th, but to the server there's no confusion because it makes the rules.

    There's no race condition here because the server is the only entity deciding the results. Even if the data it takes is completely wrong, it's still the one deciding who wins the tiebreaker.
  • My brother had a tie for 9-10-11 in S1 Heavy Metal and he was the 11th, and of course he was pretty annoyed. It just happened in the very last seconds of the event so I guess its sorted by time.
  • Spoit
    Spoit Posts: 3,441 Chairperson of the Boards
    Phantron wrote:
    Spoit wrote:
    mohio wrote:
    Just curious. How are ties that bridge a reward brackets handled? If two players are tied with the same score and one shows 10th and the other shows 11th, do they both get the 10th place reward? If not, what is the deciding factor? The one who got to that score first?
    I thought I saw somewhere on the forums before that it's the person who had the score most recently, but I could very well be wrong, and didn't bother searching the forums for the answer first. I'm sure someone will let us know eventually. Either way I'm 99.9% sure they don't give top 10 (or whatever the higher tier is) to both players in these cases.
    It used to be that way, but they fixed it so whoever got there first was higher. Not sure how that works with points from win/losses and race conditions

    Why would it matter? Someone has to have a score first. If I have 500 points and you have 498 and later you got a defensive win for 2, I still had 500 before you so that should give me the tiebreaker. I don't know how precise they store their time, but I'd think the chance of two people getting the same score on the same second must be astronomically low, and if that happens and they flip a coin to decide to wins, we can live with such a rare occurence.
    What if I have 525, and was hit for 25 at the same time you won that 2 points from 498? Anyway, I'm not a network engineer, so I have no idea how it actually works, but I can't imagine they don't have any parallelism, but I'll concede that point
  • Spoit wrote:
    What if I have 525, and was hit for 25 at the same time you won that 2 points from 498? Anyway, I'm not a network engineer, so I have no idea how it actually works, but I can't imagine they don't have any parallelism, but I'll concede that point

    I think you're confusing the issue of a conflict to your client, versus a conflict to the server. Your placement on the client can certainly be completely confusing. Earlier today my client told me I had 500 points was ranked #100 or so for 2 hours despite I was winning games constantly and not being hit by anyone. Eventually the client finally caught up and gave me the correct score (937). So sure, from the client's end I can see myself as 10th and then later 11th, or even some other place that has nothing to do with reality because we know you can see totally weird things on the client.

    But for the server, it's pretty simple. You have 525 and get hit by 25, and the server has to know that happened at some point and it also knows when it happened, call it time X. Likewise I have 498 points and gained 2, and it had to happen at some time Y. It doesn't even matter if the server received this information late, or even if the time is wrong (like say I hacked into server and secretly changed your time X to a later time). At the end server is just going to look at time X and time Y and see which occurred first, and assuming they're not on the exact second (and that's if they only keep time accurate to the second) one of those two times had to have happened first.

    The server can be wrong, but it's never confused. It makes the rules, so it doesn't care if the data it receives doesn't make sense/is wrong/is tempered/is lost, as long as it can order them in some way.