league rapid simuls again

Well, I quit. 

You know, it's annoying when people start screaming "UNFAIR!" that some loophole that allow them to game the system is closed, but they are perfectly okay with the rules that rig the system in their favor. Cry me a river.... I don't feel at all bad for you or your self-serving, righteously indignant protests. You don't care about fairness, you just want to win, and are perfectly okay with unfair rules that skew the odds in your favor.

Who I feel sorry for is the naive player who is dutifully grinding away hoping to win this thing. They have no shot no matter how many hours they put in or how much they are killing themselves trying to do this. That's who I feel sorry for. Not  your whining about simuls.

the only way to get a good amount of points is to do well in arena it seems. And as an 1800ish bullet player, i have about a 0% win probability against the GM i just played. It was fun to play a GM...but to market this contest as any joe schmoe can win is just false if you take away the simuls.

By which I meant, it's a nonsense phrasing of a reasonable idea.

There's a reasonable idea in there somewhere, it just needs precise language to help communicate it.

can someone tell me why simuls are bad? how do they help you?

If you increase the rate of your games, you increase the rate you earn trophies. If you play 10 games at once, you earn trophies 10x faster than someone playing one game at a time at the same time control.

They (half heartedly) want games to earn and equal number of trophies because it has a few benefits such as making the contest more appealing, having better promotional power, and being more "fair" (but only sort of).

First reason I say things like "half heartedly" is because if someone's favorite time control is 2 minutes or 5 minutes or 15 minutes, they're at a clear disadvantage... but adjusting trophies for every different time control was probably seen as too tedious.

Second reason is because they failed to make the same adjustment for arena trophies... bullet arena gives you more than blitz which gives you more than rapid. Since there are still people on the leaderboards who don't seem to realize this, I assume it's not obvious, and so I assume this wasn't done on purpose to help promote bullet arena over the others. So it's not half hearted in the sense that they don't care, but in the sense that they weren't diligent (i.e. ask for input from employees whose skills are on technical side of things).

Not to mention that they were aware of the issue with simuls on day one, and not only did they go ahead with the contest, but they didn't even mention it in the rules until many weeks in.

Diligence doesn't just mean asking employees, it also means doing play-testing and running simulations. Half "hearted" isn't the kind of half that I was thinking. Half-donkeyed is a better description.

They had it in beta for a few months, so they did test it.

Now that's funny.... They tested for months and this is what they came up with? Which part did they test exactly and how?

Usually beta testers are given one set of instructions: try to break this and report back. Either they didn't try very hard or they weren't listened to.

It's easy to show how bullet is superior for a given player. You can play blitz arena at bullet speed and win all your games as a GM to get a very high trophy per hour rate.

But you can play bullet arena at hyperbullet speed as a GM and win all your games to get an even higher trophy per hour rate.

Without simuling, to beat the current #3 who is on pace for a little over 12k trophies, I'd have to play about 17 hours a day.

Beating #3 on the leaderboard grantees you advance to champion in any division. Since you're higher rated than me, you could do it in fewer hours per day.

If you could do it in 15 hours a day, that's enough for 8 hours of sleep, plus time to eat meals (as long as you planned ahead). This is unpleasant but relatively comfortable.

If you "kill yourself" and went for multiple 20 hour days then you'd be closer to @dragonb70 (who is on pace for a little under 15k)

Thanks.

As of this post I have 0 points/0 trophies in the crystal league. I may play a few here and there, but that might be it. Let's see what happens...

lol

@llama47 has a closed account!!!

Basically, if you were part of the beta, you had access to the league pages and standings. A lot of bugs were worked out during that time. Also, the site had all members still in Leagues at the time, so they could test the features at scale.

That said, I don't think anyone in the beta, outside of staff maybe, knew there was going to be a contest initially, just that eventually there would be things for Legend.  So, some of the things that may have been tested while in beta didn't really equate to what was happening when prizes were available.

i really hated when i did it in beta, felt like pain :/