First and foremost, thank you for being a Tournament Organiser. It is a thankless task which will never make you rich, but your work keeps the Age of Sigmar community vibrant and alive. 8Realms has taken several steps to help you with your efforts, focused on making important data easily available to you and minimising the extra work you have to do to integrate 8Realms into your event.
Understanding 8Realms Integration
8Realms ingests event data from two primary sources: Best Coast Pairings (BCP) and Stats & Ladders (S&L). This approach ensures that all player data and match outcomes are consistently and accurately captured, adds a layer of security to raise the cost of ‘gaming’ the ratings, and most importantly means that TOs do not need to do any extra work to have event data added to 8Realms. No data entry, no e-mailing, just run your event as normal and 8Realms will be updated with your results. 8Realms only processes round by round results, not final rankings, so round data should be visible to registered users on the site for 8Realms to access your data (not just event attendees). It’s important to note that 8Realms does not accept manual uploads, which helps us to keep our use of third party data fair and improves the quality and legitimacy of our ratings.
Using 8Realms Data for Your Event
All data and ratings generated by 8Realms are released under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence. This means you are free to share, copy, and redistribute the material in any medium or format, provided you give appropriate credit, provide a link to the 8Realms website, and indicate whether you made any changes to the data before you used it.
This means that you can use 8Realms ratings to seed your Round 1 matchups for free, forever, as long as you include a link to our website in your tournament pack. You can also use our ratings for other purposes, such as to invite players to an invitational event or select players for a team, under the same conditions.
As long as you are using either BCP or S&L, you can also state that your tournament will count towards 8Realms ratings in any tournament packs, advertising or promotional material. You don’t need to ask our permission first to do this.
Benefits of Using 8Realms as a TO
8Realms is all about maintaining a single community standard for competitive rankings. The more that 8Realms is integrated into the community, the more people will trust the underlying ratings. We hope that 8Realms will become the standard for seeding AOS events in the UK, and that players will come to expect that 8Realms influences intitial matchups and that in turn event results will influence 8Realms ratings. Including 8Realms in your event will help to build trust in the system, and will help to build trust in how you seed your events.
8Realms also improves player experience at your event. Getting the seeding right ensures a fair, balanced and challenging event, by setting players off at the right level. By using 8Realms ratings, matches between similarly skilled players are more likely, increasing overall satisfaction among your participants.
A further benefit is driving players towards your event. We encourage you to mention 8Realms in your tournament packs and link to our website. This not only helps in promoting standardised ranking within the community but also directs players to check their current standings and possibly attract more participants who are keen on seeing how they rank on a national level. Much like ITC for the 40K community, we expect many players to be motivated to attend more events than they would otherwise to make sure they have the best rating possible, which means more players at all events.
For larger events, 8Realms means that your players will have the best matchups and the best chance of a challenging and rewarding event. For smaller events, you will not be disadvantaged – but also not unduly advantaged – in the 8Realms system, so players will not flock to a larger event just to help them qualify for a team or invitational. All events are equal in the 8Realms system, and so everyone benefits.
How to Highlight 8Realms in Your Tournament Packs
It is worth adding a bit of information to your pack about how 8Realms works, to help players understand the benefits it provides. We recommend that you include:
- A brief description of the 8Realms Elo system and its benefits
- A link to the 8Realms website where players can view their current ratings and rankings, as well as more information about the underlying maths
- An explanation of how participating in your event can affect their 8Realms ratings, emphasising the importance of every match and not just final placing
8Realms Ratings for Advanced Tournament Insights
One of the most exciting parts of the 8Realms system is the advanced analysis that you can use ratings for. With a reliable system of player ratings such as the 8Realms system, you can draw on decades of tools developed for other games such as chess and eSports. A great example of this is to determine a Most Valuable PLayer (MVP) at your event. You have probably seen events where a player defeats three challenging opponents on Day 1, ends up on the top table and then loses both Day 2 matches, ending up 3-2 while another player submarines on Day 1 and finishes on 4-1 despite having a much easier time against weaker opponents. 8Realms ratings can demonstrate this mathematically, and identify players who outperformed (or underperformed!) expectations, regardless of their placing. Below is an example of how this could be used to identify your star player, even if they did not make the podium:
Suppose a tournament ends and you want to calculate the performance rating for a player, Alarielle, whose pre-tournament rating was 1500. Suppose she played 5 rounds against players rated 1520, 1480, 1500, 1550, and 1490, and she scored 3 out of 5.
Her expected total score is the sum of her expected performance against the actual opponents she faced. Think of this as the total number of matches she is expected to win over the course of the event. In this case, the total is:
∑EA = 0.47 + 0.53 + 0.50 + 0.36 + 0.51 ≈ 2.37
So in this case, Alarielle was expected to win 2.37 of the five matches. On the day, she actually wins 4 matches! This is pretty impressive given that she was expected to lose or just about draw with all of her opponents. So now we can calculate her performance rating:
ΔR = 20(4.00−2.37) ≈ 32.6
This means Alarielle performed on the day like someone with a 32.6 point higher 8Realms rating, better than almost all of her opponents. A real MVP! You could do this for all of your players and identify players who used their finest hour at your event.
For the power players among you, particularly those involved with selecting teams, it is useful to know that in games such as Chess performance ratings are sometimes used to select people for advanced teams instead of the basic 8Realms rating, This is useful for ‘qualifier’ events, where you might set a threshold (e.g. performance rating of 1400 or above) in order to qualify for an invitational event or a team. This is because performance ratings can more accurately measure players who have recently improved (or worsened) while their 8Realms rating is still adjusting.
Summary
Integrating 8Realms into your event not only enhances the experience for participants but also elevates the competitive standard of the event.Using the detailed insights provided by an Elo system, you can offer a deeply engaging and statistically enriched tournament experience. We look forward to seeing your tournament contribute to 8Realms, and in turn the growing and vibrant UK Age of Sigmar community.