FFA Masters League

Hey all! The first week of season 20 brought us many exciting matches (and at least one not so exciting one). With 6 games played, that brings us 6 players who are well on their way to qualifying for the main season (spoiler alert):

j33.
junkerzam
FML|Renaud
DNIWE_VOVA
zTsoso
Eshan

Let's take a look at what went down this week.

Deadlock Matches

Q13:
The first match of the week was played on Deadlock and featured Renaud, Elessar (a stand-in for no-show DNIWE-VOVA), Life, and AJIKAIII. This was a fast game, with a convincing rush from Renaud on Life (Life's risky hoard did not work out for him), while simultaneously a successful rush from Elessar on AJIKAIII. When it came down to the final 1v1, Renaud was far ahead of Elessar in economy and was able to secure victory.

Q6:
Another match on Deadlock, this one featured junkerzam, bRain.Man, Tyrant66, and Letshavesomefun. This match started off with two 1v1's, bRain.Man vs Tyrant started out with a long, bloody fiend battle over the corner expo, with eventually Tyrant pulling ahead in multiple mirror battles. On the other side of the map, junker was able to edge out the surrounded letshavesomefun with excellent micro and army composition. He also opted for a somewhat rare dreadlord-first reminiscent of the PencilWarrior style of years long past. In the middle phase of the game, Tyrant was heavily teamed to the point of no return, followed by a quick clash between bRain and junker which was won by the Swede convincingly following a critical middle expo.

Q1:
Another Deadlock match, this time with SteppinRazor, DNIWE_VOVA (replaced spielman who showed up late, and re-entered the league from the game he missed himself), i-never-smile, and red7z7. In one of the shortest FML matches of all time, i-never-smile rushed out Steppin from a surrounded position with a well-timed dryad force, while shortly thereafter red7z7 launched into i-never-smiles base in a very uninformed decision. Vova proceeded to clean the game up by toming first Steppin, then red7z7, and finally finishing i-never-smile in a 1-2-3 fashion. Well played by Vova capitalizing on his position and the mistakes of his opponents.

Twilight Ruins matches


Q4:
This marathon 2 hour match was played on the all-time most popular map, Twilight Ruins and featured Mr.Sparkle aka Kajetan, NoMercy, fetta_ook, and former champion j33. Things started out with j33. blasting fetta in the face with a solid chippo push. But Fetta was able to relocate from the surround to near NoMercy where a peace was formed for much of the game. Then NoMercy hoarded, fetta rebuilt and hoarded, and Sparkle clashed with j33 time and again, each time coming up short in the battles against the quiet elf behemoth and his early DR with charm, at one point reaching 110+ food with spirit breakers and orc casters. Eventually fetta came back and clashed with nomercy while sparkle on his back-legs harassed fetta and j33, causing quite a bit of animosity. In the end, fetta was teamed out, and Sparkle's mass-tp + NoMercy's hit and run was not enough to take down the patient former champ.

Q11:
I'll claim that this is the match of the week with Magadansky, Valefort, zTsoso, and Kpect -- certainly full of action from the start to the finish. Valefort did a powerful mercenary rush on Maga to break the surround, while Maga fought on for dear life, able to barely rebuild across the map. Meanwhile, zTsoso manages to choke Kpect into submission while securing much of the right side of the map. The rest of the game is a beautiful display of talent from zTsoso as he fights head to head with Valefort while continuously stopping Maga from fully rebuilding. A well deserved win and one for the books!

Q3:
This was an entertaining twilight Ruins match between fetta_ook (sub for Ponty), Eshan, Pinballmap, and Prometeus. Eshan was able to take down the fellow orc, fetta_ook on the right side of the map. Prometeus subsequently possessed a peon from fetta's remains and built up to orc casters with his undead army, but he didn't reveal them until after defeating pinball in a drawn-out battle over expos. The dual-race army proved to be very strong in the final 1v1 with Eshan, but a few crucial mistakes left him in second place up against the orc who was able to take the better half of each fight and secure the critical mines in the end.


That's it for week 1, but come by this week to check out 5 more games -- some of them being the most anticipated yet. If you haven't confirmed your game yet, go schedule! Also, if you haven't taken notice yet, we have opened FML bets again this season, and you can always check that out here: http://ffamasters.net/index.php?page=13&season=20

Cheers and play on!

So I was talking with Eshan and Malboy and some others a couple days ago about a race-independent theory of 4-player FFA that focuses on the timing and flow of the game.

Prelude
Before I go into the theory, I want to categorize what I believe to be the two main ways of winning a game.

• Base race. You win because you have the better building-destructive power, mobility, or scouting that enables you to finish the final opponents bases before he/they finish yours.
• Dominance. You have surpassed an amount of "value" that is insurmountable by other players in the game.

A note on the word "value" as I will use it in this post: Value consists of army, heroes, gold, items, and base. Value rises and falls for each player throughout the game as gold is mined and spent, units die, heroes level up, and buildings are constructed and destroyed.

I'm sure there is a tremendous amount that can be said base-racing such as when to do it, how to make it work, etc. But the theory I want to discuss in this thread is about winning games through dominance, as I believe this approach is closest to optimal play, whereas base-racing is a tool that can be used only under certain late game conditions that cannot be reliably predicted.

The theory
What are the different ways a game can be won through dominance? I think there are just a few categories of ways.

• The balance of power has shifted around in a 3 way. On each rotation of the balance of power, you have lost less value than your opponents have, or you have succeeded in concealing your value such that your opponents cross the threshold of critical weakness before you do.
• You dominate outright from the beginning, and maintain highest value throughout the entire game. There are two sub-categories here.
  
  -The solo-series. There are two 1v1s followed by another 1v1. You win your 1v1 in a convincing manner (toming potentially) with just the right timing such that you can also win the final 1v1 before that final opponent has higher value than you. This is what great players are able to do -- they win their 1v1 with excellence skills, and time it so that they enter the second phase of the game way ahead of their opponents.
  
  -The snowball. You win your 1v1 convincingly, and by the time the two opponents realize they need to team you, your value is high enough that you can defeat them despite the teaming.

A final word: it should be noted that "value" is really a measure of potential. A great player can reach higher into that potential with exceptional micro and decision making, and it's the reason why the greatest players often win, because they can tap into more potential from a lower-value situation.

I'm curious what other players think of these ideas, and if they have observed any truth to it in their games.

Cheers

Foreward:
Hey all, in this analysis article I will look deeply into the issue of manipulation, which has always been a great discussion throughout the years. While this analysis is not going to be perfect, I think it illuminates the general trends in a way we have never seen before.

Many players, especially the veterans, have claimed that games have become longer, more boring, and full of manipulation compared to the past. For some, it has been the reason for dropping out of FML. Are these claims warranted, or is it far from the truth?

First of all, special thanks to :Germany:FML|Pinball and :Canada:FML|Renaud for uploading so many replays. Without their help I would never have been able to gather these statistics. Also special thanks to Juliusz 'Julas' Gonera for his Warcraft III replay parser (which I believe is also used for ffareplays.com and replayers.net). The site for the parser can be found at http://w3rep.sourceforge.net/.

I scraped 362 FML replays for data. With a whopping total of 34,121 hours of FML gameplay. This includes all season finals, except S9, S11 and S19. Fragments of S7 and S8. And all of S10, and S12-19. Yes, the data could be much more significant if I had complete replay archives for S1-6, but I will make do with what I have and in the future, perhaps can incorporate that data into further analysis. That said, if anyone reading this knows they have archives of the earlier seasons, let this be a call to urge you to post those up, preferably in Pinball's thread http://ffamasters.net/index.php?topic=1816.msg33294;topicseen#new

The Data:


The first set of data we look at is a histogram of the game lengths from all the FML matches. The x axes is bins for game-lengths, and the y-axis is the number of replays that fall into that bin. It appears that most replays are in the 75-minute range, with a tapering long-tail of outliers of very long games.


The second set of data we look at is the trend in game-lengths over the years. Here is the raw data with the x-axis being date and y-axes being game length in minutes. A trend line shown in red. Wow! That's actually a big surprise that the games have tended to get shorter on average over the last 4 years at least. It may not be a huge difference, but it certainly isn't a rise in game length as many players have suggested. I suspect that at least part of this trend is the slow migration away from certain maps that lend themselves to very long games, such as the banning of Gold Rush.


And here is the same data with a bit of smoothing applied so it is easier to see what's going on. Again, it is clear that there is a decrease, about 10-20 minutes in game length on average.



Now, game length is interesting and all, but it does not tell us about the quality of games. Maybe the games are shorter on average, but there is way more chat and manipulation in each game? Let's look at the data. Here is a plot of the trend in words per minute (y-axis) over the years. Well, indeed, there is a slight upward trend, an increase of perhaps as high as 50% words per minute. Considering this is compounded with the trend of shorter games, it is interesting.


Same data but smoothed out for clarity. It does appear to not be terribly significant, especially throughout the last 4 years. There does seem to be a difference between S7/8 and the S10+ a bit.



Well, so the games have tended to be a bit shorter, and there tends to be a slightly higher rate of chat. But what if the chat is just banter, or reasonable in-game discussion. How would we know if it is manipulation/flaming/raging? Well, I came up with a list of the top ~400 most frequent words and then ranked them each on a sentiment value. That way, key words like 'manip'/'manipping' and curse words and insults have a positive score (hot), while key words like 'thanks', and emoticons had a negative value (cool). I then scanned each replay for the frequencies of those words to generate a 'sentiment' score, where high scores indicate more manipulationg and flaming, while lower scores indicate positive chat. Here are the results, with the sentiment score on the y-axis. To me, it looks as if there is very little change at all over the years. There are a few outlier games with extremely high scores, which might be fun to watch as we can expect a lot of rage/manip in those games  . There are actually a few games with overall negative scores, which surprised me a lot. I inspected those replays and discovered that most of them had :Canada:FML|Renaud in them, which makes sense because we generally know Renaud to be a mild-mannered (for the most part) player who uses plenty of emoticons to diffuse the stress in the game!


Same data, smoothed. When it is smoothed, it is actually pretty clear there is a downward trend in manipulation/flaming. Wow! Who would have thought that 


Conclusion:
So, in conclusion, what we have found is 3 things:

• The games have gotten a bit shorter, at least in the last 4 years
• The games have slightly higher words-per-minute, indicating more in-game chat
• There is actually less manipulation and negative-chat in the games than there was in the past

These, at least to me, are very interesting results. I think it highlights the true trends in manipulation/game lengths and is contrary to common belief. I would like to hear from the community what you think about this, or if you see any flaws in the analysis.

Hey guys. I took it upon myself as a sort of fun exercise out of curiosity to calculate the odds for each of the remaining 12 players to win the season. As a byproduct of that calculation I was also able to calculate the chances of each player getting top 3 and top 7 after Round 6, which is relevant to who goes to the semifinal and who gets a gauranteed spot in the final. Hope you all find this interesting or useful and maybe I'll do more of these analyses in the future :). Cheers!

How did I do these calculations? I wrote a python script which simulated the season playing out match-by-match for one-million times, with random players winning each match each time. That means this calculation assumes each player in any given match has an equal chance of winning that match.

Some notes:

• I accounted for M25 being played already, that outcome was fixed
• I accounted for renaud and ostones double score cards being used in R6. Thus if either of them chooses not to use it for some crazy reason, everything here is totally wrong
• I accounted for TB points, even subtracting renaud and ostones DS ones
• I accounted for matchups for R6 changing based on outcomes of R5
• I did not account for possible future gains of TB points. This may be slightly significant as I gave Renaud a TB point for R5 while two other players will yet gain a TB point for R5, but I did not calculate for that
• I did not account for any future match swaps
• I did not account for people getting future top-score +1 bonus
• I did not account for players missing/being subbed

**Disclaimer: It is likely that there could be errors in the calculations or the graphs because I'm human, there are a lot of variables to account for, and I'm not being paid to do this**

(1)
First up, heres the chances of each of the players getting into the top 7 (in other words, the chance of not being eliminated after round 6). Most notable is Renaud, sk2flash, and noexxx are 100% gauranteed to not be eliminated!
*The x-axis shows how many games out of 1 million resulted in that player not being eliminated after round 6. Thus, divide by 1000000 to get the % likelihood.

For those interested, I've provided what the cutoff scores are for the top 7 as well. The following chart shows the likelihood of each of the score-values on the x-axis being the cutoff value. For example, see that there is nearly 60% chance of 100 being the minimum score to make top 7. There is a small chance the cutoff will be as low as 90. Missing values, such as 96, are impossible.

(2)
Next up, we have the chances of each player making top 3 after R6, guaranteeing them a spot in the s19 finals. Notably, Renaud has over 98% chance of getting in, while Yaws has a 0% chance of it at this point!

Again I've provided the chances of each of the possible minimum values, this time for making top 3 after R6. It is most likely (with a 30% chance) going to be 115 points, but there could be a freak-accident making it as low as 105 or as high as 131!

(3)
And finally, here are the chances of each player winning the entire S19. It's looking good for Renaud right now at nearly 25% chance! **Edit: corrected this value. I simulated 1 million outcomes for up to R6, but after that for final it's easy to calculate odds -- 4 possible winners of the semi, and 4 possible winners of the final for each outcome of the semi, thus 4x4 = 16 more outcomes for each of the 1000000 outcomes of R6. Thus, divide by 16 million for the final rather than 1 million to get percentage! For reference, ostone has a 14% chance, and yaodintakoi has a 7% chance, and yaws has a 1.5% chance. Every player still has a chance though! **Edit: to clarify, this distribution is not the chance of a player winning the final match in isolation. Instead, it accounts for each of the matches played between R5, R6, and semis as well, and then the chances of winning the final after all that.

**Note: if anyone feels like checking my work or running the code themselves, feel free message me. I also might upload it to github or something and post the link later.**

As we approach the long-awaited season finale, our four finalists have taken the time to give the community a real treat: a series of interviews! Next up: Magadansky, the legendary undead master.

Hello congratulations on making it into the FML season 10 finals. Can you tell us a little about yourself? Like where are you from, how old are you,what do you study or what do you do as a job, etc?
Hi, my name is Simeon and I am from Bulgaria. I am 23 years old, and currently studying European Studies in Aalborg University (Denmark) for a masters degree. I will stay in Denmark for at least an year.

When did you start playing FFA, and what is your favorite part of FFA?
I've always like playing occasionally ffa, even when I was very active as a solo player. But back then I was more playing it like solo rather than ffa. Then, when the Bulgarian scene started to die and I got tired of solo, I decided to play more ffa and I choose my weakest race back then - the undead. I reached rank 5 or something and then some people from the ffa community started to ask me if I want to join FML (hence how I discovered the league). Since season 6 already was underway I could only replace players as a sub. My first FML game was on Gold Rush vs some of the best players out there. It was also my first win.

I love playing ffa mainly because it has many different elements, not only micro like in solo. You have to be thinking for the whole picture, sometimes you need to be diplomatic or manipulative, not aggressive etc. I can say that I've been involved in many fun games.

What do you consider to be the best spell in FFA, and why?
The best spell in ffa is stomp. The reason why is because it has ridiculous range and stuns for way too much. Combined with the rest of orc's arsenal it turns out deadly.

To give us some insight into your success so far, could you tell us how you prepare for your FML matches, if at all? Do you research your opponents, come up with special plans according to the map and races, etc?
My preparation is mostly theoretical. I consider the opponents I am facing and play accordingly. Sometimes being very aggressive works out, sometimes it may lead to early defeat. The map also has importance, especially in the early stages when you have to creep fast or break surround. Such kind of preparation is, in my opinion, vital for the success.

Is there anything you’re particularly afraid of or anything you are hoping to see in the final match?
I can't say I am afraid of anyone or anything, I've played everyone more or less. The cast for the final is very tough and I certainly don't agree that Humans7ar for example is an underdog. He played solidly so far and I believe he has a chance just as high as the rest of us. It is going to be awesome match!

Any final words or advice to say to the community or your opponents before going into your final match?
Thanks to everyone who is watching/playing/enjoying ffa since this is what this community is built on. FFA shall never die!

Thank you for your time and good luck in the final!

Daselend, the orc legend, has taken the time to grace the community with the next wonderful interview in this series. Check out what this FFA master has to say!

Hello congratulations on making it into the FML season 10 finals. Can you tell us a little about yourself? Like where are you from, how old are you, what do you study or what do you do as a job, etc?
Hey, my name is Paul and I am currently studying German philology as well as law and business (needless to say, I like the first one the most...). I'm 23 years old and live in Vienna, Austria.

When did you start playing FFA, and what is your favorite part of FFA?
About 5 years ago (shit...). My favorite part is when I overcome teaming without resorting to manipulation of any kind.

What do you consider to be the best spell in FFA, and why?
Difficult question, but I'll say it's healing wave (lvl 3). There is no other spell that synergises so well with the arguably best standard orc army composition.

To give us some insight into your success so far, could you tell us how you prepare for your FML matches, if at all? Do you research your opponents, come up with special plans according to the map and races, etc?
When I first started FFA, I actually did try out certain creeping routes on various maps. Once being confident in most of my creeping routes, I basically stopped preparing and focused on micro as well as improving my terrible macro during regular ladder games. I usually don't have a certain game plan, I feel like the volatility of spawns, races and resulting gameflows in FFA is too high for rigid play. For the same reasons I never practice, I just try not to be too rusty in terms of control.

Is there anything you’re particularly afraid of or anything you are hoping to see in the final match?
12 gryphs and wyrm/fiend in my base before the 12 minute mark would feel like a bummer 

Any final words or advice to say to the community or your opponents before going into your final match?
Sometimes an orc is not the biggest threat, even though his BM will always haunt you in your dreams.

Thank you for your time and good luck in the final!

So I see everyone talk about suicide and there seems to be a lot of debate on what's actually considered suiciding and what's not. So this thread aims to define the term more precisely and clear up some of the confusion.

My interpretation as a noob is that suicide means engaging in a solo with someone despite the fact that it's costly for the attacker. Further and depends on the context of whats happening on the rest of the map.

Examples:
player X engages player Y for 15 minutes while the other two players  hoard. Suicide.

player X engages player Y for 15 minutes while the other two players are also fighting. Not suicide.

Player X engages player Y and kills player Y off, while player X loses a lot himself. In a 4 way this is not suicide, but in a 3 way it is.

Not only does it seem to be based on context, but it's also a scale. The less the fight cost the attacker, the less its considered suicide.

Thoughts?