Wintersday Ladder/ Xunlai Tournement House on Gw.com

Yeah.
Lets say you are clueless and just randomly set them in any order, the probability that you will get at least one point, which will entitles you to 1 candy wepaon, is

1 - (e^(-1)) = 0.632120559 = ~63%

(the formula is supposed to be more complex, but 32 is a big enough number to round it up and use "e").

Considering you placed the better known guilds at the top, and so forth, it's probably a bit higher, and I would intuitively through the number "85%".

Now, if you guessed the order, the probability to get 11 points, which entitles you to two candy weapons, is in effect, zero. (I haven't calculated that, but I'm pretty sure. I'll try to check it out further). if you know how to guess, or took a list from someone who do, then you might have a chance, but I bet that the vast majority of players will have only 1 candy cane weapon per account.

gl everybody.

What on earth makes you think that?

Livingston

Wand spike is serious business.

So the best shot I have is to look at what other people are putting down and try to match it to some degree?

It's very hard to tell with any great accuracy how the teams are going to fair in this tournement, even for those who follow the guilds on a regular basis. The reason being is because they are only allowed to use skills that are core or Nightfall. This means that most of the teams will be playing out of their natural elements.

Thus teams that are normally considered to be rather uber, but constantly use similar builds which rely on skills that they won't have access to during the tourney are naturaly going to be at a huge disadvantage.

There are also those teams that most people in the PVP circuit know to have used "cheap" spike builds to quickly move up the later and thus have "earned" a place in the tourney. It is relatively easy for these types of teams to beat a lot of standard teams, but they'll be smashed to pieces by the true ladder toppers.

Thus more than likely the ones who will do well in this tourney are those teams who are very flexible and are simply all around good players.

As such, it is a safe bet to pick Team Quitter and Team Everfrost to be in position 1 or 2. Opinions will vary on who will take the cake, but it should be pretty close.

It's also pretty safe to say that Frozen Flame will probably be in the top 5.

Were I someone who knew absolutely nothing about any of the teamns or how the system worked, I would find as many people's lists that I could who seem to know what they are talking about and compare them. There will definitely be a lot of variety in the choices but more than likely you will notice that there will be at least 4 teams that are somewhere on nearly all of their top 10s, and conversely 4 teams that will be at the bottom 10.

Thus it would be a safe bet to match that to some degree.

The whacky thing about the way it is set up is that even if someone knew exactly how good all of the teams were and how well they should be against each other, if one team surprises them and makes it to a top spot when they thought they would be a lot lower, it would throw off their entire list.

For example take my list:

#1 Team Quitter
#2 Team Everfrost
#3 Frozen Flame
#4 Clan Detained
#5 The Celebrities
#6 Necro Raiders
#7 Supernova Jpn
#8 Chaossanctuary[]
#9 The Bouncers
#10 I Agony Realm I

Now say that I was the lord of knowledge on this subject (which I'm not by any stretch of the imgination ) and based on everything I know, this is what I predict will happen. And I am so good that it does, but with one exception:

#1 Team Quitter
#2 The Bouncers
#3 Team Everfrost
#4 Frozen Flame
#5 Clan Detained
#6 The Celebrities
#7 Necro Raiders
#8 Supernova Jpn
#9 Chaossanctuary[]
#10 I Agony Realm I

The Bouncers miraculously beat out everyone to take spot two on the charts. Now the fact that I was indeed so accurate but was wrong about the surprise team, that has thrown nearly my whole list off. Where as I accurately predicted how ever team would do in relation to the other's positions, since I was off with one, I thus become off on all of them but two.

In an even extremer case, say it was I Agony Realm I that was the surprise team and they took #1. Even though every other relative postition is perfect, that has completely thrown off the whole list, and thus every single one of them is wrong.

So you see it's possible that even those with an extreme amount of knowledge could be put in an even worse position due to how accurate they actually are.

Of course this is nearly impossible to do, so I think my early suggestion of randomly charting the list based on common team in the top 10 and bottom 10 is probably the best way to go, and is similar to the method I used to construct my own list.

Also for those who do nothing more than put Team Quitter, Team Everfrost, and Frozen Flame in the top positions because I suggested it and win, please send me a PM and let me know. It would be interesting to see how many that knowledge effects. And just so you know the first two are indeed by far the popular favorites to take the win.

Livingston

uhm.. I still haven't got my confirmation mail.

Is it now I should start crying?

I'm having a weird problem with making my selections. I took a while to think about it. I reordered positions 1-32 in the order I guessed. When I hit the update predictions, it said below is the prediction you have made, but I only see 1st with an empty selection and none of the 2-32 choices. I tried closing my browser and logging in again in both IE and Firefox, but I still can't see my selection. Any ideas on how I can ensure my selections were made the way I wanted?

Great post, Livingston! That's going to be a huge help for us all. It's true that we really can't know, even with knowledge of who all is good. Truthfully, anyone can surprise and hit the #1 spot, throwing everything else off. At least by having a reliable top 10, everyone will have a higher chance of at least getting one item.

I registered yesterday and sent in another resend email that they have on the bottom of the login form last night but still have not had an email sent back to me. Hopefully I will get one sent to me so I can choose before it ends.

This exact same thing happened to me. I hope everything worked okay.

I'm having an annoying problem with this. I want to change my ordering around slightly, so I log in and do that, then press update, then continue. But then I just see my old order instead of the new one :/

Yes. There might be some trick to cleaning up the mathematics, but I don't know a clean way to calculate the odds of getting exactly zero teams correct from a field of arbitrary size. This is inconvenient because the formula for getting N teams correct from a field of T teams is (T!/(N!*(T-N)!))*(Number of ways to get 0 correct from a field size of (T-N)). If anyone knows how to clean up that latter formula please let me know.

As is, I had to solve everything recursively (you solve for the 1 case, then calculate all the odds for specific cases and subtract from total cases to get the odds of getting zero, which lets you do the next batch.)

The upshot is the following odds:
21-30 Correct Selections: 7.54263E-21
11-20 Correct Selections: 1.00478E-08
1-10 Correct Selections: 0.632120549
0 Correct Selections: 0.367879441

I've attached a spreadsheet containing my work for those interested.

Peace,
-CxE

Same here, I'd better not get screwed out of any winnings here. Can someone else give some advice on what may be the problem? I'd really like to change one or two predictions, but it shows I haven't made any.

I'm having the same problem. I just hit save without making any changes, now when I go to change them, I have just a number 1 box which is empty. I click on update selections and it says it has been saved.

Ok, so Livingston posted a great post on the top 10, but that's only 5/16ths of the bracket, how about the worst teams? who do you all think will get knocked out first round? My vote goes for L I Z Z A R D, but that's just me, if anyone thinks they have a good bracket and would like to share their bottom half of the list, that would be great

seeing that we around a 60-80% chance of getting at least 1 team correct, that's good enough for me. And seeing people having problems making changes, it's probably wiser for me not to make any more changes.

gl all!

yep but as i would be happy with just one candy cane wintergreen weapon(to add to my full cc and gingerbead weapon collection), i am wondering if the scythe , spear and daggers will be available this wintersday and normal cc weapons (if any at all....but i try not to think about that lol). Anyways its gonna be a pain to decide if im lucky enough to get one *excited*times infinity*and if i dont get one.....ill buy one....yes i want one that bad lol.

Purely for the hope that JR won't lock any of my threads in the near future.....I put Frozen Flame at 1

Anways, where's WM. eviL, iQ, RenO? Seems kind of odd without any of those guys in the tournament.

screw being strategic with who you pick. I started out looknig at ratings and all that bs and i said "The hell with it" so then i just moved all the name sall over the place and my predictions are completely random, go me!

is anyone else not being allowed to edit their choices for the xunlai tournament for the 2nd or 3rd time?

i log in then it says it is showing my selections but all that is showing is an empty number 1 slot