GW tourney behavioral econ
i used to play guild wars competitively, and i still play during themed events like the recent canthan new year for the minigames such as dodgeball. anyways, during the january monthly guild vs guild tournament, something interesting occurred. I had read about something like this happening before in professional soccer matches in the book freakomonics. the tournament is swiss style, and how it works is that there’s a prelim elimination where the initial round of opponents are paired based on their ladder rank and are matched w/ opponents in future rounds based on the amount of points they receive after each round. a win counts for a certain amount of points, a draw fewer points, and a loss rewards no points. this tournament type is useful b/c a round number of opponents isn’t required. if there’s a participant that isn’t matched with anyone, they get a bye for that round and cannot receive another bye. after the initial 5-7 rounds where up to 32 teams compete, the top 8 teams advance to the finals and start with a clean win/loss record to play 3 more rounds. guild wars has an observation mode for high level pvp so that anyone can watch these tournaments after they’re complete.
so what happened was that rebel rising [rawr] was facing survival rate [zero] in their last round of the prelims. initially, everyone saw these teams doing the absolute best they could to gain advantage over each other and win. but after about 11 minutes, observers saw the 2 teams stop fighting, form a conga line and wait out the timer to draw the match.
the incentives of the game had suddenly changed. but what could possibly happen to make rawr, which is known as one of the most cutthroat guilds around and care for nothing but winning, suddenly stop and dick around?
apparently the players on both teams did some quick math and know a bit about game theory. the team virtual escape [vE] won their match at about 10 mins in, and now had more points than either rawr or zero. so rawr and zero were faced with something akin to a prisoner’s dilemma. they could continue to fight until one team won, in which case the losing team would fail to advance to the next round, or they could force a draw, in which case both teams would get fewer points than had one of them won, but enough for both to pass vE and enter the final rounds.
so they did what the professional soccer teams did in the exact same situation. they quit trying to win when it became clear both their teams would risk more by fighting than by cooperating. if one team decided to defect and go for the win, they would be sure to engender enmity in the other team and risk losing themselves in reprisal. so they rationally decided to cooperate and dance it away.
Arenanet, the developers of gw, didn’t quite see the situation as economists and have decided to mete out punishment to the two guilds. i believe that would be a mistake as it was anet’s own game mechanics which allowed such an outcome. if conga lines are an unwanted outcome, then they should properly incentivise the rounds by forcing some tie-breaking mechanism.
ps. games like gw use voice chat for calling team strats. i once played w/ three pounds from the team rawr and she had the most sexy fucking voice i’ve heard from any female who plays computer games. she just had this low sultry tone that made everything she said sound like it was coming from a phone sex operator. she was also the best infuse monk in the game.
pps. i actually won one such tournament during the winterbreak playing a snowball fight minigame. it was pretty thrilling to know we could destroy high ranked guilds as a much lower ranked guild playing a much simplified game. i may write more on this later.
*UPDATE: so the punishment came out and it was a slap on the wrist. rawr will have it’s permanent gold trimmed cape removed for a month and zero won’t get it’s silver cape. seems like anet realized it was their own game mechanics which allowed such an outcome and they’ll be updating it to discourage future such behavior. sounds like a good resolution to me.
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