We need at least 15 more participants before we can start (and ideally a lot more), so I'll sweeten the pot a bit. Here's some additional prizes (1st still wins LTM):

Lottery (Participation Award): Everyone who plays all their matches (in group and, if they make it, knockout stage) and didn't place 1st/2nd/3rd will be entered in a drawing for Yearly Membership (or equivalent)
Group Winner Awards: The 8+ Group winners get 500 coins each (or $5 equivalent)
2nd Place Prize: Second place winner gets Yearly Membership + 1500 coins (or $30 equivalent)
3rd Place Prize: We'll have a 3rd place match between the two people who got eliminated before finals for Yearly Membership (or equivalent)
4th Place Prize: 500 coins (or equivalent)

You can pool your prizes together (e.g., if you win a group + win the lottery + place 4th, you are entitled to $25 worth of prizes in some form). To allow for pooling, the prizes will all be distributed when the whole tournament finishes. I'll DM everyone who wins a prize on Discord and on Warzone (assuming I am not permabanned by then) and we can work out the details of how you want to receive your prize. You're welcome to be creative as long as it's not inconvenient or troublesome for me.

The total prize pool has now gone up from $60 to $165+ (we might get more Group Winner prizes if we get more than 8 groups). I hope this spurs some participation, ideally in the next 24 hours so we can start on time. :)

I notice a lot of you Europeans are shy to compete against us Americans in a trivia contest. Come prove the superiority of your education system! Even if you don't know the answers to the music and film questions, you might be able to just guess your way to the top by typing fast. Plus there's all sorts of categories- like cheese, French names for things, classical composers, European cities- that advantage people outside the US.

Edited 5/14/2021 18:56:52

Count me in

I will not send you 5,899 pennies or contribute $58.99 toward a fund to hire a samurai to intimidate your estranged ex-wife so she worries about the kids' safety and lets you spend more weekends with them

I was just about to ask for 5899 pennies to pay a ninja to stalk a non-existing enemy i don't have!

Very cool idea lavrov, sadly my english is too bad to be able to get anywhere near the top, so i will stay away from this....

The lottery is there to compensate for that, so you can get $15 for just playing. Plus you never know how well you will do. You might even get a category that's Dutch names for things.

I'm in!

TL:DR but I'll play

I will join, but only because half of the questions is "translate this from Spanish to English", or "translate this from English to Latin".

Edited 5/15/2021 03:45:05

sign me up yo

I am in

In 100%
Thanks for organizing this, this is totally cool, and adding prizes (especially essentially just monetary prizes since we can ask for same value of something different) is above and beyond. 10/10

Signed up, and I think that started it :)

We still need 4 more. Then I'll draw the groups and we'll start the tourney.

im in
i can only play from 7pm to 9pm est daily tho

Edited 5/16/2021 21:07:51

i'll keep that in mind when setting up the groups

Sign ups are closed! You are welcome to sign up as a reserve now in case any of the players drop out.

I will set up groups later today. I will first look at results from Jeopardy and separate out players who consistently do well on it into Pool A (e.g., me, Beren, rakleader, mgo), then create a Pool B of players who just play Jeopardy a lot (Ocean, Photonic Symmetry, etc.) and players who have done well in Kahoot leagues in the like (Kratt, etc.). I'll shuffle the Pool A players and put them in the 8 groups; then I'll shuffle the Pool B players and put them in the 8 groups. This way, no group should be too stacked.

After that, I'll randomly allocate the general pool (Pool C) into the remaining slots. Then I'll look at the country/time zone composition of groups and move around people so that the group stage has reasonable time zones and a high chance of everyone being able to make all their matches. I'll publish the groups here and then follow up via mail and Discord DMs about which matches need to happen, where, and by when.

Good luck everyone!

Just kidding, back down to 31. We have one slot that just opened up! Who wants to be the hero that gets this tournament started?

put me in, coach

Let's start the tournament! Expect a Warzone DM from me explaining what to do next!

Here's the Group Draw!
(sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1dCvbyt-ZSvcsojdwVIzoNXkLFV6gn7MnuzUpnWhzDRY/edit?usp=sharing)

1. Group players of similar demonstrated ability into Pools, so one Group doesn't get stacked.

Pool A has 4 players known to be good at Harmonbot Jeopardy: l4v.r0v, Beren Erchamion, rakleader, mgo

Pool B has 4 people known to have competed in Harmonbot Jeopardy tournaments before: Jefferspin, Photonic Symmetry, Ocean0.1, Checkmqte

Pool C has 9 people with significant Harmonbot usage and/or strong performance in other trivia leagues: Kratt, Athenas_Child, Aura Guardian, Bechaa, BuffaloDave, Georg Friedrich Ferdinand, HinkyPanky, a noob bot, Beep Beep I'm a Jeep

Pool D has the remaining 15 players, as the general pool.

Step 2. Assign players to Groups based on random shuffling

From the pools, we want to create groups of roughly equal strength. So we'll shuffle each pool and allocate in a semi-snake order where we stay in the same direction within a pool (i.e. A go to 1/2/3/4, B to 5/6/7/8, C to 8/7/6/5/4/3/2/1/8, D to 7/6/5/4/3/2/1/8/7/6/5/4/3/2/1).

We also don't want to make groups that have poor time compatibility, so I skipped groups if a player had a time zone that was 6 or more hours away from any other player in that group. When I skipped a group, I queued it to be the next group I visit ahead of the usual order, instead of skipping it entirely. I also handled Georg and a noob bot as edge cases with more narrow availabilities.

Here's a screenshot of my terminal so you know I shuffled the pools fairly, using secure randomization:


Here's the resulting groups:

Group A
l4v.r0v (A, UTC-7)
a noob bot (C, UTC-4)
mclollol (D, UTC+2)
Lasermancer (D, UTC+2)

Group B
rakleader (A, UTC+2)
Kratt (C, UTC+3)
Nikitan (D, UTC+8)
Asmodeus (D, UTC+3)

Group C
Beren Erchamion (A, UTC-7)
Viking1007 (D, UTC-5)
sanmu the shamu (D, UTC-7)
Jonas VIII (D, UTC-5)

Group D
mgo (B, UTC-5)
HinkyPanky (C, UTC-5)
Beep Beep I'm a Jeep (C, UTC+2)
Lefty (D, UTC-5)

Group E
Ocean0.1 (B, UTC-4)
BuffaloDave (C, UTC-4)
Ursus (D, UTC+2)
MMeldarion (D, UTC+2)

Group F
Checkmqte (B, UTC-5)
Aura Guardian (C, UTC-5)
E Masterpierround (D, UTC-5)
Rikku (D, UTC+1)

Group G
Jefferspin (B, UTC-5)
Georg Friedrich Ferdinand (C, UTC-4)
Master Shredtail (D, UTC-5)
Splat (D, UTC-4)

Group H
Photonic Symmetry (B, UTC+2)
Bechaa (C, UTC+3)
Athenas_Child (C, UTC+7)
Rick Sanchez (D, UTC+5.5)

(skip log)
- Georg incompatible with H, put in group G
- Aura incompatible with H, put in group F
- BuffaloDave incompatible with H, put in group E
- HinkyPanky incompatible with H, put in group D
- a noob bot incompatible with Beren's usual schedule and group B, put in group A
- Kratt incompatible with C, put in group B
- Athenas_Child incompatible with C, put in group H
- Beep Beep Jeep incompatible with C, G, F, E D put in group B
- Meldarion incompatible with G, F, E, D, C, put in group B
- Rick forced into Group H, skipping G, F, E, D, C, A
- Ursus incompatible with all options, put into least bad group (E) and broaden window to +/- 7
- Swap Meldarion into group E to make room for Nikitan in group B
- Swap Beep Beep Jeep into group D to make room for Asmodeus in group B
- mclollol incompatible with all options, put into least bad group (A) and broaden window to +/- 11

This probably wasn't a great algorithm to allocate people in the right groups, and as you can see above some manual adjustments had to be made to keep things sane, but I think these groups are Good Enough(TM). Beren's group has no Pool C players but there's no way to swap that without making some groups worse in terms of time zones. Plus C vs. D isn't that big a deal.

Actually, I probably will not get around to creating Warzone PM threads tonight. So I'll just post the instructions on this thread for the group stage:

Group Stage Instructions
You are in a Group of 4 players. If you're not sure who's in your group, see https://challonge.com/tsfh_trivia. You can check https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1dCvbyt-ZSvcsojdwVIzoNXkLFV6gn7MnuzUpnWhzDRY/edit?usp=sharing for their Warzone and Discord names.

Over the next 4 weeks, you are expected to play best-of-five matches against every other player in your Group twice. These matches can take place on the #harmonbot channel of the WZ Public Chat server, the #trivia channel of the FCC/Discovery server, the #jeopardy-league channel of the TSFH server, the #harmon-trivia channel of the Blitz server, or the #trivia channel of the Optimus Prime server.

It is your (and your opponents) responsibility to operate these matches and notify me of the scores. You can play your matches out of order as long as you play everyone else in your group twice- one match in which you have first pick (so you get first pick on the first board) and another in which you have second pick. You can flip a coin the first match to see who gets first pick, but the second one needs to be the opposite of the first one (e.g., if Player A got to create the board and pick the first category in their first match with Player B, Player B gets to create the board and pick the category in their second match). Note that you should also flip first pick within matches- whoever picked the category first in Game 1 should not pick it in Game 2 within the same best-of-five series.

So here's what you should do:
1. For all players in your group, see what Discord servers you have in common.
2. On those Discord servers, if you see them online, remind them that you need to play a best-of-five series of Harmonbot Jeopardy.
3. If they're hard to get a hold of, you should work out in DMs when you should schedule your match. Feel free to ask me for help here.
4. When your first match starts, flip a coin (Harmonbot has a !flip command for this) to decide who goes first.
5. The person going first gets to create the board (!jeopardy) and pick the first category (<number> 200). Remember: you shouldn't pick any 400s until you've run out of 200s, any 600s until you're out of 400s, and so son). And whoever got the last right answer gets to pick the next question.
6. After each game, tag me (@l4vr0v#2623) so I can record the result.
7. You continue until one of you has won 3 games. That marks the end of your first match.
8. Later on, you have a second best of 5 match. This time you don't need to flip a coin. Whoever lost the flip in #4 now gets to create the board and pick the first category.

If anything goes awry- someone interrupts your 1v1, you think your opponent is cheating, your internet goes down- try to work it out with your opponent first so we can get a proper series. You can just recreate your game. If that fails, notify me ASAP! This is especially important for cheating allegations as I need to deal with that stuff before it creates any bigger mess.


Let me know if you have any questions about this! Good luck, and happy trivia'ing!

Edited 5/19/2021 07:26:50

IMPORTANT: The tiebreakers on Challonge are incorrect! Group stage tiebreakers will be by:

1. Match Wins
2. # of Match Wins against Tied Opponents
3. Games/Set Win %
4. Point Difference

The actual seeding for knockout stage will be based on these tiebreakers and not the ones on the Challonge.