MCM Cup

The  is an MCM-sanctioned simulation of a Minecraft duel tournament between Tournytimers. A web applications simulates specific duels, and all coverage of the tournament is kept here.

Format
The Tournament is centered around duels. In a duel, players are simulated to be given equal gear in an enclosed, normal-terrain environment of size enough to run, but not too far. At the moment, this consists of an iron sword, iron armor, a bow and infinite arrows.

A duel lasts 15 minutes, and when players are killed, the duel is reset with full health and gear. When the 15 minutes is up, the duel ends, and the player with the most kills wins.

Any number of players can take place in the tournament. Based on that number, all will participate in qualifying. A number will be knocked out and the remainder will go on to the main tournament, which consists of two parts: The group stage, which eliminated a set number of participants, then the knockout stage, which crowns a victor.

For both the qualifying and the tournament group stages, players are put in to pots according to some metric so that the perceived strongest go in pot 1, then the weakest go in the last pot. Players are then seeded (randomly) in to groups, one from each pot.

The following criteria are used to rank the participants:
 * 1) Higher amount of points. Players are given 3 points for a win, 1 for a draw, and 0 for a loss.
 * 2) Higher amount of wins.
 * 3) Higher amount of kill-death difference.
 * 4) Higher amount of kills.
 * 5) If there is a tie, the previous criteria is used, but between only the players in question.

Host selection
Players put in "bids" to become the host, which guarantees them a place in group A of the main tournament, without having to qualify. Voting for the host consists of two rounds. In both rounds, everyone votes for anyone of their choice, but may not vote for themselves. In the first round, participants are given an amount of votes proportional to their best result in previous tournaments (MCTTT 1 and MCTTT 2). Winners are given 10, runner-ups 9, semi-finalists 7, quarter-finalists 5, 3 for those eliminated in the group stage, 2 for qualifying, and debutants are given 1 vote. The top two (or if the second place is tied, all those who tie for second) then proceed to round two, where all players vote again but all represent only a single vote. If no winner can be determined, the first round's results or taken, or a random draw takes place if that doesn't work.

Qualifying format
For qualifying, groups are between 4 and 6 players in size. The majority will be the same, but a small number may be of different size to ensure all players participate. Group participants all play each other in a double round-robin format, so that each player plays everyone of their group rivals two times.

The following methods, listed in order of preference, are used to determine which participants qualify for the main tournament:
 * 1) A set number of participants from each group qualify for the tournament.
 * 2) A set number of participants are eliminated and do not participate in the tournament.
 * 3) The previous two methods, but with a set number of participants from each group participating in play-offs.

In case number three, the play-offs can be in several different formats, in the following order of preference. The potential play-off participants can be reduced in number to satisfy a below method, if deemed necessary. Their qualifying group stage statistics will be aggregated and the normal ranking system will be used to determine which ones to eliminate.
 * 1) If there will only one player to proceed, a knockout stage will take place to determine the qualifier. The knockout must have 2 x (2, 4, 8 etc) participants.
 * 2) As long as there are no ties in the aggregate rankings, participants will be placed in to two pots according to their ranks, and participate in two-leg play-off duels to decide who proceeds.
 * 3) If there are ties, the participants are all put in a single play-off group and participate in a round-robin. If the group is up to 5 players, the round-robin is two leg, otherwise it's one.

The host and the winner of the previous tournament do not take part in qualifying – they are assigned to first and second places in pot 1 of the main tournament.

Tournament format
For the group stage of the tournament there are always four pots, and therefore groups are always four players in size. A single round-robin format is used so that all players play each other once. To rank the participants, the qualifying group stage criteria is used. The top two from each group qualify for the knockout stage. If the knockout stage will consist of 16 players, the four best third-ranked participants proceed, and the two worst-ranked are eliminated. The fourth-placed participants is always eliminated.

For the knockout stage, duels remain the same for the first 15 minutes. If the duel ends in a draw however, an additional 10 minutes are added to the time. If after those 10 minutes there is still a draw, players are reduced to minimum health and must run at each other lancer-style with no inventory except their sword, and the one who kills proceed to the next round.

Participants
Of the 38 invited, 36 elected to participate. Result indicates the highest point the player achieved of a given tournament.

Clone and Raccoon chose not to participate. Wolf participated on the condition he could not be seeded with Vat, Strew or Lrand, as did Creed with Blax.

Qualifying
There are 36 participants in the whole tournament, of which 2 automatically proceeded to the main tournament, leaving 34 to compete for the 22 remaining spots. Qualifying was split in to seven groups, six of five players and one of four. The top three from all groups advanced (21), and the rest were considered for a knockout-format play-off.

The group stage took place between July 4 and 27, 2016 over 132 duels. July 28 is reserved for the seeding of the play-off, and the 3 days following (July 29–31) are set aside for the knockout play-off.

Group stage

 * For the stage of things as of the half-way point, see here

The group stage consisted of a double round-robin. The schedule was arranged in such a way that, at a specific time on Sunday, July 17, 2016, everyone had played each other once and the group stage would be half-complete, allowing for analysis of performance before everyone was to play each other again.

As per all group stages, participants were placed in pots from highest-ranked to lowest-ranked, and seeded out randomly in to the groups so that each group has approximately the same amount of skill distribution.

Wolf was ranked #2, but automatically qualified due to his winning of the previous tournament. Onyx was ranked #11, but is the host and so also automatically qualified. Clone and Raccoon were ranks 18 and 28 respectively, but chose not to participate.

The nine debutants could not be ranked, so a random draw had to take place to decide which three were to be put in Pot 4 with ranked participants. The remainder were placed in Pot 5.

Summary
Seeding took place on June 26, 2016.

Strictly speaking, Group A had the lowest average rank (and therefore supposedly the highest average skill level) with 12, and Group B has the highest average rank with 17.5. However reliable statistics were made difficult by the fact that there were a different amount of debutants in each group.

Play-off
The play-off was used to determine the final participant to qualify for the main tournament. It consisted of an eight player knockout stage which will ended with the winner, Kit Fisto, advancing to the main tournament and all others being eliminated.

All fourth-placed players from the group stage participated, as well as the best-ranked fifth player, Tourny. Players were be put in to two pots according to aggregate rankings (the best in pot 1) and seeded in to a knockout table, with the first duels having one participant from each pot.

The seeding took place on July 28, just before any play-off game.

Tournament
The main tournament is split in to two stages: The group stage, which saw 24 reduced to 16, and the knockout stage, which will crown a victor.

The group stage began on Monday August 1 and ended on Sunday, August 21. It was contested between six groups of four participants. The top two from each group (12) proceeded to the knockout stage, the fourth-placed players were all be eliminated, and the third-placed players had their rankings aggregated, the top four of which advanced and the remaining two were eliminated.

The knockout stage will begin on Tuesday August 23, with two duels being played per day during the Round of 16, then one duel per day for the Quarter-Finals, Semi-Finals and Final, which will crown a victor on Monday, September 5.

Group stage
The Official Rankings were slightly altered following the results of qualifying. These were then be used to determine in which order participants are assigned to pots (with the lowest ranks being assigned to Pot 1), which were then be seeded in to six groups of four. Like the qualifying group stage, this was in an attempt to make groups equal in overall skill.

This rank alteration and scoring system was announced on July 15, just before the mid-way point of group stage qualifying.

Onyx's score was 7.875 and his rank was 10. Being the host, he was assigned to position A1 and so was not assigned to a pot.

Third-ranked players
The ranks of the third-placed players were aggregated and compared with each other. At the end of the group stage, the top four in those aggregate rankings advanced to the knockout stage, whereas the bottom two were eliminated.

Knockout stage
Similar to the qualifying stage's play-off, ranks for all knockout players were aggregated and assigned to two pots, then seeded so that each player from Pot 1 is set to have their first duel against a player from Pot 2.

Onyx was still assigned to a pot (Pot 2), but come seeding on August 22 he was automatically placed in to duel 1 as he was the host.

On Wednesday 25, an alteration to the schedule was made, introducing a three-day break on Friday–Sunday, 26–28th of August. The day-long breaks between stages were sacrificed instead.