Experiment - What if RR Champions Were Ineligible to Play Again?
Win and retire, like in the old PS4 days
Posts with the Experiment tag are various playful projects, presenting different scenarios, new rules, and things that could have played out differently. Don’t take things too seriously in here, but do enjoy the alternate realities emerging!
Early Roulette Rivals are memorable for their casual atmosphere, slow (or non-existent) starts, and three concurrent brackets, akin to the late Ghost Mode Tournaments. From those brackets, both PlayStation champions, Ibbe from RR1 and David Strong from RR2, decided to retire following their wins. Today’s simulation explores, what would have happened if all champions did (or were forced to do) the same.
In this experiment, we go through every tournament in the history of Roulette Rivals, marking down the champions, and removing them from every successive tournament. It would be exhausting to re-simulate every match this way, so alternative RR leaderboards are calculated instead, with the champions crossed out.1
The top finisher of the alternative leaderboard becomes the champion, is removed from the future leaderboards, and the process repeats. Watch how the experiment starts grounded, then goes off the deep end!
How it Started
Once again we begin our journey in RR1, which obviously doesn’t feature any changes from reality, apart from breaking the ties among 5th and 7th place finishers.
In this experiment, Ibbe, Frote7, and Ducker all “retire” after securing their RR titles, changing RR history forever. Immediately in RR2, the gaps left by Frote and Ducker are filled by davidredsox and pokeredface respectively, two players win RR2 who never became champions in our timeline.
The PlayStation bracket, the inspiration for this post, remains unchanged, with David Strong also quitting roulette after winning his title.
A Special Day
The biggest edge case in today’s simulation was how to handle the six players who signed up for multiple brackets in their careers. Even though they’re primarily PC players, I didn’t want to alter their console brackets, so in the end, every result counted the same.
This came especially handy for Yannini, who, without a Frote7 to beat, won both the PC and Console titles in RR3, becoming the only champion with multiple trophies.
In4Fun becomes the first world champion in this timeline too, ahead of JohhnyAxXx breaking his third-place curse from real life. Without early champions winning another title, the first Hitman 3 tournament is taken down by MrMike on PC and rookie Phanium on console.
Long Time Coming
Apart from rookie DaniButa taking down RRWC, the rest of the 2021 tournaments go to veterans who finally get their worthy titles in this dimension. Speedster and IlikeHitman don’t lose their Grand Finals to Ducker here, they retire with one gold and one silver medal each. JohnnyAxXx wins a Semi-Final at last and defeats ChrisX3 to win RR5, who in turn easily takes down RR6.
Meme Junkie and Foppr both peak this year with third-place finishes, Meme is the only player to have multiple bronze medals without anything better. Speaking of bronzes, Pigiero is already on three of them, and his best results are yet to come…
Unlikely Champions
2022 began with one-off titles from Blithe and Pigiero on the PC side, naturally, they take down these tournaments in our simulation as well. Instead of being remembered as the most successful player who never won a title, The_Buff_Guy beats 420 in his first final, followed by a rookie Jokerj winning RR8.
RR9 produced the most unlikely results, even through the eyes of this experiment: zRune triumphs on PC, while TK47 beats T_Nort23 and Sphegamer on console. The runner-up of RR4, RR6, RR8, and RR9, T_Nort is hands down the best player who never wins in this simulation.
Rieper, the King of Second Places
The results clear out once Roulette Rivals merges their brackets: rookie TheTimeCube beats GKPunk for the RRWC2022 title, and Moo isn’t facing much challenge to take down RR10. Scruffy wins RR11 instead of RR12, which allows Dein Nomos to become the first of two consecutive rookie champions. Scruffy and Dein both defeat The Rieper 47, who becomes a second-place specialist instead of always finishing fourth.
OhShitMan’s best tournament coincides with most of RR12’s top finishers being ineligible to score, making him an RR medalist in this timeline. The always rapid Meekah’s best results came in 2023, they scored three podiums but no titles.
The Newest Inductees
A strong rookie performance gives the RRWC23 title to quatilyti, as The Rieper 47 finishes second for the third tournament in a row. He finally breaks his curse in RR13, defeating k-kaneta in the final. Kaneta came close several times but he’s yet to win a title following three runner-up finishes.
Tied for seventh in the real timeline, Lord Munk snatches the RR14 title, and we already know that Music Inc has won alternate RR15, no matter how the rest of the real tournament goes. ThatObserver is on three medals from the last four tournaments and appears to be the favorite for the RRWC24 title, barring any wonder rookies.
Overall Results
Roulette Rivals’ 30 titles went to 29 players, with only Yannini winning both RR3 brackets. Notable champions include all the rookies (Phanium RR4, DaniButa RRWC21, Jokerj RR8, TheTimeCube RRWC22, Dein Nomos RR12, quatilyti RRWC23), three-time runner-up The Rieper 47, and four-time third place finisher Pigiero.
Of the ten RR Finalists from this experiment, T_Nort23 and k-kaneta came closest to winning a title, losing four and three finals, respectively. From the rest, ThatObserver has a prime chance to add more medals to his tally, perhaps even a title.
This experiment also acknowledges some players with a bronze medal who went far in tough brackets but didn’t finish in the top three: Meme Junkie twice, Foppr in RR6, linux_penguin in RR8, OhShitMan in RR12, and most recently graory in RR15.
Record Breakers
It’s impossible to define the greatest player of this experiment, but the major statistics are always fun to look through. After removing every match that includes at least one champion, we are left with 1128 games (54.6% of 2065 before RR15). Counting the remaining matches, Some Random Person and T_Nort23 are the most experienced players, in terms of both tournaments entered and matches played.
T_Nort has won the most matches under this system, ahead of Random and mikulers, with champions like Pigiero and The Rieper 47 high up the rankings, because their titles came after several close attempts.
Unsurprisingly, several champions (and three non-champions!) appear undefeated, either because their actual title was achieved without a loss, or they only lost to champions in real life. Behind the one-hit wonders, ChrisX3 has the best winrate, excelling in three competitions, and only losing one match in this simulation. Of those with an extended career here, ThatObserver has the best winrate, again foreshadowing a successful RRWC24 run.
How did you like this experiment? What would you like to read about next? Let me know in the comments!
In case of a tie (e.g. between the two 5th-place finishers), players’ post-tournament Elo ratings are used.
Now do one where every injustice I faced because of players cheating against me by having the unfair advantage of being better than me were banned and my Ls were turned in to Ws.
I'm the reigning, undefeated and undisputed of all time in that case?
Why thank you, In4Fun. Mighty good of you to make the case for me.
(Great post. Double thumbs up)