Experiment - What if RRWCs had Regional Qualifiers?

Putting the World in World Cup

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 here, but enjoy the emerging alternate realities!

The 2024 Roulette Rivals World Championship is around the corner, featuring 64 players in a unique two-stage tournament format. Veterans and newcomers can enjoy easing into competitive play during the busy group stage, before the toughest knockout stage of the year.

In today’s experiment, we enter an alternative world where the year's final tournament is not open to join but is based on qualifying rounds, similar to the FIFA World Cup. Join me as we compare countries, sort them into regions, and simulate a full qualifying cycle, leading to a 16-player World Cup of roulette.

A Geographical Breakdown

Before we can start thinking about the continents and regions, we need to look at the nationalities of all players. As of RR15, a total of 229 players¹ have at least one match recorded, but only 94 of them played within the last 12 months. To create a balanced tournament, we use the optimistic estimate that exactly these 94 would sign up.

According to the table below, the United States is by far the most populous roulette nation with 73 signups, including 31 from the last year. The United Kingdom is next, followed by Canada, Germany, Netherlands, and Australia, with each part of the world being represented.

While this is not an article about Elo-based analysis yet, a Country Elo stat has been added to this table: calculated with the same formula as the usual Elo. According to this, Hungary has been the top country since the end of 2021, with Ireland taking the lead for a few matches in RR14 and RR15.

Countries and their player counts, combined winrate, and Country Elo. Countries in yellow have produced at least one RR champion. Active player: someone who participated in at least RR in the last 12 months.

Roulette Regions

For our experiment, we need to sort all countries into regions for the qualifiers. In an ideal world, the continents would serve this job perfectly, but we have less than a hundred players to work with, so we must make some compromises.

The United States is by far the biggest country in the roulette world, but Americans aren’t asked about their state during signups. Since there’s no reasonable way to split the country into multiple parts, the United States will be the largest region with 31 active players.

Before adding more regions, we need to consider that the rest of the Americas have 8 active players, Europe has 45, Asia 5, Oceania 3, and Africa just 2. With timezone considerations in mind, Africa will have to play against Europeans, while Asia and Oceania merge into an eastern region, joined by Russia and Turkey.

Europe is divided into a north/western (blue) and south/eastern (brown) region, with Russia and Turkey joining the Asian-Oceanian (pink) region.

There are countless ways to divide Europe into several parts, especially taking participation into account. With the US at 31 players, Europe is split into two regions, along a southwest-northeast line. This leaves just the rest of the Americas and their eight players, they’ll be the smallest region but compensated with a busy schedule.

The five regions of this experiment, their combined winrate, and Region Elo (calculated the usual way) - sadly too inconsistent to draw any conclusions from it.

Five regions are created this way, not equal in size or skill, but this only adds to the charm of the concept. While a different size can be argued, this experiment will assume a 16-player World Cup Finals, ensuring a difficult path for everyone, but worthy finalists from all regions. The US region allocates five finalists from 31 players, while tiny Americas still gets two spots for their 8 entrants.

In this alternate universe, all five regions would have their administrators, tasked to host a qualifying tournament before the World Cup Finals. It’s easy to assume these admins would come up with fair formats unique to their region, giving them their identities. So let’s see how the 16 finalists are selected!

The United States Region

The United States region is by far the largest one, so naturally it hosts the longest and most complicated qualification process. The highest-seeded players only join the competition in Round 2, by which point 11 players are eliminated in tense single-match shootouts.

From this hypothetical Round 1, six favorites and five underdogs advance. Twenty players remain for Round 2, which are smaller, but more competitive RRWC groups. Because these groups are also seeded, the three favorites avoid each other: Phanium, TheTimeCube and The Rieper 47 all win their quarters to advance directly.

In the final group, davidredsox narrowly defeats higher-seeded ChannelJoined for a World Cup berth, but a second chance awaits all runners-up. To clinch the final US spot (and perhaps the final spot chronologically), someone needs to win two tight, First-to-8 matches: ChannelJoined is the winner in our simulation.

The Europe North-West Region

Though Europe has been arbitrarily cut in half, both regions still managed to form their own identity. ENW is the home of traditional roulette nations such as the Dutch, the British, and the Norwegians, and they opted for the simplest qualification format: four RRWC-esque groups, with the winner advancing to the World Finals.

It would be difficult to bet against the four Western European top seeds, but it’s not infeasible that any second or lower seeds could find a way through the favorites.

In Group A, Frote7 pulls off a perfect group stage, ahead of linux_penguin and 5th-seeded Some Random Person. In Group B, Ireland beats Denmark, with Scruffy and Lord Munk leading the way. In Group C, Pigiero gets close to an upset against Moo but falls short of qualification by two points. Finally, the most competitive group was won by Jokerj, finishing barely ahead of Nezuko Chan.

The first potential downside emerges from this experiment: do players still feel motivated to finish their campaigns, even if they have no chance of finishing first or second?² Would extending the Finals help with this issue, or perhaps adding a larger secondary tournament (the World Plate) is a better way?

The Europe South-East & Africa Region

While EU West has 25 active players from only eight countries, its sibling consists of 11 countries but only 17 players. Closest in timezones and mindset, Europe SE implemented the same format as their eastern neighbors, but with the Roulette League-based, first-to-3 scoring system.

With a 119-Elo gap between Yannini and ChromeX, four players are expected to fight for the three qualifying spots. Avoiding the second-seeded German, both In4Fun and IlikeHitman cruise to a dominant win, ahead of Polish opponents. In the deciding match of the group of death, Yannini narrowly beats Ducker for a spot in the World Cup.

Likely due to scoring, this European region produces far less excitement, with the group winner staying perfect in all three cases. Perhaps five matches are too few, or First-to-3 games are too short, so it’s possible that the ESEA region would improve on the format in the future.

The Asia & Oceania Region

Though the Asian-Oceanian region is the second smallest (and that’s with generously putting Turkey and Russia in here), they managed to come up with the most unique format: they’re the only region without a group stage. They based their qualification format entirely on a single-elimination bracket, which was drawn randomly except for the three seeded players who were able to start in Round 2.

As k-kaneta is almost 100 Elo above zRune, the competition would center around the three seeds and whether they would meet in the final round. After exciting matches in the first round, none of the seeds are defeated in Round 2, though zRune would give quatilyti a run for his money.

In the first-to-8 decider round, Dein Nomos ends graory’s impressive run, while RRWC specialist k-kaneta’s experience prevails against quatilyti to take the other spot.

With eleven matches, this region is by far the shortest, though with exclusively First-to-6 or longer matches. It’s not improbable that Asia-Oceania would opt for a double-elimination bracket instead, or lengthen the matches even further, perhaps trying out set-based scoring in the future.

The Americas Region

There are alternate scenarios where The Americas are merged with the US region, or with other, smaller continents. There are also worlds in which more South American players stay active, turning the next format obsolete. But with exactly eight players, the smallest Roulette Region has resurrected an old structure, based on the original Roulette League.

Instead of fewer but longer matches, The Americas went the other way: a home-and-away league with 14 games per player, but only two maps per match, both chosen by the home player.

The fight for the two World Cup places would be intense between the two veterans and the three newcomers, especially in a format no one is quite familiar with. While Music’s win is inevitable given his current form, this simulation sees Alph narrowly beat Meekah and The_Buff_Guy for that all-important second place.

The Final Sixteen

After 228 matches across five regions, over weeks (or months?) of competition, the final sixteen are finally ready to play in the World Cup Finals. The structure and expectations can be discussed endlessly, so I’ll only include one possibility for the format.

The Finals could start with four groups of four, playing in the usual RRWC round-robin format, potentially extending the match length from three maps to four or five. Only the top two would move on to the high-stakes knockout stage, perhaps in a single-elimination format, or with set-based scoring, but certainly crowning a worthy champion in the end.

Once the tournament is over, and the conclusions are drawn, the responsibility goes back to the regional admins: they get to adjust the format and onboard new players, with the qualifying slots constantly changing based on region size and performance.

Just a Theory

While this experiment was interesting and brought us far away from the regular tournament formats, one thing is certain. No one is seriously looking into changing the Roulette Rivals World Championship this drastically.

While the hypothetical World Cup format could technically coexist with RRWC, a tournament like this wouldn’t fit into the existing calendar, and even if it did, participation wouldn’t be as high as the very optimistic estimate of 94 players.

The World Championship has been one of Roulette Rivals’ greatest inventions, and especially with a brand-new knockout stage, anticipation is as high as ever. Let’s hope the tournament gets the attention it deserves, resulting in the game growing further, so that, one day, we might discuss implementing formats like this one.

The 2024 Roulette Rivals World Championship is held from October 18th to December 8th in Frote7’s Speedrun Community.

1. RRstats features 234 players, but two of them only have forfeit results and three of them have no recorded nationality.

2. The same issue also persists in the current RRWC format, but with 50% of the field advancing, players rarely have to play several matches while mathematically eliminated.