R5: Pro OC V2 - Pro OC Cup introduction

[Splave]

massman is pretty sharp guy imo...so I would only assume he is trying to help and benefit the community with his decisions and grow his website and the OC market. and on that note, just let me know what the new rules are and when we start

[Xtreme Addict]

Firstly I was against the idea of removing PRO League, I was more like adding PRO OC Cup to the existing league. I am still thinking that for most of us it would be the best solution, but all in all after some chill-out thinking I realized this PRO OC Cup doesn't seem to be that bad. In my case, it will give me few advantages:

 

- time frames, there is a winner, more viewers, more interesting for vendors - more news on websites, more achievements - bigger PR value = bigger support

 

- page with sponsors of teams, users, with banners etc.. It's very good for those (like me) who need vendors support = more value for PR, bigger vendor support

 

- only 5 benchmarks - more time to find out tweaks, more time for other things like extreme reviews, bios/mods testing for vendors, extreme overclocking/mod guides, more time for pretesting settings, more time to find golden cpus/gpus and what is important for me - more time to take part and preparing for vendors contests organized with HWBOT with prizes, the same with preparations for MOA/GOOC/AOOC

 

- making it more marketing will help those who constantly were talking that OC needs too much $ and they can't compete with sponsored or rich overclockers.

 

What would I add?

 

I think that a really good thing would be prizes for each Cup. Nothing more works for viewers, participants as prices. One Cup could be sponsored by Asrock, second by MSI, third by Gigabyte or simply mix them up. Could be $ prizes, hardware prizes. They don't need to be crazy high.

 

And in fact - after second season there will be ranking with overclockers based on Cup performance. It will be better for those who are taking part constantly. Now in PRO League you can be 1st, but when new generations come and you will not do new results, you will be in the end of league. In new ranking history counts and seasonal time frames are good for persons who don't have too much time.

Edited February 28, 2013 by Xtreme Addict

[Booj]

massman is pretty sharp guy imo...so I would only assume he is trying to help and benefit the community with his decisions and grow his website and the OC market. and on that note, just let me know what the new rules are and when we start

 

Yeah I agree, I've got nothing against Massman whatsoever, hes a top bloke. I'm no keyboard warrior. I am happy to see overclocking grow and evolve, as long as the impact on the current enthusiasts is not too high which is what I fear will be the case. I am happy to be proven wrong for the good of the sport.

 

With so many considerations.. shifting towards mobile, global economic problems, significant barriers to entry, overclocking faces challenges going ahead and it's important to minimize the impact on the core as much as possible.

[SF3D]

If there are time frames and pressure about scores, there would need to be some sort of reward coming from it. 10K€ would make me join immediatelly, cause there would be some point to stress few months about some scores and rankings in some particular benchmark.

In this old ranking there is no pressure about producing scores. Most of the top scores can not be done under pressure as they need a lot of preparing and pretesting. There will be time for that in this new league too, but it is very different.

 

Now we will be teams and only thing what came from old PRO OC rankings was personal E-pen... E-fame

It is actually quite a lot easier to get what ever you want, when you say, that you are in TOP 5 in the worldwide OC ranking.

What do we say in the future.. "We have a good team and my team mates did WR last month. Give me all your hardware, I am very good too even I have had no time to take part on anything lately"

 

My intention is to raise more discussion. Time table for this was very unclear "spring 2013" .. and then 4 days before it changes you see small news about it. I was thinking that maybe this will be just skipped as it did not sound good idea at all.

 

Now when it is decided, I do hope all vendors give marketing money for this league and all the people in community support it.

If people will leave this league and vendors wont take part it will not end well. We saw what happened with F1OC. They did it too fast with bad support and bad rules.

[der8auer]

for 10.000€ every 3 months I'd consider to join aswell haha

[elmor]

Just venting my personal opinion here. There's a lot written and I have not read it all.

 

I think this is a great idea. Most sports are already held on a seasonal basis which makes things more interesting since the top teams are always changing positions. It actually makes it easier for people to compete with "the untouchables" since they might not be able to complete all seasons due to lack of time or whatever. It also makes sure there's something interesting happening on a regular basis with different stages etc.

[der8auer]

for 10.000€ every 3 months I'd consider to join aswell haha

 

Selfquote ftw.

 

I had some thoughts about the money part of the competitions. Considering that the "top" pro-overclockers get paid for benching and world records it's pretty strange to give then thousands of euros for winning the competition

 

On the other hand it's a nice motivation for the normal extreme overclockers

[Splave]

you mean people are actually getting paid to do this? :0

[Deanzo]

Hey PJ,

 

If each block/benchmark runs for say 2~3 months.

 

With in that time, is there a leaderboard that says X team is number One! Even in the first round.

 

ie: on the first day of the comp, the team that post a score, even if on air, is shown as Number One in the World ?

 

If this is the case,

The team/s may need to do alot of re-benching each block to stay number one.

 

If not,

Then no ones going to post anything good till the last 5mins of each block.

 

 

And on a side note.

Sandbagging seems to get a hard time here, which is crazy.

Showing your best score before time is almost up, helps lazy overclockers.

It shows others what driver works best, mem setting, bclocks etc, It also tells them what kind of score can be done. Now that overclocker doesn't have to do all the hours of testing you did, and knows the score he has to beat.

Guys here like to talk about F1, you dont see teams showing other teams their test data before the race. And thats what a screenshot does.

/rant

 

 

One last thing,

I also find it odd after all the bagging Nicks comp got when he said teams could use old scores, you are going to do it in this one for the first year.

Which makes the CPU-Z round pointless

Edited February 28, 2013 by Deanzo

[der8auer]

you mean people are actually getting paid to do this? :0

 

Well not only for that but it's a part of their job or?

[K404]

And on a side note.

Sandbagging seems to get a hard time here, which is crazy.

Showing your best score before time is almost up, helps lazy overclockers.

It shows others what driver works best, mem setting, bclocks etc, It also tells them what kind of score can be done. Now that overclocker doesn't have to do all the hours of testing you did, and knows the score he has to beat.

Guys here like to talk about F1, you dont see teams showing other teams their test data before the race. And thats what a screenshot does.

/rant

 

 

Seeing as I bash sandbagging frequently, i'll chime in here: Qualifying round It's worth fighting before the race, at the start of the race, half-way through the race and knowing when to pull the rabbit out of the hat towards the end of the race.

 

Here is something I have no experience with: MOA/GOOC finals. How common is seriously sandbagging till the end? Is it not too risky?

 

Let's be honest...People only sandbag when they think it'll work in their favour....when there is one single "checkpoint"

 

 

LOL if people are gonna sandbag in the new Pro league, there will be very little to watch and/or entertain and it will NOT hold peoples interest. I don't need to explain the consequences

Edited February 28, 2013 by K404

[Massman]

Money in online competitions is always tricky. €10,000 as prize requires watertight benchmark validation, something which not many applications have, to prevent people from cheating. Also notice the interesting relation between "it is for fun" and "need to get paid".

 

As for the old scores; yeah, I know, I know. Eventually old scores will be phased out because they will be no longer relevant. It's to give people who did great scores just a couple of months ago a chance to not have those wasted because of the cup. Nick did a lot wrong, but not everything about that competition was wrong. That he got shit for it, doesn't mean it's a bad idea. CPU-Z CPU frequency was swapped out for Memory Frequency, by the way.

[Deanzo]

Here is something I have no experience with: MOA/GOOC finals. How common is seriously sandbagging till the end? Is it not too risky?

 

 

 

You can't, every new score that you get in the round that is higher, gets posted there and then. You can not save them till later.

 

But, and it's a good but.

 

It's only the score that everyone else can see at that time.

Not the screen shot, so no one knows the settings you used to get it.

{edit} other than the staff member standing over you making sure you didn't cheat, though thats also another story for another day

 

 

 

PJ,

 

What about the leaderboard thing I asked about ?

 

Edited February 28, 2013 by Deanzo

[Massman]

There's going to be a leaderboard up from day 1, on the frontpage in the sidebar. Where Pro OC League is located for now (well, a couple more hours).

 

//edit: putting the finishing touches on a news post explaining the whole damn thing, including how to get started etc. Will be up later today ... I need the production version to make the screenshots .

[knopflerbruce]

Perhaps bonus points for being #1 at certain points during the stages could be awarded?

[Deanzo]

I see, thanks

 

 

 

CPU-Z CPU frequency was swapped out for Memory Frequency, by the way.

 

Not trying to be an @ss,

 

But how do we keep up to date with anything that gets changed ?

Maybe I missed another thread,

Two days ago you posted..

 

Currently, the stage list is configured as follows (95% certain it will be like this):

• CPU-Z CPU Frequency
  
• SuperPI 32M
  
• Wprime 1024M
  
• 3DMark Fire Strike Single GPU
  
• 3DMark11 Full Out
  

Fyi, for the first season we'll allow older scores to be used for the stages. This allows Pro OC members to re-use some of the big scores they set in the past couple of months. After a couple of Pro OC Cups, we'll have a Pro OC Ranking based on the performance in the X last cups similar to how the ATP Tennis Rankings work.

 

 

Yes I can read it only says "95% certain"

 

Will, could benchmarks change before the start of the next stage.

 

Or will it be locked in for the full year ?

[TaPaKaH]

There's going to be a leaderboard up from day 1, on the frontpage in the sidebar. Where Pro OC League is located for now (well, a couple more hours).

Plan for tonight - hit F5 until it wears out, quickly move to Pro, upload lots of old scores, get to #1 of Pro OC for one minute, make a screenshot and use it for self-promotion for rest of life.

 

[Bobnova]

The more I think about it the more interesting this idea is to me.

As a very part time LN2 bencher I can wait until the hardware for a pro comp is attainable (or IB, which I have), have one (1) session or maybe two (2) sessions and spend some actual time with each benchmark, and maybe end up with a decent pro league ranking. This goes double if I team up with someone that has a good BD for CPUz, and someone that has SB-E for WP1024 and such.

 

With the current system I have no chance in hell of making even a vaguely sort of decent ranking in the pro league, I don't have binning type money, live in a tiny area of the US where PC stores say "lolno" and in the US manufacturers are awash in people who want handouts for benching, they don't even respond to requests, let alone sending hardware.

 

I see the new comp setup as giving me and people like me a better chance at a pro league ranking and some recognition.

 

For the people who actually have tons of time and actually have tons of money/parts/sponsorship it's terrible, it does something to level the playing field.

I don't see how anybody could expect the current leaders to react positively to making their job harder!

 

Lastly, I think re-using old scores is silly at best. It's a three month comp! What is it y'all usually say about the byzantine HW requirements for Team Cups and such? "You have plenty of time!", I think. This year's team cup has horrendously complicated requirements for HW and a staggering amount of benching team, and we have to do everything including buying the HW, binning stuff, etc. in 3 months. Surely the Pros can find time in three months to run five benchmarks on three platforms!

(1-AMD, 2-IB, 3-SB-E if it's single-CPU only, servers/SR-X otherwise), 4-SB-E or IB, 5-SB-E or IB)

 

 

When has HWBot had static rules that everybody liked? Only when they're changing If they aren't changing, everybody hates the rules.

[pro]

so Pieter, obviously the rules for entering the overclockers league will change now right?

 

Team.AU doesnt have the time or resources to compete in the new Pro OC cup and we use engineering sample hardware, so will this be opened up and if so what are the implications for all the oc league guys? Or have we been discarded from HWBOT as a result of this Pro OC cup,

 

I like you pj and I don't want to take away from all the hours yourself and Rich have put in effortlessly building HWBOT but you are totally kidding yourself if you are saying this is a community thing, everyone except you can see its about a business and making money.

 

And the proof? The fact nearly every single person has asked for pro oc league to stay and you have removed it. The community don't feel like this is a community project anymore and what you have to realize is this isn't an invincible site, remember what happened to XS?

 

I want HWBOT to succeed and have made my position clear that I want to support the movement, but a community driven movement, not something with $ figure in mind.

 

Please consider our opinions

Edited March 1, 2013 by pro

[Bobnova]

Is three months really not enough time to run five benchmarks? If there're five of you that's a benchmark each, not bad.

 

I agree 100% on the money part though, seems pretty obvious to me.

 

There's definitely a community here, it just doesn't have anything to do with running the operation.

There's a community despite the constant rule changes and random decisions and reversals, not because of it.

Maybe I'm too new (came in on R3), but I've never seen this as a community project, it's always looked like the Massman Show - Featuring Random Overclockers (And The Companies That Pay To Be Featured) to me.

[dinos22]

Competitions are not the same as freestyle OC. In competitions you have to work harder to bench and get ready for all out benching and you usually have to rebench multiple times due to several factors which include driver changes, new tweaks, big scores from competitors etc. We've done this before and it requires a lot of work to get right. We dont want to join comps just to participate. You are bound by a time frame which puts extra pressure to do things within the timeframe rather than whenever you really had something in mind.

[Deanzo]

I'm not 100% if I understand the time frame for each season, the cut off elimination rounds etc

 

First post and many others are just big walls of texts, with much I don't care about.

 

But if I've got this right in my head now, total season is only 3 months, but the first elimination is after 10 weeks (give or take)

So two weeks per benchmark (yea, yea, it's a team, you don't have to do it all yourself)

 

With in that time, you need to sort, test/bin the hardware needed for the five benchmarks.

 

And as much as PJ has got a little mad in some of his posts about members being upset about having to use old hardward.

It is in fact what he said in the first post it could be..

 

2) Stages:

 

"3DMark11": no hardware restrictions

"IGP 3DMark Vantage": igp platforms only

"1155 BCLK validation": 1155 only

"2-core Wprime": dual core cpus only

"sub-$50 SuperPI": only cpus that cost less than $50 are allowed

 

So if the round with SPI in it is with an under $50 cpu, Yes, there will be alot of testing/Binning to find the best one.

Or WPrime with only a two core CPU

 

And every 3 months, you start again with who knows what config from how long again

 

I for one see it as a boat load of work.

 

As a comp, I in fact like the idea, and would take part in that kind of thing from time to time.

 

But as a way to only run the "pro" leader board, No.

[knopflerbruce]

so Pieter, obviously the rules for entering the overclockers league will change now right?

 

Team.AU doesnt have the time or resources to compete in the new Pro OC cup and we use engineering sample hardware, so will this be opened up and if so what are the implications for all the oc league guys? Or have we been discarded from HWBOT as a result of this Pro OC cup,

 

I like you pj and I don't want to take away from all the hours yourself and Rich have put in effortlessly building HWBOT but you are totally kidding yourself if you are saying this is a community thing, everyone except you can see its about a business and making money.

 

And the proof? The fact nearly every single person has asked for pro oc league to stay and you have removed it. The community don't feel like this is a community project anymore and what you have to realize is this isn't an invincible site, remember what happened to XS?

 

I want HWBOT to succeed and have made my position clear that I want to support the movement, but a community driven movement, not something with $ figure in mind.

 

Please consider our opinions

 

I'm not PJ, but you can still use ES, just not current gen. if you ask me, this should stay the same.

 

I should probably look this up, but I THINk you can still post ES scores, just unboint them. When next gen is out, you'll get the points.

 

What we'll do with the heavily sponsored guys that do not want to compete in that sort of competitions is something we need to discuss as well. Allowing those people in the Xtreme league means the Xtreme league is the same as it was a couple of years ago, apart from those who then decide to participate in the Pro OC Cup instead.

[Massman]

Options were considered and arguments were given why some options made things needlessly complicated or would not have the positive effect some people think it would have. Vivi was still one of the youngest overclockers attending the latest MOA grand final, apart from JJJC, meaning the influx of new extreme guys is very, very, VERY low. I'm not sure how some of you guys think overclocking will "move forward", but the severe lack of new blood at the top rankings is a very, very big problem. And we're not talking about guys enlisted in companies - we're talking people like Splave, Rbuass or Xtreme Addict who try to climb their way up to the top with own funding. These are community members.

 

We've seen that the Pro OC League simply doesn't work. We've seen that the OC League doesn't work. So how on earth can you guys argue that keeping the Pro OC League is definitely the way forward?! That logic does not compute here. Most of you haven't spoken a hundred words about the Pro League since it kicked off, but now all of the sudden is the reason you bench and the only motivation to bench? C'mon, don't be rediculous.

 

As for the $$, what can I say. There's a simple economic reality that requires every single project, whether it's community-driven (look at the staff here!) or pure business (look at Futuremark), to have enough income to run and (god forbid) grow. Having a dedicated developer doesn't come for free, unless you all agree we should go back to last year where sometimes there were no bug-fixes in months due to a severe shortage in available development time. If I want to get more audience to spectate, obviously that is related to an increased economic activity in the overclocking eco-system. The eco-system is far bigger than just HWBOT or me, it's all the teams that are trying to get a review or test sample. It's the people that are organising events such as EOC or AOMC and trying to get funding. It's the people that reach out to vendors for sponsorship and help setting up an overclocking event. Of course, I want HWBOT to benefit from that increased economic activity - I would be stupid and irresponsible if I didn't - but that does not make this project any less community-driven. Any statement of such nature I find highly offensive, in fact. I know what I do and why I do it and money has, quite frankly, very little to do with it.

 

// yes, I'm typing this angry and disgusted //

 

It's quite simple. If this was a $$-driven website, you would not see anything like the Hardware Masters (99% old hardware), not a single Country Cup (no sponsors required), oldies such as 3DMark01 and Aquamark removed, not a single HWBOT OC Challenge and so on. The only thing that would matter is the latest 3D benchmark and nothing but paid overclocking results. Do you love your 3DMark01? We still rank, reward and write about it! Would a corporate $$-driven machine do that?

 

No, the rules for the OC League don't change. Latest generation ES is not allowed, because the community doesn't want those used in the rankings.

[Massman]

I'm not 100% if I understand the time frame for each season, the cut off elimination rounds etc

 

First post and many others are just big walls of texts, with much I don't care about.

 

But if I've got this right in my head now, total season is only 3 months, but the first elimination is after 10 weeks (give or take)

So two weeks per benchmark (yea, yea, it's a team, you don't have to do it all yourself)

 

With in that time, you need to sort, test/bin the hardware needed for the five benchmarks.

 

- Start: March 1

- Registration closed: April 1

- Elimination #1: May 15

- End of competition: May 31

 

All five stages are open from March 1 until May 31.