RPA Winners, Losers, and Eligibility
Over the past few weeks, we (the dev team of Rock, Paper, Azure) have gotten to be best friends with our internal legal department. It’s been an educational experience, and this is where things stand with Rock, Paper, Azure.
When one player wins a round, he or she is ineligible to win a future round. If you don’t win, you are eligible to keep playing in subsequent weeks to try to win. We’ve received a number of very good questions and concerns, so, I’ll try to summarize them here.
1. What if I win second or third place, and I want to keep playing to try to in the first place prize? Can I do that?
Players do have the option to refuse their prize. If you come in second or third, you may reject it, forfeit your place, and continue playing. Please note though that you assume the risk for doing this and the decision is final. As weeks go by, I would expect the competition to get more difficult, so you may do worse and not win any prize at all, and also give up your place should there be a change in eligibility (see next paragraph).
In addition to a player purposefully choosing to remove him or herself from claiming the prize, a player may also be found ineligible. In either case, the prize goes to the next person in line. So, hypothetically speaking, if the first place player was found ineligible, the second/third/fourth players become first/second/third. Had player 2 already decided to refuse his place … yep, that’s right – the top three are now third/fourth/fifth from the leaderboard.
It’s a bit confusing, but as you can imagine there are legalities involved here.
2. Why are previous winners still playing? I thought they were ineligible!?
Past winners are ineligible to win a prize again. We’ll remove ineligible players as we can – as you might imagine, there’s a little delay because we’re sorting out the winners from week 1. But rest assured, before we run the final round on Fridays, we vet all players and then rerun the entire round. Remember that during the week, the “continuous integration” of your bot is primarily for fun and strategy – it’s only the final round that counts!
3. So, who won week 1?
We had no idea it would be this volatile, but it turns out players 2 and 3 (Serplat and marsh) have been removed – one for his choice to keep playing, the other because of, unfortunately, eligibility. (I wish that wasn’t the case, but laws are laws.)
That means that players 4 and 5 slide up to 2 and 3 – s7orm and AttnSystem now become 2nd and 3rd place, unless they too decide to keep playing and give up their place.
So just remember – you’re never out of it!