2023 Tournament Format

In 2023, NHRL will switch tournament formats, away from double elimination.

Our main tournament will be NHRL Live. In it, we will start the day with a new preliminary round. All competitors will be placed in a single-elimination bracket based on the result of their preliminary fight.

We will also hold NHRL Freestyle Fights, which is a series of grudge fights that eliminated competitors can participate in for most of the day. Starting in March, you can choose to register to fight in just the Freestyle Fights and not NHRL Live.

This means that most competitors will get at least two fights in the bracket. Competitors who get knocked out of the bracket early are welcome to fight grudges until closing time.

We will continue to allow anyone to fight here for free (other than a refundable deposit), and we will continue to provide complimentary builder services in our workshop during and between events. We are also making repair timing adjustments to better accommodate the 12lb and 30lb weight classes.

We want you to spend the entire day with us, fighting with your bot!

Why make this change?

This is a big change, and we’re making it for a few reasons.

• Our events in 2023 will be shorter. We anticipate each event will end between 8 and 10 pm.
• Less crunch and stress for repair time.
• No registration cap or fee, other than the refundable deposit. Our events continue to be open to the public, and we can continue to grow.
• We will stream all NHRL Live fights, including the preliminary round.
• Fights will be more fun to watch and participate in, especially at the end of the tournament.
• NHRL Freestyle Fights means plentiful opportunities for grudge fights. If you want to fight all day, you will fight all day.
• You will have a predictable maximum number of fights, and it will be easier for you to strategize for your next fight.
• Single-elimination is far easier for spectators to follow.

What will a day look like?

Note that we will be open for check-in and safety inspections on the day before the event, as always.

We are still settling on the day’s schedule, so please don’t take these times as gospel! Things may shift by an hour or so.

• 8 am: The House of Havoc opens. Builders passing safety on either Friday or Saturday will get several pogs for their bot. More on this in a moment!
• 10 am: The preliminary round begins. It will happen simultaneously in the Steel and Titanium areas. We will cover it in multiple streams. These parallel preliminary round streams will be run by a smaller team than our usual events.
• 1 pm: The preliminary round ends, as do both of the streams covering them. The single-elimination bracket begins. This will be streamed by our full production team.
• 2 pm: Freestyle fights for 3lb bots begins on the Titanium Stage. (Most 12lb sportsmen will be allowed to fight grudges here as well.)
• 6 pm: Freestyle fights on the Titanium Stage close. By this time, we should be able to run 12lb and 30lb grudges in the Steel Arena, if we haven’t started already.
• 8 pm: The final fights of the evening. We will have 3rd-place fights for each bracket, followed by each bracket's final.
• 9 pm: The event ends.

What are the pogs for?

You’ll get a few pogs when you pass safety. These are poker chips that will have the date of the event on one side, and be blank on the other side. You’re welcome to decorate the blank side of your pog with the name of your bot, any way you’d like (nothing mean or dirty please!).You can draw directly on the pog or print out stickers that you can stick onto it.

When you lose a fight, be it in the preliminary round, bracket, or freestyle, we ask that the losing captain give the winning captain one of their bot’s pogs.

That means you’ll have a physical history of all the bots you’ve beaten!

If you want to pre-print stickers for these chips, these stickers should work fine.

What’s the point of fighting in the preliminary round?

If you win your preliminary round fight, you will likely have an easier path through the single-elimination bracket.

If you are present at the event and forfeit your fight in the preliminary round, it will count as a loss towards your record and your ranking. Your opponent is not credited with a win for the purposes of ranking. Any other forfeits during the single-elimination bracket do not count towards your record and your ranking.

(Exception: if you are an individual bringing multiple bots, and you have both your bots matched up against each other in the preliminary round, you may choose to forfeit one of them, and it will not count as a loss in this case. We are no longer reseeding the bracket so that multiple bots from the same team or builder will not face each other early, to make bracket creation more transparent and fair to other builders.)

Will I still get 20 minutes to repair my bot?

You might get more!

All competitors are guaranteed one hour of repair time after their preliminary round fight.

In the single-elimination bracket, your guaranteed amount of repair time will depend on your weight class.

• 3lb bots are guaranteed 20 minutes of repair time.
• 12lb bots are guaranteed 25 minutes of repair time.
• 30lb bots are guaranteed 30 minutes of repair time.

Note that if you have multiple bots, their repair times will be concurrent. It'll be up to you to manage your time to repair all bots you have brought.

We hope this will make for less-stressful repairs!

Am I guaranteed at least two fights in NHRL Live?

While we can't guarantee two fights in NHRL Live, we have come up with a plan to make sure competitors who don't get a fight in the preliminary round can still arrange one. Read more about it here.

How are fights for the preliminary round determined?

The answer is a bit complicated, but it boils down to this:

Most single-elimination brackets have a certain number of first-round byes, based on the number of competitors. We will divide the fights in the preliminary round into groups based on this number.

• Group 1 is made up of fights in which both competitors are guaranteed byes.
• Group 2 is made up of fights in which the winner of the fight gets a bye.
• Group 3 is made up of fights in which neither competitor gets a bye.

Then, we split the competitors up by levels.

• Level 1 is made up of bots that have NHRL experience in that weight class. This level is ordered by rank. (Note that we will not have any Level 1 bots in January.)
• Level 2 is made up of bots that have fought outside of NHRL, but this is their first NHRL event. This level is ordered randomly.
• Level 3 is made up of bots that have never fought before, but the builder has combat robotics experience, either at NHRL or elsewhere. This level is ordered randomly.
• Level 4 is made up of bots that have never fought before, from builders with no combat robotics experience. This level is ordered randomly.

About 10 days before the event, we will livestream the bracket seeding. We will start by filling Group 1 with Level 1 bots. Once a group fills up, we move onto the next group. Once we have no more bots in a level, we move onto the next level.

There will not be the same number of bots in a level as the number of slots in the group of the same number. This is fine, as long as we proceed through them in order.

If we need to determine a random order for bots in a level, we will do so by pulling tiles out of a bag, or some other similar randomizer.

At the end of the process, we will have a preliminary round that will feed the single-elimination bracket.

• You will probably not face your preliminary round opponent in the single-elimination bracket, unless you both make the final. There are brackets where we cannot guarantee this, but we will make sure it happens as late as possible.
• Highly-ranked bots will not fight each other early in the single-elimination bracket, unless the bracket is very small.
• Winning your preliminary round fight will generally give you easier fights in the single-elimination bracket.

If there are an odd number of bots registered for that weight class, then the top-seeded bot will get a bye in the preliminary round and another bye in the first round of the single-elimination bracket.

Important: In 2022, if a builder or team brought multiple bots in the same weight class, we re-seeded the bracket to make sure they didn’t meet early. We are not doing this in 2023, because it’s more fair to builders with a single bot, and it’s far more transparent to do it this way.

If you are an individual builder (not a team) bringing multiple bots and they are scheduled to fight in the preliminary round, you may choose to forfeit the fight, and it will not count as a loss. Any other preliminary round forfeit counts as a loss.

How do bots qualify for the NHRL World Championships in November?

Just as in years past, the top 4 bots in each weight class will qualify for the NHRL World Championships. That means if you win the quarterfinal fight in the single-elimination bracket, you make it in!

In the past, if a bot that has already qualified for the Championships makes it into the top 4, we would take the two bots tied for 5th place. But in a single-elimination bracket, there is a 4-way tie for 5th place.

So in the case that a bot that has already qualified for the Championships makes it into the top 4 of an event, the 5th-place bot with the highest ranking going into the event will qualify.

If there is a tie in ranking, then the 5th-place bot that lost to the bot that already qualified will qualify for the Championships.

How are rankings determined?

Rankings are determined by a bot’s win-loss record from this season and the previous season. The basic idea is that you get 1 point for a win and lose 1 point for a loss, and the bot with the most points gets the highest ranking. We have extra modifiers for upsets, rookies, and bots that make it deep into a tournament.

If you want more detail about our ranking system, you can read about it here.

Can I bring a bot to fight only in the Freestyle grudge fights?

Starting in March, yes! You will still need to pay a deposit and pass safety. You will get pogs for your Freestyle-only bot.

What happens if we don’t have a lot of signups for a weight class?

We will run the preliminary round and single elimination bracket as long as we have at least 8 registered bots in that given weight class.

• If we have 4-7 registered bots in that weight class, we will run a standard double-elimination bracket instead, with no preliminary round.
• If we have 2-3 registered bots in that weight class, we will run a round-robin bracket instead, with no preliminary round, and all bots fighting each other head-to-head once.
• If we have only 1 registered bot in that weight class, we will not run it.

We will still seed the double-elimination or round-robin bracket on the seeding livestream, about 10 days before the event.