# Introduction

The ctf world currently doesn't have a world cup, a competition to determine who's the strongest team. CTFTime points and the ICC makes respectively for an analog of elo and olympics.
Both in feeling and establishment, DefCon kind of holds the spot already. However, it suffers from a historical focus on rev and pwn and cannot accurately judge strength in other categories (quote from an anonymous crypto player: "defcon is fucking dogshit"). Furthermore, the jeopardy qualifications in most top CTFs serve as step torwards A/D finals.
The Jeopardy World Cup aims to fill the vacuum by proposing a contest with very hard challs in every category, that could be recognized by the community as a proper Jeopardy Final.

The present document exposes a plan to establish such a contest, along with a roadmap for the embryo edition (more on that later). Everything below is tentative; discussion and suggestions are very welcome at https://discord.gg/rMR22prwtM.

### Format (end goal)

Once established, the Jeopardy World Cup (JWC) would be an on-site jeopardy style CTF. The challenges in each category (Crypto, Forensics?, Misc?, PWN, Rev, Web) would be as hard as possible, written by (paid as possible) authors. Along with the other prizes, the winning team would depart with a cup and the title of Jeopardy Champions for this year.

To qualify to the JWC, teams would need to place top 3 in one of the hardest CTFs throughout the year. The qualifying CTFs would be chosen as follow:
- Every year, the community rates the difficulty of a CTF in every category. If one of them meets a certain threshold, and if the CTF organizers are willing, the CTF would serve next year as a qualifier.

In order to avoid problems determining who qualifies exactly when different mergers place well in several qualifiers, a team (not its players) would need to be preregistered prior to a qualifying event (more details on preregistration in the tentative rulebook).

# Embryo edition
Of course, such an event will not get recognized overnight. Hence, the first edition (Embryo edition) will rather be a remote CTF. The challenges will still be as hard as possible, but we cannot guarantee good compensation to the challenge authors (the current plan is to distribute all the remaining sponsor money evenly among them — weighed by amount of challs written — with an *attempted* baseline of at least $50/chall). No money will go to the organizing team.
In particular, due to this issue and the recent nature of the event, we expect the challenges to be less hard than intended: the embryo edition will serve more as a POC to show that with community support, a world cup really could happen.

It remains to be discussed whether we attempt the qualifiers (in which case such an item and its dependents should be added to the roadmap) for the embryo edition, or if it should simply be a standard remote CTF with hard challs.
This point shall be clarified at the end of the testing-the-waters phase.

#### Phase 1 (now → end of summer 2023)
- [Testing the waters](#Testing-the-waters)
#### Phase 2
- [First challenge call](#First-challenge-call)
- [Reaching out to potential sponsors](#Reaching-out-to-sponsors)
- [Finalizing the organising team](#Finalizing-the-organising-team)
- [Testing the challenges](#Testing-the-challenges)
- [Second challenge call](#Second-challenge-call)
- [Testing the challenges](#Testing-the-challenges)
#### Phase 3
- [Preparing prizes](#Preparing-prizes)
- [Setting up the infrastructure](#Setting-up-the-infrastructure)
- [Jeopardy World Cup](#Jeopardy-World-Cup)
#### Phase 4
- [Paying the chall devs](#Paying-the-chall-devs)
- [Sending the prizes](#Sending-the-prizes)

## Phase 1

### Testing the waters
**Deadline:** End of summer 2023.

**Goals:**
- Gauge interest in the JWC.
- If there is not enough interest, axe the event.
- Discuss the ins and outs of the embryo and main editions
- Create some amount of hype.
- Invite potential organisers and/or chall authors, we can't do this with only 3 people.
- Spread the word about the JWC.
- Decide whether to attempt the qualifiers for the embryo edition.
- Make sure people know the embryo edition will probably be easier than the qualifiers CTFs.

**Details:**
In the CTF Discord, we will send an introductory message explaining why we want to organize the JWC (basically the introduction above), asking for thoughts about how well-received the event could be. The primary goal is to spark a discussion in which further details can be explained, in order to show that some proper thought has been put into this and that the JWC could actually happen. In order to support this, the message will come with a link to this roadmap.

When the discussion in the CTF discord dies down, it will move to the JWC discord (cf link in the introduction).
During this phase, if enough teams (not necessarily top ones) express their interest in the JWC, we can ask them whether they would be willing to use their CTF as qualifiers for the embryo edition.

Ideally, most details about both the embryo and main editions should be hashed out by the end of this phase.

## Phase 2

### First challenge call
### Reaching out to sponsors
### Finalizing the organising team
### Testing the challenges
### Second challenge call
### Testing the challenges

## Phase 3

### Preparing prizes
### Setting up the infrastructure
### Jeopardy World Cup

## Phase 4

### Paying the chall devs
### Sending the prizes