seasonal "point system sucks" thread
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ngl this thread is way to long for me to read, I have the attention span of a mouse. But when it comes to ffw points, I’d much rather have a system like what micah suggests for points decay. I think it is silly to punish a team because there is a bye week or that a team died. a Decay system doesn’t necessarily hurt the teams that get unlucky for the one. I do think a decay doesn’t work well in RR, though I think that isn’t as bad considering they move teams around to fill the RR if a team dies (and its less often that it does)
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@tua Team deaths fuck everyone over so it makes sense to limit it happening. But teams can and will always die during the season. It can’t be prevented entirely, and sometimes it is for the better.
Having to play out the season with a group of people who’ve stopped having fun and just hate each other’s guts all because the alternative is all 9 of you getting ban hammered would just suck.
Something to keep in mind.
This thread is also all over the place. But there are a lot of good points being made here in regard to short season/strength of schedule/team longevity.
I did make a comment about adding the w/l v mp debate to a survey and i guess i didn’t know it had been polled before. But now the general sentiment seems to be very much against MP system. Is this due to a vocal minority? Or an increased interest in what really makes a good metric? -
some ideas thrown around in #discussions for what to do with forfeits instead:
1) Prorate match points for forfeit winners (but not forfeit losers)
i.e. if you got 10.0 match points across 6 games
out of 18 possible
and the 7th is a ffw
then you get (10/18)*21 = 11.66 points totalthis has the advantage of not letting the winning team fall behind (if you dont give them any points) or jump ahead (if you give them full points)
also a viable solution for BYE weeks imo
edit: since @lYnn wants me to rephrase it for morons like him, basically:
in case of ffw, give the team match points so that their match points earned to match points possible ratio doesn’t change
2) don’t allow forfeits
teams must play with the players they’ve got; if they cannot play or ready up in time (without valid cause, in which case they should be in contact w an admin) they are expelled from the league
match overturns are still allowed, but not matches not being played at all
potential corollary: overturns/not on time ready ups must be rescheduled, so add a week between the regular season and playoffs like sixes to allow for this without eating into non-tf2 time for players
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@FlipFTW btw, staff are marked by badges showing their primary forum group
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@FlipFTW love code highlighting in non code stuff
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@FlipFTW
@FlipFTW said in seasonal “points system sucks” thread:
(Can we please get post #'s on these forums?)
This something we can prob look at doing with the theme rework, but you can find posts already by just clicking on the time of the post, and looking at the post nav on the top bar.
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@vibeisveryo
Prorate match points
I emotionally like this idea because I think it follows my stated instinct to put greater weight on the provable accomplishments of the team, but I didn’t propose it despite thinking of a similar system because I think the execution beyond that needs too much discussion and rework. Since you proposed it, I’ll share my thoughts and outline the issues I see.
- The proposed system has no scalability for earlier / later in the season.
Ignoring the divide by 0 error if its the first game of the season, what happens when a team has a win then a FFW or a loss then a FFW respectively? In the former full match points, in the latter literally no points for a forfeit because you may have gotten rolled by the #1 team in the div prior. It’s worth mentioning it’s not possible to delay this judgement of forfeit worth because the swiss format requires a “similar” opponent so everyone must be scored prior to matches being organized.
- Maintaining the matches to points earned ratio is misleading
The way the system maintains the ratio is effectively by putting greater weight on the earlier matches - this is visible in the example above, the issue with this is that it can definitely cause "double dipping into punishing a team - the stated example lets say is the result of
2 roll losses (0 / 6)
1 close game loss (1 / 3)
3 won games (9 / 9)
So this 3-3 team with 10/18 points has their 7th team forfeit and as a result gets 1.66 points - this is 0.33 less than the MINIMUM for a win. Maybe your choose your example poorly, but this compensation doesn’t seem fair for a forfeit WIN, a dirty fix would be to give the same minimum (2 points for winning) but at this point I feel like it’s band-aiding a flawed foundation.- There is no weighting toward the strength of the opponent
A point in the discord #discussion you didn’t mention was about the typical case of forfeits - a team is performing poorly and essentially disbands, this is usually synonymous with a poor performance and doubly likely when about to face a stronger team with this in mind ideally there would be some consideration toward a likely roll/victory.
I’ve been told I’m not allowed to only complain about other peoples ideas, so here’s my proposal:
It’s not a perfect system, but I think awarding the winning team the average amount of points scored against the forfeiting team (per match) w/ a minimum of 2 is a more complete fix/proposal.I still think it’s hilarious to go further into fractional points and I fully recognize this could theoretically create situations where a team is disadvantaged because of another teams performance against a team that has disbanded, but I strongly believe as a basis that a forfeit WIN should give points in the range of a current WIN (2 to 3).
Don’t allow forfeits
You know, if HL is actually getting to be a paid league that might lessen this issue, but I just wanted to emphasize that some teams aren’t meant to be - this is like how some of my friends don’t get along, its not because they’re bad people (well, not all of them) - some groups just don’t have chemistry. That’s not an excuse to attempt to make it work, but I do think forcing teams to stick together can create some really toxic hostage situations.
Personally I think if there is punishment - it should be leaned toward the “leader(s?)” - they’re presumably the ones forming the team and it’s shallow but maybe that’d put some weight behind… well, being a team leader. Arguably its a lot of weight, responsibility, and pressure onto an already stressful position … and the sadist in me thinks the possibility of a punishment might help some less responsible see that.
Mothership Forum trick is neat but you’ve raised another question in me, does not knowing how this forum works make me a boomer or a zoomer?
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@FlipFTW said in seasonal "point system sucks" thread:
but I do think forcing teams to stick together can create some really toxic hostage situations.
but you don’t force teams to stick together. just if they have a match scheduled and fail to show up, they are expelled from the league
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also i’m not sure you understood what i meant by the finer details in the prorate idea.
the prorates would be applied at the end of the season and based on ALL non-forfeit matches in the season; for seeding 1.6 points would be given in the meantime as is practice now (as forfeits cause problems for final playoffs seeding, not for Swiss scheduling as much) - so the real points earned/points possible ratio is still directly honoured
no weight to opponent strength is fair - but i don’t think there’s a better way to do it unless you want to distort the stuff by giving everyone flat 3.0
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@vibeisveryo
It’s quite frequent that parts of a team that fall apart find other teams to join - this is especially true for when a team has rough starts or following losses where teams can no longer make playoffs. The act of finding another team once yours has died is an act of determination to continue to play in the league I don’t want to discourage, and can result in the formation of strong bonds and teams going into the next season.Even for team leaders responsible for organizing teams that fall apart I can’t help but feel bad for people who are forced to take a break from a game they might love - I’d probably suggest a demerit preventing them from making a team next season (AS A LEADER) which they can even appeal by demonstrating improved responsibility and reflection.
As a note having a record of teams that a player has played on that died could be framed in a negative manner and in doing so there could be discouragement from the perspective of recruitment for players who have played a high amount of “incomplete” seasons. This could take the form of a 1-hr ban and essentially be a stat on a players permanent record if you were feeling cruel - this probably guarantees that any recruiter will see this and ask about their previois teams dying.
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@vibeisveryo
I did misunderstand, I wasn’t aware of the 1.6 points to seed mid season and despite saying it several times I can’t mentally grasp single digit games played per season I guess.I’m more for the idea, but I do think it can come into conflict with having accomplishments weighted too heavily especially with this low temporary seeding rule:
A somewhat drastic example to demonstrate this point: Two forfeit wins early => 1.6 and 1.6 for seeding while will presumably put you against lighter opponents (than actually winning) AND these lighter opponents are technically worth “more” due to the protraction.
The weighted idea of the average of other teams win record vs the forfeited team has a chance of giving a more accurate seeding for Swiss, and I do think that even just effectively giving a number in the range of 2-3 for a FFW should be the standard.
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@vibeisveryo @FlipFTW @Micahlele you guys are missing the forest for the trees here really hard
UGC already gave partial points for FFWs way back in the day and it caused so many issues every goddamn season that even the UGC admins realized it was a terrible system. i’ll go really in-depth on this if you want, but it really boils down to good teams getting punished for random matchups with clown teams. and in the same way that people arguing W/L seeding over MP don’t realize that the system is in place because the alternative has already been tried, and the demerits of the current system have been deemed the least damaging of the alternatives.
yes, the situation in AM is strange and unfortunate, but the fact that we only have one of these scenarios, if any, each season is an indicator that the system is working. it’s an extreme outlier and any attempts to standardize the system to account for extreme outliers is, more often than not, going to do far more harm than good. so how do we deal with scenarios like this, then? I see two options.
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We don’t? Forfeits are, a very large percentage of the time, going to be a 3-0 in favor of the team receiving the FFW. if the 3-4 team had just won both of those matches instead, are we having this discussion? probably not. “but they only went 1-4!!!” no shit, the way swiss works essentially guarantees that a team is going to have “easy matches” or “hard matches”. when you get matched up against a clown team for one of those “easy matches”, and they end up forfeiting, it takes a win that you otherwise likely had coming and “delegitimizes” it in some way, simply because the 90% chance you had of 3-0ing was made 100%. comparison: if shovel forfeited their matches against 3600 and HOOD this season, saying ‘they actually went 5-0 in the matches they played!! maybe they beat hood!!’ is just inane and intellectually dishonest.
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ironically one of the few places where UGC was ahead of RGL: give admins the ability to force a play-in for extreme outlier situations like this one or the CSn situation a few seasons ago. there’s a ton of scenarios you can pull for this, but kumori did it back in s15(?) plat for a similar scenario and while the team who had gotten then bye week/ffw that caused it was a little miffed, there ultimately weren’t any issues.
I’m gonna restate it, but points from FFWs aren’t an issue, like, at all. if these scenarios were happening more often there might be more of an argument for it, but when it’s such a relatively rare occurrence given the large amount of data in a tf2 season, it ironically serves as proof that the system is fine.
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@Alto i think you misunderstand that forfeit losers don’t gain anything under my proposed system. saying shovel might should get credit if they ff’d is wrong - they would get nothing - but the ffw should gain points commensurate to how they performed in the rest of their season matches.
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@vibeisveryo that’s not my point, all i’m saying is that the notion of discrediting a team with 2 FFWs for “only having one actual win” is almost as ridiculous as saying a team that only has FFLs is “undefeated”. and again, if you dock points from teams who receive a FFW, you are thereby removing points that a team could’ve rightfully earned during the match that was most likely going to be a 3-0 in their favor, simply because they had the bad luck of getting swiss’d against a team that didn’t have their shit together. that’s not something you can rightfully punish a team for.
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@Alto unfortunately this is really hard to ascertain, especially for teams with otherwise bad records. in high divs yes, forfeits happen more for the shittiest team dying or something, but in low divs teams forfeit for some of the stupidest reasons even if they’re doing well
even if patterns exist in every specific case it’s impossible to tell what the expected outcome would have been, in the absence of pages of scrim logs, and so the most fair option would be to simply exclude the ffw from the calculation by prorating points
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@vibeisveryo Unless we’re seeing teams with their full roster forfeiting because their engi has a headache, if a team forfeited on a given night they were almost guaranteed to lose because of the circumstances of that night. Two seasons ago, my main team (that ended up finishing 3rd) lost to the 2nd worst team in the div because we were missing 4 mains at match time and both of the subs we had arranged to play vanished into thin air. We ended up starting 15 minutes in an 8v9 with like 4 offclassers and an actual pubber on scout so we lost pretty handily. Even though we would’ve rolled that team on any other night, they were able to field the better roster on that night and thus deserved the win. Match night circumstances have always been a part of HL, and will continue to be a part of HL. It ended up not mattering because that team wasn’t close to playoffs, but prorating FFW points is inevitably going to cause a team that got matched against a clown team to miss playoffs and this entire conversation is going to storm back in the other direction.
and even if a team ends up getting a win against a team they would’ve lost to, in most cases (all except week 7), it’s going to even itself out the week after because that team’s been artificially inflated so they’ll eat an 0-3 the following week to even it out. Like, either you get the FFW and then lose 0-3 the next week, or you play out the match and lose, only to likely win the next week. The only difference is that by being on the receiving end of a FFW, you now have points taken away from you by things completely outside of your control.
I’ll say it again, we’ve already had this happen in UGC years ago and if the braindead UGC admins were able to realize that it was an awful system, there’s no reason why it should be touching RGL.
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@Alto the only counter arguement I would state is that currently you only get 1.6 MP for a FFW, and then you get the rest of the points later at the end of the season if the teams cannot schedule a rematch for the rest of the MP.
so FFW do not punish you as hard in the rankings since you have less MP than a full FFW during the regular season scheduling.
Perhaps instead we can give full MP on the FFW, and allow a rematch to allow the FF team to “steal” back up to 1.4 MP? I don’t like this idea, but its the only one I could think of at the moment.
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I propose that we give full MP for the winning team and 0 MP for the losing team. We could keep counters for rounds won/dropped and use this for any tie breakers. This seems like a natural and simple solution that rewards the teams that win with higher seeds.
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@shotaway So… w/l with rw/rl as a tiebreak
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@vibeisveryo i for one love this solution