Okay, after taking some time to read over this discussion from the start I believe there are several key disconnects here that are going to prevent us from ever seeing eye to eye unless we address the underlying reasons we disagree with each other. I attempt to do that in this reply, in addition to replying to other miscellaneous things others have said.
About past polls and their relevance to this discussion
@Inquisition said in Highlander Match Point System:
You cannot possibly know what popular opinion is on my pure rounds match point system because you have failed to poll it.
I’m not “hiding behind polls,”
Then why the hell have you, time and time again in this thread, been using polls to support your opinion? You know as well as I do that the polls say absolutely nothing.
I’ll paste again for convenience all the times you said this.
but we polled for it and you are in the minority
the thing that won a majority of player votes
We voted not to prioritize wins
we didn’t want to have wins be the determining factor
the fact we don’t care about match wins
This is exactly the opposite of what we agreed to do in the poll that I have been referencing. We voted NOT to prioritize match wins, so its absurd that they are built into the system at all. Match wins should not be considered in the world where we decided that they weren’t important.
given that we are trying not to prioritize match wins.
I think you and I are, regardless of what either of us may have said earlier in this thread, in agreement that past polls are silent on this issue. So I don’t want to talk about them anymore. I’m not going to bring them up, and I’d like you to refrain from doing so as well. Let’s focus on the present and future.
Response to Flare’s facts and logic
@Flare, you bring up an interesting point with the mathematical demonstration.
My math was really rough and not terribly precise, but I’m of the opinion that a maximum potential error of 11% is unacceptable in principle,
But I can’t agree with you for the simple reason that I’m not looking at this as you are. You are looking at this from the viewpoint of measuring its deviation (error) from pure proportionality, which you believe is an ideal to strive towards. I don’t, with absolutely no offense or personal insult intended, give a shit about pure proportionality. I value, on a personal level, teams being rewarded for winning matches, not just rounds. The current system does that reasonably, in my opinion, rewarding 2/3 of the match points to the match winner and rewarding the remaining 1/3 based on rounds won by the loser.
Unless we can address our disagreements at the root of the issue (why you believe points being rewarded in exact proportion to rounds won is ideal, and why I don’t) I will never agree with your framing of this as an error minimization problem, because I don’t believe there is error to begin with. Accordingly, I don’t find either an 11% or 19% error appalling; I find it correct, a good solution to match wins not really mattering; I’ll get more into this just below.
Preface to responding to Inquisition’s argumentation
Everything regarding polls aside:
Having taken a look at the rest of the thread, I do agree that your idea was talked about and seriously criticized less than I thought. I believe I discussed this in a private discord with some others, and thought the arguments I made there I had posted here, when in fact I hadn’t. That’s on me for not doing my due diligence - sorry about that. I’ll try to make up for it here.
In specific, I think my earlier posts on this thread focused far too much on the inconsistency of you using past polls to defend your opinion and far too little on the substance of the discussion. That’s also on me. I’ll come back to this later, but I believe in a consensus building model for decision making, and combativeness helps nobody. I’ll try to set that aside from now.
Responding to the original idea, except for calls for a poll to be done
I value, as I said above responding to Flare, winning matches. I think winning matches is the point of having a league - I think several rounds are just a means to make sure matches aren’t decided by flukes.
But also, because of the way Highlander is set up, with relatively small Swiss-style divisions and only 7 matches that count for seeding, I believe that introducing a system that prioritizes win-loss first creates some major problems I’d rather avoid; namely, teams with a far easier schedule making it into playoffs over teams that are better than them, because 7 matches isn’t enough to calibrate Swiss properly. (Note that Mothership brought this up earlier.) I highly value the teams in playoffs truly being the best teams in the div - I think this is more important than whatever system we use to get there, and I don’t think pure win-loss would do a good job. So I support match points, BUT: I still value winning matches, and so I support the current match point system where 2/3 of the points are given to the match winner, but the loser still has a shot at some value out of the match beyond for tiebreaks.
Why don’t I believe that match points being rewarded in proportion to rounds won is a good thing? Because I think it also has several other pernicious effects on the league that I’d rather avoid.
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It incentivizes teams, in order to maximize their final seeding, to prioritize consistent round winning over winning matches. This includes by gaming the Swiss system through soft-throwing deciding rounds earlier in the season to get matched against easier opponents later in the season, so they can guarantee 4-0s / 2-0s.
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It makes the regular season inconsistent with playoffs, where regular season wins don’t matter at all but in playoffs wins are all that matter.
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It reduces satisfaction from clutching a game.
The reason I don’t personally believe a poll is necessary (one of several criteria I use in my head to justify a poll - more on that later) is because I’m not convinced the system you propose is a good enough alternative to the current system to be pitted against it. I don’t blame this on you - I haven’t given you a chance to defend it against these criticisms of mine. Here’s said chance.
Regarding a future poll
The people are always right, sorry. The success of the league is defined by player satisfaction. If you satisfy more players, you’re doing better.
I think this is another fundamental disconnect that’s going to fundamentally make us not see eye to eye unless either you or I is convinced otherwise at the root. And in all fairness to you, for several reasons I’m far more stubborn about this than I am about the other disconnect re: match points, so I think it’s fairly unlikely you’re going to convince me otherwise. If that means we won’t see eye to eye on this point ever, so be it.
I don’t believe the people are always right. I don’t believe in democracy as inherently correct or an inherently optimal way to do things, whether within RGL, elsewhere on the internet, or in real life.
I do agree with you that the league’s fundamental goal is to maximize player satisfaction. But I don’t think that democracy, or polling, is the best way to do it. People are liable to make bad choices, including ones that reduce their own satisfaction. Let’s see how.
The idea behind democracy is the idea of social utility maximization - an economic problem. Individuals are well-behaved, rational actors who have preferences that are complete (they have an opinion on everything and understand everything perfectly), monotonic (they believe more of something that they think is good is better), and transitive (there is a strict order to their preferences - if A is better than B and B is better than C, then A must be better than C to them). So in democracy, if everyone that has preferences expresses them, we, by design, maximize everyone’s collective utilities.
The problem with this idea is that one of the premises, the assumption that preferences are complete, is simply not true. Specifically, the idea that people (the respondents to a survey) have an opinion on everything and understand it perfectly. People’s brains work in weird ways, primed by the latest experiences they had, and so they make irrational choices. @TheS4rr also mentioned this earlier:
But polls can’t decide every little minute detail of how the league runs because most players may not understand an issue well enough or they may gain an advantage from a rule change that is actually bad.
(“that is actually bad” in the sense that it reduces overall player satisfaction, despite being voted for.)
A clear example of this, in the context of RGL, is that before the rotation in HL was established, it seemed that every season, people voted for either Cascade or Lakeside, and then at the end of that season poll, hit the “fuck go back” button.
To be clear: I don’t believe that this means every decision should be closed-door, ivory tower up to the admins. I think every person has a valuable perspective to provide, if they choose to or care to - I just don’t think the people, as a collective, can be assumed to be right. I also understand that the admins, including myself, are just players at heart. We are not some super technocratic group that knows better than everyone else. We have our biases too. There is one advantage admins have in decision-making, that I’ll get to later.
I admire the Wikipedia model for making decisions through building consensus. If there is a dispute, people discuss it and try their best to reach a consensus that everyone can accept, whether grudgingly/with reservations or happily.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Consensus (bolding/emphasis is mine):
Decisions on Wikipedia are primarily made by consensus, which is accepted as the best method to achieve Wikipedia’s goals, i.e., the five pillars. Consensus on Wikipedia does not mean unanimity (which is ideal but not always achievable), nor is it the result of a vote.
Wikipedia consensus usually occurs implicitly. An edit has presumed consensus until it is disputed or reverted. Should another editor revise that edit then the new edit will have presumed consensus until it meets with disagreement. In this way, the encyclopedia gradually improves over time.
When agreement cannot be reached through editing alone, the consensus-forming process becomes more explicit: editors open a section on the associated talk page and try to work out the dispute through discussion, using reasons based in policy, sources, and common sense; they can also suggest alternative solutions or compromises that may satisfy all concerns. The result might be an agreement that does not satisfy anyone completely, but that all recognize as a reasonable solution. Consensus is an ongoing process on Wikipedia; it is often better to accept a less-than-perfect compromise—with the understanding that the page is gradually improving—than to try to fight to implement a particular preferred version immediately.
I think consensus-based decision making is the best model for a community like this, where there is fairly little cross-sectional diversity that meaningfully impacts people’s preferences (unlike in real life, where, for example, people’s political opinions are very much shaped by whether they were born into a rich or poor family). I will note that it’s probably more ideal to have argument in short bites, more chatroom style, than through these long essays; very few people in this community, unlike Wikipedia, are nerds enough or have enough energy to read an essay like this one, let alone write them. But I think resolving people’s disagreements, whether through convincing them or compromise, is better than just ramming through a system with a bit more than half the people supporting it and a bit less than half the people opposing it.
I personally believe that the role of admins is to facilitate said consensus building. That’s why I am active on these forums, where some other admins may not want to be, and why I’m responding at all to this thread despite my disagreement with a lot of what has been said by everyone, not just you. Of course, by only engaging with one of your points, I’m kind of doing a lousy job at that - but that can always be rectified.
Then, I think the point of a poll is to officiate a consensus that has already been reached. With disagreement and people that don’t look at an issue the same way, a poll is just a way to push through a half-popular change - one that not everyone may have fully considered. With consensus, on the other hand, we can be sure that enough people are aware of the consequences of a change that they’re voting rationally, and the consensus ensures that enough people will be happy with it that it won’t be a “fuck go back” kind of situation.
Without consensus, we have several options:
- If the status quo is not horribly broken, keep it
- If the status quo is horribly broken, unilateral admin action to fix it - which may result in a suboptimal (or optimal) outcome that is still better than the status quo
- Try to create consensus
This is a fairly mundane, though important, topic. Anyone who is in this thread is either a nerd or is just clowning on someone or the other for whatever reason. So #3 may not be possible. I will always strive for it, but it’s not necessarily easy. That’s where #1 and #2 comes in as a backup.
The system as it is is not horribly broken. It may be flawed, but it’s not broken. Otherwise you’d have people (a LOT of them, not just a few) complaining about it very publicly since when it was implemented in Season 3. So our options are #3 and #1. We can iron out flaws through consensus, but not through a poll.
Back to the advantage admins have - it is admins’ jobs to consider the implications for the divs they admin, which they, by design, do not have a conflict of interest in. This lets them weigh the proposals more, but not totally, impartially. Also, admins - whether current or future ones - are the people that ultimately have to implement a system, and so if a system would make it significantly more difficult/less feasible for admins to do a good job, then admin veto may be necessary against it. But admin actions SHOULD be open to public scrutiny, and transparency is an absolute must (on gameplay/league matters - I am not talking about, say, bans). Then, admins should guide consensus making where possible, make decisions where it is not possible, and put things to a vote when there is good reason to put them to a vote (fairly simple options, truly matters of preference, etc. etc.), and not just because there is a dispute.
So @Inquisition @Teli @Flare if I or any other RGL admin could do better to take logic into account, and to avoid vague wording without posing an unbearable burden on us*, please let me know, I’m happy to hear. I/we may not agree with you or implement your proposal, because it may not necessarily be good, but it is always my goal, and hopefully that of other admins as well, to be open minded. In particular, I obviously and clearly disagree with you on the necessity of a poll or the usefulness of one, but I’m willing to discuss it.
* Yes, I know admins should take on work necessary to make the league better, but at the end of the day admins are volunteers. If the workload is unbearable, admins will quit, and the league will not have as many people willing to do the work for it, making it even harder to get the work done.
I respect the hell out of you if you’ve read every word in this post.