@vibeisveryo I appreciate that you’ve taken a step back to make sure you understand what I’m saying. You’ve given me much more to discuss here, instead of forcing me to repeat myself and be frustrated.
Regarding polls and their purpose
I reject your proposal to move away from polls. I am not “hiding behind polls” in the same way that Thor does not hide behind his hammer. Polls are my primary weapon in this discussion, so to take them away from me is to defeat my entire purpose here. Literally the only reason I started this thread to convince you guys to run a poll. The exact point I have been making is that past polls on the issue have failed in their entirety, so you should run an updated poll on this very poll-able question.
While I agree that coming to a consensus is the best option, polling with majority rule is necessarily a part of the process of coming to consensus. Most people aren’t going to read a word from this thread, but many of them will still have their opinions and vote in polls. If you give them what they asked for, and they decide that they don’t like it, then that’s okay. The idea of a ‘back button’ is an important part of this. If people realize their idea was wrong, then they will change their minds and vote differently on the poll the next time it comes around.
Secondly, the primary reason that pure democracy fails in most real-life situations is that it’s very difficult to poll the general populous in a reasonable manner. Not everyone has easy access to polls, and for those who do, the trouble of doing so might not be worth the value they gain by voting. This is closely connected to the idea that many people think their votes don’t matter, because it’s never the case that a singular vote will be the deciding factor in polls. In our case, however, none of this applies for the following reasons:
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It is not difficult to poll people in RGL. As I mentioned before, it doesn’t take much effort on the part of the admins to put up polls. You could have already put it up in the time we have been discussing this.
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It is not difficult for us to respond to polls. You know that every single RGL player has access to the internet, and can easily find your polls. You can put them on the front page of the RGL website and advertise them in the discord. It takes only a few minutes of effort to vote in RGL polls. Excepting special circumstances, anyone who wants to can easily vote in your polls. The only (again, excepting special circumstances) reason that someone would not vote in the polls is that they simply don’t care about the contents of the poll, which means we wouldn’t need them voting anyway.
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Individual votes actually do matter. When the total voting base is barely a few hundred people, it’s completely reasonable that having a small group change their mind could alter the majority on the poll. Also, the people voting in polls are almost always directly effected by the results of the poll, so it will be easy for them to form opinions and decide what to vote for. At the end of the day, as long you include an “I don’t care” option in the poll, you can be sure that anyone who votes one way on a two way issue is actually speaking their mind.
Regarding the point system and its goals
For this section, keep in mind that I am advocating for potentially different point systems for swiss and round robin. I will be discussing exclusively my thoughts for round robin divisions, because the reasoning is different for each.
I’ll start here. @vibeisveryo, you said this.
I highly value the teams in playoffs truly being the best teams in the div
It would help if I knew what you meant by “best in the div,” because the way I see it, this will be best accomplished using my system. The ultimate goal of the regular season is to produce the most competitive playoff bracket, and so it should be the case that we consider the “best” teams to be the teams with the greatest chance at winning the entire playoff bracket.
Looking at it in this way, a team with 4 perfect wins (no rounds lost) against the bottom 4 teams and 3 perfect losses (no rounds won) against the top 3 teams is significantly less valuable in a playoff bracket than a team with imperfect wins and losses. If you know this team is getting rolled by every playoff team, it doesn’t matter that they’re better than the non-playoff teams. There’s almost no point in letting them into playoffs in the first place. On the other hand, a team that has maximum rounds won on loss against other top teams is much more likely to take that one last round and turn the tide. Even though they might be dropping rounds to worse teams, they’re still more likely to be the entire division winner than the team with only perfect wins and losses. Hence, I see the regular season as the perfect time to look at rounds won, rather than win/loss.
Secondly, to address your desire to reward winning teams no matter what, I will say that winning a match still has its merits, even if you purely care about rounds won. At the end of the day, the prize pools are abysmal, so the only thing anyone gains from winning invite is just glory. If you win the division, everyone knows. If you win a tough match, people will notice and word will get out. “Oh, team so and so beat the top team? Amazing. Maybe they’ll be able to beat them in playoffs when it actually counts, otherwise it was just a fluke”
Glory for a win is rewarding, but if its not in playoffs then its not really worth much. Winning a regular season match doesn’t mean you’d beat the team later in playoffs, which is why a system that encourages consistency is preferred. Consistency is the only factor in the pure rounds system, which makes it the best.
I’ll be happy to share my thoughts about the Swiss system as well, (they’re very similar to my thoughts about RR), but frankly I don’t care about results in any division below invite. I suppose winning advanced has some impact also, as it feeds a team into invite as well, but at the moment advanced is also round robin. As far as I’m concerned, we should let the players in Swiss divisions decide how to score their own match points. That’s why the division filter on the poll will be important.
Final remarks about polls
I find it funny that you mention the issue between Cascade and Lakeside before rotation was introduced. If you didn’t already know this, the reason that rotation was introduced was because I (me, Inquisition, not someone else) identified the problem with preexisting map polls, then wrote a poll (yes, I wrote it. I’ll give some credit also to exa who modified it before it was published). The results of the poll showed exactly what I said they would show, that rotation is highly favored to anything else. Because I wrote it, there was no room for confusion, and because I was on the admin team, it was very easy for me to get the poll through.
Here I am, again, explaining an issue that should be polled. The only problem for me now is that I am no longer an admin, so I have to post on threads to convince you to run polls. I also am unsure what the results of the poll will be, which is why I have been saying this whole time that if majority votes against me I will accept my loss.
If you want a problem fixed in RGL, all you need to do is run a poll (written by me), then the correct answer will be served to you on a platter.
I have read every word of every post on this thread, and will continue to do so to in order to respond properly and convince admins to run the damn poll.