I think that as @Wize said, having a forum/roundtable where representatives of the community (team leaders is a good subset) can directly bring concerns to the admins without having to reach out on their own would be an excellent thing. I think that having all the team leaders from Main to Invite would be a bit chaotic, especially in a voice chat format, but smaller meetings are definitely something I can see working. I’ll be sure to follow up with our other mods and admins and RGL leadership to see what we can do with regards to this.
Moreover, I think that the current format of admins scoping out what issues are contentious in the community and then polling them in post-season surveys works in some ways but falls short in others.
They do an excellent job of scoping out community opinion on short, easy questions. For example, should the Scorch Shot be banned. Sure, there are sophisticated arguments for and against such questions, but the end result can be boiled down to a yes/no question that almost everyone is likely to have a clear opinion on and a clear picture of what the format would look like in either world.
They also do well on confirming community opinion where the community clearly leans heavily towards a certain policy outcome, but the change is major/radical enough that it requires polling of some kind just to make sure there isn’t a silent majority/even split that opposes the outcome.
Where they fail, in my mind, is when the choice isn’t simple. When the choice is between round robin small-team-count advanced and Swiss relatively-large-team-count advanced, there are several implications for players, not all of which are encapsulated by a simple survey question.
For example, the implications of round robin Adv are:
- (+) Each team plays every other team -> Each team has a similarly strong schedule and final seedings are reasonably representative of each team’s relative strength to others in the division (I say reasonably, not totally, because team strengths vary by map).
- (~) The division structure reflects that of the top division, Invite, which Advanced sorta serves as a holding chamber for.
- (~) There is a fixed cap of 8 teams (number of weeks + 1) meaning that teams that do not, whether subjectively determined by admins or objectively determined through qualifiers, get pushed down to the division below. This has further implications for the div structure below - for example, does Main simply expand to accommodate more teams, or are some teams from what would be Main pushed down to IM, or is another RR div (Chal-Adv) introduced to hold the overflow?
- (-) RR means that team deaths affect everyone more than Swiss - either a forced bye week is added, one for every team death, or teams are pulled up from the division below, leading to possibly more team deaths (See Invite and how teams die to avoid playing it)
and the implications of Swiss adv are as follows:
- (+) Flexible division structure means you can accommodate as few or as many teams as you like, only strictly bounded on the bottom by 8 (number of weeks + 1), and team deaths do not disproportionately affect it
- (~) The opposites of 2 & 3 for RR
- (-) Small-div Swiss leads to suboptimal outcomes (See an analysis BBL did last season and I contributed to here)
Look at all those (~)! They’re neither objectively good nor bad - they can be construed as good or bad for any number of reasons, and people will always have wildly different ideas on the nuanced aspects of this. Should, for example, RR be accommodated by adding back Challenger, or should the worst teams simply be moved down to Main, having the potentially desirable, neutral, OR undesirable effect of increasing the skill gap in main (see also, arguments in this very thread about whether it is right for main to be a filtering grounds for the top divs, or if main should be a div with a more defined skill and that all teams should fit in that skill, or 15 other nuanced viewpoints that I can’t possibly list out)?
This is the kind of stuff that a post-season survey just cannot accurately capture the public’s opinions on. When you survey their opinion using disjoint questions that people respond to individually, without the whole picture in mind, the outcomes are reasonably likely to be different from what they would actually prefer.
This is the kind of stuff that staff should directly approach the community to ask about. This is, after all, as I’m sure @Mothership would appreciate me saying, the point of these forums: to have reasoned discussions about things in comp TF2 and to collect intelligent, nuanced viewpoints that cannot be represented by bar graphs and checkboxes.
Admins can then use the general consensus drawn on in these threads to make stronger, more popular decisions that are less likely to lead to disappointment and more likely to be sustainable over the long term, so we can stop reinventing the wheel of divisions (as just one example) every season.
I’m going to commit myself to working, as I said earlier, with other mods and admins and RGL leadership to see what I can do to take initiative in soliciting community feedback in a back-and-forth manner like this thread, minus the resentment/disappointment and in a more proactive manner. If anyone has any thoughts on how this can be done, feel free to drop them as well.