Morax Response:
Since your post is concrete I do not feel the need to do a point-by-point refutation of things. Instead I will first go through your credibility for the position and then proceed to talk about the adjustments you plan on doing for each segment of PC responsibilities.
Ethos:
Your ethos can be broken up to three central facets. First you point to your time as M&M Councillor as well as the time you have invested into the variety of these duties. I have no qualms with what you have said related to these details. However, none of it is relevant as this is the Player Councillor election and not the Creative Councillor election. All this facet of your ethos is good for is evidence that you have consistency on FAF and will not just peace out as soon as you meet the slightest level of pushback.
The second facet relates to the tournaments you have hosted. Since you brought up your past history about tournaments, I feel it’s only fair to go into those tournaments. Your tournament history essentially stops at 2019 which was around the time period where you became a councillor, which is totally fair. I say this to clarify that I’m not ignoring more recent tournaments of yours where you have cleared yourself of any worries about your methodology surrounding tournaments but rather looking at the most recent information available to me. So, archsimkat’s post has touched upon most of my qualms when it would come to you being responsible for managing TDs and assuring people a baseline of integrity in the tournament process. You have a history of completely canceling events because of criticism towards your format or reneging on funds due to being unhappy with tournaments for whatever reason. Of course, doing that is totally within your rights as a private donator, but it is also an action that has consequences in people’s views to handle FAF funds impartially.
Beyond that, I do not think the funds you have put towards FAF is relevant. That plants the seed in my mind that you are using your money as a “pro” for your application and a failure to be elected would result in you not funding anything. Once again, that is your right, but the position is not something up for sale and therefore I would like this fear to not cast a cloud over people’s decision making as they cast a vote.
Finally you have the ethos of being a past member of the Matchmaker Team. This is probably the strongest area of credence you have towards the position. However, you left the position and to me it seemed like you left because you generally left every FAF Discord you were part of and wanted to entirely distance yourself from any contributive element after you left your position as a councillor. You have now informed me that you left because archsimkat failed to communicate with you about the 1v1 pool but I have no real information about the reality of this whole situation.
Tournaments:
None of the tournament adjustments you have proposed are anything different to current policy. It is simply you stating that if you were PC you would keep what I currently do and will into existence the manpower hours and funds to support lower level events. I will assume that the magic manpower and funds will come from you directly. If so, why are you not doing this now? Nothing prohibits it. You know nothing prohibits it because all of the active, regular TDs (including me) have told you they would love to help out where they can but they are simply at capacity in hosting their current responsibilities.
LotS:
Your LotS suggestions ultimately boil down the same problem: manpower. Let’s assume by an U1900 LotS you want a real LotS event. This entails things like operating league invitationals, advertising these invitationals to lower rated players, having new seasonal tournaments, and having mini-LotS events prior to this new LotS. Of course all of this also carries implicit things like casters, money, and organization. You have provided zero reasons for me to believe you would be able to not only do what I currently do with LotS but in fact double the workload (actually more as it’s much harder to organize 1300-1800 players than 1800+) so I discard this as your intention with your plan.
Thus, if these things do not exist, then it isn’t LotS. It’s a U1900 one-off tournament that is just taking place at the end of the year. Is that a problem? No. I would love more tournaments. But this begs the question of why you are not doing such a thing now; it’s not hard to attach such a thing to LotS as an off-event to cover the month before or whatever. But it’s not exactly a “LotS Event” and making it sound like it is after all the work I have done to make LotS a serious community effort bothers me.
Ladder & Team Matchmaker:
My problem here relates to the feasibility of your ideas. Regards to polls and threads about new maps, I do not think the community is going to test and review maps proactively. What you’re essentially saying is to remove the current responsibilities of the Matchmaker Team and outsource it out to random dudes that deem it worth responding in forum threads. I do not understand why this would lead to anything beneficial, the people interested in helping me out now are going to be the people that are responding in this thread. You’re just shifting them around so that they are responding on the forums instead of on Discord and adding additional noise from players that were not vetted.
I’m willing to reimplement polls in order to collect player opinions after having a new map in the ladder as this is where new players will get exposed to the map. This poll, provided decent participation, can then be used as a relevant statistic for categorizing new maps as either classic, common, or experimental.
I also don’t really get your transparency stuff, it just sounds like vague platitudes meant to appeal to the generic user that thinks “more open is more gooder.” What matters is mappers having a pipeline to vetted players that are able to provide feedback on why a map is or isn’t competitively viable. If you want to be considered a vetted player, apply for it. Why add needless noise for mappers to accommodate? Jip has already posted in this thread about how everyone and their mother has a different idea about a map. I want to concentrate as high of a level of people that, while they have varying ideas about what is GOOD gameplay on a map, are able to coherently explain why X or Y decision would lead to worse gameplay in THEIR OPINION. Jip saw me and Tagada argue for like 4 hours about his new 2v2 map about specific pointed things on his map rather than 4 hours of “map is trash I like more open stuff.”
And this carries over to your problem with numeric polls. Let’s look at what I imagine a functional system is:
A qualified team of players that I trust as able to identify solid maps and pinpoint issues maps may have.
Polls to collect information about general player attitudes towards a map in practice
You can promise to poll all 2000 dudes on the ladder I guess, but what I expect you to be polling is like 5 dudes that are highly rated and play ladder a lot. Then you’ll find they say maps are either always ok or are bad. Once again, if these people wanted to give pointed feedback, why don’t they just join the team where that’s what you’re expected to do? Of all your points here, this is probably the one that just makes me ask “why bother.”
Your reset point just reads like it’s generally immature both for discarding resets as an option while also failing to really address any reason why I did the reset. I know you know why I did the reset because I had a several hour Discord conversation about it with you and I also had several discussions with you both on Zulip and Discord about it where you were present.
So let me explain it here for a final time:
TMM was intended to have itself built around global rating from the start. Miscommunication about the features that we needed in TMM prior to a public release resulted in a public release prior to this part of the code being ready. Therefore, rather than simply removing the feature after a public release was made, we simply kept it up and would include it later.
Months later I’m presented with the decision to either include it with a cleanse of the current TMM data or keep the current data while attaching the soft reset on top of it. The logic of removing the current data stems from current information about the issues around 1v1 rating and the deflationary element of it. A lot of the deflation seems to stem from a biased initial sample pool, I wanted to remove any possibility of this happening for the 2v2 matchmaker.
With this consideration in the back of my mind, I began to weigh the quantity and quality of the data available to me related to the current tmm rating. To do this, I got a data dump of all 2v2 ratings from Brutus. The first thing I did was actually review how many people had a sigma under 200 (which is hardly real certainty for a TrueSkill rating) and I got about 90 people. This is not that significant of a data pool.
So with the fact that there was hardly any decent data attached to TrueSkill and the general risk of potential issues that I wished to minimize, I went forward with the reset. I was essentially asking people to play 10 placement games, I didn’t think it would be such a big deal. As it turns out, it’s the end of the world for some players.
Training:
You don’t do any of this. Full stop. As far as I’m concerned I put you in the same box as Suzuji here. I do not care if you promise to upload 60 billion new videos in 1080p and 144 fps.
I am ridiculously active in the training channel to answer questions and help out with general management. I have also written 2 different guides, motivated BH to write his guide, and reviewed some of the guides that were posted on the old wiki. You have done none of this.
In the end I don’t think there’s anything wrong with collecting 50 videos to make into a list, but that sure isn’t a productive way to train anybody. You putting this as your sole action here does not inspire much confidence in you actually training anybody for me.
Also about your new player engagement, let me give an example of how that works. I went through the entire #newbie channel, so about 200 or so people, and directly pinged each and every single one of them. Why was that? Well I needed a <300 player to play with me and Farm in a tournament. I messaged them to ask if they were interested in getting some training. I got 3 responses. Of these 3, I spent several hours going through basic bos and how to look at the game. None of them logged on again. Then I got a random guy on the day of the tournament to play with us.
Training requires will to get better. How do you find that will? You wait for people to be proactive about it. Insert proverb about not being able to make a horse drink water here.
Collaboration:
Promo Councillor:
Want to know why I manage FAFLive? Because nobody else was going to do it. You trying to push the responsibility on somebody else just makes me think you’re going to do that for a ton of the rest of my responsibilities which are technically the responsibilities of other councillors but I do because nobody else wants to do it.
Balance Councillor:
I’d argue there is nobody MORE capable of voicing community feedback to the balance team than me considering how incredibly close I am not only to the councillor but several members in the team itself. Whenever I don’t understand anything about balance patches and need Petric to explain it to me so I can in turn explain it to others, I have zero trouble with it.
With regards to your tournament, that is once again nothing you couldn’t be doing now. You will never get Petric to agree to mandating tournaments to push a patch and I don’t even understand why you would want to mandate that. Push a patch when it’s ready to be released, end of.
The rest of your collaboration stuff is stuff I already do so I don’t feel a need to go into it.