FtX talking about adjustments that he can't join the thread in

10

"Experience: people will push things to the limits as much as possible as often as possible if they are not getting their way. What is the point of a leader if the team can just overthrow said person at any time?"

Well.... yeah? Are you paying the people you're working with so you have some sort of leverage to necessitate them listening to you as a leader? No? Then you're working purely on good will and good faith. If you fail to maintain that good will and good faith you failed as a leader in a pure volunteer project and are now tightening your grip on sand and only causing more to fall out of your hand.

Cooperate and collaborate with the team, ensure things are done in a way where all voices are heard but accept that sometimes a fork in the road is hit and a direction must be chosen. If some people leave or stop contributing because of that it just means new people need to be found. If you chose a terrible direction that goes against the vision of the rest of the team then you should be replaced because then you're losing all your manpower for zero real reason. Easier to replace a single person than an entire team and in most situations the whole team is capable of carrying the weight of a singular person more than the singular person can carry the weight of the entire team.

"Who is going to decide who the "matchmaker team" is going forward when this breaking up of the player council takes place? I don't believe the current members should simply carry over."

You have no explanation for why membership cannot carry over. The current team has been responsible for probably the most difficult ladder transitions in FAF history with the least complaints about how things operate relative to previous PC management. It has absolutely proven itself to be capable of working together and also working in a way that does not directly harm FAF, two things that any team you suggest have failed to prove.

Beyond that, the matchmaker team itself is more than capable of choosing members for itself. This is how new applicants were decided in the past. Someone pm'd me, I gave them a list of 5-7 maps. I asked them to rank them. I then pressed them on why they ranked certain maps certain ratings. I would then post these conversations in the ladder team channel and see if anyone has any issues with recruiting an individual. If it's alright with the majority I let the person into the team.

This solves a few things. For one, it generally means that the person asking to join the team has some motivation because he went through this whole process with me and will actually engage in these sort of discussions. For two, it means this person isn't joining as some unknown entity into an inherently collaborative yet subjective environment where a baseline of respect for the credibility of all parties is necessary for conversation to actually go anywhere. If you think canis is an F tier map equivalent to high noon in 2v2 while I think it's A tier, then the conversation is dead from the start and one of us needs to be disregarded for the conversation to lead anywhere. If it was a situation of canis is B or A tier, then discussions can happen.

"Set a minimum number of people that must be on the team ( let us say 8 )"

This is bad. No minimums need to be set because this already puts tension with the rest of your argument about ensuring people are active. Inactive people will be kept purely to maintain the magic number of 8. No other team on FAF operates like this and in fact I wish there was more effort in removing inactive people that just hold roles to more correctly showcase where manpower issues exist on FAF. You make your team consist of people that are willing to help while having the baseline level of competency to help. Doesn't get more complicated than that.

"Let us say that the matchmaker team must consist of 2 high-level players, 2 mappers, 2 developers (Sheikah & Penguin for example as they code and update map gen), 2 middle-level players to keep discussions as all-encompassing as possible"

Seems arbitrary. I want 2 low rated players, I want 2 new players, I want 2 promotion team members, I want 2 popular casters, I want 2 Tournament Directors, and I also want 2 aoe4 players so we can compare cross-game ladders.

All this does is create conflict and tension. Penguin was already rejected because he has an entirely alien idea of what makes a decent map compared to the rest of the matchmaker team. Tinkering with map gen doesn't qualify you whatsoever for making decent pools or having the competency to discuss maps, it qualifies you to talk about tinkering with map gen.

The same applies to mappers. When I was PC, I had high level players that were also mappers because they were interested in helping my vision. Now they aren't there. When I had mid-level mappers they knew their lane and generally stayed in the area of rating maps based on aesthetics while leaving gameplay and variance to high level players. They got involved of course, but they knew it wasn't their "field of expertise" and that the conversation was guided by those with the ethos in the area.

The middle-level players is entirely arbitrary for the reasons stated above, you can extend this all the way down to include 2 of every group of FAF. The rational restriction is what I already posted. Is the dude motivated to help ie does he contact the leader or does someone on the team find him interested in helping? Is the dude competent enough to not be disregarded immediately in the discussion? Congrats, he would join the team. Doesn't matter what his rating is or what else he does on FAF. Same as how balance team works.

"The future matchmaker teams MUST be built from the ground up to remove any previous bias, voted upon by the association and reviewed by the board"

You have failed to showcase any problematic bias or any reason why this is true. You just implicitly hold it to be true.

"The matchmaker team will follow a set of guides to allow new content into the pool by majority voting in favor of using new maps, adding/removing quanitity of map gens, allocating weights to maps showing up in ladder, anything that deviates from a typical map pool"

You have now made a matchmaker team redundant. This is the Association (who consists largely of people with zero credibility in something like map pools) deciding all the rules and obligations which the matchmaker team operate under. If there is zero faith in the matchmaker team to determine their own guidelines and decision-making process then nobody will join the team because I have zero interest in volunteering to do a process some dude that plays 1 FAF game every 3 months has decided to vote is in the best interest of FAF.

"Let us say that a "typical map pool" is one like we currently have where there is a certain number of 5x5, 10x10, 20x20 (excluding other sizes for simplicity here)"

See above, you have given the matchmaker team zero room to maneuver and nobody is going to work in that environment in a volunteer project. You are not paying the matchmaker team.

"Set a guide where community feedback MUST be taken into account by creating discussions with "x number" of people to weight decisions by yy%."

See above. Also, just a terrible way to approach it. Feedback is as good as the way it's asked and for what it's asked for. Something being popular doesn't make it right nor does it make it reasonable. The obligation of a matchmaker team is to synthesize realistic, doable ideas and then if something is inherently subjective and outside the scope of knowledge of the team (such as what sort of pools people like at certain ratings) then you hold a poll to gather the information. Polls are utilized to multiply the efficacy of decision-making, not do the decision-making for you.

"When votes do happen, leader gets a slighty edge % vote, all other teams members are split, plus the % from 7)"

If odd - majority, if even - team votes and leader acts as tiebreaker. This is how anything operates.

"Why? Because the matchmaker team in current is thin at only 4 real members (you really can't just let inactive members sit there and decide things once a year). I don't think it's feasible to expect a leader to be accurately portrayed as doing their job effectively with such a low amount of people. Because there are not enough people it becomes a stalemate and we experience issues like we saw in the association chat when a decision was forced."

Then remove inactive people. I removed like 2-3 people for inactivity when I was PC and nobody had any problem with it. People generally don't have a problem with removing people for compelling reasons like inactivity. Just as people don't have a problem with introducing new people when there is a compelling reason to introduce them.

This isn't a situation of evil matchmaker team trying to be a dictatorship and grasping onto power. This is a situation of a matchmaker team feeling disrespected, ignored, and discarded. Of course you get pushback. Incorporate the team into decisions rather than dictating terms to them and you don't. In the end that's how all teams on FAF are required to work because otherwise nobody is going to do the work except you.

"We need to really do a better job of setting hard requirements so people do not get confused and "run to the board" to settle matters. If we cannot find enough volunteers to create a sizable team then there should be no team and just an assigned person for the 1v1, 2v2, 4v4 pools that exist, let them be judged by the association / board / community."

Hard requirements do exist. The problem is that they were disregarded. Feel free to ask me about any of the hard requirements that exist on the team I made.

"When you say "we should just be able to vote whenever we want" it sounds like we can't work as a board-association and decide what we actually want."

Makes no sense. The Board and Association shouldn't be babysitting any team on FAF. If they are, the team is a failure and the reason for the failure needs to be reviewed.