NOTE: HAVE NOT PROOFREAD
The recent rising stars tournament run by Eddie this past week was a huge success in my opinion. It was incredibly well run from a spectator’s perspective (I watched the entire tournament except for the semi-finals onwards). Both streams ran smoothly, the games were entertaining, and SEA managed to accrue a decent stream viewership thanks to being listed on the front page of TeamLiquid.
Post tournament, Eddie asked for some feedback. I will now gladly oblige this request.
In the following lines I will attempt to be as objective and fair as possible. Feel free to call me out on anything specious or fallacious. Don’t hesitate to pick up on any meaningless buzz words or tools of rhetoric as well.
You may ask why I would bother wasting this much time into such a comprehensive examination of the rising stars tournament, but hey, I’m bored with nothing to do and this sort of analysis is fun for me (this isn’t much work for me anyways really).
The key problem I had with this tournament was the decision to seed higher ranked players (by OSC points) further into the tournament by 2 rounds (effectively giving them 2 free wins). The logic behind this decision was that is gave weaker players (again, decided by OSC points as Paperclip pointed out) a chance to play closer games as opposed to be stomped by somebody like Blysk. Note I have no issue with the players invited nor the criteria upon which an invitation was granted, my only qualm is with the seeding style.
Here are some brief pros and cons of the seeding style (if you feel I have missed any, let me know and I can edit the article and append my arguments for/against said point).
The Pros
- – Lesser known players given a better chance to win.
- – Smoother stream transitions, don’t need to wait for sets.
- – Overall, more exposure for lesser known players, by extension, more exposure for SEA.
The Cons
- – Player fatigue increases the effective skill gap between players.
- – Higher seeded players get another advantage in being able to see the tournament builds of their opponents prior to facing them.
- – Degrades the invitation process and integrity of players, the bracket format is the antithesis of “fair”.
- – Seeding style relied on inductive assumptions. Implies more than a correlation in relationship between OSC points and “skill”.
I will now extrapolate upon the niceties of these pros and cons through individual investigation and also the meshing together of these concepts into one.
So, examining the pros first.
Giving a lesser known player a designed chance to win in any kind of tournament seems counter intuitive to me (if you take into account the competitive nature and purpose of tournaments). The goal of a tournament in any form is to determine the single best player from a set of many (best player within the scope of the tournament at least). I don’t think you could describe this tournament as both “truly competitive” and “fair”. By intentionally modelling the tournament to give a deliberately better chance of lower level players to win contradicts the concept of competitive fairness (where EVERYBODY is placed on the same pedestal, there are no handicaps). That being said, it is the rising stars tournament. After the long discussion on the sc2sea forums about the seeding idea it seems the primary purpose of this event was to promote SEA talent and SEA itself. So I suppose this is consistent if you hold to that premise.
On the stream side of things, yes this tournament did wonderfully. There was very little downtime between sets because the earlier seeding had developed the bracket further. With two streams going this meant there was scarcely a time when a set wasn’t being played on at least one of them. Stream downtime is arguably the most frustrating thing you can experience as a viewer, especially when the tournament you are watching isn’t the WCS finals but rather a lower levelled tournament held in a very small region (SEA) by players few have ever heard of. By minimizing stream downtime the tournament probably (I don’t have stats, merely an assumption, forgive me please) kept more viewers hooked on spectating. This by definition means more exposure for SEA talent. This was a good thing. But is it worth the loss of tournament integrity? (Which I will explain now).
Cons time,
By implementing this seeding idea one opens the tournament up to a variety of problems both esoterically and practically. Firstly, by giving the “better” players a further seed into the event you give them the distinct advantage of being able to watch the streams and perhaps (if they are lucky) view the tournament strategies of their upcoming opponents. Furthermore, with the example of Fray’Wally, who had to play 6 sets compared to Fray’Crimson’s 3 sets yet both were eliminated at the same time (Losers Round 5) and both received the same placing and the same prize. The fatigue Wally must have been playing with surely had an effect on his game (I’m sure this was the same for many other players). The speed at which the games were played (as indicative of the stream) also gave the lower seeded players less chance to rest since their next opponent was already ready and raring to go. This seems like a problem to me.
The seeding implemented also degrades the integrity of the invitation process. When you are offered the privilege of being invited to a tournament based off a combination of dedication, skill and participation, I don’t see why these criterion need to be assessed for a second time when creating the bracket. This is not an ACL pro bracket where players with more points are seeded higher (note they also do not get double walkovers because of this seeding, they still play the same as everybody else). People are invited on OSC points etc. It seems overly elaborate to me to judge the players AGAIN by the very means upon which they were invited in the first place.
Extending this point one may rebut and say “but how are we to make this tournament fair and give the lesser known players (amongst the lesser known if the tournaments premise is to be accepted) a better chance of winning / have more entertaining games?”. Well as I mentioned earlier, I don’t see any reason why a tournament should be skewed to favour less skilled players by counter intuitively giving their competition (better players) further seeding into the bracket, again this just seems like added wheel spinning. I also do not accept the ludicrous argument put forth by some that “it can allow for more exciting games”. I’ve never known a serious tournament to base its bracketing structure off of spectator preference, this defeats the very point and definition of what a tournament is. What I find most insidious about this tournament is that it takes for granted the competitive mindset of the competitors. As far as I am concerned, if I was one of the players relegated to the very first round of the tournament I would feel cheated and disrespected. I apparently have the qualifications to enter this rising stars tournament, but I’m not quite respected enough in my play to deserve a shot against players deemed “better than me” (by OSC points at that). Everybody deserves a fair shot at everybody else, this tournament is the antithesis of fair and I argue it has no claim at all to any form of competitive equality.
On the quantification of skill, again as Paperclip pointed out, is based off of OSC points. Now I don’t think anybody here can make a logical case for OSC points being causally related to skill, they are merely a correlation. Using OSC points as a measure of skill I therefore argue is fallacious. Yet in the reasoning behind this logic we are told that people with higher OSC points deserve that higher spot because of both 1. skill and 2. reward for participation. I have already pointed out why using this criterion AGAIN after invitation seems frivolous (therefore refuting 2.) and I have also explained why OSC points are not a necessary indication of skill (therefore refuting 1.) . Besides, there seems to be an inherent contradiction in seeding the “better” players further via their OSC points and deemed “skill” but then placing those with lower OSC points and by apparent extension “skill” lower. One cannot build half the tournament around one measurement and the other half around a completely different measurement if you want it to be taken seriously.
I left out other points but I didn’t feel they were worth mentioning. Again, criticize as much as you want, I would love for my mind to be changed since it is quite clear which camp I am in.
All in all this tournament did not seem to be seriously promoting the integrity of its players but was instead meant to promote the SEA region as a whole. I don’t have a problem with this concept, but with that point in mind I cannot take the tournament seriously.
People may say this tournament “worked” but I can’t imagine a tournament not working… it seems like an unanswerable question which can neither be refuted nor proved. My gripe is with the bracket format and that is all. I can’t imagine a spectator deciding to not watch a tournament because of the seeding, but I can imagine a tournament being compromised (results wise) by poor structure.
Final remark.
“We have to try new things, we have to take risks”
Anybody who employs this phrase as an argument needs to learn basic logic. Just because something is new doesn’t mean it is superior. What you need to do is have a debate about your new idea and hash out all of the different perspectives. Perhaps this is too much to ask of people in a community run by those with full time jobs, but I don’t want to see this nonsense spouted as a reason for doing anything differently. Blizzard may as well just seed Jaedong into the finals of WCS because “well we aren’t getting as much viewers as we could, so we are going to try something new, we have to take risks after all right?”. You need to analyse an idea first.
Done. tl;dr I have a lot of spare time on my hands.
P.S. HAVE NOT PROOFREAD AT ALL
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