[North America] NEW SPLATFEST: Team Past Travel vs. Team Future Travel!

[Litagano Motscoud]

Oh god.

Please don't act like reactions to US Splatfests are some kind of indicator of overall American society, because it's not.

You know what confirmation bias is, right? The people who don't have complaints about Splatfest have no reason to voice their opinions, which only leave the people who aren't happy with Splatfest. It gives a false sense of the general sentiment.

Don't fall into that trap, please. It drives me up the wall.

 

[BlackZero]

Oh god.

Please don't act like reactions to US Splatfests are some kind of indicator of overall American society, because it's not.

You know what confirmation bias is, right? The people who don't have complaints about Splatfest have no reason to voice their opinions, which only leave the people who aren't happy with Splatfest. It gives a false sense of the general sentiment.

Don't fall into that trap, please. It drives me up the wall.

I'm just exercising my constitutional right to sensationalize, overhype, and attach inflated social significance to trivial events under the guise of deep analysis.

 

[Award]

n response to your first question, my answer is the following: there wouldn't be any actual incentive to join the team with the subject that you truly prefer unless it is the one that gives you a greater chance of winning by it being the less popular one. In Splatfests, you're supposed to choose the team that you like the most and its popularity is factored into the final score, so it certainly was partially a ballot. The amount of wins were always given a greater weight, but not as much as it is now. As it is now for the North America Splatfests, being on the popular team puts you at a clear disadvantage.

I think there's two big misunderstandings in that reasoning. The first is being on the less popular team does NOT in any way increase your chance of winning. Nor do you know what team is least popular when you vote. I think that's the central point that's getting lost any time this topic comes up. The less popular team is not advantaged, it does not have higher odds of winning, and it is not actually known which is the less popular team until the splatfest has concluded. I'm not singling you out on that, there's a lot of people that seem to be doing the same thing: Looking at the symptom and believing it to be the cause.

There is no advantage or disadvantage to being on the popular or unpopular team. The problem is not at all related to which team is more popular. The problem is that the internet community of skilled players has formed the opinion that the less popular team will win, and therefore get together before each splatfest, place their bets on which team is probably going to be less popular, and therefore all sign up for that team, so that one team, the team that is less popular, has the concentration of most of the best players, including the bulk of the S, S+, and competitive scene players. The other team has the bulk of the people that are not any of the above so you end up with Team A loaded with most of Splatoon's skillbase in NoA territory, and Team B loaded with the lack-of-skillbase. Doesn't matter which is more popular. It's the fact that the skilled players all choose one team instead of the other every time that's the real cause. It wouldn't matter which team they all chose, that one would be most likely to win. The upset in Autobots (and Cats) simply defined a criteria which would be used to pick which team those players would all herd into.

However the important point here is that it does not actually have anything to do with one team actually being less popular. It's only the internet deciding which team to sign up for that actually secures that result. If the internet community of good players decided "the popular team always wins" and all signed up for that team, it would be the popular team winning each time.

Alternately, if the internet bet gets it wrong, and votes for a team, believing it will be the unpopular team, but it turned out to be the popular team, the popular team will win.

Now there is one way in which this is an attempt to influence results. By deciding on joining the less popular team as a collective of skilled players, it means those skilled players will play a greater percentage of the rounds than lesser skilled players since they will make up a greater percentage of the total player base of that team. They're effectively making a concerted effort to stack the roster with an all star team on the team with the smaller roster, however I haven't seen evidence that that factor has actually even been considered by the fanbase as a factor. I don't think they're into Game Theory (gambling, not video games - the deep math stuff) enough to actually take that level of detail of how to stack the deck into consideration. They're Splatoon players, not "the boys down at the docks."

However, they do not KNOW which team actually has the smaller roster, they're making a bet and psychoanalyzing the personalities attracted to either team. They're taking a gamble on which team that is, not an informed statistic. Granted, this is a game that tells you to go talk to the addict in the back alley to trade living creatures for the purpose of killing them in exchange for a slot machine pull to gamble your abilities who can also "acquire" gear you "order" from him, so it's probably fair to assume the good players might be skilled at gambling, but still... it's a gamble, not a choice.

The second misunderstanding is that the ballot was ever meant to factor into the score.

If they didn't want popularity to have any slightly significant role in Splatfests, then they shouldn't have designed the rules of Splatfests to be the way that they were and are. Also, the spectators in a baseball match and the players in Splatoon who choose their favorite Splatfest team are clearly dissimilar; in the latter, the players tend to be actively participating in Splatfests by trying to win Turf War Matches.

oM&M used the spectators analogy for soccer. My analogy was with baseball teams who had more players that wanted to sign up with them. The analogy only half applies, but the fact is Team B did not have MORE players on the field at a time. There's no advantage to offset there. They had more people available on the bench to play any given round (and some had to sit out), while Team A had less people on the bench, so the same people were more likely to play multiple rounds, while Team B had more bench warmers (Future playing Future. Though I did have one Past v Past round.) You can't add points to a team because they had more people on the bench. You can only award points for games played, which is always equal.

If you start augmenting wins by applying heavy weights to team popularity, then you just reverse the problem: The popular team always wins. It didn't fix anything. Then it's not really a competition anymore, just a vote. Nintendo has made it very clear by steadily increasing the multiplier that their intention is for popularity and ballot NOT to count unless it's in the most extreme of tie breaking situations. And they've made it clear that the tie they'd most be interested in breaking is the influence of popularity so that even a 1% win can massively offset popularity differences. They've done all they can to prevent popularity from having much pull at all, so I'm not sure it's fair to say they wanted popularity to be significant when the evidence numerically states otherwise.

I'm not saying the current situation is good, I'm just saying that the analysis tends to have the situation backward, and that any means presented of fixing it is likely to make it worse or do nothing at all. The root of the problem has nothing to do with the teams and is more related to internet groupthink which the game can not address.

If you want it to be totally "fair" there should be no vote, there should be two color choices and players should be randomly assigned one or the other 50/50. No cause, no topic, just a battle of two randomly selected teams. No popularity factor. Then it would be a totally fair test of two teams. But then we'd all be griping about how the RNG is rigged and favors the S players to get more snails on the left-side team. And if you let players VOTE on if they're Team Purple or Team Yellow, then we're back to the internet groups players all choosing to side with one or the other and stuffing it with all stars again.

Even if we're going to propose theoretical fixes to the issue knowing they'll never happen (as some of us love doing with the atrocious ranked scoring system... ;)) we have to start with a proper understanding of what the actual issue is - which is not "Team Callie/Less Popular Wins", nor is it "The vote was supposed to have weight."

My reasoning for why the multiplier should be lowered back to 2x is based mainly on how the score is calculated. Hypothetically, if Team A with 55% popularity lost to Team B with a 51% win rate because of the 6x multiplier, do you think that Team A should have lost or "deserved" to lose? For all that we would know, the win rates could have been moderately close, but the win rate was rounded in Team B's favor. I haven't seen the win percentage for both teams in any Splatfest be 50% yet. Also, I doubt that the difference in any future teams' popularity will be as large as the difference between Team Pirates and Team Ninjas' popularity. Assuming that the popularity difference between any pair of teams doesn't become larger than that and the same multiplier is used, then a team needs only a 54% win rate in order to guarantee getting more points than the other. In the latest Splatfest, Team Past vs Team Future, Team Past needed only 52% of the wins in order to overcome the 39%/61% popularity difference. My argument is that it is too easy to overcome moderately large differences in popularity whenever the more popular team doesn't have a higher win rate, which has been the case in all but one of the NA Splatfests.

But the question still remains: Why should a team be allowed to win a bigger prize for losing more games, just because they had more players that wanted to play on their team?

Let's assume Team A has 600 players, Team B has 400 players - 60%/40%. We'll assume 15,000 rounds were played in 24 hours (a theoretical ~6 times an hour for 24 hours where all of the smallest team was engaged in battles with 4 player teams.) Team B won 7650 (51%) Team A won 7350 (49%) Team A lost 300 more games than Team B. Given the 4v4 profile, assuming the teams played full rosters 6 times an hour for all 24 hours, that implies each player in Team A played ~6.25 games that splatfest, while each player in Team B palayed ~9.3 games in that splatfest.

So each player on Team B individually played more games against a greater variety of players on Team A than any individual on Team A, and won more of those games against a broader range of opponents. They individually played more rounds, and played them better. The methodology behind putting more weight behind popularity specifically states that the team consisting of individuals who played more games more skillfully should LOSE because the other team had more individuals who played fewer games and played them worse.

That sounds like a TERRIBLE scoring system!

...and yet, with the current x6 multiplier, that's exactly what would happen! 354-346, victory to the popular team. The unpopular team would have had to have had 52% wins to win even with the x6 multiplier, meaning they'd have to have the same individuals win an even greater percentage of games than they already did to actually win! The above scenario makes x6 look too frivolous. Make it x8! :D

The problem we have in NA is that collectively online most of the skilled players all agree BEFORE the Splatfest to all join the one team. So we'll take our fake numbers and say there's 350 great skilled players in the online Splatoon community participating in this splatfest. 300 of them follow each other to the same team. 50 go the other way.

So with current NA logic, Team B consists of 300 great players and 100 mixed bag against 550 mixed bag players and 50 great ones. And each of those great players play 9.3 rounds a piece compared to any of Team A's 6.25 rounds a piece. So the skillful individuals played more games, individually than the mixed bag players on Team A.

But if the Oracle of the Internet put the skilled players in Team A, Team A would consist of 50% great players and 50% mixed bag, while Team B would consist of 350 mixed bags and 50 great players. Statistically divided evenly any given match would still consist of a Team A that had 2 great players and 2 mixed bags, and a Team B with zero or 1 great player and 3-4 mixed bags. The advantage would strongly favor Team A (the popular team) because that's where the internet said to go.

The popularity, nor the ignoring of popularity due to 6x isn't the issue at all. It just looks that way if you glance at the effect.


Edit: Keep in mind the numbers are heavily rounded and statistically impossible to have that many players playing 24 hours straight ;)

 

[LimitCrown]

But the question still remains: Why should a team be allowed to win a bigger prize for losing more games, just because they had more players that wanted to play on their team?

Let's assume Team A has 600 players, Team B has 400 players - 60%/40%. We'll assume 15,000 rounds were played in 24 hours (a theoretical ~6 times an hour for 24 hours where all of the smallest team was engaged in battles with 4 player teams.) Team B won 7650 (51%) Team A won 7350 (49%) Team A lost 300 more games than Team B. Given the 4v4 profile, assuming the teams played full rosters 6 times an hour for all 24 hours, that implies each player in Team A played ~6.25 games that splatfest, while each player in Team B palayed ~9.3 games in that splatfest.

So each player on Team B individually played more games against a greater variety of players on Team A than any individual on Team A, and won more of those games against a broader range of opponents. They individually played more rounds, and played them better. The methodology behind putting more weight behind popularity specifically states that the team consisting of individuals who played more games more skillfully should LOSE because the other team had more individuals who played fewer games and played them worse.

That sounds like a TERRIBLE scoring system!

...and yet, with the current x6 multiplier, that's exactly what would happen! 354-346, victory to the popular team. The unpopular team would have had to have had 52% wins to win even with the x6 multiplier, meaning they'd have to have the same individuals win an even greater percentage of games than they already did to actually win! The above scenario makes x6 look too frivolous. Make it x8! :D

The problem we have in NA is that collectively online most of the skilled players all agree BEFORE the Splatfest to all join the one team. So we'll take our fake numbers and say there's 350 great skilled players in the online Splatoon community participating in this splatfest. 300 of them follow each other to the same team. 50 go the other way.

So with current NA logic, Team B consists of 300 great players and 100 mixed bag against 550 mixed bag players and 50 great ones. And each of those great players play 9.3 rounds a piece compared to any of Team A's 6.25 rounds a piece. So the skillful individuals played more games, individually than the mixed bag players on Team A.

But if the Oracle of the Internet put the skilled players in Team A, Team A would consist of 50% great players and 50% mixed bag, while Team B would consist of 350 mixed bags and 50 great players. Statistically divided evenly any given match would still consist of a Team A that had 2 great players and 2 mixed bags, and a Team B with zero or 1 great player and 3-4 mixed bags. The advantage would strongly favor Team A (the popular team) because that's where the internet said to go.

The popularity, nor the ignoring of popularity due to 6x isn't the issue at all. It just looks that way if you glance at the effect.


Edit: Keep in mind the numbers are heavily rounded and statistically impossible to have that many players playing 24 hours straight ;)

That is the problem with the calculations that you used. Your calculations of the win rates in your example are made so that Team B has an exact 51% win rate and Team A has an exact 49% win rate. In my example, I stated that as far as we would know, the win rates could have been very close to each other. Basically, Team A could have actually had a 49.7034% win rate while Team B could have had a 50.3066% win rate. Therefore, I had asked that in that situation whether you think that Team A with its 55% popularity deserved to lose to Team B with a win rate that was rounded up to 51%. Even if the win percentages were exactly 51% and 49%, the difference between the two is actually very small, so should Team A lose because they won just a little bit less than the other team did? Also, note that theoretically, some of those in the most popular team will definitely fight each other instead of the players on the opposing team. Although this won't negatively affect their team's win rate (at least, not directly), those Turf War matches are still a waste of time.

In your example, you're using a pair of teams each with an amount of players that is smaller than it would realistically be. In NA Splatfests since Art vs Science, the win rates of the less popular teams have been very high and they are high enough to practically guarantee a win, assuming that the popularity difference between Team Pirates and Team Ninjas remains the highest. Team Naughty had 41% popularity, which is similar to your example, but they also had a 59% win rate as well. The Splatfest that is the closest to your example is Team Dogs vs Team Cats, but that was one of the first Splatfests that took place and people were complaining about Splatfests putting too much emphasis on popularity, which was clearly a knee-jerk reaction. Team Cats would have needed a x13 multiplier in order to be victorious, but the people who complained weren't thinking about that at the time.

The second misunderstanding is that the ballot was ever meant to factor into the score.

If they didn't want the votes to factor into the score, then they should never have made a point system that counted popularity and they should not have made the rules of Splatfests reliant on choosing a team that you support the most in the first place. It doesn't make sense for them to have scoring work any way that is similar to how it does if they were apparently so averse to the possibility of teams with more popularity and less wins getting more points.

 

[Flareth]

@LimitCrown

Yes, Team A deserves to lose because they didn't win the most matches. So what if they were more popular? You don't (well, shouldn't) give a team a pass just because more people like them over the competition. So what if the difference in wins is that small? One team still has the edge in that regard, so it should be acknowledged.

 

[Award]

Right now, we have what amounts to collusion between the better players to all join one team because they know other people who are serious about winning will be on that team. That's not really fun or fair to people who join a team because they actually like that team better when one team is pretty much loaded with top-tier players that are going to beat the other. So how exactly does one fix a problem like this so that the other team wins some? You can't force people to not play for the same team two Splatfests in a row, or else you'll get the same situation with all the serious player bouncing from one team to another. The easiest way to do this is to factor in popularity, so that the odds slant in favor of the team that is expected to lose if it has the popular vote.

There really is no other way to break this chain other than to start some type of campaign to convince the serious players to not default to one team. People who have maxed out their sea snails don't have any real incentive to join the winning team other than to win the Splatfest. These people might consider joining the losing team to balance the odds, but that's entirely up to each player. That's basically asking people to volunteer to lose a Splatfest with the hopes that they break a chain of an almost guaranteed winning team. Honestly, people may not want to change this predictable winning trend. If you are trying to farm snails, you'd probably want to know what team would maximize your snail award.

It's really quite depressing that the US Splatfests have become a case study in collusion while the others are more of an actual competition. It really says a lot about US society and psychology that such practices emerge in what is supposed to be a lighthearted contest.

Your analysis of the problem is the same (sorry, I missed your post before I replied earlier) but factoring in popularity tries to fix one collusion by implementing another. Counting cards to offset the house stacked deck doesn't solve anything. There isn't a team that's "expected to lose" no one knows the popularity for sure until it's over. It's an educated guess, but a guess. We had our own guessing right here in this forum for this and last splatfest and we figured it was too close to tell for sure (we were wrong.) Some of these other players groups clearly have a bit more dedication to the meta than we do here. Rigging the system in that manner could produce the opposite effect, and if nothing else would simply guarantee the colluders would move to the team they expect is more popular yielding the same result. Instead of complaining that the unpopular team always wins because the top players collude we'd be complaining the popular team always wins because the top players collude, so they'd still win the match AND have the popularity points.

No scoring change can fix a situation in which the star players collude to back one team. They'll simply collude to back whichever team they believe the current scoring system will work for them.

I doubt players supporting a team they believe will win as a "US problem" It's just that here they collude to back the unpopular team, in EU they collude to back the popular team, and in Japan they have enough players and separate serious user communities because Nintendo isn't snubbed there, that the whole skilled player base is unable to collude as one so it's a serious competition. Small player bases of a niche brand make the collusion easy. In Japan it's not a niche brand. I bet Halo competitions would be easy to unify there though.... all 137 players this year!

 

[LimitCrown]

@LimitCrown

Yes, Team A deserves to lose because they didn't win the most matches. So what if they were more popular? You don't (well, shouldn't) give a team a pass just because more people like them over the competition. So what if the difference in wins is that small? One team still has the edge in that regard, so it should be acknowledged.

So, to you, any difference in the win rates, no matter how small and insignificant they may be, should completely overrule any differences in popularity, therefore making choosing the more popular team an incredibly bad choice and making the amount of people who basically voted for their teams meaningless. You would also ignore the fact that people deliberately choose the least popular team in the NA Splatfests in order to have a better chance of winning because apparently winning is the only thing that should matter.

If you really think that popularity shouldn't matter at all in Splatfests, then maybe you would prefer all of the players to be randomly assigned to one of two teams, and for those teams to compete against each other. However, it's likely that most people and probably you would complain about the RNG placing them on a team with worse players, which is as @Award said.

 

[Award]

That is the problem with the calculations that you used. Your calculations of the win rates in your example are made so that Team B has an exact 51% win rate and Team A has an exact 49% win rate. In my example, I stated that as far as we would know, the win rates could have been very close to each other. Basically, Team A could have actually had a 49.7034% win rate while Team B could have had a 50.3066% win rate. Therefore, I had asked that in that situation whether you think that Team A with its 55% popularity deserved to lose to Team B with a win rate that was rounded up to 51%. Even if the win percentages were exactly 51% and 49%, the difference between the two is actually very small, so should Team A lose because they won just a little bit less than the other team did? Also, note that theoretically, some of those in the most popular team will definitely fight each other instead of the players on the opposing team. Although this won't negatively affect their team's win rate (at least, not directly), those Turf War matches are still a waste of time.

We're both using arbitrary numbers which have never occurred in any Splatfest to point to potential cracks with the system. I used mine to demonstrate, once you remove percentages what even a tiny sample of the whole numbers look like. My numbers were of course WAY smaller than the real number, with real numbers in the hundreds of thousands of players and rounds played likely in the millions. My estimate then of a "300 game loss" based on the 15,000 rounds with a real 2% loss in the last splatfest likely involving thousands or tens of thousands of additional losses. Splatoon has over 1 million copies in the wild in NoA (4 million in Japan). And that's a devastatingly low figure for an online shooter. Even if half the NoA player base participated, you're looking at 500,000 players and just a wild guess given the possible permutations of that, low balling it, maybe 2 million rounds played on Saturday. And that's a VERY low estimate. When you look at wins as hard figures rather than percentages it's a little harder to say "but the team that lost 20,000 extra rounds should win because they were popular!"

Your figures assuming rounding would be rounded to 50/50 (50.3 rounds down, 49.7 rounds up) then it would be a tie breaker and popularity would factor in. A 5% popularity skew and a 1% (or less than one percent) win skew, we're then still talking about a team that maybe won 10,000+ additional rounds being told they're going to lose because more people signed up to play on the other team? That's terrible. They earned their wins by playing the game well and winning Turf War numerous more times in battles against the other team.

That would be a bad system to tell the group that actually wins the competition that they're not going to get the prize because gosh darn it, there's just so many deserving people on the losing team!

In your example, you're using a pair of teams each with an amount of players that is smaller than it would realistically be. In NA Splatfests since Art vs Science, the win rates of the less popular teams have been very high and they are high enough to practically guarantee a win, assuming that the popularity difference between Team Pirates and Team Ninjas remains the highest. Team Naughty had 41% popularity, which is similar to your example, but they also had a 59% win rate as well. The Splatfest that is the closest to your example is Team Dogs vs Team Cats, but that was one of the first Splatfests that took place and people were complaining about Splatfests putting too much emphasis on popularity, which was clearly a knee-jerk reaction. Team Cats would have needed a x13 multiplier in order to be victorious, but the people who complained weren't thinking about that at the time.

Since you're talking about percentages so much the number of players being smaller for readability doesn't affect percentages. When you put it in realistic numbers as above, it reinforces why even 1% win is a big deal. If a win

If they didn't want the votes to factor into the score, then they should never have made a point system that counted popularity and they should not have made the rules of Splatfests reliant on choosing a team that you support the most in the first place. It doesn't make sense for them to have scoring work any way that is similar to how it does if they were apparently so averse to the possibility of teams with more popularity and less wins getting more points.

But they didn't. IMO they shouldn't have had popularity factor in as it did, but I call it naivete on Nintendo's part. After the results of the original splatfests and popularity skewing clear wins Nintendo made it very clear with the multipliers that their intention was for the team that wins the tournament to win, not the one with the most votes. It was the Polite Japanese Business way of saying "we screwed up" without having to admit they screwed it up (you can go with "Please Understand" if you prefer ;).) They simply "adjusted the scoring system to improve the experience." A.K.A. "Well, that didn't go like we thought..." 6x is a bold statement from them that the game winner wins unless the situation is extreme and that's how they intend it. The notion that they don't intend it that way is a red herring.

Choosing a team was never about voting for who gets more snails (the exact problem the players are accused of causing) you were just signing up for an item/place/mood to represent in your fighting. The same way sports teams represent their city/country. They don't win the game because they're from x city or country, that's just the "cause" their win represents. You don't support Team Future by voting for it, you support Team Future by FIGHTING and WINNING for it. It would be a terrible type of competition of victory could be overridden by popularity. I was never under any illusion otherwise until people started complaining about the "less popular team wins" situation which, as I said, has nothing to do with team popularity at all.

So, to you, any difference in the win rates, no matter how small and insignificant it may be, should completely overrule the the differences in popularity, therefore make choosing the most popular team an incredibly bad choice and making the amount of people who basically voted for their teams meaningless. You would also ignore the fact that people deliberately choose the least popular team in the NA Splatfests in order to have a better chance of winning because apparently winning is the only thing that should matter.

Again, it's an illusion to both sides that "the least popular team has a better chance of winning" They don't. The side that all the good players unite to join has the better chance of winning. Right now they believe "least popular" is their golden ticket. If they change their thinking to "most popular" being the golden ticket then most popular shall win. Adjusting the multiplier would net them one whole Splatfest lost until they change sides to support the winning team.

I'm not defending that the good players uniting on one side isn't a problem. I'm just saying that's a problem Nintendo can't fix. No score adjustment fixes the problem that one team will be very superior to the other. All it can do is determine WHICH side will be very superior.

 

[BlackZero]

Your analysis of the problem is the same (sorry, I missed your post before I replied earlier) but factoring in popularity tries to fix one collusion by implementing another. Counting cards to offset the house stacked deck doesn't solve anything. There isn't a team that's "expected to lose" no one knows the popularity for sure until it's over. It's an educated guess, but a guess. We had our own guessing right here in this forum for this and last splatfest and we figured it was too close to tell for sure (we were wrong.) Some of these other players groups clearly have a bit more dedication to the meta than we do here. Rigging the system in that manner could produce the opposite effect, and if nothing else would simply guarantee the colluders would move to the team they expect is more popular yielding the same result. Instead of complaining that the unpopular team always wins because the top players collude we'd be complaining the popular team always wins because the top players collude, so they'd still win the match AND have the popularity points.

I never said it was a good idea. It's just the only way to try balancing things without flat out telling people they can't join a certain team because it already has a certain number of skilled players. That system won't work either, because you are basically taking away people's ability to choose a team they want to join, which defeats the purpose of voting in the first place.

Personally, I would weight each win based on the number of S,A,B, and C ranks on each team. A win for Team A should count for more if it has fewer S and A ranks than Team B. This way, all the S+ people can join Team A and Team B still has a chance if the Bs and As play well enough. I think it would discourage grossly imbalanced team by still counting wins, but also rewarding/penalizing teams more if they are imbalanced. Snail rewards could also be adjusted to compensate for heavily imbalanced teams. this would do two things: discourage all the serious players from joining one team, and cause serious butt hurt when people got shortchanged for forming a "dream team" and steamrolling the competition. Sweet, delicious butt-hurt I can snuggle with when I go to bed.

 

[Zero Meddler]

Personally, I would weight each win based on the number of S,A,B, and C ranks on each team. A win for Team A should count for more if it has fewer S and A ranks than Team B. This way, all the S+ people can join Team A and Team B still has a chance if the Bs and As play well enough. I think it would discourage grossly imbalanced team by still counting wins, but also rewarding/penalizing teams more if they are imbalanced. Snail rewards could also be adjusted to compensate for heavily imbalanced teams. this would do two things: discourage all the serious players from joining one team, and cause serious butt hurt when people got shortchanged for forming a "dream team" and steamrolling the competition. Sweet, delicious butt-hurt I can snuggle with when I go to bed.

This sounds less like an actual solution and more of a solution "out of spite". Another thing, rank isn't a 100% accurate measure of skill. There are plenty of S ranks that aren't THAT great. You also need to consider those with alternate accounts. A B rank could really be an S rank on that account and they would make as much of a contribution as B ranks, which according to you would be MORE than an A or S rank player. Essentially, people could have C and B rank alts on standby, wait until a Splatfest, join with their alt, and sway it in their favor because they contribute more. You don't solve the "problem" with this, you just create another one.

 

[BlackZero]

This sounds less like an actual solution and more of a solution "out of spite".

This isn't sour grapes. I got to Past King and received the max snail payout last Splatfest and didn't really participate in any of the others because I didn't have time. Personally I think Splatfests should be actual contests. It goes against the spirit of competition for players to set up one team as the winner before it even begins. Does giving the team with a significant skill disadvantage some kind of equalizer count as doing something "out of spite?" I guess that depends on whether you want Splatfests to be an actual competition or not.

You also need to consider those with alternate accounts. A B rank could really be an S rank on that account and they would make as much of a contribution as B ranks, which according to you would be MORE than an A or S rank player.

It's very likely people will. So what? The point of changing the system is to make the winning team harder to predict and ween people off of the idea that one team is the winning team before the Fest even begins (assuming that is what people want). If they don't, there's no reason to change anything.

You don't solve the "problem" with this, you just create another one.

This suggests you don't think there is a problem. In that case, any solution will make things worse. Personally, I don't think it will. This system will either succeed in making the winner harder to predict beforehand, or it will fail and people will adapt to the new system. Either way, Splatoon life will go on, though the former might bring about some hilarity.

 

[Flareth]

So, to you, any difference in the win rates, no matter how small and insignificant they may be, should completely overrule any differences in popularity, therefore making choosing the more popular team an incredibly bad choice and making the amount of people who basically voted for their teams meaningless. You would also ignore the fact that people deliberately choose the least popular team in the NA Splatfests in order to have a better chance of winning because apparently winning is the only thing that should matter.

It is not an inherent fact that the more popular team will always lose. Have you already forgotten about Japan and Europe? And, well, @Award said it better than I could, but it isn't set in stone that the better players will pick the least popular team. Is it a trend now, yeah, but it's something that could be changed.

Also, I wouldn't call 18 Sea Snails "meaningless."

If you really think that popularity shouldn't matter at all in Splatfests, then maybe you would prefer all of the players to be randomly assigned to one of two teams, and for those teams to compete against each other. However, it's likely that most people and probably you would complain about the RNG placing them on a team with worse players, which is as @Award said.

Sir, please do not put words in my mouth. I don't want such a system, nor do I think anyone else would. Where the hell did you get that idea from?

And if I may pose my own question, would you rather axe the Turf War aspect entirely, and just have it be a voting contest where the most popular team wins?
(I'm only half-joking about this; from your posts as of late, that's the impression that I get.)

 

[Zero Meddler]

This isn't sour grapes. I got to Past King and received the max snail payout last Splatfest and didn't really participate in any of the others because I didn't have time. Personally I think Splatfests should be actual contests. It goes against the spirit of competition for players to set up one team as the winner before it even begins. Does giving the team with a significant skill disadvantage some kind of equalizer count as doing something "out of spite?" I guess that depends on whether you want Splatfests to be an actual competition or not.

" this would do two things: discourage all the serious players from joining one team, and cause serious butt hurt when people got shortchanged for forming a "dream team" and steamrolling the competition. Sweet, delicious butt-hurt I can snuggle with when I go to bed."

This statement is why I said what I did in my first sentence. That's all.

It's very likely people will. So what? The point of changing the system is to make the winning team harder to predict and ween people off of the idea that one team is the winning team before the Fest even begins (assuming that is what people want). If they don't, there's no reason to change anything.

This system may make it more difficult to "know" which team will win, but this still creates a way to exploit Splatfest and sway results one way or another, which the entire discussion has been about. In that regard, your suggestion doesn't exactly solve anything. Like I said, you'd be creating another problem.

 

[BlackZero]

This statement is why I said what I did in my first sentence. That's all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarcasm

This system may make it more difficult to "know" which team will win, but this still creates a way to exploit Splatfest and sway results one way or another, which the entire discussion has been about.

In order to exploit such a system, first people have to realize something has changed. If the devs do not announce this change, that may take a few Splatfests. People would then have to figure out what specifically changed and how the change impacted who won. That would take even more time and possibly a few more Splatfests for people to test their respective theories. By that time, the general population would have hopefully accepted that the age of predictable winners had passed and go back to choosing teams in a less biased way. It may even take long enough that the sequel (hopefully with a better way of calculating player skill) comes out and people stop caring. If it doesn't, we've gone from one imperfect, exploitable system to another so we aren't any better or worse off.

The goal isn't to create a system that can't be exploited because that is impossible; people will find a way to exploit a "perfect" system just like they find away to hack unhackable networks. The goal is to make what worked before stop working long enough for people to abandon the old system of stacking one deck at the expense of the other. This is all a rather moot point, however. I don't see any changes happening. If anything, they'll change how they handle Splatfest scoring in the sequel, assuming they make another team shooter.

 

[Zombie Aladdin]

Personally, while I feel there isn't that much collusion, at least conscious and active collusion, among the top players to join a particular team, I do feel there IS some level of groupthink, and outside of that, a vicious cycle. People have noted a pattern of the less popular team winning most of the most recent Splatfests, so even those who aren't in these circles may just try to predict the less popular team and pick that. (I still say that such a system is inherently unstable once enough people catch on, such that it becomes the MORE popular team, but that'll take a while to happen.)

The only way to break this trend is to remove the incentive. That incentive, of course, are the extra six Super Sea Snails. The only people who'd really want that many are the most serious players, so as a result, only the really serious players are, well, that serious about winning the Splatfests. It is clear the original intent was for people to join whatever team they wanted, as even losers will get a lot of Super Sea Snails, but it became clear that humans are greedy and even a little bonus is enough for them to try to game the system.

The easiest way to remove the incentive is to give an equal amount of Super Sea Snails to both teams and base it entirely on your Splatfest title. That might cause problems of people tuning out once it's over though, so maybe one can revamp the Splatfest points system to continue counting up after reaching King or Queen and get extra Super Sea Snails based on that.

There is another possibility, however, which is a misleading pre-Splatfest analysis that puts a lot of the most serious players into the MORE popular team, causing it to win. A break in the pattern will start causing doubts; a second break will dispel the notion. That will have to be a roll of the dice though.

By the way, there isn't some sort of cabal of every top player: I found some really good players in Team Future. In fact, I began on such a team. For the first time in a while, I was at the bottom of the list but was consistently winning.

By afternoon the tables turned and I saw long losing streaks followed by an occasional win. The odd things is the matchups seemed favorable for us on paper. Rooms of mostly lvl 35-ish players against rooms of teens and twenties, yet the teens and 20's were winning - Plaza said they're Cs & Bs - but they didn't move like Cs & Bs I've seen. I'm guessing the upper crust players got their main accounts up to royalty in the AM, then brought their alts in later - alts that are still in lower ranks and lower levels and they get placed in lower room. Other than that, it's the first time in WEEKS that I got to play TW without being crammed against unlimited S/S+ teams.

I also discovered I'm shockingly good with an Aerospray MG. Now I have ANOTHER main. I liked it back in the early days for me, but "moved past it" since it was mostly a crutch as an inker. Turns out it's a heck of a fighter too - and seekers aren't nearly as awful as I'd remembered.

My sister went up against a team with someone named "Award" using an Aerospray (I wasn't able to remember which), but I take it it was you. She was using an L-3 Nozzlenose, went by "[ZOT]Mar," and was mowing down all of your teammates, but she just couldn't splat you more than once in that match. It was on Piranha Pit.

I'll tell you now: The reason she is Level 42 and B is because she rarely ever plays Ranked. The reason is simple: She just doesn't like any of the Ranked modes except Splat Zones. Most of her play sessions are exclusively Turf War; she can't get enough of that.

However the important point here is that it does not actually have anything to do with one team actually being less popular. It's only the internet deciding which team to sign up for that actually secures that result. If the internet community of good players decided "the popular team always wins" and all signed up for that team, it would be the popular team winning each time.

Alternately, if the internet bet gets it wrong, and votes for a team, believing it will be the unpopular team, but it turned out to be the popular team, the popular team will win.

Now there is one way in which this is an attempt to influence results. By deciding on joining the less popular team as a collective of skilled players, it means those skilled players will play a greater percentage of the rounds than lesser skilled players since they will make up a greater percentage of the total player base of that team. They're effectively making a concerted effort to stack the roster with an all star team on the team with the smaller roster, however I haven't seen evidence that that factor has actually even been considered by the fanbase as a factor. I don't think they're into Game Theory (gambling, not video games - the deep math stuff) enough to actually take that level of detail of how to stack the deck into consideration. They're Splatoon players, not "the boys down at the docks."

The people who want to win the Splatfest without caring whom they voted for will pck the team they think will win, and that applies to all regions. In North America, the mindset is that the less popular team always wins. In Japan, however, it's the opposite: The MORE popular team will always win.

I don't think there's any conspiracy to create an "all star team" with a high concentration of skilled players. I think they're just simply placing their bets on which team will win, nothing more complicated than that. It wouldn't explain why the Japanese elite would want to join the more popular teams, unless they're trying to be good samaritans and help more people win a Splatfest or provide support for more normal players.

One thing I think IS a significant factor, however, is the possibility of facing another quartet from the same team. (That is, Team A vs. Team A.) I see a lot of complaining about that, though when you give it some thought, it has no negative effect on the Splatfest: It won't waste your time ranking up, and it won't count towards your side's win percentage. It is possible the North American players are more bothered by it than the Japanese counterparts. It is also possible that the most serious Japanese players prefer to play against each other, whereas the most serious North American players do not.

Note, also, that in Europe, it's been pretty split between the more popular team and the less popular team winning. As a result, unlike in Japan and North America, no vicious cycle has set in (at least not yet). If there's any collusion in Europe, they're doing it with no significant correlation to their chosen team's popularity.

 

[Award]

Personally, I would weight each win based on the number of S,A,B, and C ranks on each team. A win for Team A should count for more if it has fewer S and A ranks than Team B. This way, all the S+ people can join Team A and Team B still has a chance if the Bs and As play well enough. I think it would discourage grossly imbalanced team by still counting wins, but also rewarding/penalizing teams more if they are imbalanced. Snail rewards could also be adjusted to compensate for heavily imbalanced teams. this would do two things: discourage all the serious players from joining one team, and cause serious butt hurt when people got shortchanged for forming a "dream team" and steamrolling the competition. Sweet, delicious butt-hurt I can snuggle with when I go to bed.

Yes, because you and I have spent a lot of time discussing how reliable and sensible the ranked scoring system is. ;) I don't think gluing the absurdly broken ranking letters onto the abused splatfest team building is going to help. Doing it stealthily and favoring the house so that the results you see are imaginary "adjusted" wins does quite the opposite of helping. Kudos to the elite players though, they managed a matchmaker that fails even harder than Nintendo's.

Ultimately given two choices, and a community that wants to win knowing they can win by all choosing the same side will always have the same result. The only way to solve it (it can't be "adjusted" reliably enough with scoring) is to fix the reason why everyone joins one team to begin with: Snails. Splatfests are intense because snails are too expensive and scarce otherwise to get the amount of snails you want. As long as there's no other good way to get snails, and as long as the random lottery reroll system is so random, savescumming and now festscumming will continue. The bias can't be "fixed" by scoring without enforcing ranks, it can only be fixed by changing the reason for play. Or they could throw in a bonus. Keep the current scoring and current snails awards. Add Bonus Snails for popularity. More popular team gets +3 snails. That closes the snail gap by half when the unpopular team wins, but is a boost to the popular team if the popular team wins (making the gap wider than now) It has the added affect of equally benefiting all popular team participants that don't have time to make royalty and might cause more elite players to shift to the popular team, but not all of them since they like their all star team. It might do nothing, but at least it's a way of changing the stakes slightly. And it's the stakes that are the problem, not the scoring.

The easiest way to remove the incentive is to give an equal amount of Super Sea Snails to both teams and base it entirely on your Splatfest title. That might cause problems of people tuning out once it's over though, so maybe one can revamp the Splatfest points system to continue counting up after reaching King or Queen and get extra Super Sea Snails based on that.

We already have an "everyone's a winner" system. I don't know that "everyone's an equal winner for participating" system works very well for competition. That sounds a little like our Cold War conversation, on the other side, actually :D

But great minds think alike! I wrote the above before reading your post! :) I do like the idea of additional fest ranks. I had another idea where EVERY win awards a snail, but then I realized that woudn't fix gaming the system since the strong team would be more likely to win each round (though not always true, I lost a LOT on Team Past. It's not that team future was great, it's just that my team did not paint anything. If I used Aerospray we won a lot. If I used Carbon we won moderately often. If I used eliter we were sunk, even if we held mid and even pushed because our base was not painted. That said most of the Future players I played were NOT awful. Not superhuman Japanese Sploosh amazing, but not awful. I didn't need ninja reflexes just to keep my death count in the single digits like the nightmare S+ TW rounds I get on regular days, but fighting was intense enough to be interesting and addictive. It wasn't "defend the noob" and shoot no one type gameplay.

My sister went up against a team with someone named "Award" using an Aerospray (I wasn't able to remember which), but I take it it was you. She was using an L-3 Nozzlenose, went by "[ZOT]Mar," and was mowing down all of your teammates, but she just couldn't splat you more than once in that match. It was on Piranha Pit.

I'll tell you now: The reason she is Level 42 and B is because she rarely ever plays Ranked. The reason is simple: She just doesn't like any of the Ranked modes except Splat Zones. Most of her play sessions are exclusively Turf War; she can't get enough of that.

Yaaay! I actually finally played someone on/related to the boards! That's so Fresh! :) Yep, that was me! The name rings a bell (I try to pay attention when I see a clan tag, they're the ones I have to watch most for! ;)) If I recall correctly she was definitely one of the more "troublesome" squids I fought that day (and I'm pretty certain we lost that round!) It was the Aerospray MG. Inkmines kill all interest in the RG for me. Other than inkstrike I'll never understand RG's popularity (I know, I know, your little inkers...) I'm trying to remember, I see that name and I'm picturing getting splatted in one of the lower sections....I can't remember if it was ours or the enemy bases. I usually hold a defensive position in Piranha, but I think with Aero I was going offensive (because my little suicidal maniacs never make it far enough to effectively paint in a push, and my weapon was most effective for it anyway :p) Some of those rounds on that map I was walking right into enemy territory knowing I'd get splatted because I figured at Aero's fire rate, it'd be worth it for the coverage!

That's pretty neat to hear feedback like that! It can be frustrating in the game to never really know how you're doing. I'm much the same way, I mostly prefer TW (that's the selling point of the game after all!) and get frustrated with the rank scoring, so I rarely play ranked (I'll probably start a lot more soon since I kind of miss the modes!) and play mostly TW.

Thanks, both of you, for noticing/telling me about it! :)

The people who want to win the Splatfest without caring whom they voted for will pck the team they think will win, and that applies to all regions. In North America, the mindset is that the less popular team always wins. In Japan, however, it's the opposite: The MORE popular team will always win.

I don't think there's any conspiracy to create an "all star team" with a high concentration of skilled players. I think they're just simply placing their bets on which team will win, nothing more complicated than that. It wouldn't explain why the Japanese elite would want to join the more popular teams, unless they're trying to be good samaritans and help more people win a Splatfest or provide support for more normal players.

One thing I think IS a significant factor, however, is the possibility of facing another quartet from the same team. (That is, Team A vs. Team A.) I see a lot of complaining about that, though when you give it some thought, it has no negative effect on the Splatfest: It won't waste your time ranking up, and it won't count towards your side's win percentage. It is possible the North American players are more bothered by it than the Japanese counterparts. It is also possible that the most serious Japanese players prefer to play against each other, whereas the most serious North American players do not.

Note, also, that in Europe, it's been pretty split between the more popular team and the less popular team winning. As a result, unlike in Japan and North America, no vicious cycle has set in (at least not yet). If there's any collusion in Europe, they're doing it with no significant correlation to their chosen team's popularity.

I think in Japan it's more open just due to the volume of players, roughly 4x what we have. (1M vs 4M which is why you're 4x more likely to see Japanese players in your lobby.) Even of consensus is "popular team wins" there's enough variety and mix between different mindsets that both teams are much more balanced. Also, the TYPE of players in Japan are different. Here Nintendo is a "kids brand' that parents buy their childeren AND it's "THE" brand for us in the know "vintage" gamers (80s/90s kids) and fans of Japanese games. XBox and PS are where "1337 Gamerez" go. In Japan Nintendo is the brand for "1337 Gamerez" followed very closely by PS, and XBox is that weird thing for Ameriphiles with an odd fettish for sports games and Halo. So a bigger player base of Splatoon is "core gamers" out of the Japanese 4M than the NoA 1M. (Thus the "run, it's the Japanese!" memes in Splatoon - there's more of them, and more of them are skilled gamers.) So even if the "best" go for one team, the "everyone else" team is made of middle of the road players and still has a solid chance at winning rather than assuming everyone on Team B is Cindy Lou Hoo.

Europe....wait, they still sell Nintendos in Europe? :p It's just SOOO unpopular. In NoA we at least have that kid thing going on. In Europe it's just unpopular through and through. But it's regional. Most of Europe doesn't care about Nintendo at all, but a few countries like it in percentages similar to Japan. France and Italy are huge Nintendo bastions in Europe, but most other countries...not so much. So I think their player pool is more like Japans in that it's more "core gamers" but only from a handful of countries, but instead of padding the rest with 6 year olds, it's just a whole lot of dead air.

Regarding playing your own team, I think part of it is just which modes are more popular. I think the US best players tend to focus squarely on ranked modes and not a whole lot on TW, and play it only for snails on splatfest days so they can improve their ranked play. I get the impression the Japanese are equal if not bigger fans of TW, so they don't tend to feel like they HAVE to play it on splatfest days.

So when a US team gets a team v team they groan "ohh geez, I have to play Turf War and I don't even get anything for it, this sucks!" and myself (and a large portion of Japanese players) think "ohh, darn this one isn't for the team, but it's still TW like I'd be playing anyway right now if this weren't Splatfest!"

 

[PrinceOfKoopas]

Can you just provide evidence (like, links) of collusion on a massive scale? That doesn't seem to really happen on Squidboards unless it's all done in private.

 

[BlackZero]

Yes, because you and I have spent a lot of time discussing how reliable and sensible the ranked scoring system is. ;) I don't think gluing the absurdly broken ranking letters onto the abused splatfest team building is going to help. Doing it stealthily and favoring the house so that the results you see are imaginary "adjusted" wins does quite the opposite of helping.

We will have to agree to disagree on this. You keep saying Nintendo has a "house always wins" matchmaker, but haven't explained the incentive for Ninty to program an algorithm that intentionally screws over certain players in a way that makes sense to me. Even if such a conspiracy exists, it won't matter in this case. It would be used to equalize a gap in average skill level by compensating for having a single win count more for a team at a disadvantage. It will be only for scoring purposes and not affect how much your rank changes or who you are matched with. Just FYI, more sophisticated algorithms like TrueSkill work in the same way for determining how much a win or loss should count towards a player's record. It's not the concept itself that's flawed, it's the way it was shoehorned into this game.

Can you just provide evidence (like, links) of collusion on a massive scale? That doesn't seem to really happen on Squidboards unless it's all done in private.

I am not saying people are deliberately colluding. I'm saying the end result is similar. I don't honestly think some Splatoon Mafia meet in a speakeasy and plan out the winner. I think the serious players are choosing the side they assume will win based on past trends, which makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy. So you get a "collusion effect" when all the more hardcore players who want snails for improved gear join one team while the other team is filled mostly with people who are more interested in a teams theme or sister (less serious players). This creates a skill discrepancy and places one team at a disadvantage because it has a lower concentration of serious players compared to the team everyone assumes will win. I used the word "collusion" because I couldn't think of a better word for it and didn't want to write out a paragraph explaining it.

 

[Zero Meddler]

In order to exploit such a system, first people have to realize something has changed. If the devs do not announce this change, that may take a few Splatfests. People would then have to figure out what specifically changed and how the change impacted who won. That would take even more time and possibly a few more Splatfests for people to test their respective theories. By that time, the general population would have hopefully accepted that the age of predictable winners had passed and go back to choosing teams in a less biased way. It may even take long enough that the sequel (hopefully with a better way of calculating player skill) comes out and people stop caring. If it doesn't, we've gone from one imperfect, exploitable system to another so we aren't any better or worse off.

The goal isn't to create a system that can't be exploited because that is impossible; people will find a way to exploit a "perfect" system just like they find away to hack unhackable networks. The goal is to make what worked before stop working long enough for people to abandon the old system of stacking one deck at the expense of the other. This is all a rather moot point, however. I don't see any changes happening. If anything, they'll change how they handle Splatfest scoring in the sequel, assuming they make another team shooter.

People will find a way to figure out how a Splatfests are scored, even if it does take a while. It took a few for people to realize that the less popular teams are winning and use that to their advantage, so I don't see why people wouldn't try to figure out how this system of scoring would work if it were implemented. People don't give up THAT easily. This suggestion would only be temporary.

And no, no system will ever be 100% flawless. That's not why I'm questioning your suggestion. If you ask me, offering an idea to replace one with a critical flaw with another that has a critical flaw makes no sense. Even if it does take a while for people to figure it out, there's still the risk that SOMEONE would and spread that information.

It's not a terrible idea (considering there ARE clear skill gaps between ranks) and I do apologize if that was what I was implying, but to me, this will lead right back to the issue at hand.

With that said, there's one thing that people seem to be dismissing. Voting. This is the root of the current NA trend and it's clear that the "choosing your favorite team" won't take place. I mean, why would those who have seen success with the current system stop doing it? Since this is such an issue, I would recommend a complete overhaul of Splatfest. Ditch voting, ditch themes, and just have people decide whether or not they want to participate. Those who do will automatically be put on one of two teams and let's say the day before it begins, teams are balanced based on Rank (since that's really all we have to go by for skill) and number of players, then the event begins. Teams can't be swayed in anyone's favor since no one will know what team they'll be put on. Wins are all that would count. Popularity would play no role. Some may say "it takes the fun out of it" or "what's the point if you can't vote". I'd say "Would you rather have freedom of choice with potentially imbalanced teams or being forced on a team with (theoretically) more balanced teams?

Of course this system isn't perfect either, I mean for starters...

Another thing, rank isn't a 100% accurate measure of skill. There are plenty of S ranks that aren't THAT great. You also need to consider those with alternate accounts. A B rank could really be an S rank on that account

Obviously, this can throw the skill system that's in Splatoon out of whack a bit (which isn't perfect to begin with). But there's also the problem, how WOULD skill be measured? I think if we can answer that question, then we can start really getting some more solid ideas as to how this problem could be solved. In the end it's as Black Zero stated (I'm seeing many more people with "Zero" in their name lately O-O ):

"This is all a rather moot point, however. I don't see any changes happening. If anything, they'll change how they handle Splatfest scoring in the sequel, assuming they make another team shooter."

 

[Award]

Can you just provide evidence (like, links) of collusion on a massive scale? That doesn't seem to really happen on Squidboards unless it's all done in private.

@BlackZero did a good job of explaining what he meant, but I'd offer this very thread as the example of what he described. The thread is a poll thread. How do you think many chose to use that poll to determine which team they believe will win based on past trend? The thread isn't intentional collusion but this thread is the extent of it on Squidboards in terms of providing information to those who are looking "For the winning team" It's one of the groupthink points of departure (each individual "following the trend")

We will have to agree to disagree on this. You keep saying Nintendo has a "house always wins" matchmaker, but haven't explained the incentive for Ninty to program an algorithm that intentionally screws over certain players in a way that makes sense to me. Even if such a conspiracy exists, it won't matter in this case. It would be used to equalize a gap in average skill level by compensating for having a single win count more for a team at a disadvantage. It will be only for scoring purposes and not affect how much your rank changes or who you are matched with. Just FYI, more sophisticated algorithms like TrueSkill work in the same way for determining how much a win or loss should count towards a player's record. It's not the concept itself that's flawed, it's the way it was shoehorned into this game.

This time I was talking about your suggestion that would be "rigging the house" by changing which team's win counts for how much of a win based on average skill. The win scores would then not reflect real wins but "wins that should be." I really can't like that idea much, especially since the only way to gauge skill on a team is by the ranks that we've already determined are meaningless.