Why Luti should be held more often

[youre_a_squib_now]

I'm no expert, but it seems like what is desired (and seemingly way, way more practical here) is a better method of quickly evaluating team skill, rather than revamping the tournament itself. Divisions are great but when the only way of updating that is an annual tournament, it can be frustrating for teams that feel like their assigned div isn't representative of their skill.

Have there ever been discussions to expand Divisions beyond LUTI (as strange as that sounds)? Like, an automated process that takes results from trusted tournaments to "rank" teams, and divide them into desired sizes of divs from there? Maybe I'm just roundaboutedly describing sendou q but I personally like the idea for the sake of easing the human involvement.

This is where scrims come in. Think of divs not as a LUTI specific thing, but like a skill estimate (like x power, but for teams). What LUTI does is "calibrate" this skill measurement every year, but if you didn't participate in LUTI or you improved as a team, you can get a good idea of your div by scrimming other teams.

 

[DoubleDrewski]

This is where scrims come in. Think of divs not as a LUTI specific thing, but like a skill estimate (like x power, but for teams). What LUTI does is "calibrate" this skill measurement every year, but if you didn't participate in LUTI or you improved as a team, you can get a good idea of your div by scrimming other teams.

In no way do I disagree, but to personalize my argument, my team was seeded LUTI div 8. We were a new team so it's not like a grave error was made. But we got whooped in LUTI itself. A clear sign from this was "hey, after playing that level of competition, we're not quite there yet." The problem was that a couple tournaments we found tailored to div 9, which we thought would be perfect for us, we got turned down because of our nominal skill level.

To be clear, I don't blame the TOs of those tournaments. They see div 8 in their div 9 tournament and that kills the point. But if there was a way to update your div at least semi-regularly, perhaps we'd be able to enter those tournaments. I'm not really asking for div changes to measure personal change; that's way more complex than a number. Maybe its a pipedream, but after all the magic that's happened on sendou I can't help but wonder if a system updated more regularly could be devised.

TLDR; I agree, I wish the "calibration" could be more frequent

 

[missingno]

I don't envy the organizers trying to manage an event this massive. I've done some TOing for a few other games in the past, just very small scale niche brackets, and even that was a lot of work. 600+ teams is an insane scale.

 

[Dragonuto]

Hi, on and off LUTI staff here.

So basically it's like how a lot of the other TOs have said. To run LUTI more frequently would require a hell of a lot of effort and time. It already takes a lot of planning to start with. Even with that being said one of our biggest contributing staff members, Alice runs her own tournaments all times of the year.

It's a huge commitment for everyone to even rustle up and join discussions on new seasons. We all have jobs and outside commitments like relationships & our own events to plan for (For me that's Breeze). A lot of the trouble is we also work with Hitzel to run speedladder and we run FLUTI pre-season which is yet another load of work since we tend to hit pretty insane signup numbers, to run those multiple times a year wouldn't be easy and the burn out would come quick.

We have to gather up seeding staff, create availability for ourselves and then go through probably the most irritating process which is dropping and replacing teams who get mad at their Division placing. Not to mention the **** storm that is our DMs during that period of time.

Now I'm not as consistent of a staff member as some like Thoma and Alice. And I don't do any of the work Lean does to automate score reporting for the regular season & all that jazz. But I still get plenty of the pain that we get shoved our way during that regular season sprint.

Of course at the end of the day we're all volunteers and do it of our own volition we wouldnt help run it or stick around if we didnt enjoy it to some extent, and not to be bitchy but some of the people that enter LUTI and honestly all tournaments refuse to read our rules and can act generally entitled to our little time and little resource.

Would we all like more staff? Sure. Are there a lot of qualified TOs willing to staff LUTI? No.

And why would they it's a Ballache and not worth it for most and that should be respected.

And as others have mentioned when it comes to donations and the like, that wouldn't be enough to change the pacing and could end up being a detriment to our mental health, as it piles on another thing to worry about.

So no LUTI staff most likely wouldn't increase our League season output and no there's really not much you can do to change it.


Bulletpoints for tl;dr

-it's a lot for staff already
-there's more than just the regular season that goes into it.
-we don't have enough staff or time
-some of us(me included) like to take breaks
-money wouldn't change it significantly
-we have other commitments LUTI isn't our life


OH AND THE BIGGEST THING.


LUTI STAFF DO NOT ENDORSE THE USE OF DIVISIONS FOR INDIVIDUAL NOR TEAM RANKING, IT DOES NOT ACCURATELY REFLECT YOUR PLACING IN THE COMMUNITY

Please stop using divs for competitive ranks, the amount of divs & teams changes every season and the skill level is adjusted accordingly for that. We won't get it right every time anyway it's a rough estimate of skill based on data we acrew through FLUTI, speed ladder & your own submitted results.

Typed this up on mobile so might be spelling or formatting errors.

 

[DoubleDrewski]

LUTI STAFF DO NOT ENDORSE THE USE OF DIVISIONS FOR INDIVIDUAL NOR TEAM RANKING, IT DOES NOT ACCURATELY REFLECT YOUR PLACING IN THE COMMUNITY

Please stop using divs for competitive ranks, the amount of divs & teams changes every season and the skill level is adjusted accordingly for that. We won't get it right every time anyway it's a rough estimate of skill based on data we acrew through FLUTI, speed ladder & your own submitted results.

I think this is the biggest point to all of this discussion. Why do people want more LUTI so much? It's very much the case that (as stated above, against the staff's wishes) We lean really, really heavily on the divisions of a tournament to indicate our skill level universally. This doesn't apply to everyone, but IMO a lot of people don't want more of LUTI the tournament, they want more of LUTI the system. I hate to beat a dead horse but I feel like the best way to mitigate this desire would be an alternate system with multiple tournaments in mind, rather than the divisions of a large tournament who explicitly does not want you to use them as a measuring stick.

 

[liligravybread]

i’m helping to organise a *small* league format tournament in OCE region and it’s a huge amount of work, can’t imagine how much work running LUTI with any more frequency than it currently would be.

 

[Dragonuto]

If you mean more in a sense of tiering rungs, Like

Div10-6 tournaments

Div6-4 tournaments

Div4-2 tournaments

Div2-x tournaments.

And instead of having regular season(or just having a shorter smaller season & treating the tournaments like 'promotion tourneys') just have tournaments split about the year with a graduation system like Lowink.

I think that'd be a whole nother thing. And a whole hell of a lot of work.

The benefit of having LUTI be a couple months of everything LUTI and then a big break, is that it avoids both Player & staff burn out. The dream for the whole scene would of course be a system of circuits, but you're talking about something that even the companies that own these games & the organisations that are paid millions to produce and participate in creating tournaments for can't even get right.

There is an ideal and then there's what we've got right now, which is a loose system of LANs, tournaments & short Leagues that prop up our communities competitive scene, with the occasional big event like Nintendos Championship series, or a buy-in tournament, or a Major LAN(Genesis, Riptide, Breeze, Fullwipe etc). We've got a lot more than many grass roots scenes do.

SendouQ & sendou/ink, LUTI, Low Ink, Paddling Pool & many many more provide consistent ways for players to learn and progress up a ladder, and the incredible group of TO's and producing staff make an amazing product and yet a lot of people don't use SendouQ, or outright avoid Paddling pool and similar tournament series.

If Nintendo came around and shoved money in all our faces, sure we'd be able to mesh our force together and work on a proper joint circuit with clear skill boundaries, a promotion system, weekly tournaments and a big finale tournament. But honestly would people even participate? Would they step into the ring if their was an upfront cost to enter or if they knew to get to those higher ranks they'd have to grind out for months or even years? I don't think so, they'd drop like so many do from LUTI.

They call LUTI a team tester, since so many teams disband a few weeks in after trying to align schedules, or drop because they didn't get the div they wanted.

Would running LUTI twice a year fix this problem? no.

Would creating a circuit help keep teams invested in Skill assessing? yes but with what backing.


gunna moan a bit here but even the TOs creating unions & Safety councils to keep our players safe received backlash and ridicule. To create a series of circuits whilst personally I'd be interested in doing because it sounds fun, would be a massive risk since one misplaced stone would bring the tower we'd create crashing down.


Basically all I'm saying is that the sentiment is appreciated, the idea is great. But the logic isn't sound, and the means aren't there yet.

 

[Dragonuto]

Lol okay I went on a bit of a rant o_O

 

[DoubleDrewski]

TYSM for the input! Personally, your closing statements are why I'm much more interested in an automated system of some kind. Assign different weights to major (or otherwise reputable, like IPL) tournaments and their results, with the only human aspects being A. determining where to draw the lines and B. determining which tournaments "matter" more. The benefit with that would be that, hopefully, an "open-source" route would be way more prone to fruitful discussion. The question moves away from "this isn't the div I wanted!!!" since if you're really curious, you could literally see how your ranking was determined. In my head I'm mainly drawing from (and I know this is probably coming out of left field) Sabermetrics in baseball, which spawns from the idea of combining a multitude of statistics into something representable by a single number yet widely applicable. The prime example is WAR, or Wins Above Replacement, which crams a whole lot of stuff together to basically give you a "how good is this player" number. Obviously for a team-based esport the approach would be wildly different, but there are real world examples of squeezing a single, meaningful number from a chaos of messy competition data.

Of course, it needs to be said that this is a very, very untested idea, and I haven't the expertise to know how such a system would come about or how people would react (or care for that matter). But hey, maybe if enough computer-science oriented individuals with high standing the community deem it something worth pursuing, we can create something wholly our own and tailored to our desires (see: sendou.ink).

Edit: I realize what I described is very, very similar to sendou q. What I'm mainly discussing is something that could be applied universally due to universally acquired data (i.e. independent tournaments).

 

[Dragonuto]

TYSM for the input! Personally, your closing statements are why I'm much more interested in an automated system of some kind. Assign different weights to major (or otherwise reputable, like IPL) tournaments and their results, with the only human aspects being A. determining where to draw the lines and B. determining which tournaments "matter" more. The benefit with that would be that, hopefully, an "open-source" route would be way more prone to fruitful discussion. The question moves away from "this isn't the div I wanted!!!" since if you're really curious, you could literally see how your ranking was determined. In my head I'm mainly drawing from (and I know this is probably coming out of left field) Sabermetrics in baseball, which spawns from the idea of combining a multitude of statistics into something representable by a single number yet widely applicable. The prime example is WAR, or Wins Above Replacement, which crams a whole lot of stuff together to basically give you a "how good is this player" number. Obviously for a team-based esport the approach would be wildly different, but there are real world examples of squeezing a single, meaningful number from a chaos of messy competition data.

Of course, it needs to be said that this is a very, very untested idea, and I haven't the expertise to know how such a system would come about or how people would react (or care for that matter). But hey, maybe if enough computer-science oriented individuals with high standing the community deem it something worth pursuing, we can create something wholly our own and tailored to our desires (see: sendou.ink).

Cool idea, tough the implement especially on that scale. but none the less cool idea. I guess my only issue I see with this is people changing their names, identities etc when entering tournaments to avoid it being used in their calcs. I guess that's the thing with online esports. unlike Baseball and such you don't have a strict identity that you're attached to. it's more fluid.

 

[DoubleDrewski]

Cool idea, tough the implement especially on that scale. but none the less cool idea. I guess my only issue I see with this is people changing their names, identities etc when entering tournaments to avoid it being used in their calcs. I guess that's the thing with online esports. unlike Baseball and such you don't have a strict identity that you're attached to. it's more fluid.

It's a little brute force, but the only feasible workaround I could think of is limiting the system to teams only. Even now I'd like to believe people view divs as more team-oriented, and only use them individually to refer to experience rather than skill. Since this hypothetical dream system is intended to supplant divs, accounting for pickups and such wouldn't be a priority.

In terms of practicality, I'd be interested (in fact I'm already considering giving it a shot) in seeing a small-scale version scraping data from battlefy/sendou of certain teams and trying to ascertain "scores" for them.

 

[Dragonuto]

Go for it, make a thread about it. see the interest. It's always worthwhile and Squidboards provides a good place to show data and get feedback.

 

[KnickKnock]

pay LUTI staff and we'll run it more

 

[Leagues Under The Ink]

If everyone is playing in weeklies there is enough data to seed teams and players. Luti isn't the only reliable way to do that.

That being said, every Luti season gives me an excuse to run another Speed Ladder so I don't mind it haha.

You wanna do another speed ladder in like 2 months

 

[liligravybread]

You wanna do another speed ladder in like 2 months

LUTI’s posting now, thread closed guys it’s time to pack it up and go home.

 

[Hitzel]

You wanna do another speed ladder in like 2 months

Yeah

 

[.jpg_]

Hi, on and off LUTI staff here.

So basically it's like how a lot of the other TOs have said. To run LUTI more frequently would require a hell of a lot of effort and time. It already takes a lot of planning to start with. Even with that being said one of our biggest contributing staff members, Alice runs her own tournaments all times of the year.

It's a huge commitment for everyone to even rustle up and join discussions on new seasons. We all have jobs and outside commitments like relationships & our own events to plan for (For me that's Breeze). A lot of the trouble is we also work with Hitzel to run speedladder and we run FLUTI pre-season which is yet another load of work since we tend to hit pretty insane signup numbers, to run those multiple times a year wouldn't be easy and the burn out would come quick.

We have to gather up seeding staff, create availability for ourselves and then go through probably the most irritating process which is dropping and replacing teams who get mad at their Division placing. Not to mention the **** storm that is our DMs during that period of time.

Now I'm not as consistent of a staff member as some like Thoma and Alice. And I don't do any of the work Lean does to automate score reporting for the regular season & all that jazz. But I still get plenty of the pain that we get shoved our way during that regular season sprint.

Of course at the end of the day we're all volunteers and do it of our own volition we wouldnt help run it or stick around if we didnt enjoy it to some extent, and not to be bitchy but some of the people that enter LUTI and honestly all tournaments refuse to read our rules and can act generally entitled to our little time and little resource.

Would we all like more staff? Sure. Are there a lot of qualified TOs willing to staff LUTI? No.

And why would they it's a Ballache and not worth it for most and that should be respected.

And as others have mentioned when it comes to donations and the like, that wouldn't be enough to change the pacing and could end up being a detriment to our mental health, as it piles on another thing to worry about.

So no LUTI staff most likely wouldn't increase our League season output and no there's really not much you can do to change it.


Bulletpoints for tl;dr

-it's a lot for staff already
-there's more than just the regular season that goes into it.
-we don't have enough staff or time
-some of us(me included) like to take breaks
-money wouldn't change it significantly
-we have other commitments LUTI isn't our life


OH AND THE BIGGEST THING.


LUTI STAFF DO NOT ENDORSE THE USE OF DIVISIONS FOR INDIVIDUAL NOR TEAM RANKING, IT DOES NOT ACCURATELY REFLECT YOUR PLACING IN THE COMMUNITY

Please stop using divs for competitive ranks, the amount of divs & teams changes every season and the skill level is adjusted accordingly for that. We won't get it right every time anyway it's a rough estimate of skill based on data we acrew through FLUTI, speed ladder & your own submitted results.

Typed this up on mobile so might be spelling or formatting errors.

All I'm saying is this is my goat and nothing can change that

 

[GreGuru]

As others have said, people don’t want more LUTI seasons, they want more div assignments. Aside from the immense work it takes to run the season, we see how roster changes and other factors can make those div assignments obsolete in a matter of weeks.

I think the solution to this problem is a broader community buy in to SendouQ. Right now everyone just kind of associates it with the individual leaderboard and grinding pickups to climb the ranks, but the system is perfectly viable for teams. If you’re the kind of team that feels validated by being assigned a certain div in LUTI, I don’t see why achieving a certain leaderboard placement or point total on SendouQ can’t give you that same validation.

Yes, there are people who may have inflated ranks because they are on there all the time and farm lower level players for minimum points and yes there are people with undeservedly low ranks because they don’t play as often, but no system will be perfect and the system can only improve with more data which means more participation from everyone. More tournaments moving to the Sendou.ink platform and those sets affecting SendouQ points will continue to provide more data and improve things without people having to do the queuing process.

Adopting this system community wide would mean a lot less work for TOs and a much better indicator of where your team is today as opposed to where it was 4 months ago.

 

[Gh0ul1sh]

I'm no expert, but it seems like what is desired (and seemingly way, way more practical here) is a better method of quickly evaluating team skill, rather than revamping the tournament itself. Divisions are great but when the only way of updating that is an annual tournament, it can be frustrating for teams that feel like their assigned div isn't representative of their skill.

Have there ever been discussions to expand Divisions beyond LUTI (as strange as that sounds)? Like, an automated process that takes results from trusted tournaments to "rank" teams, and divide them into desired sizes of divs from there? Maybe I'm just roundaboutedly describing sendou q but I personally like the idea for the sake of easing the human involvement.

honestly I feel like what people want would just be like a team sendouQ ranking or something similar. Maybe if there was a site where you register your team and place your results against the other registered teams and it ranks you based on that, so you get an idea of what your skill level is based on the overall community results, and from there there could be divisions based of top % for people to find others around their skill level

 

[DoubleDrewski]

honestly I feel like what people want would just be like a team sendouQ ranking or something similar. Maybe if there was a site where you register your team and place your results against the other registered teams and it ranks you based on that, so you get an idea of what your skill level is based on the overall community results, and from there there could be divisions based of top % for people to find others around their skill level

I actually made a thread concerning the potential structure of an idea like this!