Esports are a lot like elections. Rather, elections are just a dolled up competition. They’re just giant tournaments to see who’s “King” or “President” or “Champion” or whatever the role is called until the next tournament starts up. Given the importance of these tournaments, you’d think they’d have perfected the format. The playing field will be set, and everyone’s got the same chance to win. They’re one of the oldest forms of competition around after all.
Say that to any AP Gov student and they’d laugh. Elections are a fine tuned machine in many ways, but the format of the election and the way votes work isn’t nearly as clean as you’d think.
There’s the (American) standard where each citizen gets one vote, and only one vote. That one vote counts only for that candidate and the voter’s influence ends there. But this can lead to issues where you get the ‘best of the worst’ and people vote for a candidate that is the best out of the ones with a chance to win. The shiniest turd if you will. Sure, you can vote for a third party candidate in America, but in effect it’s the same as not voting at all.
There’s also ranked voting, where you rank the candidates based on how much you like them. A 1st place vote gets more points than a 2nd place vote, etc. This model also has problems though, enough to make an 18th century Marquis infamous for their paradox.
No matter what model ends up being used, there’s always situations where a candidate that should’ve won according to some standard lost, and those that should’ve lost fail upwards instead. Another parallel with esports. These models are flawed, and these are the equivalent of unfixable glitches in a game. That NPC causing the bug being crucial to everything working in that sorcery we call code.
Esports features a slew of different formats, and they all cater to the various interests of different parties. Some benefit the broadcaster, others the player, and others the community at large. As Core-A Gaming pointed out: Invitationals benefitted the players and broadcaster greatly but at the cost of the grassroots FGC.
It should come as no surprise then, that when one of these “unfixable glitches” comes around, you get a lot of people wanting change. For fair elections, for the most competitive video game tournaments, same situation different name.
The swiss stage is often treated as a sort of holy grail, as close to a perfect balance as you can get. The tournament format originated in Chess and it’s seen a fair amount of play in esports as well, and is one of the best received formats used especially for Tac FPS’s. There’s other formats of course, Round Robin, single elimination, double elim, there’s plenty of options.
But choosing the right format is important. Not only will different formats cause different results – G2 never would’ve won SI23 without the double elimination bracket – but choosing a specific format means picking your poison. Swiss is no exception. Just like good old Condorcet found the paradox in the ranked voting system, there’s questions to be had about seeding in a Swiss system. Notable results (or lack thereof) in ELEMENT ONE highlight this.
ELEMENT One operates with the Monrad version of the Swiss system. It seeds teams for the opening match, and then faces teams with similar records against each other. (1-0 teams face other 1-0 teams, 0-2 against 0-2) Similar score lines will face each other in the next round, so a 7-1 victory will match you against another team with a dominant win. Teams have 3 “lives” allowing room for upsets and all promotion/elimination matches are Best of 3s. It’s a solid format in every sense of the word. You have to earn your placing for better and for worse. If you fall out 0-3, it’s your own damn fault. It balances the interests of the teams and the broadcast pretty damn well, and has led to consistently great tournaments for T2 NA before.
Unfortunately things didn’t play out cleanly in ELEMENT ONE and interesting developments highlighted the glitches inherent to Monrad. Dilemma is a team that’s been eliminated from ELEMENT ONE. They won their first match in dominant fashion before going up against one of the top teams, Arial Arise. After a close loss they faced Karn&co, a mid-high tier team. After another close loss they faced WildCard, another team that was at least mid tier, before losing in close fashion. Dilemma exited E1 with a 1-3 record.
CintaNegra esports is a team still in E1 as of…a 4-3 scoreline against Wildcard on Kafe. Their path through the tournament started against Gang Gang Gang, a team of ex-pros. After a swift loss they faced Taken Kings, a team that should’ve been playoff contenders, and lost 7-5. On tournament life they faced Sway, one of the worst teams in ELEMENT ONE. After a clown fiesta of a match, CNE prevailed and stayed alive. They were slated to face the winner of For My Gang vs Slate but instead got a forfeit victory following For My Gang’s disqualification.
The two paths of these teams are very different, about as different as the level they play at. While yes, Dilemma has to win against those in front of them, don’t lose and it’s not a problem, yadda yadda. Their reward for losing to Arial Arise was facing another top team. CintaNegra lost to Taken Kings and got to face Sway. Now CNE will have placed higher than Dilemma, regardless of the game going on – now down 4-6 – having faced worse opponents. Hell, before their disqualification FMG was placed higher than Dilemma for having beat Sway and Slate.
After watching their matches most people would say DLMA is a better team than CNE, but tournament placing would suggest otherwise. To be clear: this isn’t a bug. The Monrad system is working the way it’s meant to and the inputs are producing the expected outputs. If we wanted different results we’d need a different formula. There’s been a lot of noise made about the way this format has played out, and this is the reason why.
Now, what does this all mean for ELEMENT ONE? In the big picture it doesn’t really matter. As much as I like Ozone and co, I’m of the mind they were probably going out in quarters or semis at most. We aren’t losing the tournament favorite early in freak circumstances. Monrad glitching out isn’t a gamebreaker nor does it necessarily call for a change in format.
We still do standard voting despite all the bugs and situations that arise. For the Tournament Organizer, Fermay and everyone else working the broadcast, they thought they were going with a solid system. It worked plenty fine for SCS7, SFCL, and XGS, why would Monrad be unnacceptable now?
But this theorycrafting is all irrelevant. Halfway through a stiff drink and watching the postgame interview it seems everything will work out relatively well. WildCard beat CNE in 2-0 fashion, saving us from a guaranteed wash of a playoff game and I’ve gotten a message from Fermay that confirms they’re reevaluating the format going into ELEMENT TWO.
Regardless of whether we get a different format, there’s still going to be these moments where teams place better or worse than they should. Why get cranky over it when we can enjoy the highest level of Siege available right now? I’ve got Arial Arise going up against SSG Acad in the finals. Rumors are going around about org interest in the NAL, so we’re likely to see the E1 winner get picked up for Tier 1 play. Effectively this is the closest we’ll ever get to having relegations back but people are worried about teams going out in groups or quarter finals, as if that’s the part that matters. The good teams will bounce back, the circuit isn’t dying tomorrow, despite what people say, lets all just enjoy our time playing silly games in these silly little tournaments.