divine punishment for being young sanity :sadge:

not to mention that one of the teams that beat them on round differential only did so because of a ffw that erroneously gave 4-0 that season

Another point I made 2 seasons ago that was also ignored by the admins I spoke to mid-season.

Nope, I deserve this for being "controversial" and a "terrible" person.

I think if your system for finding the top 8 playoff teams is to identify the top 8 "best" teams, and you choose W/L as your primary metric for determining team skill, using RW% as a secondary metric is not insane. After all, if your goal is to just identify the best 8 teams, why do I care about how you did vs. a team that wouldn't even be in playoffs by this ranking system. I would care more about how you did vs. the division as a whole. This is especially true if you use the (what I think is) ideal definition of team skill, that being the the average probability of defeating any other team in the division.

That being said though I still think H2H is the way to go for tiebreaks because the forced map schedule makes the variance during the regular season way higher than if it were pick/ban, even with 16 matches compared to something like highlander's 7/8. Makes me more inclined to say fuck it and just reward W's over everything.

Map variance with pick/ban is a factor but a minor one that would be completely acceptable if RW% was secondary to H2H. The major factor that makes RW% unreliable is how scheduling is done. Not all teams have a chance to play the weakest teams before they die by mid season making the RW% an unfair balance for those lucky enough to 5-0 some hopeless teams in the first few weeks.

If compared to a professional league where all teams had a shared schedule by playing the same teams then RW% is completely fine. It would never be possible in TF2 so the rules need to adapt to account for that for balance and fairness. RW% is always a skewed stat for that reason and should not be the top determining factor for a tiebreaker.

Getting a win against another "playoff or bubble team" has way more worth than some meaningless rounds you won in week 1-3 against the lowest skill teams in the division.

Completely agree, I mentioned map scheduling when it should've just been scheduling in general.

This being said, in a tiebreak situation do you think wins against playoff teams should also be considered compared to just the H2H among the teams fighting for the remaining spots? As an example, minions this season have a win over image during regular season (and a dominant win at that), while none of the remaining 9-7 teams have playoff team wins (besides other 9-7 teams). A team that has like 2 wins over higher seed playoff teams would probably have a better chance of doing better in playoffs, but it would feel shitty to have them yoink that last seed if you, as a team with the same W/L, beat them and every other team in H2H. Interested to see your opinion.

I do not think wins against other playoff teams should be a factor at all. I can see your point above and it does make sense when thinking about always wanting the "best 8 teams" to advance. I think what you suggest could be a highly "subjective" criteria to add and would cause way more problems. If you can include performance against the top teams they play, you also have to include performance against the bottom teams they play. #9 team beats #2 team 3-2 on Gully but lost to the #18 team 5-4 on Snakewater earlier in the season. How do you judge this difference and do you really want RGL admins to determine this?

You would also have things like schedule strength comparison and random situations like when a top team offclasses vs a bubble team. If that bubble teams wins, they are now getting more credit for beating a top team that was goofing off in week 7 or 8?? I can't see that as fair and something the admins can regulate and/or balance.

IMO its all about match performance between the tied teams to see who gets those final slots. My feeling is either you win when it matters or lose and you are out. Then teams can blame themselves instead of the league rules or an admin making a ruling.

Last thing, it also adds human bias and favoritism to the mix which is never anyone's friend. Admins are now in control over who they "think" had the tougher schedule or played the better teams? Sounds like a nightmare, I'll keep the RW% over that. :)

SpaceCadet kinda spitting rn. Just to add on, valuing RW% over H2H as tie break creates a perverse incentive to play more passively, which is the worst part of 6s. If your RW% is positive, a round lost hurts you more than a round won helps. The biggest issue with 5cp as a game mode is how it incentivizes passive play, further incentives for passive play are the last thing we need in our league rules

i would also prefer that h2h be valued over effectively meaningless things like how many rounds u lost in a game u won

the only positive about weighting wr% highly is it makes the last 2 weeks or so of matches not a complete waste of time for the top and bottom teams. the top is fighting to keep their rw% high and the bottom is fighting to spoil teams by stealing rounds off top teams

this is also a stupid way to play and very annoying, but its better than meaningless matches 99% of the time

The h2h vs rw% discussion was brought up internally at RGL about a year ago. As part of that, I ran a statistical analysis that looked at whether h2h or rw% better predicted playoff outcomes using the dataset of S1-S6 playoffs (not including RR divs or am or nc). The results indicated rw% was a better predictor of playoff performance across the board, including when taking into account potential biases. Even when we looked at teams that had faced each other in playoffs, rw% was a better predictor of which team would win - which is a situation where you'd expect h2h to have a significant advantage. This lead to us keeping it as the primary tiebreaking metric. I've got a big writeup draft somewhere with all the stats and methodologies that I wanted to publish back then, but we got busy with S7 and it got put on the back burner.

Through doing the analysis, I figured out that the general reason rw% is better than h2h can be qualitatively stated as "it only takes a single thing happening to mess up a h2h result, but it takes a bunch of things happening to mess up a w% result." (which was backed up by the data and the mathematical modeling I did)

Of course, neither method is perfect - the only way to have perfect competitiveness is to run a double RR division with pick-bans for maps (which is why that's the format for Invite). RGL uses RW% as a tiebreaker because it's correct more of the time than the alternatives. There will always be cases where it's not accurate, no matter which method is used.

If anyone's deeply interested in the methodology, etc, feel free to message me on discord - matchmaking and playoffs structures are one of my main focuses at RGL, and I'm always happy to chat about this kind of thing.

Also, random interesting data drop:
As part of the investigation, we looked into the potential bias that some maps would yield more rounds than others. The data shows a small but not insignificant effect:

Data from adv-im S5 regular season
rt = rounds taken
rtow = rounds taken on win
rtol = rounds taken on loss
rtol/rtow = % of the winning team's rounds the loosing team takes = rtol/rtow
rtol/rp = % of all rounds the losing team takes
#m = number of matches
map                  | rt  | rtow | rotl | # matches | rotl/rotw | rotl/rp | avg. score
cp_gullywash_final1  | 409 | 303  | 106  | 66        | 34.98%    | 25.92%  | 4.59 - 1.61
cp_metalworks        | 407 | 292  | 115  | 64        | 39.38%    | 28.26%  | 4.56 - 1.80
cp_process_f7        | 364 | 290  |  74  | 65        | 25.52%    | 20.33%  | 4.46 - 1.14
cp_snakewater_final1 | 369 | 287  |  82  | 60        | 28.57%    | 22.22%  | 4.78 - 1.37
cp_sunshine          | 418 | 297  | 121  | 65        | 40.74%    | 28.95%  | 4.57 - 1.86
cp_villa_b18         | 424 | 306  | 118  | 63        | 38.56%    | 27.83%  | 4.86 - 1.87
koth_clearcut_b15d   | 305 | 248  |  57  | 65        | 22.98%    | 18.69%  | 3.82 - 0.88
koth_product_rcx     | 320 | 235  |  85  | 61        | 36.17%    | 26.56%  | 3.85 - 1.39

I appreciate the post and the stats but I don't quite understand some of this.

What is the single thing that can happen to ruin a H2H result?

No offense, but none of your stats or analysis seem to address the scheduling conflicts with some teams playing strong opponents early in the season and getting "free" 5-0 results. That weak team then dies and the other teams in the division are denied that same free 5-0.

We all know neither method is perfect and nobody is saying to remove RW% completely, it is very much needed and should continually be refined. I am saying H2H should be first and RW% secondary. Wins and Losses should ALWAYS be treated with more priority than rounds.

Why not just pit all the bubble teams against eachother in the week after reg szn but before playoffs? Maybe I'm ignorant to the topic but I always thought if there like 4 teams that went 9-7, having them play against eachother makes sense.

Either that week's map being a better map for one team or things like ringers or internet issues can easily make a H2H result inaccurate, particularly when you're only looking at tiebreaking against close teams (where a map favoring one team can make the difference). I want to call out though that this statement isn't my argument, just a hypothesis about why the stats show rw% is more accurate. The decision was made based on rw% being statistically notably better at predicting which team was stronger.

Rough numbers:
RNG tiebreaker: right 50% of the time (baseline)
H2H tiebreaker: right ~65% of the time (better than RNG, but not by much)
RW% tiebreaker: right ~77% of the time (better than H2H and significantly better than RNG)

Strength-of-schedule is absolutely a challenge with any non-rr tournament, and we've talked plenty about possible improvements to reduce its effect. However, it was absolutely accounted for in the data - the situation you're describing happened plenty over the 6 seasons of data analyzed, and rw% still shows better results than h2h.

Why? The goal of a tiebreaking metric is that the better team makes it into playoffs. Across all of the first 6 seasons of RGL, rw% outperformed h2h, even when looking at situations where h2h should have a large advantage. Fwiw I totally get the gut reaction that h2h should be better and went into the study partly expecting to find that, but the data shows that rw% is more accurate.

To call it out again, in one of the analyses we looked at teams with identical records that played each other in the regular season and then had a rematch in playoffs. Even in that situation, rw% was a better predictor than the regular season h2h result of which team would win the rematch.

Just to preface, I'm not arguing with you but I can clearly see where we differ on this subject.

In your quotes above you seem to value and want to be "better to predict" which team is better based off of RW% even though you realize the stat is skewed and can be wrong for many reasons.

I don't want to "predict" who is better. The Wins and Losses clearly do that and is not a skewed stat between teams of equal records. Simply put, you either win or lose when it matters and that should be rewarded.

Reason for a loss means nothing, everyone has a reason / excuse why they lost. Rewarding teams for getting meaningless RW% against poor teams should never be the top reason for a tiebreak. IMO you devalue the actual match wins by making other metrics more important and you can influence other factors.

Frankly, there is more incentive for teams to pick KOTH maps or to pick maps that are more defensive oriented knowing they can "salvage" their RW% when they know they cannot win the match. I would rather lose 0-4 on a KOTH map than 0-5 on a CP map or I would pick a defensive stalemate map like Snakewater and see if we can park busses and drag out a 0-3 loss or something like that. As poster #429 said, this type of rule is counter productive to making teams push for wins and play more offensively.

https://clips.twitch.tv/MotionlessVenomousHyenaImGlitch-jzrqB_la0DXi7XZ0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfZ5__1lfXo

GGs & much love to the boys of PERUTECH. Really fun match, and you guys definitely earned it (almost 4 hours of gaming!!!).

This season was without a doubt the most fun I've had playing TF2 since I got into competitive. Nothing but love to all my guys & everyone that made the season possible, both on the team and off. Really looking forward to whatever's next!
GGs

so why exactly is andrew decided to not be a default ringer? its already insane cope to try to deny him ringing for perutech but how did an admin sign off on one playoffs demo not ringing for another?

Andrew should for sure be default unless there’s a new rule this season I’m not aware of

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IagRtAIR_rw

Ask chell 0.o

Must win main by trying to deny default ringers !

₣₳łⱠɄⱤɆ ĐØɆ₴₦'₮ ₥Ɇ₳₦ ₮ⱧɆ

ɨţ ʍ€ąɲ$ ţя¥ ąǥąɨɲ ώɨţh

I like beer and this is an extremely not beer move

beer moves only 2023

:beers:

:eriktfJay: :beers: :eriktfJay:

Streaming kyle flett v minions with the bungalows tonight at 10:30 pm!
twitch.tv/uncljohn