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Quoted from kaidus

[…]

Please tell me how, exactly, this poll represents the runnings of a day-to-day democracy? As I have experienced democracy, one elects people with an expertise in a specific area to make decisions that voters simply do not have the time, intellect or skill to accurately make for themselves. If democratic civilisation functioned in the same way as etf2l’s democracy (you know, the one where any delinquent who knows absolutely nothing about competitive tf2 but happens to have an account registered has as equal say on the matter as someone who has played it for 4 years at the highest level) do you really think democratic nations would be the way they are now? Suppose this is the real world and the question is not “which maps should be in the pool?” but instead “How do we solve the economic crisis?”. I can’t speak about other countries, but I know the vast, vast, vast, VAST majority of Britains have absolutely no clue as to the functioning of an economic system, in the same way that the majority of ETF2L voters simply do not know what a map needs to function well in 6v6 long-term. I would literally shit my pants if the british public suddenly were the soul determining factor in important decision making.

I’m not saying these systems are perfect or even particularly good (many are not), but you cannot defend etf2l’s method with the blanket statement “democracy”, as that word comes laden with associations with things that it simply does not resemble in any half-decent practice.

The truth is there are very few, if any, real decisions made on a purely democratic basis (or at least, a directly democratic basis). The ones that are and were tend to have fucking awful consequences. Just ask socrates.

the map vote wasn’t direct democracy, if that were the case we could have voted ANY available map. We were given an approved pool to pick from.

Quoted from djc

so will any of our feedback be “rewarded” with some sort of official admin statement about the bizarre foundry decision, or….?

i don’t think as many people would be bothered or annoyed by it if there were any justification or reasoning given, but there’s been absolutely nothing said yet

We are keeping an eye on this thread and discuss raised points in our IRC channel from time to time but I do not think you need admin input to discuss the map pool, you are doing just fine ;-)

Quoted from slate

[…]

the map vote wasn’t direct democracy, if that were the case we could have voted ANY available map. We were given an approved pool to pick from.

Not that it actually matters, but to appease the pedant in me direct democracy simply means participants vote on policy rather than to elect a representative who acts on their behalf. Whether the choice is open-ended or not is completely irrelevant.

My point was more that blanket statements like “it’s democracy! LOL” should not be thrown around as if that and that alone justifies whatever shitty outcome comes about as a result. I never denied (or at least never meant to :p) that it was in fact democratic, but by drawing parallels to the functioning of a real world democracy I aimed to show that there is such a thing as good (arguably) democracy and bad democracy. Whoevers post I quoted clearly felt like what was going on in etf2l’s poll was somehow equivalent to what he understands as a “democratic process” which I’m sure is derived from a remedial understanding of real-world politics, when in fact it simply just is not.

Also I think you raise an interesting point with the example of danish currency. Most directly democratic decision making is binary (ie. consists of yes [ ] no [ ]), as in your example, rather than tallying up a mish mash of 6 choices from a possible 10 blah blah blah. To put this into the context of the map vote, whilst the style of poll etf2l chose to implement might have shown freight to be the 6th most popular map in the pool; I’d go out on a limb and say if there was a vote “Should freight be in the map pool? yes [] no []” the answer would be an overwhelming no.

Quoted from Koeitje

If it was a democracy in the sense that we vote for our leaders we would vote for admins. Those admins would then make an informed decision about what maps to pick.

Ashkan would rig the election, I seen the devil in his eyes.

Foundry as a 7th map decider is certainly an ‘experimental’ decision, I am not sure I agree with it but I would be willing to give it a shot for 1 season – same maps over time get boring, try something new.

Quoted from Hildreth

[…]

Ashkan would rig the election, I seen the devil in his eyes.

Foundry as a 7th map decider is certainly an ‘experimental’ decision, I am not sure I agree with it but I would be willing to give it a shot for 1 season – same maps over time get boring, try something new.

i’m sure that most people would be willing to give foundry a shot as a map for a season… i doubt many of those people would agree with the decision to make it a decider map, especially when it’s not going to be a rotation map and especially when nobody is going to play it (precisely because it is not a rotation map). there’s a big difference between “experimental” and “illogical,” and that’s why i’m really curious in hearing any admin offer an explanation (and potentially some “logic”) to the decision — the only reason to put foundry as the decider map is to get it some actual, serious pcw time… but that would also be achieved by making it a rotation map.

basically, it’d be cool if there were any semblance of transparency to decisions like this.

Quoted from djc

basically, it’d be cool if there were any semblance of transparency to decisions like this.

First there was the question of how many maps in the pool.

6 maps was the same as last season and didn’t receive any memorable complaints. Downsides were certain maps being played more often than others (6/14 = 2 remainder 2), and the playoff problem.

7 maps makes for a tidier schedule using division groups of 8 and is a better fit for the playoff process, but results in 1 extra map for every team to practice compared to last season.

Less than 6 was not considered, neither was more than 7.

For the vote, we started out with 16 maps. The 6 maps eliminated to make the first pool were turbine_pro, pro_viaduct, standin, warmfront, yukon and obscure_remake, with the consensus being that they had little chance of being in the top 6 of any poll.

Obscure_final, croissant and bazillion were switched out when it was conclusive that they would not reach the top 6; pro_viaduct and turbine_pro were added since they were requested and it raised the chances of a little variety in the pool. We are reading the ideas for different ways of running the polls (such as Admirable’s idea somewhere in the comments/in this thread), and we will consider them for next season’s map pool.

While I was writing the post announcing the map pool, I had intended to write that foundry would be added to the pool as a choice during the playoffs, to avoid some of the difficulty in picking maps seen last season. Hopefully it’s fairly easy to see that in the prem playoffs (4 games out of around 15), foundry would never be picked, so the only real difference would be that one team’s elimination is effectively wasted removing foundry compared to Season 10!. Yes it eliminates the problem as intended, just not very nicely.

The main attraction to foundry as a decider is it’s neutrality. If we were to force a map from the existing pool as a decider, there would always be some level of favourability to one team over another. Also, being as it is the new Valve map it’s pretty popular on pub servers at present. Teams refusing to practice isn’t a factor – we’re talking about one map, played between 1 and 3 times by about 30 teams, 9 weeks from now.

Admittedly, I had an idea of the kind of feedback the foundry decider rule would receive. It was added to the post relatively late, though there was still enough time for dicussion in the admin section.

So far the response feels more like surprise than dislike – Droso put in an hour or two discussing alternatives in irc last night, TheSucker may have done as well (apologies if anyone else did, you were credit to team but not memorably) but besides that there has been little talk of alternatives, just “wtf”-type comments.

Of course we haven’t stopped thinking of alternatives. Before I started this there were none better than the ones we already had. At present we’re considering removing one map from the 6 for the playoffs rather than adding a 7th. The main candidates for removal are gravelpit (broken, least favoured map in the pool) and freight (popular, but generally considered bad).

While this would solve the problem of the number of maps in the pool for picks/eliminations, it reveals a second problem – deciding which team chooses first in the process. In prem playoffs and up/down matches (e.g. yoyotech vs equilibrium last season) it can simply be done by the higher-placed team, but in tiebreaker matches we have yet to think of a decent way to decide it.

On top of that, we still have a lot of rules to update for S11 and some new ones that still require at least one more review. Sadly it seems that some of them will not be implemented in time for the start of the season due to certain requirements (mostly tweaks to the site).

Seeding, re-stocking the ac team, planning any concurrent 6v6 tournaments, planning the end of Highlander S1 and the start of S2, talking to valve, talking to multiplay, talking to steelseries, talking to other people about half-formed ideas that aren’t ready for public consumption. This is just the stuff that I can remember we need to do this week that’s related to ETF2L. Not that we don’t love it, I’m simply trying to be transparent about what we have been doing lately and what we intend to do in future.

:)

Quoted from djc

that single post has made you the best/most successful admin in recent etf2l history. thank you for actually typing it up.

+1