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The second of my weekly pieces for The Spire, taking a look at how the leagues look following the 2016 VAC bans.

More coming every Friday.

http://www.thespire.tv/2016-vac-wave-and-the-aftershock/

Quoted from Selek

[…]

I unfortunately have to disagree with you. Constructive feedback has nothing to do with whining.

A wall of shame will only make feel people needlessly bad, and even more importantly, make them to play more for logs than going for good teamplay. E.g.: Who cares if the Soldier held the flank all game, letting no one through but got only few kills and no Medic bombs in the process? That might have been exactly what the team needed to win.

Or, a personal example: I don’t expect to ever be mentioned as a top Spy player in this list, simply because my play style results in a low K/D. The only thing I achieve regularly for the logs is top kills for the enemy Pyro. But be sure I do a lot for my team, semi-maincalls, opening push options, synchronized attacks. As long as my team is content with my playstyle and performance, I really couldn’t care less for my stats.

But others might be disheartened from trying out playstyles that don’t result in good statistics and even get shamed for it.

Let the team decide if the player’s performance is sufficient for the team, don’t shame players publicly. Especially if the sole benchmark for their performance are simple number calculations.

Exactly this.

You can perfectly have bad stats but still be a huge contribution to the team. And it also works in the opposite direction. You can topfrag and topdamage, but if you don’t do what you are expected to do or die at points where you really shouldn’t, you are not playing very well.

Kills on logs don’t tell you if it are high or low impact kills. They don’t tell how much damage you did to get these kills. It also doesn’t really matter who gets the kills. If you do a 3dmg shot across the map and get a kill, so be it.

Assist counting in TF2 doesn’t make any sense.

DPM also is a stat that doesn’t say anything since it often depends on the flow of the game or how much damage you can deal by spamming chokes in stalemate situations without gaining anything.

People care too much about logs. Surely they tell something, but you can’t base of logs if someone played “good” or “bad”.

Clark summed it up perfectly but I thought I’d write my own reply (sorry it’s a bit long).

The thing is I’m well aware that logs aren’t perfect, I really do wish there was a better way of doing it which didn’t involve me spending somewhere between 5-10 hours a week watching games, most of which I’ll have to track down the STVs myself probably by harassing team leaders and lord knows I harass them enough already for other things like roster confirmations.

The problem with TF2 in general, and this is something that many other people who have tried to analyse TF2 before (e.g. Gentlemanjon) have struggled with, is that it’s a very unusual game with a wide variety of classes which can be played in a variety of different ways. Contrary to popular belief I am very aware of this and in fact when I play medic, I tend to get very low assists (and hence lower KA/Ds) because of the way I rotate my heals – yet I always have some of the highest HPM.

So trust me. I know the issues and again, if there was something I could do about it in the the time I have, I would. I spend the whole of my Friday evening + Saturday + Sunday and sometimes Monday writing these things and to be honest I can only do that because I am unemployed right now.

As Clark said there are examples of me accounting for this. One particular instance was I gave an honorable mention to Seb despite the fact he had bad stats because his stats, considering how difficult the game was for him + his team, were really good. That is, as a medic main myself, a judgement call I can make. Clark + Tomu assist me in judging other classes that I’m unfamiliar with and everything is checked with everybody at least once normally twice and I’ve had some discussions with those 2 that have lasted sometimes more than an hour about a particular decision I made whether that be for a worst/best/honorable/dishonorable pick.

I gave my readers the opportunity to ditch the negative side of team of the week and the majority chose the status quo. You can argue with me whether or not that is right but at the end of the day I went the fair and democratic route and a decision was made based on nothing else, I was fully prepared to drop that part of my article series.

If you guys don’t like that part then skip it, I’m not forcing you to read it and up until recently people seemed to be very happy with my writing which (hopefully) hasn’t dropped in quality since I started doing this so there’s something for everyone to enjoy.

With some things that have happened in game and IRL recently I’m losing my motivation to play and these articles are pretty much the only connection I have left with the TF2 community for the moment. I hope it’ll be as pleasant an experience as possible for all of those involved.

Also, with the start of the high 6s season, I’m dreading the sheer volume of work I’d have to put in to cover every team which is something I really want to do but I may have to choose to cover only some of it. The question is, where do I draw the line?

Please keep the constructive critique coming as always.

Thank you for your extensive replies. Please understand I never meant to criticise you personally and I deeply appreciate your efforts.

It’s a trivial observation to me that you can’t watch every match and thus are mostly going after log statistics. I didn’t criticise you for that at all. However, this would mean that since you are going for numbers and numbers don’t say everything, there are certain consequences. And I would claim not mentioning players with lower numbers than others is one of them.

The democratic process is fine and dandy, but 9/10 people don’t have a problem with bullying after all ;)

It’s obviously your choice if you leave it in or not. I personally still disagree with keeping a wall of shame whose main purpose is to spotlight the perceived bad players.

At the end of the day, I trust that my readers are smart enough to realise that statistics are never the whole story and that the people I’m criticising either genuinely have room for improvement or very deliberately play a certain style which means they are under-represented in the numbers. If the latter is the case then they would (like you do Selek) know this and act accordingly.

At the end of the day, everything I write is light-hearted. I’m also pretty self-deprecating and like to make jokes at my expense fairly frequently so everyone gets a hammering at some point.

I will leave the articles as is but only because the majority want it and not because I want it.

The democratic process is fine and dandy, but 9/10 people don’t have a problem with bullying after all ;)

I do hope you’re not equating an analysis of some stats to bullying.

Quoted from Casino

[…]

I do hope you’re not equating an analysis of some stats to bullying.

it is though

Hi, I feel like I can tell my opinion since I’ve been both shittalked and praised in R.E.M.’s articles. Judging people by their performances in a videogame makes me sick. A lot of people have taken this personally and feel bad cause of it, they just don’t talk about it openly like some others, and I’m not gonna say names.
Even though I know it’s impossible you can’t just base your opinion on logs, you don’t know what’s going through that specific’s person’s life. Me for example, getting praised in week 4 and then ending up being the worst in week 5. You can’t know what happened to me, and that article certainly didn’t help me.
I don’t know if my team is considered top high since we only came 5th, but I know what it feels like getting bullied on, and I’m definetly against the dishonorable mentions part of the article. Apart from that I think you’re a skilled writer and I always find it quite a pleasant read.

What is the value to the wall of shame? If it’s because people enjoy laughing at others, I don’t think that’s a strong enough reason. People like to read good, informative writing, sprinkled with humour. I don’t think calling people out is necessary, outside of Prem (and even then…). For sure, keep track of players who you think have been performing poorly for yourself, because then commenting on any improvement will be all the more meaningful if it does appear.

While I do a lot of shit talking in casts, I also think there’s a qualitative difference in the two media; people tend to take the written word far more seriously than they do casts, there’s more weight to it. Which is funny because at least the caster is actually watching what the player is doing!