08-19-2022, 11:07 PM_Blitz_ Wrote:

08-19-2022, 05:32 AMRomanesEuntDomus Wrote: That's absolutely fair, there are two main issues though in my opinion. The first is that Award criteria is much more fluid and not nearly as constant over time as people might think. Of course there is a general set of criteria that we largely agree on for each Award that I can share, but it is still an ever-evolving process. Whenever a new engine is announced or major rule changes happen within an engine, like we just had for tactics for example, the Awards landscape changes. And that has happened at least 3-4 times over the last 15 or so seasons. Each time that happens, it tends to take a few seasons for everyone to adjust and determine how the value of different stats has been affected by the change and what implications that has for the Awards process. And even when there is relative calm for a couple of seasons, things still evolve as a natural part of the process and you just happen to identify little things over time that you think should be adjusted, especially when new members come into the Commitee.

And that's essentially my second point here, the role of the individual member. Every member of the Committee sees things a bit differently and I actually think that's a Strength, not a Weakness. To a certain extent I want people to use somewhat different criteria for the various Awards, as long as the are able to give a good justification for why they decided that way. It gives us much better input and more differing points of view to then distill the truth from. Of course you still need to adhere to certain standards and I will call people out and am not afraid to remove them if their votes don't make any sense but that rarely ever happens. So I could absolutely make a post denoting the criteria used for the different Awards (maybe I'll actually do that in here in a bit) but ultimately that would be my criteria and not the definitions shared by everyone else on the Committee.

08-18-2022, 09:29 PMRAmenAmen Wrote: Speaking as the J Awards head (though I'm sadly on my way out since I'm GMing), Awards are tough, voting is tough, and the rationale behind each committee member's vote is different. In my time on the J committee, I've made it a policy *not* to share ballot results, because I don't think it would do anything but create unneeded controversy and take away from celebrating the award winners. I'm not opposed to what you're referencing either, but a few things would absolutely need to change in order to make this happen.

First, the awards committee, while an awesome job to have, is not a lucrative job. The pay for a season of awards work is about the same as 1-2 media pieces a dedicated user could write up in a few hours. That's not to say the committee doesn't work hard on their decisions, but that many committee members are spending their SHL time working on other jobs or media to make sure they earn enough to keep up with training, coaching, and their trading card addictions. Committing to more extensive writeups to back their award ballot decisions would take a lot more time, and would *need* to be backed by additional pay to justify the expected work. It would also likely delay getting results out to the rest of the site. While the decision process begins at the end of the regular season, we also each have players invested in the season, streams to watch, and many of us have war rooms to participate in, which get much busier during the playoffs, when we're also hard at work discussing awards and filling out ballots. If the expectation from the committee is to write some in-depth analysis, it would either need to delay the awards presentation by another week or two (something nobody wants), or it would need to be a separate task to be done during the early stages of the following season (again, adding an extensive amount of expected work).

I love this kind of analysis, and maybe this *is* the direction we want to go, but if it is, please be patient with your awards committees. And also pay them more.

I'll reply to both at once because I think you hit a lot of the same points.

RED, that's exactly where I was trying to go, I just wasn't as sure how to phrase it and I didn't want to assume too many things. Ramen, I can understand that perspective and focus, and I agree that it should be focused on the winners. For what it's worth, I seem to recall the piece I mentioned having anonymous excerpts.

It's completely understandable that things change and the determination changes with those things. It'd be nonsensical and probably negligent if they never changed with as dynamic as the league has been in the almost 3 years that I've been here. I think the disconnect is that y'all are on V66 of how this works, and there's a lot of people who aren't. Personally, I'm still somewhere around V60. Ultimately what I'm asking is for some idea of what V66 of what the Awards Committee is looking at is like. I agree wholeheartedly that bringing different viewpoints and justifications for consideration is something that should be in practice, and I'm glad that you do that. That's not where I get lost though; I get lost on the nuances of the common ground that you're starting from. I'm not sure that you necessarily have to share results and put people on blast for who and how they voted, and honestly I don't really care about how the committee voted on an individual basis because it can be very different. I want to know ultimately where the committee agreed and what made them decide the things that they decided.

As an example, the most mad I've ever been about an Award was that I didn't get nominated for the Dar in S59. I thought that the ideal Jeff Dar candidate had 1) solid statistic representation in blocked shots and hits, 2) more than 60 points, and 3) a GA:TA ratio greater than 1. Time came, and I wasn't nominated. It didn't matter so much that I had solid hits and blocks, didn't matter that I had more points. Somebody ultimately passed down that GA:TA is the golden stat for winning the Dar, or was at the time. I got mad because I was left to interpret what was going to happen, thought I might get a good thing, and then I was wrong. It was especially frustrating to me because I thought that the Dar and the Holmes are similar awards, and I won a Holmes with a similar stat distribution. I'm okay with it changing, but my complaint here and the request for more of a breakdown in the process is that the worst part of change is finding out that it's different when you've gotten your hopes up. I feel like cutting off a lot of that "why-why-why" type of thinking at the knees by talking more about committee practice is a good way to keep that from happening. It also allows more space to focus on the winners and their achievements.

As a bit of a hot take, I think especially as we move to a culture where we're not testing and finding what works, offering a system of values to strive toward is a new aspect that we may begin to see people look for in Awards more frequently. I think the new meta may not be as well decided by FHM in the coming 3 to 5 seasons, but we'll see it coming out of the All-Star selections, Fantasy stats, and Awards noms. People want to be good, it's part of the game, and that inspiration from builds has always been pulled. I think now that people shouldn't be doing their own testing, we'll see more copycatting. 

I also think paying people more is generally worthwhile in the SHL. Make it rain.

The thing is that while all these small shifts happen and Awards criteria changes, we often aren't conciously aware of most that ourselves so it is really hard to pin it down and do write-ups about it. And for a lot of Awards there isn't actually a "consensus" to speak of but competing interpretations and viewpoints going up against each and one being successful, that a significant portion of the Committee might not agree with. It's tough to verbalize an objective summary in that case as it will always only cover the opinion of a portion of the Committee. But I don't want to weasel my way out of this, I can absolutely try to put up some summaries like that this season.

In regards to your own personal case, looking at the stats now I assume you are talking about S60 and not S59, right? I think what eliminated you from contention there for a lot of people was that you didn't see significant PK-time. PK-time is not a stat where having as much of it as possible will give you a crazy edge over the rest, but one where you simple need to be above a certain cut-off to really be considered and I think for most voters that is between 0:30 and 1:00. Another factor where the nominees had you beat by a good margin were possession stats (relative Corsi/Fenwick), which actually is one example of a Stat that has changed quite a bit over time. It uses to be very important for some Awards a few seasons back but it's significance has diminished since as certain mechanisms of the Sim have become more apparent to us.