I didn’t quite make it a year away from Clarity staff.
It should come as no surprise that the Clarity Labs concept is immensely appealing to me — it’s just format development on speed. Being completely frank, it’s an idea that’s been wriggling about in my skull for a long time, to the point that, for the past few months, I’d been considering offering the admins to run something of that sort as a side event.
Lo and behold, eisi beat me to that particular punch. As it turns out, handpicking your staff tends to yield good results — though I suppose that shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone ancient enough to remember community voted council additions in RD2L.
I am…very excited about Labs. I’m opting to rant about it here in large part to just revel in said excitement — and seeing as the demo for this kind of blog consists almost entirely of people who share my interest in the organizational side of things, I assume talking about it might happen to infect some of them with that same giddiness.
That being said, this particular diatribe isn’t state sponsore-, er, funded by the globalis-, er, endorsed by the secret cabal of mische-, er…this isn’t official staff communication, insofar as this isn’t a carefully collated summary of a back and forth conducted between staff members. It’s simply me ranting about the things Labs lets us do, and why that’s good and likely to yield benefits for the core Clarity events.
The Why
There exists no such thing as a perfect format. The goal in developing them is to get as close to perfect as possible, and in our context that, generally, will tend to be code for one thing: what upsets the lowest number of players?
Because, mind you, someone will always be upset. The grass is always greener on the other side — or, well, in the other format. We ran multiple seasons of BO3-only double elimination playoffs, and people were (understandably) disgruntled about having the multiple week long breaks necessary for the lower bracket to play out.
We then switched to a pair of lower bracket rounds being played out as BO1s to alleviate that issue — and are now beset by complaints about how much the BO1s suck. Should that pressure mount, some subsequent event might go back to full BO3s (once again incurring the wrath of those who despise going weeks without play), or switch to single elimination, where you’d instead get feedback that you get eliminated too quickly and easily before ever getting into the swing of things.
You might switch back to dual playday to alleviate the issues of the full BO3 gauntlet, only to ostracize a large chunk of your potential playerbase who either can’t commit to multiple days or have schedule conflicts with one of the two days.
You could implement group stage elimination, where a short group stage will lead to dozens of players being eliminated from a tournament quicker than it took to start, or a longer group stage will see teams knowing they’re mathematically eliminated well before the final round(s), making results meaningless for them but potentially crucial for their opponents, who become likelier to cruise through demoralized opposition.
One group will bemoan not getting to face every team and player in the division in certain setups. Another will get thoroughly confused by various implementations of Swiss or GSL. So on, so forth, into infinity.
The grass is always greener.
I say all this for two reasons: one, to reinforce the idea that there is no perfect format, and two…that it’s immensely difficult to rely on the community to solve this particular head scratcher.
I’ve played more than enough seasons and leagues without being part of the organizing team to know that that’s perfectly normal. It’s very human. It’s in our nature to externalize at least some part of failure, particularly in competition.
That might take the shape of, “yeah, this format detail was suboptimal”, or of “this is really stupid, why are they doing it like this? The opposite is so much better!” — and it’s really quite easy to get caught up in that. What it disallows for, however, is rationality in weighing the pros and cons of the alternatives. Because, well, the alternative to the current format isn’t what contributed to your loss, it was the current format.
As you might imagine, this isn’t particularly useful to admins. In what I’ll admit is an issue I seem to have more than most, this can lead to becoming a bit jaded with regard to community feedback, because large swathes of it will amount purely to complaints with no suggestion or proposed alternative.
But then you’ll have 1 in 20 people say something that helps you snap out of it — these are the individuals whose feedback comes with details on why they feel a certain way about one setup, and put thought into their suggestion for an alternative. These suggestions aren’t perfect — long-time admins will miss issues with a format, so it’s only natural for a community member uninvolved in that process to do the same — but it creates a foundation to work off of.
I say none of this to dissuade people from providing any kind of feedback; part of the administrative gig is sifting through it, and even when it isn’t necessarily helpful in outright creating improvements, simply signaling discontent with some aspect of the league or format gives staff a better grasp on community sentiment, which is something that otherwise involves a lot of guesswork.
I promise these ramblings have a point: there is, in my experience, no adequate substitute for simply trying something. When you root the process of considering alternative ideas in lived experience, rather than speculation, you become able to spot issues much more easily and, perhaps most crucially, allow keen community members to craft feedback with context they may not otherwise have.
Enter Labs — a low-risk, noncommittal testing ground for all the things one might find difficult to just jam into the main season.
It’s hardly a panacea; the players will play because that’s what they’re in a video game league to do. They’re not going into it with the intent of carefully contrasting one format against the other. Extracting sentiments — and enabling and enticing the playerbase to do so — is the job of the staff, but that is significantly easier to do when that playerbase has actually tried the idea.
It also isn’t intended to be a panacea. For staff it’s a way to trial things. For players, it’s more Dota, and the staff are glorified players, so that’s well understood — so Labs will feature plenty of less serious events. There are more ideas for both the serious and fun Labs events than there are offseasons a year, so you’ll get your fill of both.
The What
With a rundown of the broader idea laid out, I’d like to go through the current event’s changes to highlight how this concept will be implemented, as well as speak more generally about some of the concepts I find intriguing for future Labs events.
I’ll make an effort to emphasize which concepts are potential considerations for future main events in my eyes, and why or why not I’m classifying them as such.
Timeslots
There’s been much ado about playday selection — from the matter of what day to use alongside Tuesday for dual playday seasons, to determining slots for the now-defunct Clarity Linear (rest in piss), side events, inhouses, all the way to newly bubbling discourse surrounding a secondary event as the playerbase balloons.
The time of day, however, has been locked in place at 20:00 CE(S)T — for good reason, mind, as anything earlier creates issues for the significant UK population, and anything later disqualifies people an hour or two ahead from committing to multiple months of going to bed well past midnight.
Sticking Labs into the Sunday slot, however, allows for something really unique — a timeslot that is significantly earlier than the usual, rather than an hour or two. We settled on 15:00 CE(S)T to begin with.
It’s an idea that I’m very curious about. There’s been occasional chatter about earlier start times, but never by this much. In theory, it’s pretty ideal; late enough that those who like to sleep in on the weekend aren’t out here setting alarms, but early enough that they don’t have to risk lost sleep heading into Monday, and early enough for us to get seriously experimental.
The timeslot itself is one I could get behind making the transition into main event feature. I don’t know that that will ever take the shape of having a dual playday event with 20:00 Tuesday as your first series of the week and 15:00 Sunday as the second, but should the admins ever reach the conclusion that it’s worth spreading the playerbase out over two concurrent events, this might make more sense than, say, Thursday or Sunday 20:00 CE(S)T — if only to have a significant differentiating element between the two events.
What I’m not entirely convinced will (or should) see the light of day in that scenario, however, is the tiebreaker change: should tiebreakers be necessary after the final group games in Labs I, they will be played right then and there, immediately after the group games. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a really neat idea, particularly in its function of condensing the schedule for this initial event, but a BO3 into another game sounds more draining than I think most people would want to deal with regularly.
The Group Stage
Perhaps it’s simply Mikel’s incessant babbling, but I’ve been slowly coming around to quite liking group stage elimination.
It has some issues, in my view, chief of which is that it doesn’t, for lack of better words, fit where it should: it makes sense in my mind for group stage elimination to be a trait of longer group stage events — it makes something like, for example, 8-team single group round robin feel less pointless, and you’re given plenty of chances to earn your spot. The group stage becomes a more important part of the competition, rather than 7 rather meaningless weeks of glorified scrims.
And yet…it’s bad in that format. It’s actually, kinda, really bad — because by the time you arrive at week 7, the fates of some teams are decently likely to be sealed. Without elimination, if you’re locked into the bottom half of the group by week 6 or 7, your remaining games aren’t massively important, but you’re still going into the playoffs, so you’re still looking to improve and practice, if not also improve your seeding. With elimination, you’re not doing anything after the group stage, and have very little incentive to try to win the match — while your opponents in those matchups can, as previously discussed, potentially get an easier match into demoralized opponents, or even just a forfeit win if a team decides they don’t want to play out a match that is entirely meaningless.
Conversely, in shorter group stages — in Clarity’s case most notably two groups of 4 teams playing 3 weeks of round robin (but also including alternatives, chiefly Swiss), introducing elimination means that half the players will be eliminated very quickly. As in, they’ve spent comfortably more time patiently waiting for the season to start than they’ve spent in it.
That all being the case, Labs I features 2x4 RR with group stage elimination, going against what is described above. The reason here is fairly simple — it’s just an effective way of making the event shorter, but it’s not really a trial of whether 2x4 RR elimination is viable for the main season. Nevertheless, future Labs events will undoubtedly feature new division sizes — and in a larger division with team counts that don’t fit quite as neatly into groups and brackets, group stage elimination will likely be a key point.
Predetermined Round 1 Nominations
An idea that surfaces every now and then, I’m fairly convinced that this is likely a much smaller deal than most people imagine it will be. For the most part, the nominations in round 1 of the auction draft already tend to consist mostly of the best players in the division.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t potential benefits to it. The central theme of the pros, in my mind, is that the draft becomes marginally more friendly to newcomers. They would be faced with less pressure right away, and get some extra time to find their bearings, spectating the nomination into bidding process. Additionally, it levels the playing field a slight bit, as more experienced drafters will generally tend to nominate higher MMR players they don’t want in an effort to dent others’ budgets — and particularly if that’s paired with other drafters nominating players below the top 15 or so, it creates openings for those experienced drafters to get good deals on some of the remaining top players. But, again, very minor.
There is also the perspective that this technically runs the risk of forcing a player who might not necessarily end up in the division into it. This is a much more realistic proposition in the middle divisions, where the top-to-bottom MMR range might be fairly tight, and while I haven’t checked this to make sure, I do believe that if you retroactively applied this to prior seasons, there would be cases where a player who slipped through would be locked into a higher division than they ultimately ended up playing. There may also be slight concerns that this actually disincentivizes players from reporting MMR gains to avoid being locked into a div.
All that being said, the concept is what Labs intends to be: experimental. There may be more significant benefits to this that are difficult to see right away; the concerns might be overblown. My rating on the likelihood of this coming to main events is a solid “I have no clue and that’s why Labs is cool.”
I’ve yapped enough for the time being — don’t fret, I’ll be blabbing about Labs for a good while; but, I’d be remiss not to tease what the future holds for the event a bit.
Things you might expect for the next couple Labs events include everything from serious trials of different division sizes, to wacky draft formats like blind drafts, to minor format changes like higher seeds having side/pick choice priority instead of coinflips, to releasing the uncalibrated into the populace.
I’m saying this for the millionth time, but it’s a genuinely exciting project that I’m fairly certain will make Clarity better. That, however, will rely significantly on the community participating in reaching that potential. I don’t really need to do a call to action here — if you’re one of the few little slop piggies who have made it far enough to read this, you’re almost certainly one of the individuals who will have thoughts to share on everything it is we try. I can only ask that you actually do so — because there’s very little that engages the community at large as much as someone making the effort to start the discourse.
