Rules Discussion—Match Scoring

We’re not quite out of the woods yet. I’d like to do all that I can to ensure the final scoring of the Nyroth arc is conducted fairly.

The “dark” nature of the BoP provides a “veil of ignorance” opportunity to discuss this topic without anyone really knowing how it would help or hinder their faction specifically. So let’s take advantage of that.

Unranked Summoners

At first, we continued the usual practice of counting the higher of S3 or S4 rank. This was doable, despite the hundreds and hundreds of matches in need of scoring, because LoL Nexus conveniently displayed both ranks side-by-side in screenshots. When that data ceased to be readily available, we switched to Season 4 rank only.

We also adopted this S4-only approach for Featured Matches. That eventually proved to be problematic, and we’ve now reverted to using the higher of S3 and S4 rank for such purposes. (This requires more work, but is much more manageable in a Featured Match context than in the scoring of hundreds of individual pick-up matches.)

I don’t see a way that we can revert to using the higher of the two ranks for pick-up match scoring. Our current policy is to score using S4 rank only, even if the scorer happens to know the Summoners’ S3 ranks. (There may be some places where a scorekeeper has, in an effort to be thorough, manually overridden the displayed S4 rank with the S3 rank. I’d like to request that those be reverted: fairness demands that this approach be “all-or-nothing”, and unless the scorekeepers want to commit to researching the S3 ranks of every single Summoner named in every single match since the S4-only change was put into effect, I don’t think it would be fair to do so selectively.)

The problem there is that it’s entirely possible that there are some Summoners out there who, e.g., were unranked in Season 4 but had been Gold or Platinum in Season 3.

A solution I’ve proposed: discount the value of the match by 10% for every unranked Summoner in the match, to reflect our diminished certainty about their “true” rank. This is in no way meant to “penalize” unranked Summoners: rather, it’s meant to acknowledge a gap in the system, which leaves us less sure of the proper weighting of a match the more “unranked” Summoners are in it.

I think we should decide one way or the other on this matter before the Rawlsian veil is lifted.

I’ve created a discussion thread here.

Scoring Corrections

The most democratic way to handle scoring corrections and objections is to ask everyone to report errors for resolution.

You can view the Balance of Power spreadsheet here. If you see any potential errors or other problems, please use the form embedded below to alert the scoring staff:

They will be asked to review these submissions and note the resolution on each one. I will help as best as I can.

That said, we do need to draw the line somewhere. I am establishing the following timeline:

• December 26—comments on pre-dark matches. If you have any comments about the matches currently in the BoP (i.e. those since before the BoP went “dark”), please submit them by midnight Pacific (or so) on December 26.
• December 27—comments on the final set of matches. We’ll allow an extra day for any comments or issues on the final set of matches.

We will then post the final score as soon as we’re able to resolve any such issues.

One particular type of issue I’d like to request your help on detecting: it seems that recently LoL Nexus has begun glitching, leading to some matches with Summoners improperly labeled as “unranked”. I’ve gone through and fixed some of these myself, but if you see any matches with a large number of unranked Summoners, you may want to take a closer look.

I’ve created a discussion thread here, as well.

Final Scoring

We need to make the final decisions at some point, unless we want to spend literally weeks combing through every single match looking for errors. I’ve allotted several days for people to hunt down the most significant errors. (Our scoring staff is quite conscientious, so there probably are not many of those, but I wanted to make sure people had an opportunity to look it over themselves.)

Once the final decision is announced, sometime after December 27, that result will be locked in. Even if someone suddenly discovers a massive error that would completely change the outcome, it will not be changed after the comment period ends. Again, I really doubt such an error exists, but smaller ones probably do, and some arcs come down to a very small number of points. So please, take this opportunity to check things over.

Likewise, there will be no retroactive changes to scoring procedures after that time. I’ll do one final update to the tier-gap winrate database, apply it, and then that will be that.

Please raise all scoring methodology issues in this thread. I’ve alerted the scoring staff of said thread; please discuss with them there. I’ll take the heat for the final decisions, but I’ll defer to their judgment in most cases.

—CupcakeTrap