S28 Awards Results/Ballots

[Mooty99]

The fact that the reaction of a bunch of people when you point something out about the voting is "Welcome to ISFL LMAO" should say enough about the voting.

I'm going to take this as an honest criticism and ask - what about the voting is bad? I haven't paid attention to the league (and I don't vote, just count them) but is it the method of counting? Is it the voters? The committee? If we want to improve, I want to know what areas need work.

Personally, although I'm not james, I have problems with all 3 of these. I see an issue when someone gets 50% of first place votes on first ballot, and then the award ends up going to someone else after 3 or 4 different runoffs. I'm not entirely sure how to solve that.

A REALLY big problem comes with the voters. There's unabashed homerism all over the place, that also happens to be inconsistent, some teams don't appear to do research in regards to the candidates, and due to a long history in the league there's probably some teams who specifically don't vote for other teams' players. The unabashed homerism and "what the actual hell were these guys smoking when they voted this" votes are more blatant than anti-team bias, though. As for the committee, I'm doing a bit of writing about that right now, but suffice to say I don't feel that there's enough looking over people getting on the ballots, and I think the MVP ballots need to be changed in some way.

While there certainly were (and always are) contention decisions with awards (defining a "breakout" this season seems to be the big one) the awards processes has been worked on and improved and will continue to evolve and improve. For a few of your points as I see it personally:

1) Run offs replaced points a few seasons ago (voted in by GMs) after issues where the person with the most 1st Place votes did not win. I don't think there is a perfect system and 2nd and 3rd votes are actually less valuable in run offs than in a points based system which is why it was introduced.

2) You are never going to avoid some homerism however this is why we publish everyone's votes, it makes all voters accountable and answerable to how they voted to the general public.

3) Improvements to how things work are always welcome so I look forward to what you have on it especially for how MVP nominations work.

[infinitempg]

Personally, although I'm not james, I have problems with all 3 of these. I see an issue when someone gets 50% of first place votes on first ballot, and then the award ends up going to someone else after 3 or 4 different runoffs. I'm not entirely sure how to solve that.

A REALLY big problem comes with the voters. There's unabashed homerism all over the place, that also happens to be inconsistent, some teams don't appear to do research in regards to the candidates, and due to a long history in the league there's probably some teams who specifically don't vote for other teams' players. The unabashed homerism and "what the actual hell were these guys smoking when they voted this" votes are more blatant than anti-team bias, though. As for the committee, I'm doing a bit of writing about that right now, but suffice to say I don't feel that there's enough looking over people getting on the ballots, and I think the MVP ballots need to be changed in some way.

I think these are fair criticisms - I can't control the voters or the committee but I have proposed a rule for the upcoming summit to switch back to the old point system, since I think it ends up being easier to understand and values second and third place votes more than the runoff system we switched to recently. The runoff system certainly has its merits (especially for real elections) but it seems to add extra complexity where it isn't needed.

I think a little bit of homerism from GM voters is actually okay also, and typically if someone does better than a player on their team GMs will recognize that. HO used to be the "neutral party" in voting but no longer votes because the offseason is really busy already for them. Some people think that the awards committee should vote on the awards and cut GMs out of the process, but I think that would run into the same homerism issues.

There's also a rule proposal to push the MVP/PotY/RotY award voting until the other positional awards have been voted on, as to reduce undue influence on the positional award voting. Players who make the MVP list typically auto-win their positional awards, and so that proposal aims to keep voters blind until the time comes. Now of course, this also means some voters will get clowned for voting someone as QBotY that didn't make the MVP ballot for example.

[The_Kidd]

I was not on the ballot for CBoty after all? Who doth thou playeth such evil games of the mind with thou innocent player?