Time for a change in award voting

[Jubis 1,350]

Just now, Enorama said:

 

Each voter doesn't just pick someone for each award, they rank them in order (usually top 3-5). The votees are assigned points in reverse order of their ranking.

 

For example, here's how it worked out the one time we did it:

 

I like this. 

 

I always thought it would be cool if the David knight was voted on nby all gms.   Im sure ill get bashed for this idea lol

[Beketov 9,095]

40 minutes ago, Enorama said:

Also, bring back rank choice voting while we're at it

"Back" is a bit of a stretch for something that was used for 1 award in 1 season and resulted in the person who got the most "first place" votes not winning the award because someone decided to rank them last.

 

No, I'm not bitter, why do you ask?

41 minutes ago, Jubis said:

Still can't believe Couture wasn't even discussed for the Funk.

The funk is undeniably the hardest to make the ballot for. You have to judge good to great vs. bad to good; you have to find examples from the entire league over 2 seasons, and then you have to narrow all that down to a few people. I get why it's usually the one with the most controversy because when you're looking at only your own team or something it's easy to spot big jumps in quality but when looking at 16 teams it's much more difficult to choose who gets on that ballot.

 

43 minutes ago, Jubis said:

Wheres the 1st gen love when it comes to awards??

First gen love? If people deserve an award they get one; they are entirely based on stats. We don't look at the member involved at any point in the process so it's less abut ignoring first gens and more about them not having the same level of stats.

[Beketov 9,095]

5 minutes ago, Jubis said:

I like this. 

 

I always thought it would be cool if the David knight was voted on nby all gms.   Im sure ill get bashed for this idea lol

Maybe I'm just bitter because Shawn placing himself first and me last cost me that Kanou but a system that means the person with the most first place votes doesn't win the award seems flawed. The amount of 2's on Pepper's showcases exactly the issue with ranked choice: it favours second choice unless it's nearly unanimous on who's best and who's worst.

 

Again though, it's very possible I'm just bitter that I lost the Kanou in the only time ranked choice was ever used. Might just be that the season it was done had an incredibly tight vote.

[Jubis 1,350]

12 minutes ago, Crstats23 said:

As someone who ended up being nominated for the Funk, it surprised me to not see Couture even on the ballot, I’m even surprised I was on the ballot over them

Thank you 

[eaglesfan036 4,605]

I definitely belong on awards committee right @Devise

[mediocrepony 1,216]

lmao another one

[omgitshim 903]

1 hour ago, Beketov said:

Maybe I'm just bitter because Shawn placing himself first and me last cost me that Kanou but a system that means the person with the most first place votes doesn't win the award seems flawed.

 

That's more an issue of a voter abusing their power than an issue with the system itself. Which is the primary reason people want more transparency in the voting process to prevent those kinds of malpractice. Not everyone is going to agree on every award, and there's always going to be some element of bias (even if it's just subconsciously, that's human nature) but voters should be able to give reasoning to their votes. If someone isn't participating in discussions or giving their reasoning elsewhere, then they vote in a direction that is vastly different than the ways the conversation was going, then chuck out their vote. 

[Gustav 6,468]

2 hours ago, bigAL said:

ok actually finally this time: we have to trust our community. Our mods are awesome. We’re getting better at self policing even without the reds. You can’t be making decisions to shield yourself from the potential of personal attacks. That’s the extreme opposite of transparency. With voting especially, I’d like to think that we could handle this. Lots of things here are very personal, but the award voting is one of the most non-human-personal things we do. Elembeck aside, awards are completely about on-fake-ice characters and performance. Bek didn’t win shit last night, but Mikko Lahtinen had to rent a truck to haul all his trophies home. Yes, people are deeply invested in their players and their teams, but the voters arguments begin and end with the objective, quantitative SimonT index. On awards night, it’s all about the players, and I think most of the angry mob you think is waiting for you in the comments knows that too. 

 

I agree. And I'd like to think things could be kept civil. I also take it you weren't on Discord last night...which was a bit of a mess. People taking exception to certain award winners and immediately demanding that votes be released (for what reason? I hope you wouldn't say they're planning on having a polite and civil convo about it), people calling for firing/removal of people who voted a certain way for certain awards, all that good stuff. I was even angrily pinged in particular to explain votes that I didn't even make. Yes, I trust the community as a whole, and yes, most people aren't doing this. But this kind of comes across as "if we make all the votes public, this won't happen" when it was already borderline happening without specifying who voted for what. 

 

Again, I agree that transparency is good. It just so happens that in this particular case, there's a bit of a dark side to it that I'm not confident will not be uncovered.

[rory 1,943]

don't even have to release the names tbh. make them submit 1-2 sentences about what compelled then to vote for whoever they did. After expanding the awards selection of course lmfao 9 people

[Jericho 917]

Publically releasing the votes would be a bad idea. The discussions can get pretty heated among the voters and those are MOSTLY people who have a fairly nuanced take on what's going on. They've generally been expected to be able to justify it to the other BoG members and the Blue team, so there wasn't a complete lack of accountability.

 

The issue you'll run into is that there are cases where there isn't an objective right or wrong answer, and two differing takes could be valid but the guy who loses may or may not see it that way. Way back in the day it was voted on by GMs (which was terrible because you'd have cases where a GM would vote for their guy when he had worse stats in every category than the winner in some cases). But people are going to be pissed if someone votes the other way, and people hold grudges. I've seen people get mad about objective awards before (Most Goals, Most Assists, etc), just because they're mad and they want to blame someone for something.

 

Awards voting is super complicated, and not every member is qualified to weigh in on that discussion critically. The headaches they'll get from angry members aren't reasonably something to expect them to put up with.

[Beketov 9,095]

15 minutes ago, GustavMattias said:

 

I agree. And I'd like to think things could be kept civil. I also take it you weren't on Discord last night...which was a bit of a mess. People taking exception to certain award winners and immediately demanding that votes be released (for what reason? I hope you wouldn't say they're planning on having a polite and civil convo about it), people calling for firing/removal of people who voted a certain way for certain awards, all that good stuff. I was even angrily pinged in particular to explain votes that I didn't even make. Yes, I trust the community as a whole, and yes, most people aren't doing this. But this kind of comes across as "if we make all the votes public, this won't happen" when it was already borderline happening without specifying who voted for what. 

 

Again, I agree that transparency is good. It just so happens that in this particular case, there's a bit of a dark side to it that I'm not confident will not be uncovered.

This is sorta my fear, more so than the argument that we’re trying to stifle transparency or hide our bias or whatever. Personally obviously I’ve got nothing to lose by releasing them because I don’t vote but the anonymity of the vote, in a way, allows people to vote how they feel is best without fear that someone could just come at them for it. It might be extreme but imagine a situation where a voter is deciding between two players, one controlled by an individual who avoids conflict and one controlled by an individual who prefers to argue and debate. They may vote for the latter purely to avoid the argument.

 

With all of that said I agree with your previous point that in general there’s a lack of discussion sometimes which could be problematic. Depending on the ballot certain awards sometimes will hit a “forgone conclusion” stage where everyone just kinda agrees. In general I think we are seeing less of that lately but it does still happen on occasion, usually one one is pretty far and ahead of the others. Tonn for the Shaw this season is a good example. He led in basically everything category, is there much need for further discussion on that front?

[Beketov 9,095]

5 minutes ago, rory said:

don't even have to release the names tbh. make them submit 1-2 sentences about what compelled then to vote for whoever they did. After expanding the awards selection of course lmfao 9 people

There are only so many BOG members and commishes don’t vote. I believe @tfong  doesn’t either on principle of being in the same vein as blue team. So the amount of potential votes is already a bit limited and this season schedule wise the vote went a bit quicker than usual so it’s possible some people missed it.

 

With that said a justification sentence or two for the votes without names attached could be a good middle ground. The vote gets justified without the name being dragged through the mid potentially. We would just have to make sure we don’t hit a point where people decide “that’s not good enough justification” and try to toss out votes which isn’t realistically fair.

[Jericho 917]

1 minute ago, Beketov said:

This is sorta my fear, more so than the argument that we’re trying to stifle transparency or hide our bias or whatever. Personally obviously I’ve got nothing to lose by releasing them because I don’t vote but the anonymity of the vote, in a way, allows people to vote how they feel is best without fear that someone could just come at them for it. It might be extreme but imagine a situation where a voter is deciding between two players, one controlled by an individual who avoids conflict and one controlled by an individual who prefers to argue and debate. They may vote for the latter purely to avoid the argument.

 

With all of that said I agree with your previous point that in general there’s a lack of discussion sometimes which could be problematic. Depending on the ballot certain awards sometimes will hit a “forgone conclusion” stage where everyone just kinda agrees. In general I think we are seeing less of that lately but it does still happen on occasion, usually one one is pretty far and ahead of the others. Tonn for the Shaw this season is a good example. He led in basically everything category, is there much need for further discussion on that front?

 

This is a good point as well. Some of those awards take a lot more discussion than others. When a guy leads his position in every category basically everyone just goes "Yup" and moves on, which is totally reasonable. The complex ones are when you have different guys leading in different stats. "Well Player A had 10 more goals and 30 more hits but Player B had 25 more assists. Who's our top Offensive Defenseman". Those are the ones that take pages to discuss.

[rory 1,943]

Just now, Jericho said:

 

This is a good point as well. Some of those awards take a lot more discussion than others. When a guy leads his position in every category basically everyone just goes "Yup" and moves on, which is totally reasonable. The complex ones are when you have different guys leading in different stats. "Well Player A had 10 more goals and 30 more hits but Player B had 25 more assists. Who's our top Offensive Defenseman". Those are the ones that take pages to discuss.

great, so let's have a bog member write a summation of the debate or everyone write 1-2 sentences about why they voted for the person.

[Gustav 6,468]

3 minutes ago, Beketov said:

Tonn for the Shaw this season is a good example. He led in basically everything category, is there much need for further discussion on that front?

 

Yeah, and that's fine. The winner is obvious, so there's no real need to discuss. I'm more referring to the threads (like this year's Reilly, last year's Stolzschwieger if I'm spelling that right) where one person said one thing about someone they liked, nobody said anything else about that person despite there being surrounding arguments for others, and then that person...somehow wins. Based on discussion I fully expected both of those to go a different direction and I'm not sure why they didn't. 

[Josh 1,672]

Going through the award discussion threads it just seems like a complete lack of interest from most of BoG.

 

Out of every player/member based award, only 5 non-blue members contributed to discussion. And some of them cleared required more discussion. The only award some people commented on was the Elmebeck.

[omgitshim 903]

10 minutes ago, Beketov said:

 

With that said a justification sentence or two for the votes without names attached could be a good middle ground. The vote gets justified without the name being dragged through the mid potentially. We would just have to make sure we don’t hit a point where people decide “that’s not good enough justification” and try to toss out votes which isn’t realistically fair.

 

As long as there's some reasonable justification that isn't "I like him better" or "he has more TPE", that should suffice. There may be some responses that could make someone roll their eyes but as long as there's a line of logic behind it that's ok.

[omgitshim 903]

1 minute ago, Josh said:

Going through the award discussion threads it just seems like a complete lack of interest from most of BoG.

 

If that's the case then bringing back awards committee wouldn't be a bad idea. Let the BoG who are actively involved continue to be involved and bring in a few more members to drive the discussions.

[Jericho 917]

13 minutes ago, rory said:

great, so let's have a bog member write a summation of the debate or everyone write 1-2 sentences about why they voted for the person.

 

I think you missed the entire argument above that about how toxic the community can be toward the voters if those are released. This wouldn't solve that issue at all.

[rory 1,943]

1 minute ago, Jericho said:

 

I think you missed the entire argument above that about how toxic the community can be toward the voters if those are released. This wouldn't solve that issue at all.

Don't have to release individual names to release the sentences lol

[Jericho 917]

Just now, rory said:

Don't have to release individual names to release the sentences lol

 

Yeah that'll solve everything. Then instead of giving people just the results to argue with they can also argue with what everyone said and things will be even more toxic around award times than they already are.

 

Creates more problems than it solves.

[Beketov 9,095]

11 minutes ago, omgitshim said:

 

As long as there's some reasonable justification that isn't "I like him better" or "he has more TPE", that should suffice. There may be some responses that could make someone roll their eyes but as long as there's a line of logic behind it that's ok.

I don’t think any BOG member ever has or ever would vote for someone based on TPE (it’s not listed so they’d have to actually go out of their way to even find it) but I do get the overall argument.

[Devise 4,475]

10 minutes ago, Josh said:

Going through the award discussion threads it just seems like a complete lack of interest from most of BoG.

 

FWIW, given that I was on vacation most of this season I decided not to vote in this years awards as I didn't have the time to go through the threads. When I do vote, I generally do provide discussion as required. 

 

That said, I don't know about this topic. I'm not opposed to having more members help out with awards/getting a larger member pool represented in that, but the last time we did an Award Committee we had to nix it because it eventually wound up having a similar problem we are having here. Not the transparency issue, the issue of discussion. To @GustavMattias's point, even when we had the AC a lot of award debating for close awards boils down to one or two good arguments and people picking their sides after the fact. It's very rare where we have an award where there are 3 or 4 legitimate winners so the conversation bounces back and forth in a way that suggests a more open ended voting process. In most cases when the award isn't open and shut it's because there is a second candidate who is likely just as good as the first, so people are cherry picking arguments for what works for them to justify a vote. 

I have no issue provided the usernames aren't shown if we show a tally of total votes. Maybe couple that with adding people specifically to BoG with permissions only to post in the Awards section, so instead of shuffling up the system entirely just bring in BoG Awards specific members to increase the number of people we have voting on awards, and add to the transparency as these members would then be able to see some of the BoG conversations going on outside of Awards, and obviously be able to report on how the Awards process is handled as well. 

[Baozi 1,662]

Bring back award committee and people that actively are willing to put the effort into it

 

Tbf back when i did vote, I had hella heated discussions like FACEoffs and hits and PIMS related especially in the two way forward categories

 

There are certain things I look for in each award certainly but it does require people to actively want to look at context of stats, not just people being forced to vote so they just cherry pick stats.

Edited March 12, 2021 by tfong

[Jubis 1,350]

 

Look at s75 ROTY nominees and winner and look at the same for s76 ? 

Either the forwards from s75 got screwed or the D from s76 

Just doesn't seem consistent .  

And yes I looked heavily over all stats 

 

Note: I love both members that won.  Just using this as an example based on stats

Edited March 12, 2021 by Jubis