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Originally Posted by devonin
My problem with the argument, especially the one that points to other esports not having formal divisions (For competitive play they absolutely do, by having divisions bounded by your ELO and MMR and matching you against players of similar skill) is that we have a game where literally 100% of the playing of the game happens via this website, and 100% of "official" events are run by our team of staff.
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e-sports doesn't have formal divisions
in competition, which is the point i've been trying to get across in the first place. everything that i'm arguing against has to do with the constraint of divisions
in competition. major competitions do not have these divisions.
skill rankings that determine your capability in a game are great and incentivize player growth. however, tournaments do not give a shit what your skill grouping is. and e-sports follow this motto.
if you're at the top of your game, you are expected to do well in a tournament because you are classified to be in the top of that rank. that doesn't mean someone who is of a lower rank can't perform well in a tournament at all.
in LoL, you can
expect all of the competitors at the highest levels to be Challenger because that's likely the absolute minimum to get to a professional team that plays in a major circuit. there is nothing that forces you to be that level, but you're likely not going to succeed unless you're at the top-of-the-top. this fits into the tournament structure i mentioned: you'll need to be at the top.
in Rocket League, you can
expect all of the competitors at a large event to be Grand Champion, because that's likely the absolute minimum to get to a professional team that plays in a major circuit. same thing as above. nothing forces you to be that level, but you're likely not going to succeed unless you're at the top-of-the-top.
in Apex Legends, you can
expect all of the competitors at a large event to be Apex Predator ranking, because that's likely the absolute minimum to get to a professional team. this game is newer and because of that, there's room for exceptions, which fits even more nicely in this example that there are people NOT at the top "ranking" still playing at the top levels.
even for non e-sports games, chess tournaments are a great example - as some tournaments have a separate bracket depending on whether or not they're FIDE-ranked players. as a result, you won't find someone like Nakamura/Caruana/Carlsen playing in the same bracket as you, but you're bound to have a shitton of players way better than you in the non-elite bracket.
i'll keep saying this until i'm blue in the face. competitions with excessive divisions are a complacency that has been developed within this community, and the existence of this ridiculous separation causes a nightmare in logistics.
for many other games, if you want exposure to competition, you have to play in *smaller* events.
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There's nowhere else to HAVE tournaments to do seeding, and ranking and sorting so there can be a major event that only invites the top players, and other lower tier events where high tier players won't waste their time for lower ability players to shine and improve that are open to anybody etc.
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having events that are split into upper/lower flights is not terrible. if a standard can be established to showcase players who might be "ranked" and players who might be above the curve, whatever. but FFR needs to lose this obsession of hyper-separating divisions more and more and more. we had basically an argumentative discussion about the incorporation of a 7th division back during the 8th Official Tournament and had another one this tournament. people keep advocating for more and more and more and more separation - when in reality, there really should just be a pool of players who are interested in playing an event that is *maybe* split once and that's it.
the problem is that FFR itself also doesn't have a good system for playing competitively as it is because your performance is not determined by your ability to perform in a given moment - it is about how much you can improve over a fixed period of time. as a result, there's also no variance in capability. you can't really "underperform" unless you've lost enough skill to fall an entire division beneath, which then opens the doors for people to complain about the fact that they had some sort of issue that merits them needing to be dropped a division -- which is something that also gets eliminated when you remove the notion of division.
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That's also always been one of the biggest flaws of the prizing system which is what actually makes people sandbag, not the division system on its own necessarily.
You are rewarded dramatically better for finishing 1st in a division than finishing basically ANYWHERE other than near the top of the division above it, so you have a structural incentive to try and NOT move up until after you've been placed, which, combined with not moving anybody up -during- the event is what makes people not put effort into having their level actually reflective of their skill.
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except that's an inherent fault with the division system... people are contained within this grouping that they're trying to keep themselves within. this would happen if there were no prizes, because people are more willing to say they got a better rank in a lower division than they would be to see a larger number out of an even larger pool of contestants.
none of this happens if divisions are removed. you get what you get out of it.