CommunityFortress

First off, please understand this is a blog, which means it's not commft's announcement for esea-open. This is coming from someone who is trying to state his own opinion, not someone who is trying to get his team a higher seed. I truly believe the ESEA admins dropped the ball on the latest playoff seeding and here's why:

Today, ESEA's admins officially announced the seeding for the esea open playoffs. For the longest time, there were 2 speculations for how the seeding will go. Killing in the name and DaishiKiller wrote them out well in their gotfrag posts:

Killing in the name:
Going by head to head rules...

LMM (Lores Merry Men) is the only team to beat GC (Gentlemen's Club) in the 12-4 pack. Therefore LMM must be above GC. Now GC beat the others except detox. So since GC must be above HF (Hostile Faction) and EX (eXpertise), LMM must be above those three. In the case of detox they lost to both HF and Ex, which GC beat which must put them lower than those two and finally Ex beat HF. LMM > GC > Ex > HF > Detox

4. LMM
5. GC
6. Ex
7. HF
8. Detox

DaishiKiller:

You take the head to head record for all the teams tied. Then when you have a tie like in GC and HF you take rounds won.

Team records vs. the 5 tied 12-4 teams.
eX 2-1
LMM 1-0
GC 1-1
HF 1-1
Detox 0-2

Both options seemed reasonable and adhered to the rules stated by the ESEA website:

• Open division (double elimination bracket) - top 12 teams based upon:
  • Overall record then by
  • Head to head record then by
  • Highest amount of regulation rounds won
  • Single map playoff if all other tie breaker scenarios are indecisive

When the actual seeding was released, it shows that the admins have thrown out the head to head records and decided to use highest amount of regulation rounds won to decide the seeding.

ehfk, head tf2 admin explained it like this:

Alright, so here is the explanation:

Since the five team that were 12-4 did NOT face every team once, head to head can't be used as a proper tie break. Therefore the next tie breaker has to be used. Why do the seeds not match the rounds for listed on the site? Because the site sucks and it lists forfeits as 16-0's (cs style). So we had to go through and tweak the forfeits.

ESEA has always been set up so forfeits do not penalize the team who is receiving them, so for all forfeit wins we used these rounds for:
Push Maps: 5
Stopwatch: 2
KOTH: 4
CTF: 16

So the final rounds for ended up being like so:
GC 89-41
Detox 89-46
HF 83
EX 82
LMM 76

Although I do agree with ehfk's opinion that the head to head matchup is flawed. The Total Rounds seeding is also flawed. The total rounds included the 2 matches every team played on turbine. When put against a bad opponent on Turbine, teams have the ability to put up 3 or 4 times the score that a team can get on a CP map. Therefore, you can almost say that the 2 Turbine matches during the season decided the tiebreaker for playoff seeding.

Here are the total points each team gained on Turbine:

GC - 43
Detox - 39
eXpertise - 29
HF - 27
LMM - 27

Very similar to the current seeding.

However, if you just took out the 2 turbine matches and added the total points up, you would get a completely different seeding:

HF 56
EX 53
Detox 50
LMM 49
GC 46

Are there any other options to decide seeding? Well, nothing we can implement right now and change for this playoff, it is already too late. But it is time for the admins of ESEA to implement the Strength of Schedule tiebreak used by TWL or the CPI rating used by CEVO. Having one flawed tiebreaker backing up another flawed tiebreaker is unacceptable for TF2's best league...a league that players had to pay $20 to play.