Guild Wars 2

Hey all, Sireph from Mistpedia here,

Mistpedia formed in 2013 with a focus on providing a platform for the Guild Wars 2 community to compete, grow, and have fun together. When Blu, Kenigmatic and I first put together the plans to form an organization to promote the scene, we made it our mission to serve the PvP community and its needs. One of those needs today, unfortunately, is to address the issue of recent accusations of favoritism and bracket fixing by Mistpedia in Tournament of Legends 2’s EU finals towards the most recent addition to our organization’s family, Team MIST.

Mistpedia first approached the team then known as The Civilized Gentlemen because we felt it was a great opportunity to work with a consistent group of people who were willing to put in as much work into perfecting their gameplay as we were with putting out tournaments and events. Both sides decided this would be the best course of action and Team MIST was created. To us, this team was not only a group of strong and talented players but ambassadors to Guild Wars 2. They are personalities that we felt, if given enough support, could inspire more people to play and that could only benefit the scene. The players would help us grow the Guild Wars 2 scene through entertaining livestreams and content that. We still feel this way.

Today players have accused us of changing seeding into the Tournament of Legends 2 EU Finals for “no apparent reason”. The issues of Conflicts of Interest (CoIs) have been brought up as well, and these are not topics that we take lightly. To answer any questions about CoIs first, we looked to the examples of established eSports organizations in other games for the best way to conduct ourselves. We maintain that it is possible to host large events as a team organization. Examples of this in StarCraft 2 are prevalent in Team Liquid’s TSLs and Evil Geniuses Master’s Cups, both events that netted players thousands of dollars and had players from the hosting teams competing in them. We have realized, however, that our community may not be ready for an organization like that. At the end of the day Mistpedia is here to serve the Guild Wars 2 Community’s best interests. So it is with a heavy heart that I announce that Mistpedia and Team MIST are parting ways. This is clearly not the outcome we wanted but splitting the organizations seems to be the best course of action at this time.

Post continued in next comment

To address the other accusation, that of bracket fixing. Some players believe that the seed of Cheese Mode was changed without reason, giving Team MIST an unfair advantage going into the finals. The original post assumes that Cheese Mode was to get the fourth seed and this assumption is just flat out incorrect. The way we were seeding teams was never disclosed to the public ’until Cheese Mode approached us. It was explained that due to their great performances in ESL Weekly Cups, their seed was decided to be 2nd. I spoke to our head admin, Olrun, and he explains it far better than I can:

“The main goal of bracket seeding is to make sure teams place where they deserve. In an eight team bracket, you want the top 4 to win their first match, the top 2 to win their second match, and the best team to win. In the past, tournaments were seeded based purely on observation. The community has almost unanimously agreed that the leaderboards were inaccurate. However, in the Tournament of Legends 2, we decided to try something different. We used the peak leaderboard rating achieved by the players to give us a baseline and made minor alterations to that. The reasoning behind the alterations was that the peak leaderboard rating method didn’t seem accurate at the extremes. On the lower end, this was irrelevant because they were all grouped in the bottom 16 of each bracket. However, on the high end, the inaccuracy was relevant. For that reason, we made changes based on team performance.

In regards to the finals brackets, Team Mist won the first Tournament of Legends. It would take significant proof to unseat them as 1st seed, and I can’t say that we’ve seen that. However, the point of brackets is not to screw over one team or another. Cheese Mode does not dispute that they deserve a seed higher than 4th.

However, this is not to say that we don’t acknowledge the COI in these situations. That is why we’ve decided to implement a publicly accessible ELO system. Future MP tournaments will be seeded with this ELO system. More about it will be released soon, but rest assured that we do acknowledge the issue.” – Olrun

I spoke with players today about the peak leaderboard rating system and it is clear that many if not most players do not like it. Since that’s the case, we’re getting rid of it and have been planning to for a while. Olrun said that we would release more info on the new rating system soon but I’m going to give it to you now.

Click the following link to read about the rating system we will use in the future:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Y29VFutvrDxq8X1YbUS9pvDxp-XhFZTUMsauyp0U2aE/edit

So what happens now?

Effective immediately, Team Mist and Mistpedia are parting ways. We still believe in the massive potential of the squad and wish them the very best. They have a pedigree of working with established competitive organizations already and we hope that in the future they will continue to play at and exceed the level they are now.

More transparency across the board.
We want you all to feel more involved in the competitive community. We want you to feel listened to. As such we are implementing the new ELO System. Updates from the Mistpedia crew will be more frequent and we will actively seek feedback from top teams.
We want to hear your feedback so please let us know what you think!
You can email events@mistpedia.net for event specific topics or rule related issues.
Reach the crew on twitter @Mistpedia or on http://facebook.com/Mistpedia
My personal email is always open. You can email will@mistpedia.net any concern and I’ll do my best to get back to you as soon as possible.

Finally we are going to impose the following rule on ourselves:
All Mistpedia Staff are prohibited from participating in Mistpedia tournaments outside of weekly cups.

Again, we started Mistpedia to give the community more room and tools to grow. This is a game and scene that we love dearly. We have supported it through thick and thin and will continue to do so. If you’ve got any questions, comments, flames, or otherwise, my inbox is open for you.

-Will ‘Sireph’ Abreu
Co-Founder, Mistpedia

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So let me get this straight, you guys had a set way the brackets would be seeded – some math magic about average top leaderboard rankings or whatever – and then based on the results of the ESL Weekly Cups, you decided to go ahead and just deviate from your original established system… just because?

The ESL Weekly Cups were always a factor in seeding, the changes were not a deviation.

I appreciate the public statement, and I’m happy to see that you split. Regardless of what other “eSports” deem appropriate, CoI is a massive issue, and just because some other people get away with it doesn’t mean its okay.

Neko.9021:

-________-

So let me get this straight, you guys had a set way the brackets would be seeded – some math magic about average top leaderboard rankings or whatever – and then based on the results of the ESL Weekly Cups, you decided to go ahead and just deviate from your original established system… just because?

Yeah… this lead to this issue really. This is why Riot was recently put under heavy pressure to make their seeding selection (for Worlds) public; not because people don’t trust Riot, but because it squashes all possible accusations and issues. I honestly am not sure why there was secrecy about this, we constantly criticize ANet for not being open with us… and then a player made organization does something very similar. The brackets should have been entirely random, or the process should have been 100% public, but surprises like this lead to issues.

Anyway, best of luck to Mistpedia, and I hope there are no issues going forward.

Sireph.2581:

In regards to the finals brackets, Team Mist won the first Tournament of Legends. It would take significant proof to unseat them as 1st seed, and I can’t say that we’ve seen that. However, the point of brackets is not to screw over one team or another. Cheese Mode does not dispute that they deserve a seed higher than 4th.

After that logic shouldn’t 55HP Monks be 2nd seed since they got 2nd in TOL and won the majority of the ESL matches against CM since then or at least against the pug that used the name CM? Seems legit.

@Neko The Tournament of Legends was a very unique tournament, incorporating players of all skill levels. With rewards offered at every tier in a single elimination tournament, approximately correct seeding of every team affects the prize distribution. How do we seed teams that we’ve never seen or heard of before? The obvious choice is the leaderboards. However, with the way decay works, current leaderboard rating wouldn’t necessarily be accurate for most teams. That’s why I went for peak. However, most top tier players will tell you that the leaderboards are a joke. I agree that the leaderboards are not necessarily an accurate representation of skill level at high levels of play. That’s why we adjusted the seeding based on performance in weeklies and team queues. Ideally, I would have picked peak leaderboard rating in the past month or two, but I didn’t have access to that information. We never deviated from the system of using the leaderboards as a baseline and making modifications based on recent performance.

@Bhawb There was never any secrecy as to how the seeding was done. We told anyone who asked how it was done. However, we do understand the desire for it to be 100% public. At the time, we didn’t have the capability of making accurate brackets without putting some amount of opinion in it. The ELO system we’re releasing now should fix this issue.

@Keksmuffin CM took the past two weeklies, and it was in the opinion of Mistpedia and parties within the Authorized Shoutcaster Program, who we showed the seeding to before making them public, that CM should have been the second seed.,

at first I didnt understand how anyone could complain about top 8 seeding when the best team will win no matter who they face Then I realized that everyone is a carebear and worrying about the 35 losers getting the prizes they “deserve” for not winning the tournament is important to them…

If I were Anet I wouldn’t want one of my tournament hosts being the “sponsor” of a team. Regardless of whether or not they give their team an advantage in any way possible, it’s still seen as an “inside man” to sway things for them. You can’t trust one man’s word on the internet..

I’m not saying Mistpedia has done this, I’m just saying it doesn’t look good on Anet to allow for this.

If you look at past tournaments like vVv Gaming’s tournaments, you can see things were done differently. I was the captain of vVv’s team and although vVv sponsored the tournament, they had absolutely nothing to do with seeding or organization of the tournaments they hosted. I, myself, did not even get to know the brackets or anything about the tournament until everyone else did.

If I recall correctly.. Blu and Sireph organized the tournament while vVv just sponsored it and their sponsors gave out prizes.

Would it not make more sense for another organization to seed and oversee certain parts of events that people may have anything to do with giving any particular team an edge?

Explaining a little bit more about the ELO system as I got a few PMs about it already: Everyone will start at 1200 rating when they are first added to the list. Were going to start tracking matches this weekend with the ToL2 finals and any tournaments from then onward that meet the requirements listed on that sheet will be fed into the system. Were going to use the ELO ratings for any Conquest events we run with the exception of our weeklies, so assuming it is kept up to date there should no longer be issues with seeding in these events as we will seed based purely off of the ELO rating system, and not on opinion or arbitrary leaderboard ratings. This system will also be open for anyone to use and view, so if other TOs in the future are looking for a fair way to seed they may use our ratings. MP is acting as the manager of this ELO system, but anyone with a match that meets our requirements is free to submit a match to be entered into the system so long as it meets the requirements listed on the page.

@Zirith Getting 2nd place in a major tournament is nothing to sneeze at. It’s perfectly reasonable to desire good bracket seeding, especially with single elimination. That’s why we do our best to ensure accurate brackets.

@tichorum We understand the issue of COI. That is why Mistpedia and Team Mist are splitting ways and we are implementing the ELO system. This simultaneously removes the COI and removes the possibility of a COI affecting brackets in the future. Hopefully these changes assuage your concerns.

Sireph.2581:

Cheese Mode does not dispute that they deserve a seed higher than 4th._

Future MP tournaments will be seeded with this ELO system.

We dont dispute that we deserve a spot higher than 4th? Now you are just making things up to make you guys look better ^^

Fact is, when we found out that we were not being seeded as 4th we contacted mistpedia directly to change the brackets to how they should be, rather than “favoring” us so that we wouldnt meet TCG till the finals. Mistpedias only responce to denying this obviously correct choice to put the brackets how they should be was, “Yeah but one CM member is only saying this because of personal vendetta with mistpedia”. After this they continued to ignore the situation.

It looks they have still ignored it, as in Sirephs wall of text there was no mention to actually change the seeding so that CM would be seeded 4th (Like we should be). We believe that not putting us as a 4th place seed is only favoring TCG, it doesn’t matter if you drop the tag Team Mists if you still continue to favor them.

The fact that you have said that future tournaments organised by mistpedia will be doing it right kinda suggests your thoughts in ToL 2 are – “Oh well, we messed this up already lets not fix it though bcs we only have 3 days to change brackets and thats simply not enough time!!”

Also I saw a few comments blaming Anet/Gw2 for this screw up so I thought I should address it. Anet had little/nothing to do with these brackets and tournament so there is no use chucking blame at GW2 only mistpedia.

Frae

How many failures can we as a community, or arenanet stand before mistpedia gets the punishment for all the failures they have done? Like seriously.

Also at the " we are no longer going to be associated with team mist" crap…

THAT’S NOT THE POINT. You still changed the brackets at the time of when you were with them. Just because you aren’t not doesn’t mean you screwed up, nor does it fix the issue, nor do we forgive this stupidity. lol

Guys it’s a fun tourney nothing rlly competetive like WTS, no “real” prizes. I think your reactions are a little bit to much.
It’s not ok that they probably changed the brackets into TM’s favour but it isn’t a tourney where it rlly matters I think.
WTS would be another thing but not ToL2.
So chill guys and have fun.
If Cheese Mode is just half as good as they think they are, they win it anyways.

Guild Wars 2 tournaments have a history of terrible transparency. Reading these posts as an outsider is just hilarious and makes everyone involved look really unprofessional. How hard can it be to make clean rules about seeding?

These tournaments are being organised by multiple people and yet stuff like this has kept popping up over the past years (if its not seeding then other forms of “drama” caused by the lack of transparency).

If you are actually saying as Mistpedia admins that you are looking at how other big esports events are being organised then either you are lying or insulting those tournaments.

What I would love to see from community organised tournaments are reports like this as well:
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/starcraft-2/464612-destiny-i-financial-report
http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/458859-sandisk-shoutcraft-invitational-post-mortem

Both these tournaments have been mainly organised by one individual (Destiny with almost no experience and TotalBiscuit with a lot of experience) and were very high quality tournaments.
Both these tournaments have in common that the format is clearly posted for everyone to see and they give an extensive financial report after the tournament is over. This is the kind of stuff that you need in order to prevent drama especially in the petite esports community that Guild Wars 2 has.

“The obvious choice is the leaderboards. However, with the way decay works, current leaderboard rating wouldn’t necessarily be accurate for most teams. That’s why I went for peak. "
Make this know of all BEFORE the tournament, Team will tryhard their rating, Teamq will be less boring, more competitive, and leaderboard more representative. it is also simple.

Keksmuffin.1450:

Sireph.2581:

In regards to the finals brackets, Team Mist won the first Tournament of Legends. It would take significant proof to unseat them as 1st seed, and I can’t say that we’ve seen that. However, the point of brackets is not to screw over one team or another. Cheese Mode does not dispute that they deserve a seed higher than 4th.

After that logic shouldn’t 55HP Monks be 2nd seed since they got 2nd in TOL and won the majority of the ESL matches against CM since then or at least against the pug that used the name CM? Seems legit.

Exactly this, your excuse is really bad btw <3

It seems to me, changing a team to a higher seed is deserved. It seems that Formerly TM, CM, and 55 HP all deserve to be somewhere in the top 3. I believe that Formerly TM should be seeded at the 1 position leaving CM and 55 HP to wrestle it out for the 2nd seed. Now, I know nothing about EU, but, from what I just skimmed in the comments it seems 55 HP has been better than CM and that CM in THE LAST 2 WEEKS has become better. This was shown in the weekly ESL cups that that happened DURING ToL. Because ToL has been going on for over a month. In that case, It seems like if I were watching March Madness, and at the start of it some team was doing ok, but then by the final 8 they started to do really well in practice we bump that 5 seed up to a 2 seed. That doesn’t make sense, the tournament is still going on and would be highly suspicious, such as happened here. Therefore, come up with a set system beforehand and fill the teams in ONCE or seed all 128 teams.

Coming out with an ELO system that we can see is all and good, but if you keep reseeding up until over 80% of the tourney has completed then people could potentially throw games and such just to get a good seeding, which is messed up.

Fraelin.7409:

Sireph.2581:

Cheese Mode does not dispute that they deserve a seed higher than 4th._

Future MP tournaments will be seeded with this ELO system.

We dont dispute that we deserve a spot higher than 4th? Now you are just making things up to make you guys look better ^^

Fact is, when we found out that we were not being seeded as 4th we contacted mistpedia directly to change the brackets to how they should be, rather than “favoring” us so that we wouldnt meet TCG till the finals. Mistpedias only responce to denying this obviously correct choice to put the brackets how they should be was, “Yeah but one CM member is only saying this because of personal vendetta with mistpedia”. After this they continued to ignore the situation.

It looks they have still ignored it, as in Sirephs wall of text there was no mention to actually change the seeding so that CM would be seeded 4th (Like we should be). We believe that not putting us as a 4th place seed is only favoring TCG, it doesn’t matter if you drop the tag Team Mists if you still continue to favor them.

The fact that you have said that future tournaments organised by mistpedia will be doing it right kinda suggests your thoughts in ToL 2 are – “Oh well, we messed this up already lets not fix it though bcs we only have 3 days to change brackets and thats simply not enough time!!”

Frae

This exactly. First of all 55 hp monks should be #2 seed period. Then considering CM performance from last ToL, new roster, and other factors CM may have told mistpedia, I wouldn’t deny they should be #4. I haven’t seen other teams play much on EU since Tol1, but I have seen team exaltation more then CM and have been doing well. So wouldn’t they deserve #3 if we are going based on ESL performances? CM hardly plays in any ESL’s with this new roster lol.

Once a company has integrity issues they always do unless someone loses their job!
Who ever changed the bracket should lose their job or Anet should pull their support from the group responsible for the ToL2.

I also know about 20+ players that would love to participate in weekly tournaments but because they are run by MistPedia including myself. I guess thats why some of the NA tournaments have less then 8 teams sign up some weeks. Maybe!

I don’t believe MistPedia is an evil leader but someone should step down ( the guy who changed the bracket).

I enjoy Blu’s shout casting and he has come along way from the first time I saw him over a year ago. I would love to participate in the weekly events especially the 2v2 but they start to early for me, I have asked in forums and by sending Blu messages about changing the time but Iv never got a reply. I would love to see MistPedia work on helping more teams join by offering to help get them to a level to compete with some of these top teams. I would like to see them promote getting players together to form teams and how to go about doing so. I struggle with getting the same guys together every night and someone helping would improve the integrity of this company.

@Fraelin When Blackjack originally approached BLU about the issue, after explaining how it was done, BLU directed him to me for any additional questions. In our discussion, Blackjack said what he thought the seeding should be (1st CM, 2nd 55HP, 3rd TM). Now, obviously, we didn’t go with that seeding. It is our belief that the winner of the last tournament should hold first seed in the following one without significant reason to change that. However, it clearly shows that Blackjack thinks CM deserves higher than 4th place.

On another note, you did not contact us to find out why you weren’t 4th seed. The issue you brought to us was that Team MIST had the 1st seed. You only found out about how it was seeded after you contacted us, so there would have been no reason to assume you were 4th seed prior to that.

In regards to ignoring the situation, that is also false. As I told Blackjack I would, I talked to BLU about the possibility of removing all opinion from the seeding and going with a pure leaderboard seeding. However, we decided that altering the brackets due to pressure applied by top teams threatening to leave the tournament would set a poor precedent. We acknowledge the issue, and that’s what led to the ELO system being created.

As the tournament admins, we tried to make seeds reflect skill as much as possible. Unfortunately that process involved subjective judgements based on observations. If you read what Will quoted me saying, we never did seeding purely based on leaderboards (that would be an inaccurate method as explained in the OP). We did that for teams that we had no knowledge of and made tweaks based on recent performance. We try to make the brackets as accurate as we possibly can.

@Jindavikk There is a lot of misinformation going around about how we seeded the brackets, and I’m not sure where it originated from. From the start we were only using the leaderboards as a base to build from.

@RaZaC I’d like to start off by saying that we don’t have any financial reports because no money is involved. There is no prize money. We are not paid. In regards to the difficulty of setting up clean rules for seeding: past GW2 tournaments have been seeded either randomly or by the opinions of the tournament organizers. The leaderboards weren’t accurate enough for our tastes at high levels of play, but they were a step in the right direction. The ELO system we’re starting up is our next step, and hopefully final solution, to that problem.

@st desnuss Yes, that would have been a good idea.

@Eurantien The way ToL 2 was organized included the 4 qualifiers and then the finals. Because it was semi-random who got into which qualifier (leading to the stacked/empty qualifiers), we felt it necessary to reseed for the finals. Please note, this was the plan from the start, and it’s what we told anyone who asked. The assumption that we had it set up any other way to begin with is false. On another note, the ELO system will only count tournament games. Throwing matches, in addition to only resulting in a worse seed, would also hurt that team in tournament placement.

So you can measure the one team by peak rating and another team by other performances? You admit that this is crap and yet refuse to fix it, so any further discussion is pointless.

Next time find a shady system where you don´t have to cheat on, kk thx bye.

Random seeds would still be better. I think there was a mistake made, I believe there was some human error involved. Maybe no one intended for this to happen and just maybe it won’t happen again. But covering it up with newspaper isn’t the best way to go about it. You guys should stop answering these post because you are backing yourself into a corner. Go about your business and make things better. Your apology and action was enough and now your have fueled more issues.

I don’t understand what everyone is so upset about, atm. If you want to win, you are gonna have to beat the 2nd best and 3rd/4th best teams (or teams who beat them, making them 3rd/4th best). The only thing this affects is that people in the 2-8 positions might not be in order of 2nd-best to 8th-best. If there is consensus on a top 4 seeding, then this is just a lot of moaning and finger-pointing over the difference between a 2nd place and 3rd/4th place prize.

If that is really what you are belly-aching over, I suggest you get better and actually try to WIN the darned thing. The difference between 2nd and 3rd/4th place prize isn’t that great anyway.

They don´t care about the prizes, they want a fair competition. It is not fair when a team gets a free ride to finals because they use a weird system that makes a team look like #1 when the only thing they did was winning 3 games few weeks after a patch vs niahs useless bunkerranger. After that all other teams did better in team qs and weeklies. In addition they change the rules of their system to make the strongest teams face each other in the semi finals already, so their sponsered team gets a higher chance of winning, since a best of 5 can always go both directions.

Arenanet is having their infrastructure handled for free by third party enthusiasts that determine seeding based off of opinions. “Opinions” meaning the game after two years has no system in place to actually live out their esports dream.

Why would a previous winning tol team not be seeded first in the finals for the next tol tournament in a game that outsources their infrastructure for free?

In my opinion this whole thing is about in game accessories for dress up dolls. Some people just want that dreamer bow. Must be a broney thing wanting a unicorn dancing on rainbows I guess.

while i understand the cry for transparency (justified or not, plus, i would have gone for complete random seeding, because rng is anets favourite tool to drive people insane ) i still do not understand CMs beef with going up against TM/TCG in the semi finals. The way some posts in this thread were written, it seems like there’s some really bad blood going on between some of you guys, which is very, very disappointing, considering this is, after all, just a game and MP are organizing all this kitten for free as well. MP has elaborated their methods, they promised to improve the system PLUS parted ways with TM, so you can actually see they are trying to make it right. It’s time to be a little forgiving as well, so stop being a bunch of crybabies, win the effin tournament and start having fun.

also, if you believe in the polls, CM is a sure win anyways, so why complain?