We agree! Showing respect for your opponent is an important part of sportsmanship and we spent time playtesting several versions that included honoring your opponents. In the end, there were a few reasons why combining team recognition with opponent recognition wasn’t working.

For example, we spent a lot of time on the categories and what matters when it comes to sportsmanship in League. In general, you have a very different picture of your fellow teammates compared to your opponents, so we’d need to have categories that were meaningful for both. For instance, getting outplayed 1v1 feels different than a teammate helping the team stay cool and focused on winning. If we solve that by collapsing to more generic categories for teammates and opponents, they wouldn’t mean as much since they could stand for anything. But if we had a bunch of really specific categories you wouldn’t have time to choose between them (assuming you could even find the right one).

Also, honoring your opponent and honoring your teammate just felt like two separate things. Testers not only felt the vote screen was crowded, but due to the incomplete information you have, it was hard to have the confidence to pick an opponent that really stood out. We tried a few iterations, including having the system choose for you some “finalists,” but ultimately it felt best when it was wholly a player decision.

So in the end we made the call to focus on teamwork right now, including improving the system for 2018, and revisit honoring your opponent in the future.