Numbers and Names (The Fallacy in Data and Name Recognition)

I regularly post these and things like these on my Twitter, as well as other Smash stuff: twitter.com/Vermanubis



Because there’s ultimately no concrete way to delineate between players of similar skill levels, we rely almost exclusively on data to inform our opinions on relative skill.



While we’re right to do this for lack of any other practical metric of assessment, most methods we use to gather data and stratify players, if not obviously flawed, are still flawed, but in much more subtle ways. The two major means of assessment we use are tournament placing and people beaten. I want to explain why both are necessary, but really only approximate actuality rather than reflect it with 100% fidelity.



Tournament Placement



This one seems fairly cut and dry: you place higher than someone else, you obviously performed better. Moreover, if you placed high, you obviously did well!



I… don’t know about that.



You see, while those may be true as a general rule, they’re not necessarily true. As I said, this form of measurement only approximates actuality as a matter of likelihood; there’s nothing about a high tournament placing that necessarily entails the statement two paragraphs ago. In other words, it is likely that those two statements are true, but they are not true all the time. This means that we should be skeptical of these figures out of context.



Consider I enter a major and I place 250/1000. That appears to be a severely mediocre placing that’s going to send me home with a sore tailpipe. But what if I told you I was seeded dead last and had to beat Abadango, Ranai, and VoiD to get there? What if one of them was simply upset by someone else and I had to face them early in bracket?



250 doesn’t seem so bad now. Now what if I told you I placed 1/1000? Woah, far out, man!



Haha, not so fast, Eager McBeaver! Turns out everyone but me in the tournament was either a small child, common housefly or a can of delicious baked beans! Minus beating the can of delicious baked beans, this is decidedly unimpressive, and I hope all you folks without profound mental deficits would agree!



To cast this more concretely, consider this post by Kennicky from Reddit:



"I think a really good example is HugS at DH Austin (I know it's the wrong game but the point still stands)

The only notable person HugS faced in bracket was Shroomed, which he lost; he then defeated LK, ALP, and SFOP to lose to Laudandus and place 13th. Meanwhile, Axe got 17th while defeating Santiago and losing to Android and SFAT. Crush tied with HugS but had to defeat S2J and MacD to get there."



The reality is that funky shit happening in bracket can dramatically lighten or encumber someone’s run. Beyond this one, we’re hardly starved for an example of seeding being subverted by an upset or two, resulting in remarkably caddywampus -- as far as projections go -- results. I personally have had placings where I had to beat 6+ PRed players in a row that were numerically inferior to tournaments with far easier brackets.



People Beaten

This is the genuinely tricky one to navigate because of our intuitions. It’s sort of a reaction we have to double take when we see someone take a name we recognize out. It’s exciting! The drama is infectious! In spite of this, though, we still have reason to be skeptical. Why?



Again, the name of a well-known player is only an approximation of what we’re trying to measure. It’s assumed that whatever that player did in an upset match they lost was faithful to their standard, almost as if it doesn’t matter how they played so much as their name.

This is an idea that is vastly underappreciated. The name alone of the person we’re watching can bend us between assessing the exact same match as utter shite or the supreme echelon of gameplay to which we all aspire; we all, to some degree, have a player bias. The truth remains though: top players can still err, play off kilter, be ignorant to a particular MU, or otherwise perform in ways we’d not recognize them if we didn’t already know it was them. If our honest pursuit is that of excellent gameplay and the accurate stratification of skill levels, then we should certainly prefer an excellent performance that is lacking the glory and face value of name recognition to an underwhelming performance by a celebrated player. If Ally starts having an aneurysm mid-set and plays in a way that reflects that, him simply being Ally doesn't turn your win into something more than it actually was. Similarly, if an unknown player gives a stellar performance, it should be treated as such and not devalued for lack of name recognition. If I play two people, Zero and an unknown player, and Zero plays like hell and the unknown player plays marvelously, then Zero being Zero should not magically make my win over him more meaningful than over the unknown player if he played like hell.

(Reminder: this is with respect to an individual level; not on a large-scale one where things like PGR rankings are calculated. As I mentioned in the beginning and will mention again at the end, I'm discussing actuality, not rankings. For the purposes of rankings, this is all highly impractical)



Simply put, we lose sight of what we’re actually trying to measure with all these approximations and indicators such as placings, names and so on: excellence or lack thereof. That’s why I encourage people so frequently to be skeptical of these indicators in a vacuum, and instead to prefer, above all else, the direct, observable quality of gameplay irrespective of name recognition and numbers. These things are all very necessary for the sake of practicality, but should be treated with healthy skepticism on an individual level instead of dismissing high-quality gameplay for lack of name recognition and, similarly, extolling what might be mediocre gameplay simply because we make assumptions about numbers and names.

If this post did not give you some kind of exotic disease of the mind such that you might even consider reading another in the future, I post updates as well as other Smash "musings" to my Twitter: twitter.com/Vermanubis



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