Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[traces Around]

I have an invited group of voters to subjectively rank Dominion players each month. Specifically, I have them rank "as many players as need to be ranked" and leave it up to them how many this is. This means that these rankings are both a reflection of perceived skill and attention brought upon this skill to the voters.

Once I have the submitted ballots, I take the names which appeared on at least half of the lists and take an average which accounts for both the rank on those lists and the number of ballots which it appeared on. The voter group is based on discord so the appearances are likely to bias slightly towards that community and majorly towards those who participate in tournaments here. I also provide the names of any others who received any votes in no particular order.

Complain about the rankings here. The voters will see it and they will not care.

If you are interested in becoming a voter, contact me privately on discord. It is not a certainty that you will become one - if you have reason to believe that you will, you probably will.

Poll results (newer towards the top):
January 2017

[traces Around]

Poll completed January 18, 2017

8 voters

Ranked (appeared on at least 4 ballots, first place votes in parentheses):
1. Stef (5)
2. Mic Qsenoch (2)
3. Dan Brooks (1)
4. jsh357
5. DG
6. Dingan
7. JW
8. gamesou
9. limetime
10. breppert

Also received votes (in no particular order): Andrew Iannacone, Philip, vsiewnar, funkdoc, wachsmuth, yunna_tu, smcrtorchs, Horist, Derg17, Adam Horton, Geronimoo, A Drowned Kernel, Qvist, Rabid, E.Honda, tracer, Burning Skull, markus, Seprix, irrationalE, Jeb, Beyond Awesome

[McGarnacle]

insulted to not be on the list.

[werothegreat]

I'm not sure I see the point of this

[jsh357]

No Japanese players in the top ten = madness. Me being fourth = nonsense.

[traces Around]

I'm not sure I see the point of this

I can give you a point but I can't make you care: when people say "top players", this is who they are actually referring to - those people who they see as the best. I continue to want to do this because it reflects a variety of things a leaderboard cannot (both in what it has and what it doesn't have) and because it is a fun exercise. I can always not publish the results here even though they will continue to happen if that better suits the desires of this forum, which based on the number of upvotes this quoted post is generating, seems to be the case.

No Japanese players in the top ten = madness. Me being fourth = nonsense.

The former is rather unfortunate because it shows the divide between our community and theirs - as you can see, only one Japanese player even received votes, which more says that they are invisible to us rather than that they are not some of the best players in the world. As for the latter, you need to do a better job of convincing people of that fact  .

[SettingFraming]

No Japanese players in the top ten = madness.

Japanese players are certainly in the top 10, but we made the decision (at least I recall this in discussion) to not include any Japanese players since we've never really seen them play much, and would just be echoing what trueskill says, which was not the point of this ranking.

I'm not sure I see the point of this

It's similar to the point of having, say, a Coaches poll in collegiate sports, i.e. it gives you an idea of who the people in competition think their best peers are. You can argue the utility of that certainly, and you would have strong grounds, but nonetheless that is the point.

[Witherweaver]

I'm not sure I see the point of this

So that you can make your Fantasy Dominion League Team, obviously.

[jsh357]

My case against myself is "look at my tournament history." I've won a single tournament and come third at best in all others. On the leader board I have only briefly ever cracked the top 6. I would name at minimum rabid and marin better players.

[theory]

I'm not sure I see the point of this

The 3rd-most fundamental Law of the Universe that there's no better conversation bait than rankings.

[Witherweaver]

My case against myself is "look at my tournament history." I've won a single tournament and come third at best in all others. On the leader board I have only briefly ever cracked the top 6. I would name at minimum rabid and marin better players.

Well, come up with your own ranking list, and let's rank them to see which one is better.

[jsh357]

Let me flip the table a bit then: what was the voters' justification for ranking these particular players? That is more interesting than the ranking.

[Watno]

My case against myself is "look at my tournament history." I've won a single tournament and come third at best in all others. On the leader board I have only briefly ever cracked the top 6. I would name at minimum rabid and marin better players.

Well, come up with your own ranking list, and let's rank them to see which one is better.

http://gokosalvager.com/leaderboard/?sortkey=level&full=True

[Awaclus]

I can give you a point but I can't make you care: when people say "top players", this is who they are actually referring to - those people who they see as the best.

Well, that's what your ranking committee is referring to. When I say "top players", I'm not referring to any particular individuals, I'm referring to the concept of people who are better at the game than anyone else — basically, I think you're a top player at the point where you have learned pretty much everything that there is to learn by listening to other players, and can only further improve at the game by playing the game and making your own new discoveries about it. I'm sure there are people who literally mean the top X people on the current leaderboard when they say "top players". Even if you're talking about perceived top players, you're probably talking about your own individual perceptions, not this list.

The problem with this kind of a thing is that people tend to categorize Dominion players into "the pros" and "everyone else". What this means is that when you get strategy advice from someone in the "everyone else" group, you might as well not pay any attention to it because you're also in the "everyone else" group so you're pretty much as good at the game as that guy anyway. There have even been cases of people not really paying attention to Mic Q's advice until Stef chimed in and said the same thing, and obviously I feel like my advice gets everyone-else'd all the time even though it's, like, really high level advice and quite often the exact same advice you would have gotten from someone like Stef.

And the point that I'm trying to make here is not that people should think of me as one of the top 10 players in the world, it's that the difference in skill between someone who's roughly at my level and someone who actually is in the top 10 on the leaderboard is nowhere near as big as people think. And that's only if you look at the leaderboard. When you introduce people's own perceptions about everyone's skill level, it gets even worse because then you might be ignoring some of the players who are actually some of the absolute best players, such as shark_bait, apparently, because nobody even mentioned him in these rankings. And when you make these kinds of rankings, it's going to make those perceptions even more biased than they already are, because people are going to see the ranking and think that it must be an accurate representation of whose advice they should and shouldn't trust.

[markusin]

I feel one shortcoming of this kind of list is that it's likely biased towards a ranking of best players that make themselves known and/or are currently active in the game and/or community. One example is all those Japanese players (aside: they remind me why Touhou Dominion is a thing). Another is perhaps shark_bait as mentioned by Awaclus but who I believe is not often online these days.

Actually, is Andrew Iannacone still around? If not, then it's perhaps odd that AI is on the list but not someone like JOG.

[DG]

If someone was to make a shortlist of 'best played games' each month that might be more tangible. How those games get recorded, collected, and judged I do not know.

[Dingan]

I'm not sure I see the point of this

The 3rd-most fundamental Law of the Universe that there's no better conversation bait than rankings.

But what are #1-#2 and #4-#10???

+1 for not caring about rankings/lists (except when something actually tangible comes out of it, like seeds for a tournament or whatever).  I agree with the above: anyone can get advice from anyone, and anyone giving advice can be wrong.  It's up to the individual to parse through all the junk out there and find what is useful to them -- which may not be the same stuff others find useful.

[jsh357]

I do want to make it clear that I don't mind the concept of a Player Ranking system, and think it might actually be cool to have one with writeups and stats explaining why the players have been chosen, what separates them (if discernible) from other players, and what have you. However, I don't understand who is on this committee of voters, what qualifies them to decide who the best players are, what timespan they are looking at, and what exact factors they are considering (as well as how those are enumerated). For instance, do League placings matter as much as the leaderboard? What about minor tournaments? What about records vs. just other top players?  I think it's interesting data ripe to be explored, but the one presented here is just a featureless list with no information. You could have listed any arbitrary names you wanted.

Example of the type of list I mean: http://www.redbull.com/us/en/esports/stories/1331839019649/ssbmrank-2016-4-6-red-bull-esports

[shark_bait]

Another is perhaps shark_bait as mentioned by Awaclus but who I believe is not often online these days.

I'm online but mostly lurking.  Haven't been playing online as much since the around the start of Goko/Making Fun.  I'm honored to be mentioned, and I do know that my Adventures/Empires skill is lower as to not playing nearly as many games with them.  However I do get to play Dominion IRL with my wife on a regular basis, which is pretty darn awesome.

Totally agree on Marin.  As one of the "legacy" players, playing him felt like attacking a grizzly bear with my bare hands.

@Awculus - It's the shared Masterpiece love, isn't it. 

[Beyond Awesome]

I feel this list is more of a who are the most "well-known" good Dominion players. This feels to me more of a popularity contest. It would be interesting to make a thread highlighting some of the not so well-known players.

Also, Wandering Winder is missing from here. While he has quit Dominion, he was arguably one of the best players around.

[Derg17]

This is an interesting idea. It seems likely they got the first two right

[drsteelhammer]

Marin is still very good- I've run into him quite a bit in 2017. I stand a chance in Big Money games, though

[markusin]

Another is perhaps shark_bait as mentioned by Awaclus but who I believe is not often online these days.

I'm online but mostly lurking.  Haven't been playing online as much since the around the start of Goko/Making Fun.  I'm honored to be mentioned, and I do know that my Adventures/Empires skill is lower as to not playing nearly as many games with them.  However I do get to play Dominion IRL with my wife on a regular basis, which is pretty darn awesome.

Totally agree on Marin.  As one of the "legacy" players, playing him felt like attacking a grizzly bear with my bare hands.

@Awculus - It's the shared Masterpiece love, isn't it. 

Ah, nice to hear from you. I think I remember you saying you haven't been playing much recently so I kinda figured that would affect forum time (even though it doesn't stop me from lurking even when not actively playing).

[shark_bait]

Another is perhaps shark_bait as mentioned by Awaclus but who I believe is not often online these days.

I'm online but mostly lurking.  Haven't been playing online as much since the around the start of Goko/Making Fun.  I'm honored to be mentioned, and I do know that my Adventures/Empires skill is lower as to not playing nearly as many games with them.  However I do get to play Dominion IRL with my wife on a regular basis, which is pretty darn awesome.

Totally agree on Marin.  As one of the "legacy" players, playing him felt like attacking a grizzly bear with my bare hands.

@Awculus - It's the shared Masterpiece love, isn't it. 

Ah, nice to hear from you. I think I remember you saying you haven't been playing much recently so I kinda figured that would affect forum time (even though it doesn't stop me from lurking even when not actively playing).

I can lurk the forum at work easily.  Can't do an hour or two online dominion binge so easily at work. 

[2.71828.....]

Another player that I think should be somewhere on this list is lespeutere. I completely agree with everything jsh had said on the topic. It is really cool to see my name in the honorable mention, but seeing the voting process and reasoning behind each vote would be really cool as well. I am thinking back to amalloy's player data page or even going way back to councilroom to gather some data where you can find how well you played against some of these top players. You can see who beats them most consistently. Rankings are cool. Data is cooler