Discussion Abstain Votes in Suspect Tests

[UT]

With all the overhauls to suspect testing in recent weeks, this is a good time to also address a historically controversial element: abstaining.

Currently in a normal suspect test, once voting goes up, there are four things you can do: vote ban, vote do not ban, vote abstain, or not vote at all. Currently, the first three options all count towards the requirements for Tiering Contributor, while not voting at all does not.

Abstain votes counting for TC have been controversial for a while because, well, in a literal sense, you did not actually contribute to tiering. Your abstain vote has the exact same impact as completely forgetting to vote, which is currently not rewarded, and there has been debate in the past if abstain votes should even be an option for that reason.

The major argument I am aware of for keeping the abstain option is it lets voters that are truly undecided still get their TC progress while not impacting the vote; if we removed abstains or took away TC progress for them, we’d be encouraging apathetic or undecided voters to cast a vote they do not actually believe in.

Personally I would support removing the option to abstain, and continuing non-votes not counting for TC. It makes sense to me that to get TC progress, you should actually contribute to the outcome.

Please discuss.

 

[chaos]

i dont care if you award tc points or not, but i object to different treatment of not voting and abstaining, 1) they already did all the work to ladder and /linksmogon, and 2) its potentially extra stuff for me to code for very little historical benefit

 

[DrReuniclus]

I've voted abstain like 5 times when getting recs. I just want to say, if abstain was removed and I got recs, I would apathetically vote for a suspect I don't care about, I don't feel like I have the knowledge to be voting on or I am on the fence about rather than leave a non-vote, especially if you changed it to not give TC, which is something I find less healthy to the suspect process than abstain.

Abstain is a good option for this to me, but if it was removed I'd probably just flip a coin on my vote if I felt the way I do when I abstain to get some vote out there rather than leave it blank and I don't think that's a healthy way of determining a vote. Don't know how others feel when they vote abstain or if they wouldn't vote, but giving my 2 cents.

 

[Fc]

I would delete abstain votes entirely they're cringe, if you care enough to ladder and vote then you should have to form an opinion somewhere in there to actually get anything out of it. I agree that you literally didn't contribute to anything for TC if you vote abstain, you're just kinda badge farming the already easiest badge. I wouldn't differentiate between how TC treats them I'd just remove it, there's no point in having them. They add nothing and most OP's don't even include a copy paste of an option for it so I don't think they should exist, wasn't even aware they were still included tbh since no one gives it out as an option, it's very rarely used now

 

[Icemaster]

People will always ladder just for TC and 20-30 ladder games is often not enough for them to form a real opinion. Allowing this group of players to abstain is good - otherwise they're just going to ask their friend to vote or flip a coin and it's best for accurate voting for the voting pool to consist of people who are informed and have a stake in the tier. I don't think the option hurts anyone.

 

[Texas Cloverleaf]

Abstention serves no purpose, the default position for any suspect should be no ban and the onus on the voter to make the case for the items removal. If you aren't able to form a compelling reason to vote for a ban in your ladder session then your vote should be no ban.

 

[Dorron]

People will always ladder just for TC and 20-30 ladder games is often not enough for them to form a real opinion. Allowing this group of players to abstain is good - otherwise they're just going to ask their friend to vote or flip a coin. I don't think the option hurts anyone.

but this contributes to absolutely nothing at all? What benefits do getting reqs and voting abstain provide? If you don't know what to vote you shouldn't get reqs, and if you do and vote abstain then you contributed nothing to Smogon. I'd leave the option to abstain but it wouldn't contribute to TC. If you want to abstain wait until you can't change the outcome and vote the option that won. If your vote matters cope.


There's also the old gens voting where people can get access to the voting without trying by playing tours (let's say I go 4-0 by playing BW RU in BWPL and qualify to vote for Moltres but didn't really know what to vote), in that case I'd accept an abstain if the people who abstain explained why in the subsequent thread by giving arguments for both sides.

 

[ken]

In order to obtain a badge with contributor in the name, they should contribute in some form, which abstention and not voting are effectively not doing. Tie abstention + not voting together, sure; they laddered, got reqs, and didn't contribute towards the tiering (in)action, and leave them both not count towards progress for the badge or its top variant.

 

[Eledyr]

For me, this is quite a no-brainer; the badge is entitled "Tiering Contributor", if you do not contribute, you shouldn't be able to get the badge, and abstaining is exactly what this is, in essence it's just not contributing.

 

[chimp]

For me, this is quite a no-brainer; the badge is entitled "Tiering Contributor", if you do not contribute, you shouldn't be able to get the badge, and abstaining is exactly what this is, in essence it's just not contributing.

Perhaps then we ought to not have a badge that is earned by just laddering every once in a while whenever there’s a suspect test, and should reward contributors who actually contribute. Im not saying we axe TC badge entirely but maybe its worth reworking it?

 

[Arcticblast]

I've voted abstain like 5 times when getting recs. I just want to say, if abstain was removed and I got recs, I would apathetically vote for a suspect I don't care about, I don't feel like I have the knowledge to be voting on or I am on the fence about rather than leave a non-vote, especially if you changed it to not give TC, which is something I find less healthy to the suspect process than abstain.

Abstain is a good option for this to me, but if it was removed I'd probably just flip a coin on my vote if I felt the way I do when I abstain to get some vote out there rather than leave it blank and I don't think that's a healthy way of determining a vote. Don't know how others feel when they vote abstain or if they wouldn't vote, but giving my 2 cents.

If this is the viewpoint that other people hold, then clearly making abstain not count isn't the solution on its own - we should make it harder or less rewarding to ladder suspect tests across formats to get TC... again. Or we could just axe the laddering portion of the badge entirely and award it only to tier leaders and tiering council members.

The idea of laddering for "a suspect you don't care about" is something I believe we should actively discourage at every turn. Let's encourage people to play formats they're actually interested in, rather than getting people to play UU for one week twice a year or whatever.
to be clear this is not a dig at UU

 

[UT]

If this is the viewpoint that other people hold, then clearly making abstain not count isn't the solution on its own - we should make it harder or less rewarding to ladder suspect tests across formats to get TC... again. Or we could just axe the laddering portion of the badge entirely and award it only to tier leaders and tiering council members.

The idea of laddering for "a suspect you don't care about" is something I believe we should actively discourage at every turn. Let's encourage people to play formats they're actually interested in, rather than getting people to play UU for one week twice a year or whatever.
to be clear this is not a dig at UU

Let’s keep this thread focused on the topic at hand, which is abstentions in the current process. If you want to propose larger changes to the suspect process, that should be a separate topic.

 

[BigFatMantis]

Is there actually a downside to abstaining - like what was the actual problem with it beyond some people are getting badges without "contributing" (they would just vote randomly to "contribute" if you remove it or don't instruct them to vote for the status quo if unsure)

 

[UT]

like what was the actual problem with it beyond some people are getting badges without "contributing”

Badges are to reward contributions, so if people are getting them without contributing that is a problem in of itself.

 

[Amaranth]

Badges are to reward contributions, so if people are getting them without contributing that is a problem in of itself.

it's not exactly a secret that TC is the "easy" badge that people who don't want to contribute but still want a badge shoot for. just look at the numbers of people who have TC vs literally any other badge

everything else requires you to produce something of material value, usually even many things of material value, or at least to hold a position that places some responsibility on you. TC is the badge for people who don't want to help new players through resources or directly through tutoring or team rating, don't want to help experienced players by posting high-level insightful discussion or hosting tournaments, don't want to make art, content, god forbid programming, and don't want to hold any responsibility on smogon at all

i certainly do not feel that TC havers are contributing to smogon because they cleared some very arbitrary and usually low bar for competence in a tier of their choosing over and over. i honestly feel like the suspect process in general is due a long review, especially in light of recent events, but that's another debate altogether

to try and stay slightly on topic, i don't think you have suddenly contributed if you flip a coin to select "ban" or "do not ban" instead of "abstain". i think doing that would encourage uninformed votes and be directly detrimental to the actual results of the suspect, which is WAY more of a priority than whether people get badges or not.
but also, people probably shouldn't get a badge for this at all lol. either that or ease up the other badges to be comparable levels of effort, i don't know

 

[Ren]

So I've never had abstaining as my final position, but there've been times where I genuinely haven't been convinced until like, the last day on what to vote. For the Scizor suspect way back when, I wasn't sure what to vote until 5 minutes before I actually put in the vote - I was super on the fence about it. I think that if that hadn't happened, I probably would've voted abstain. If this proposal was implemented back then, I still would've voted abstain - but there's no guarantee others would do the same.

I feel like in this scenario specifically, the proposal would do more harm than not. It's very rare that a suspect comes down to the last few votes submitted, but it does happen. If someone's laddered for reqs, odds are they already have a fairly decent picture of where the element being suspected stands in the metagame. If they're voting abstain after that, I think that's a totally fair position to take. Whether Smogon wants to reward that or not is up to you guys, but Amaranth's point on how removing abstain from counting opens up the system to bad actors is something I'd consider heavily.

Also like... if the issue really is the fact that this badge is titled tiering contributor, I'd suggest changing the name before you change the system. More people having this badge only really grants them IS access and more name changing freedom (unless I'm drastically missing something). It + top TC are 0 pointers in the badgeshop, so it isn't like it grants them any extra privileges. I don't really see the harm in people who put the time into something getting recognized for it when it's basically just a cookie (and it isn't even chocolate chip, it's oatmeal raisin).

So yeah, I don't think this proposal is a good idea. I understand the sentiment behind it and even agree with some of the arguments in favor of it, but it really is a case of "what's proposed with good reasoning would ultimately make the system worse" to me. From a personal standpoint too, I know I've already seen one or two suspects that ended in a result that mains of that tier didn't like, and that was largely because of outside voters. I don't really agree with that insular thinking specifically because of abstain existing - if they laddered enough to form an opinion, it doesn't matter if they main the tier or not. My opinion would 100% change if abstain was removed or deincentivized as an option, though.

 

[peng]

Abstain existing is largely pointless when votes are calculated as a % of total qualified. Abstain in our setting literally = do not ban.

That said my preferred option by a mile would be to keep abstains and just remove those votes when calculating % thresholds. There are legitimate reasons to not want to vote after qualifying - a very obvious one being that maybe you actually did not face the problematic pokemon/item enough during your ladder session to form a strong enough opinion, which is very possible. If people really feel like they cannot make a decision then I do not believe their slot should be allocated to the DNB side by default when we already have the 60% supermajority in place to protect the status quo. If someone truly has no opinion then let “no opinion” be a valid stance, not a “DNB by default”.

 

[Lily]

Abstain existing is largely pointless when votes are calculated as a % of total qualified. Abstain in our setting literally = do not ban.

That said my preferred option by a mile would be to keep abstains and just remove those votes when calculating % thresholds. There are legitimate reasons to not want to vote after qualifying - a very obvious one being that maybe you actually did not face the problematic pokemon/item enough during your ladder session to form a strong enough opinion, which is very possible. If people really feel like they cannot make a decision then I do not believe their slot should be allocated to the DNB side by default when we already have the 60% supermajority in place to protect the status quo. If someone truly has no opinion then let “no opinion” be a valid stance, not a “DNB by default”.

Fwiw abstention votes right now are treated the way you're describing them (or at least they're supposed to be). TLs shouldn't be treating them as DNB votes, they're just removed from the pool. Example here - p old but yea still the same thing now

Personally agree w/ the camp of thought that right now the flaw lies in TC's badge requirements and that encouraging uncertain voters to flip a coin is unideal. I would prefer if we'd allow abstain votes to count towards TC and focus on exploring better solutions to how people qualify for the badge - to me an abstention vote is more thoughtful than just picking at random because you want the point, since it has a level of humility attached and still rewards folks for laddering which is the current goal of the badge. If picking at random is enough to qualify as contribution then that's a sign that things need to change at their core.

 

[Ropalme1914]

Personally, I don't see the advantage in removing abstain. If the problem is giving out the badge, Tiering Contributor already is the lowest value one - the only benefits it can give are either equal or less than any other badge, and those people already match the requirements to getting the progress on it. Even if you call out that the person didn't contribute to the tier - the other complaint is that the reqs are often easy to get and farm for people who know nothing about the tier. Remove the contribution from abstaining, and now you have a lower quality for your suspect votes, because they're encouraged to vote into anything at all, even if they feel like they shouldn't move the outcome towards any side. If badge farming truly is an issue (I don't really think it's that big of deal), then the requirements for the badge in general should be reviewed, because the abstain option doesn't make it any easier (if they were able to vote abstain for the contribution, they could vote for anything), it just makes it not negatively impact the outcome of suspects.

 

[Oculars]

I personally think abstain votes should stay, badge farming for TC will always be a thing and I personally believe its better if those who are simply getting reqs to grind the badge have an option to remove themselves from the voter pool, especially if they have no vested interest or knowledge in the actual tier they are getting reqs for. Abstains should not count as a default "dnb" or "dnu" in the case of testing something down from a higher tier, they should be removed from the pool entirely.

Forcing people grinding reqs to take a stance one way or another on a tier they have no interest in can have some significant negative consequences on a tier due to this skewing results one way or another especially with how close a lot of tests are and I think its a necessary evil as there is no way to stop people badge farming even if abstain is removed.

 

[Bughouse]

If I understand the situation correctly: Given that TC is the "easy" badge for many to get and that they may sometimes/often do so in tiers that they don't know/care about, there's 3/4 options here (somewhat echoing Amaranth).

Option 1a) Status Quo - Allow these users to Abstain, count it towards TC
Option 1b) More or less status quo, remove Abstain as a voting option, but instead start counting a suspect towards TC based on having achieved reqs rather than having posted in Blind Voting, i.e. the way to "Abstain" and count towards TC just doesn't require a post anymore. It has historically, but now you'd just have to get reqs and not vote to effectively abstain, which still counts towards the badge.
Option 2) Actually fully remove Abstain, and since these voters will still get reqs to get the badge, etc. and will then have to actually "contribute" to the vote in order to get closer to the TC badge, a contribution which is perceived as good, yay, but they may do so arbitrarily if they can no longer abstain, which is bad, so boo. Do we really want these types of drive by voters influencing tiering any more than they have to/already do? If all they care about is TC and they don't care about the tier, wouldn't we rather they abstain?
Option 3) Much more broadly rework either the suspect process to make drive by voting much harder (difficult/impossible... we're surely not going back to requiring "posting" reqs after many debacles, and I don't think anyone really wants to go to like pure council bans, so what then? public votes will always generate these types of voters so long as TC exists) or change incentives around the TC badge (which is always difficult/controversial in its own way) such that these voters don't exist much and you no longer really have to choose between 1 and 2.

Removing Abstain seems to only have negative consequences to me and doesn't really solve any problem. Personally I don't really perceive a "problem" in the first place to people getting TC by abstaining sometimes (or even all the time), because I don't really see a problem with any user in general getting any particular badge. And moreover is the "contribution" and "effort" really the one post that says ban or DNB or is it the time spent laddering and winning games? There's certainly always arguments to go down the road of option 3, but I don't think the "problem" of abstentions is anywhere near enough to justify going down that road. There may be other better arguments about TC, but idk to me abstentions just isn't it.

I don't see a huge functional difference between 1a and 1b. 1a is the current status quo, was the easiest way to track things since you could just search for posts by a user in blind voting and count the N of posts to see how many times they voted, and that's easier than tracking to see if they qualified (i assume). If 1b is somehow now the easier way to track things for some reason, then I don't have a problem with 1b. I think it could cause some communication problems maybe around whether voters know the way to abstain is to not vote and that abstaining still counts, etc. But that's also true today anyhow, since Abstain isn't really mentioned as an option in OPs. So yeah I don't really see a difference. If 1b is preferable to 1a for some reason, then sure fine by me.

Abstain existing is largely pointless when votes are calculated as a % of total qualified. Abstain in our setting literally = do not ban.

As Lily said, this is incorrect. Abstentions are removed from the denominator, and if that's not happening, then the TL is doing it wrong (but I'm not aware of any cases).

i dont care if you award tc points or not, but i object to different treatment of not voting and abstaining, 1) they already did all the work to ladder and /linksmogon, and 2) its potentially extra stuff for me to code for very little historical benefit

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "extra stuff to code" and /linksmogon? this is a very new process so I'm not sure I follow the problem. As far as I could tell the PS command just looks like a way to automatically track reqs and tie them to smogon accounts, and then I presumed that users would still be given permissions to vote in Blind Voting, so it isn't clear to me how this has much to do with the Abstain option/not ultimately voting/etc. Is there a more overarching process here I'm missing? Is this about the 1a/1b I'm describing?

 

[batMAN]

Abstention right now is the better of two evils to me. It's best to have people not vote and thus not influence the vote if they are not "educated" enough on the tier to vote properly rather than have them arbitrarily vote either Ban or DNB and potentially shake up the voting for those who really care about their tier. Ren also brings up a pretty good point - sometimes, even players who are in touch with the metagame and who have laddered for the suspects genuinely don't have an opinion one way or the other even through the suspect. Removing abstain, in this scenario, forces them to either forfeit their rights to TC progress or make a vote that they might not fully believe in.

Overall, we shouldn't remove abstain and leave tiering policy in its current state, as that only forces more voters who don't really care about the result into the vote.

 

[Shurtugal]

I personally think abstain votes should stay, badge farming for TC will always be a thing and I personally believe its better if those who are simply getting reqs to grind the badge have an option to remove themselves from the voter pool, especially if they have no vested interest or knowledge in the actual tier they are getting reqs for. Abstains should not count as a default "dnb" or "dnu" in the case of testing something down from a higher tier, they should be removed from the pool entirely.

Forcing people grinding reqs to take a stance one way or another on a tier they have no interest in can have some significant negative consequences on a tier due to this skewing results one way or another especially with how close a lot of tests are and I think its a necessary evil as there is no way to stop people badge farming even if abstain is removed.

To add on to this, I think it is also fairly reasonable when a suspect has such a gray area to be uncertain of the vote. Currently NDOU is suspecting Tera, and I still don't know which way I want to vote for it, just to give an example here.

I think if a lot of players are voting to Abstain, that this indicates that the issue being voted on is inconclusive or not immediately obvious. This kind of feedback can still be useful-- for example, if it narrowly goes into one direction, the conclusion to revisit the topic could be more viable if you see a lot of Abstain votes. (NDOU is suspecting Tera three times! Just to put it out there how this type of vote can contribute to a tier still.)

Really, I just think that Abstain is fine & doesn't really need to be removed. It is still a contribution because you actively contributed to the ladder (putting pressure on other users to qualify), and you're giving feedback to the tier (this issue is not an obvious issue to vote on). If people want to revaluate the TC badge, that's probably valid but would need a different thread. As for the issue of Abstain, it would be much more harmful to push people to contribute to a vote they don't really care for (thus hurting the process).

 

[chaos]

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "extra stuff to code" and /linksmogon? this is a very new process so I'm not sure I follow the problem. As far as I could tell the PS command just looks like a way to automatically track reqs and tie them to smogon accounts, and then I presumed that users would still be given permissions to vote in Blind Voting, so it isn't clear to me how this has much to do with the Abstain option/not ultimately voting/etc. Is there a more overarching process here I'm missing? Is this about the 1a/1b I'm describing?

The blind voting forum is no longer a thing. Voters can vote for any of the options the TL configures or not vote at all. A separate thing, where they vote, but it's not a vote, is a waste of time, because they can just not vote.

 

[FayaWizard]

I do not think removing Abstain would be the best decision considering the current state of the Tiering Contributor badge, and requirements for suspect tests. In some tiers, you can go an entire run without facing many, if any skilled players at all, and thus be unable to form a strong opinion on the suspected element. In this case, Abstain still allows those who laddered but do not wish to vote with an uninformed/uncertain stance to still qualify for the badge, while not influencing the vote in a negative way.

For example, I recently qualified for the Natdex Tera suspect, and despite playing 46 games, I don't think I faced more than 7 serious teams, of which even fewer were piloted by a decent/good player. Luckily, I've already been playing Natdex for sometime, and came into this test knowing what I wanted to vote, but someone could very feasibly end up with little to no experience playing against actual teams in the tier, and thus have to base their opinion on Tera off of someone's mono-Bug team, or all UU/RU team (both of which I faced near the end of my run). In this case, I believe it would be best for everyone if they voted Abstain.

Now, whether Tiering Contributor should incentivize people to play tiers they have little to no experience with in the first place is a different topic to discuss, but as long as the badge remains this way, I believe we should keep the Abstain vote.