Greetings Buddies, I’m back with another sportsmanship-related article, this time looking at one of the most common (mis)perceptions about sports scores. In particular, conventional wisdom says that if people lose to an opponent, that they then tend to rate those opponents lower in sports. Essentially people just get grouchy when they lose.
To put it another way, people who smash all of their opponents end up being rated lower in sports than someone who loses all of their games. By extension, if you want to get a great sports score, you need to “ease up” and not beat anyone by too much. But is that really true? Do tournament placings actually back this up? Let’s take a look at the data and see what it tells us.
For this analysis I compiled tournament scores from over 30 two-day Kings of War events, going back to 2016. I wanted to remove regional bias as much as possible, so I made sure to consider tourneys from around the US, including the Alamo GT, Lone Wolf, Unplugged GT, Masters, Crossroads, Orc Town, and others from the Southeast and Midwest.
As you probably know, all these events use different methods to rate battle and sports, so doing a straight comparison of the raw scores wouldn’t work. To account for this, I ranked all the participants by their battle scores, and again by their sports scores, with 1 being the best. I then broke the field of each tournament into five bins based on their battle ranking. So, for example, if an event had 30 players, the players who ranked numbers 1-6 would be placed in the top quintile for battle. Players who ranked 7-12 would be in the second quintile, etc. down to the players ranked 25-30, who would be in the bottom, or fifth quintile. Once that was done, I ran all the players through the same process, but this time for sports scores. The end result was that every player in each tournament was assigned a battle quintile and a sports quintile for that event, with “1”s being the best and “5’s” the worst.
I then combined all of the players from all the events together into a single dataset and plotted the sports quintile distribution for all the players across all events in each battle quintile and charted the results, (see below). In addition, the legend shows the average quintile placing for each battle group. (Lower numbers denote better sports scores).
Each line of the graph shows the sports distribution, (in quintiles), for all of the players in a given battle quintile, with blue being the players who finish in the top fifth in battle, and the red being the players who finish in the bottom fifth. The axis on the bottom is the sports quintile, so if a line peaks to the left, the group is more sporting, and if it peaks to right, they’re less sporting.
Now I’m no statistician, but I figured this would show the general gist. If the common opinion was true, you’d expect to see the red line, being the group with the lowest battle score, peak to the left of the graph, and the blue line would peak to the right of the graph. However, this wasn’t the case.
The chart shows that people who finish in the top two battle groups, (the blue and dark green lines), have better sports scores, on average. Conversely the players who finish in the middle or lower middle of the pack tend to have worse sports scores, on average. So what else can we glean from these findings?
First and foremost, it would seem that the conventional wisdom is wrong, (to a point). Apparently when players choose opponents for their best game votes, they don’t necessarily vote for opponents that they’ve beaten. Instead, they seem to value other things, such as clean play and if their opponent had a good attitude. Good players usually play a very clean game, which removes the chances for misunderstandings between players. In addition, this may indicate that long-time tourney players also understand that bouts of bad luck, tough matchups, and bad scenarios are just part of the game, which allows them to roll with the punches better.
However, this seems to only go so far. Yes, the players in the top two tiers for battle scored best in sports, but it’s important to note that the players in the top quintile scored slightly lower than the players in the second quintile. This would seem to say that people don’t mind voting for an opponent who beat them, but they’re slightly less likely to vote for an opponent who absolutely creamed them. (I know personally that I don’t enjoy games where, due to my opponent’s list or the scenario matchup, that I feel powerless).
Second, it’s interesting to me that the players in the middle and low-middle battle groups did noticeably poorer in sports. This may demonstrate that an important sports skill is learning to take a beating with a smile. Keeping a good attitude when the game goes sideways is super important to stay engaged with your opponent. And I would think that players in these brackets still have “something to play for” when it comes to their final tournament placings, so they may take losses harder than the players on the bottom tier, who are usually just happy to be there and pound a few beers.
I know this from personal experience. At the recent Crossroads tournament, I received a relatively low sports score (for me) because I took one of my losses hard, and complained relentlessly during another game that I ended up winning, which made it worse. It wasn’t my finest moment…
So, to summarize, based on the tourneys that I looked at:
Players with higher battle scores tended to score higher in sports. This may be due to factors such as clean play and keeping a good attitude when the game goes against them.
Players in the mid and low-mid battle groups scored worse in sports. This implies that “losing with grace” is an important skill for attaining higher sports scores.
Players in the bottom battle tier scored similarly (though a little worse) to the players in the top tier on sports scores. This may be because those players have a more casual bent toward the game, which allows them to take the game as it comes.
So what does this mean for people who want to improve their sports scores? Well, there are a couple of resources out there.
First, our very own Smashley Mowatt wrote a fantastic article here on Dash28. (The link can be conveniently found here: https://dash28.org/2019/07/19/sportsmanship-not-just-your-energetic-best-friend/ )
Second, in the interests of shameless self-promotion, we did a sportsmanship episode on our Unplugged Radio Podcast. (Find the link to that episode, and dozens of other interesting episodes, here: https://www.unpluggedgamers.com/podcast/episode-10-clean-play-and-clean-bodies-sportsmanship-and-more/ )
Remember, if you’re not happy with your sports scores, there are always things that you can do to improve.
Lastly, these findings bring up a couple of questions that I would like to explore in later articles. While combing through tournament data I was struck by how different the varying sports scoring methods were from each other. They produced a wide array of point spreads and rewarded different things. I don’t know if the data I have would lead to a shift in how sportsmanship is scored, or if it shows that the current systems are working as intended. (My personal opinion is that the existing systems don’t seem to have the ‘win/loss’ bias that people associate with sports scores, but there could be other biases cooked into them, such as the recency bias of judging your last game as your best game…more on that in a future article).
In the future I’d like to add more tournament results to the dataset and see if these trends still hold. I also think there’s other information to be gleaned from analyzing tourney results from a wider swath of the gaming community. (In that vein, if anyone has any results they can send my way, it would be greatly appreciated 😉 ).
In the meantime, I’d love to hear people’s opinions about the information presented in the article.
Until next time, stay Trashy!!
