The Points Clusterfuck

Shit happens man... That's neither here nor there anymore. It happened. 🤷

My frustrations lay with how it's being fixed, the penalizing the people that had no clue it was happening, and just the lack of warning or discussion at all about it. Just here you go... You lose 8 pts. Sorry... We fucked up. 🙄 No... I want my 8 points back. That was salary & my 2 draft points. It's not my responsibility to pay for what was a league error; it's the league's responsibility to inject that back in, if need be.

You say they're trying to implement the best "shitty road forward", but that's because they chose... Well, Justin chose, the shittiest road forward, effectively placing the blame on the members affected by it by taking away points that were already given out to them, and, as the league, taking absolutely zero responsibility for the error.

Outback's solution is more than viable, and was allegedly, somewhat, actually on the table originally, yet taking points away from people was supposedly the "best" option. Screw that. lol

Fair enough, but I still think the injection of those points from the league to teams that didn't benefit from the error is a far better solution than effectively penalizing the teams that did. If they have all that information, it's not hard to add up that "debt", then split it up evenly among the teams that didn't benefit from the error. If everyone benefitted from it in some capacity, then split it evenly around to every team.

No, he's saying it would catch itself up cuz fighter #1's team will be paying back their fictitious "debt" instead of upgrading their fighters.

I just woke up, and see that this thread has exploded, and it is still exploding, so if everybody could pause commenting on this thread for a few minutes while I catch up on the three pages comments and start addressing your concerns clearly and systematically, that would be a great way to get this resolved in a calm and orderly manner.

Where to start? I guess with full disclosure.

1) Full disclosure of the lack of full disclosure
When I first saw how fucked up our points became, and the gravity of the overspending hit me, I was kinda devastated. As Outback mentioned, it did give a lot of teams a lot of advantages that made me very unhappy and uncomfortable. I don’t know if I would say it made me question the validity of our past 2+ seasons, but it shook me a bit. And I did NOT want to pass these feelings onto you guys. I went back and forth between the “tell them or don’t tell them” options for a couple days, debating on how best to serve the site. In the end, I knew people would know. I know we have just enough dedicated members that 2 or 3 of you would ask enough to find out, but I had hoped to sweep enough of it up that it wouldn’t have to be as disappointing for you guys as it was for me. Though nothing of this scale has happened before, I believe little things like this have happened a few times over the past 10+ years of running ManMMA sites, and have been dealt with shadily, but without distressing anyone. As I said, I knew that would not happen here, but also knew this way would soften the blow of the reveal. And it has, believe it or not (i.e. you are now pissed at me for how I handled things, instead of pissed at all the should-be no-contests that now litter the site, lol. Though I do find some of the comments here interesting, because I definitely mentioned the entire point over-spending privately to one of these members during a voicecall about a month ago, so this was not news to that individual. But I digress

2) What happened specifically?
If you care, since he has taken blame publicly, I’ll toss Mike under the bus for the extent that he is at fault – which is “some”. A good amount of the point mis-processing was missing 'processed things', because at the time he was very busy with life, and didn’t think he was struggling as much as he apparently was. Fully fair, he is human. Austin and I did not read between the lines and think perhaps because he was busy he was missing things, so we failed at having his back and checking his work. On top of that, we learned through this auditing process that there were sometimes miscommunications with HOW I processed things. So you will notice that now, going forward, what is happening with points and to what fighter is more clearly labeled in the processing itself, to keep points easier to follow.

3) Rip the fucking bandaid off – what was the actual damage?
This hurts to post.
At the original point of discovery of this clusterfuck, these are the points people spent, but were not charged for:
Ferocity: -32
Snakes: -25
Byron: -22
Dogs: -17
Rocketmen: -14
Gap: -10
Hale Storm: -10
Phoenix: -9
Chosen: -9
Ducks: -8
WKO: -6
SOA: -5
Outback: -1
Bullies: -1
Marauders: none
Gorilla-Bear: none
Killing Joke: +1 (he was charged for a point he did not spend, so ManMMA owed him a point)


4) Why not “Option 2” – the “give everyone 25 free points so no one is in debt” solution?
As you can see from this table, there isn’t really as much of a correlation between activity and over-spending. So when I looked into giving everyone 25 points to clear up the debts (as Outback suggested, and as was CLEARLY the easiest, cleanest solution), I kept coming back to how teams like Bullies, Knockouts, and Anarchy would be given 19-24 points (a huge sum) when many of them sat on similarly large sums all season, for many seasons. Given the impact 20 points in a lump sum can have (and how vehemently most of you oppose point-hoarding), it felt like giving these teams a new pool to potentially power-level from was unfair. Especially since I would have to justify to our active members, like Phoenix, why someone, like Anarchy, got more free points than he did when he probably objectively doesn't deserve them as much as someone more dedicated like Phoenix does. And I feel this point of contention would have arisen even after explaining why people were getting free points to begin with.

Further, I did not feel like forgiving the 25 point debt of the 2 best teams in our league was consequence enough. While it isn’t about “punishing” anyone for these errors, it is my job to keep everything as fair as humanly possible. I do believe that many teams benefitted from this overspending. With how poorly Underdogs does and how well Outback does, it’s clear that it is not universal though. But simply allowing the top teams, like Byron and Rattlesnakes, to continue upgrading and increasing their top-tier fighters seemed like a bigger disservice to the league than freezing their point collection as other teams had some time to catch up. With teams having a couple weeks of point accumulation, spending, etc., I figured the quality of their catch-up upgrades would be more meaningful, and the top teams would not have as much time to continue to fine-tune their top fighters (or bolster their depth) while the other teams caught up. With a lump-sum, they COULD be some of this, but there is still no waiting period for the top teams. In the end, that waiting-period is what tilted me towards what we went with. Speaking strictly from fairness, having the top teams cool down while others worked to catch up made the most sense. Especially since a lot of the teams “catching up” are not active upgraders, and would take a while to spend those points anyway (meaning the spread between top and bottom teams would continue to grow)

5) Why “Option 3” though?
It was close, and it’s not like I didn’t carefully think this thing through for a couple weeks before doing it. Nothing brought up here in the comments of this thread isn’t something I didn’t consider at length over and over again. But a lot of it again comes down to the need for the top teams that had spend so many extra points to “pay back” what was spent. I don’t believe ManMMA should cover people’s debts, no matter who is at fault. The bank analogy came up, and it’s 100% accurate. If your bank account shows you have $200, so you spend $200, then a week later, they realize their error – they take the money back – they do not just gift you $200. (Same true in employment – couple years ago my spouse’s work accidentally double-paid her – we didn’t win the lottery, we had to send the money back to them.)

The economy of ManMMA is exactly that – an economy. So while we are working with imaginary “points”, they are all linked to the fairness of things. So while someone suggested using the point surpluses to pay off the debts, that would be like a bank using Bobs $4000 savings to pay off Frank’s credit card bill. The debts and surpluses are tied to the teams themselves. Mike had offered to pay everyone's debts out of his own point pool – and for the same reason I just said above, I told him it was not allowed. The economy is tied to the link between teams and earnings, and just as you are not allowed to trade points for a handshake, you are not allowed to pay other peoples debts within this unique economic structure.

6) No, why the SKETCHY “Option 3”?
It softened the blow by giving me lots of opportunities to give teams credit for various invisible points that they otherwise could or would have had. Some examples - I had already figured out everyone’s “18 point giveaway” points before all this. I used a bunch of those to reduce teams debt, while still being satisfied with the number of points the targeted fighters were receiving. This way, no one felt they were losing points they had/earned etc. Second example: If teams who overspent on their fighters had upgraded fighters they had unused POTN bonuses for, I used those POTNs to pay down the debt directly as well. Third example, we introduced a new award this year, and had planned on giving away 2 points to the winner(s) of it. For this season, we just auto-deducted those from the debt, delayed the announcement about the award, and bam – the affected teams lost debt they did not know they had with award points they didn’t know they had earned. So yeah, for the most part, it was all about trying to clean things up as invisibly as possible between seasons when I figured the fewest teams would be affected by it. That’s the type of sketchy shit that has absolutely no impact on anyone, and cleans up the imbalance in the points economy.

7) Shut up and show me where we are RIGHT NOW!
Sure.
So I think points thread was updated today, so this doesn’t reflect any of that, but here is where everyone sits last update:

RETIRED
Ferocity: -32

100% RESOLVED
WKO: -6 (between season transfer)
Dogs: -17(between season transfer)
Ducks: -8 (between season transfer)
Killing Joke: +1 (paid between season transfer)
Bullies: -1 (between season transfer)
SOA: -5 (3 from between seasons, Yan and Arlovski POTN used)
Outback: -1 (taken from between seasons transfer)
Hale Storm: -10 (7 points taken from between-season transfer - 1 taken from "18 points", 2 taken from gym of year award)

REMAINING FROM PARTIAL RESOLVES
Rocketmen: -12 (Edgar POTN used, 1 taken from 18 points)
Gap: -2 (2 taken from between seasons transfer, 4 taken from 18 points, 2 taken from gym of the year award)
Phoenix: -3 (6 from between seasons transfers)
Snakes: -9 ( 11 points and 1 holloway POTN used, 1 shevchenko POTN used, +1 Sterling POTN, 2 from 18 points)
Byron: -9 (1 megan POTN used, 2 from 18 points)
Chosen: -3 (-5 points taken from between seasons transfer, 1 from 18 points)


8) This is bullshit, it was your mistake!
Yes, we covered this. We are a bank. When the bank accidentally shows you you have too much money and you spend it, you have to pay it back. They do not forgive the debt, they do not give everyone else with an account at the bank the same amount they gave you. They just want their money back. Same applies. If you are paying points back now, you actually are getting less screwed than the other teams who are not, since you borrowed points interest-free for up to 3 ManMMA seasons. Which could be huge, and leads us to…

9) Advantages and Disadvantages
I had reviewed the impact as best as I could without a deep dive, and yes, there have been some unfortunate advantages. I think there’s a huge domino effect that is too complicated to simply say “I lost in the GP because of this”, because it’s all interconnected. EVERYONE is very much affected. Like (speaking strictly from theory, not from how things worked in actuality) if Byron doesn’t overspend on Penn, maybe someone else is a champion (say Khabib?), in which case, maybe Byron wins the GP, eliminating Outback or Rocketmen? The point here is in the grand scheme, this really did ripple-effect-fuck everyone in one way or another.

10) Reconciliation
I do agree there does appear to be a bit of damage done with the progress the top teams were able to make with the bonus points spending. I think based on your feedback, to help navigate this, I will gift some points to the teams who least-overspent. It should help cover the intangibles, like potential POTN bonuses they could have won that went to overspent teams, titles, GPs, etc.

I’ll use the median (which is 9 uncharged points), and work from that, gifting 5 points proportionately based on how affected you were. So bonus points are as follows:
Ducks: 0 points, but I will process your “18 points giveaway points – as I meant to do before)
WKO: -2 points
SOA: -2 points
Outback: 4 points
Bullies: 4 points
Killing Joke: 5 points

11) In Closing
In the end, the point of this sketchy shit always was about diminishing or eliminating the impact of the blow it had on you guys. I was really bummed to learn our fairness and quality had been compromised, so I really was trying to save you the disappointment I experienced with this blow. If this wasn’t first and foremost about fairness, I would have just ignored the whole thing and moved forward, rather than doing all this work (publicly and privately).

I think this 2100-word reply adequately covers everything, so I won’t be commenting any further. That said, If you have specific QUESTIONS (not complaints and insults), feel free to PM me, and I will happily answer those questions for you.

Thank you for your time, patience, and understanding.

These can be directed to The Hand of the King.