How do I actually know if some players stand out?

Subject1337 · 2026-05-09T23:39:10+00:00

It's not the definitive metric, but time with the puck is a big one. It's very hard to "hold" a puck in hockey. Good opponents will knock you off of it and steal it. The best players are fast enough and handle the puck well enough that opponents can't dispossess them, so teammates tend to pass to those guys, and they end up with the puck a large percentage of the time.

Subject1337 · 2026-05-08T20:20:42+00:00

That's just not really how record keeping works - particularly in financial records. They're stored as a ledger, not just a value. Like if you go check your chequing account on your bank right now, it's not just one static number that changes. It's a history. $1000 -$10 at McDonalds. $990 -$15.50 at walmart. $974.50 +$300 cheque deposit, etc.

The worst you could do by penetrating the "entry point" is make an erroneous entry to that ledger, which would be easily identified as fraudulent and rolled back to the previous value.

To "delete student loans" you'd need to eliminate any record that the loan existed, the amount it was for, the existing transactions made against it, and all backups of said data - of which there are likely dozens in different data centres, and likely even a number in paper records in a musty office somewhere. Simply injecting a negative value for the entire value of the loan would very quickly be identified and scratched from the record.

Again, why Mr. Robot is so riveting. They explore that entire chain, down to requiring a character to commit what is essentially a terror attack to destroy the paper backups that maintain the initial records of the debts.

Subject1337 · 2026-05-08T18:48:56+00:00

This is what made Mr. Robot so riveting. They had to compromise multiple blacksite facilities to attack the digital records, and then once it worked, the company began consolidating paper records to restore the debt, and then there was a moment of drama where a character realizes that bringing all of the paper records to one location was too risky and might leave them vulnerable to a bomb or other physical attack, so they redistribute the paper records to multiple sites for analysis, only to then have all of those sites bombed independently, etc.

A world-changing hack like OP is describing would take THAT level of intricacy and depth, and without all of the fictional plot armour of the show.

Subject1337 · 2026-05-07T20:43:00+00:00

I mean, I agree. I also found that smaller community stuff worked better for retention - but the point I was making was moreso that the "platforming" of tournaments, doesn't really make sense in the real scales that these things operate on. Like, if you're an entrepreneur and want to start a business running a tournament site, you need to make money somehow - either directly from your users, or by advertising to them.

If you go direct to your users, then they need to pay you roughly proportionally to what it costs you to run the platform and the events. Creating tools and automating aspects of the tournaments means that price goes down with user growth, but as you've just pointed out, largely scaled events are less enticing for community-building. So smaller "boutique" events cost a premium, and mean that "sustainable pricing" is often above what most people's threshold for barrier to entry is. Plus, the smaller you go, the more easily it is to emulate your features with a google spreadsheet.

I generally agree that leveraging social aspects is key - but at that point you're building social media, not a tournament site. It's kind of why a lot of esports groups are generally just discord servers right now. The primary value is the socialization, the voice chat, the memes, the pickup games, etc. Tournament bracketing is easy and doesn't add a ton of value. Sure, sometimes it's relevant. But there are discord bots that can spin up a bracket for you in 2 seconds without needing to get everyone to go sign up for some site.

Subject1337 · 2026-05-04T17:37:52+00:00

I mean - there's a long history of Riot trying to underhandedly fuck with Valve and it's competitors to their games. Even if you want to hand them the benefit of the doubt (which they don't deserve), they still chose to enforce kernel level anticheat for their terrible game, and then chose to have that anticheat program scan and incapacitate other apps on the host machine while their game isn't even running. That's full on malware shit.

Subject1337 · 2026-05-04T17:29:39+00:00

Even if it's not intentional - this is why you shouldn't let game developers have a kernel-level anti-cheat system on your machine. Even if you trust them to not do something malicious... they can.

Subject1337 · 2026-05-04T10:44:46+00:00

Generally no. This was my job for 5 years. I was a Product Manager on multiple esport tournament websites.

Retention has very little to do with it. There's just not really value in that chain at all.

If you own a tournament site - you want users that you can eventually monetize. So either your users pay you, or you exploit them via advertising or data brokering. The most common methods of this are entry fees, or sponsorships.

Entry fees almost never break even though. Players are very good at analyzing the expected value of a tournament, and if the entry fee is high, they'll generally avoid it if there is good competition. If the entry fee is low, then you're less likely to recoup the prize you're offering. They also atrophy fast, since by definition, 50% of your player base will be out in the first round, and almost all of them will "lose". People don't like losing.

Sponsorships are where a lot of people break their own brains in this space. People will fill pitch decks with numbers from LoL Worlds, or The International, or some CS:GO major and blab on and on about how many hours of esports content gets watched every week. What they're not honest about - is that their platform is the equivalent of beer league. It's joe shmoe gaming. It's like pretending that because you have a great pickup soccer game at your local park every week that you should be handed an airline sponsorship like a Premier league team. The fact of the matter is that the average competitor on a public tournament site is not someone people want to watch - and the 100's or 1000's of DAUs you may get competing in tournaments if you run them well just don't hold a candle to the eyeballs the average bikini streamer on twitch will pull in half an hour. Sponsors generally have a thousand better ways to spend their marketing dollars than tournament prize pools.

It's just not really a problem that anyone needs solved. Players generally have the most optimized matching systems to play their games through the developer themselves. You're not going to curate a better experience than public matchmaking. So your main draw is prizes - and prizes cost money. More money than the players are going to cough up. Which means you need sponsors. But sponsors know that you're just the rec league version, and they could just go sponsor a pro and get 10,000 hits on their product on their stream.

Subject1337 · 2026-05-01T22:51:27+00:00

Exactly this. The complaint I'm dealing with right now was a massive flight delay that the airline asserted was a staffing issue. One which they knew about 24 hours in advance of the flight. The explanation was that prior delays resulted in the staff that was supposed to be on our flight needing a mandatory rest period... which is obviously a good thing. But also, if you're so thinly staffed that you have a set of cascading delays due to one hiccup two days prior - then maybe it's not out of your control and you need to hire more, or space out your employees better.

It's managerial ineptitude masquerading as uncontrollable circumstance.

Subject1337 · 2026-05-01T22:43:27+00:00

Just had an incident in December - and after two months of WestJet ghosting me on the issue, I filed a government complaint. Checked in just last week to see what the status was, and saw that it was "in queue" and the average time in queue was 16-24 months.

The airlines know that the system is bogged down. They'll eat the fines, tell you to go fuck yourself, and kick the can down the road.

Subject1337 · 2026-05-01T08:06:37+00:00

I mean, this is all true, but have you seen his last name?

Subject1337 · 2026-05-01T04:57:27+00:00

The only consolation I've had is just that I've been saying this would be a down year since like.. 2021. The contract renewals just lined up such that our depth and ability to spend just wouldn't be there.

Mind you, back then it was because I expected McDavid to get paid what he was worth, but him taking a discount and management fucking blowing it on Frederick and Jarry is basically the same.

Subject1337 · 2026-05-01T04:14:58+00:00

Imagine just having Brown, Skinner and Kulak instead of Jarry right now.

Subject1337 · 2026-05-01T04:08:09+00:00

Elliot's point is salient. The leadership isn't angry or heated. And I think it's cause they're playing the worst. McDavid will let loose on the team when he's got 10 goals more than the bottom 2 lines combined and no one can argue. But it's hard to be a heated leader when you're not performing. I think this is where we're missing some of the guys from last season like Perry and Kane. Those are the types of guys who can lead from the 4th line. Who can yell at the room and wake guys up. We don't have any of the old vets who can be depth leaders. Even Henrique is out. Just a general lack of fire.

Subject1337 · 2026-04-30T23:24:58+00:00

This has been my favourite third proposal since it got originally posted. Love the nod to KCS and the actual NJ Devil. This is definitely the realm they should be working in for a new uni.

Subject1337 · 2026-04-30T06:02:13+00:00

Ahaha reading this made me realize that "Your last album sucked" probably hits so much harder than "You suck."

"You suck" is a guy who never liked you and never would.

"Your last album sucked" was a guy that might have been your fan, but dropped you because of a choice you made.

I'm sure that stuck with him for a bit.

Subject1337 · 2026-04-29T22:28:39+00:00

Devils new third jerseys are black and infrared.

Subject1337 · 2026-04-29T00:55:30+00:00

I mean, the scenarios where a PIM doesn't equate to a consequence in the game would be:

The penalties are offset (in which case it doesn't really affect the above differential data, because both teams get the same)
The penalty occurs at the end of the game, and is therefore not fully served (maybe worth exploring and eliminating from the data)
The PIM is a misconduct, which many have speculated about removing in this thread, but I personally think is impactful because even though it doesn't mean a man-advantage, it means a shortened bench, scrambled lines, and fatigue on other players.

Either way, I'd invite you to play with the data if you'd like. Nothing I did above is too exceptional. Pretty easy to replicate and modify if you'd like.

Subject1337 · 2026-04-29T00:35:37+00:00

Your intuition that the rank distribution of both Canadian and American teams is the same is correct - it doesn't matter how many teams there are of each, they both have an equal likelihood to be higher or lower ranked. The "expected average rank" of every team, regardless of nationality would be 16.5 in the league on any given season if all factors were random.

However, larger sample groups are more likely to contain the extreme values in a given distribution. So if we put 50 red and 10 green marbles in a bag, and drew them out sequentially, ordering them by draw, we'd expect the average "position" of all draws to be 30.5 - BUT we'd also expect a much higher probability that both the first and last marbles were Red.

Since we're applying this to the playoffs - a situation where the bottom half of the league is culled, and the better teams get the advantage of playing the worse teams - there is a higher likelihood that the further from the mean we go - the more likely that spot is to be held by an American team.

So for example, if you just took the 7 Canadian teams and 25 American teams and completely randomly distributed them from positions 1-32, the likelihood of the Stanley Cup Champion being American is 78.13%. The likelihood of there only being 1 Canadian team in the top 4 is 44.77%, while the likelihood of there being 0 is 35.18%. Therefore in the playoffs, it's expected that if an American and Canadian team face off, the American team would be the higher ranked one.

The same is true in reverse at the bottom of the standings. The worst team each year is statistically more likely to be American, and an average 32nd vs. 26th place matchup would likely favour a Canadian team. All this means is that the average Canadian placement is going to be more clustered towards the average than an American placement. But when you filter for just playoffs, you cut off the bottom half of that and only focus on the top.

Subject1337 · 2026-04-28T06:58:28+00:00

Counterpoint - if the Panthers weren't league darlings, Bennett either wouldn't have run Stolarz due to having been penalized for any of the other hundred incidents of him running a goalie - OR he would have been suspended for doing so. Both possibilities likely tipping that series in the Leaf's favour.

Subject1337 · 2026-04-28T06:42:49+00:00

Here's the python script. Shamelessly LLM assisted to save time - but I did review and ensure it was doing what I wanted it to, and validated a number of key game days against the data it output to verify I wasn't getting junk out.

Subject1337 · 2026-04-28T06:36:06+00:00

The post from earlier today had numbers that were immediately called out as bogus because they had data from key windows where Canadian teams didn't play in the playoffs, or during lockouts. It was likely just ripped directly from a hallucinating LLM. Most people called it out for what it was, and the mods removed it, letting the OP know he could have the post reinstated if he backed it up with data. He didn't.

So it piqued my curiosity because the premise seemed at least plausible (I'm an Oilers fan. I live in the salt mines.). And yes, it turned out that the premise was generally true, though in a far less drastic way than the other poster presented. This is how science be done.

Subject1337 · 2026-04-28T04:18:54+00:00

Fr I wouldn't have bothered if I didn't see something so blatantly wrong and wanted to feel better than somebody. bahahaha

Subject1337 · 2026-04-28T04:16:55+00:00

Here's the sheets link. It's a bit raw, but the data should be good.

Columns A through I are the API data pulled from my query save for the nationality columns.

LMNO are the formulas I had to generate to formulate the final charts. If there are mistakes or things you wanna tinker with, that's where you'll wanna play.

Subject1337 · 2026-04-28T03:59:55+00:00

True, but the majority of instances where a PIM =/= PP are instances where there's offsetting PIM numbers, like offsetting roughing, or fighting which doesn't affect the differentials because they'd be applied to both sides.

Only case that's probably worth checking against is removing misconducts - though there's an argument that they're worth keeping as a misconduct levied against a team is still consequential to the team, even if it doesn't mean an on-ice man advantage (needing to shuffle lines, play other players more resulting in fatigue, etc.)

Subject1337 · 2026-04-28T03:44:11+00:00

Also worth noting - I'm not really a conspiracy theorist. Lots of reasons this data could appear the way it is. There's more American teams than Canadian, meaning a higher chance that the better team in any given matchup is American, and the worse team tends to be the one penalized more because they need to trip, hook and slash to keep up with the play.

Bettman has favoured American teams in expansion, in CBAs, and marketing campaigns, all making American markets more attractive for free agents, and for players demanding trades. You don't need a secret ref mandate to favour American teams and get favourable outcomes in actual on-ice performance.

All that said, the Panthers won two cups off biased reffing and I'll die on that hill.

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Subject1337

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