I agree the placements method isn’t good for competition, and it’s one of the main reasons that the team event isn’t taken seriously, as well as top skaters declining to participate to focus on individual events. Is there any other team Olympic sport that uses placements rather than raw score or time values? I’ve seen quite a few SPs where the difference between third and eighth was minuscule by points but by placements it would be a disaster. Maybe a normalized across disciplines version of points? Uno placing so far ahead of the men’s SP field in Pyeongchang should have been worth more to his team rather than rendered mostly irrelevant due to placements. It should be like a relay where a strong performer can power his/her team with a huge advantage even with some weaker links instead of lol it doesn’t matter. If they scored by points and you could offset a lack of strong performers in other disciplines (Hanyu/Uno/Kihira potentially building a huge number of points to compensate for Japan’s lack of depth in dance and pairs would be pretty interesting imo), more top skaters might participate instead treating it as practice run or opting out altogether because the results are a foregone conclusion.But, in general, I'm pretty wary about using placements to decide these things. What do people think about using a scoring range instead? Like for example, a Ladies SP could be awarded 1 team point for their performance scoring 40 points, and then an additional 1 team point for every 3 points more above that mark. This would make it so the team scoring is valuing each performance itself, providing incentive for people to always skate as well as possible, and remove the issue of having a big disparity in rankings for performances that are bunched together in quality.