AG - MDL would be great, but I have a few issues.

1) Too many templates - it is nice to learn new templates, but there are simply too many IMO.

2) No team games

3) Doesn't avoid people from same clan (that is both a pro and con depending on how you look at it)

That makes it hard to really assess a clan's 'rank'. I think if you could address those things with me, I would rather just use MDL than the clan league at all. I prefer a longer term aggregation like you mentioned than this one off snapshot where a clan (or even player) may or may not go through some internal issues for a few weeks and hose the entire competition.

I've been thinking about this a little bit.
I think it makes sense if rather than a round robin, you use a double elimination style tournament with seeding (based on results of the previous season) where all clans eliminated in the earlier rounds play a third and potentially fourth game for additional placement. First teams of division A clans could receive a bye for the first round depending on the number of teams.

e.g. with 48 teams (to use an easy number as example, slightly more complicated patterns with more byes exist for all numbers):
(1) op 16 seeds get a bye to second round. Teams 17 to 32 play teams 33 to 48.
(2) The 16 first round winners play against a top 16 team for a place in the third round.
(3) After second round: 16 teams in third round, 16 in loser bracket after second round loss, 16 in loser bracket after first round loss.
Loser bracket teams play each other, first 16 teams eliminated (2 placement games against each other for places 33-36, 37-40, 41-44, 45-48), then another 8 (1 placement game against each other for places 25-28, 29-32), 8 more continue in loser bracket.
(4) After third round, 8 teams in winner bracket QF, 16 teams in loser bracket. 8 eliminated play placement game for places 17-20, 21-24, next 4 eliminated have minimum 4 games and don't play placement games anymore (13-16).
(5) Continue as a regular double elimination with placement ending as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5-6, 7-8, 9-12.
Assign points depending on placement, e.g.
1st - 20
2nd - 17
3rd - 15
4th - 13
5-6 - 11
7-8 - 10
9-12 - 9
continue up to 1 point for 41-44.

Is it possible to include those seedings in the tournament? So Seed A as the 1st team of Division A plays against the 16th ranked clan, the 2nd vs the 15th ranked and so on. I never tried it out, but is it possible to create a tournament with exactly those seedings?

A round robin tournament wouldn't work, but such a format could bring in some interesting change in the competition and i think that could be worth it, so u don't play always against the same clans, but also against other clans and that every clan gets a chance to compete for the real title.

Also i think boots become less a problem, because the stake isn't as high as in a league format. If u mess up a season due to boots, u get a worse seed, but if u're a good clan u can always challenge any of the other clans in the next season.

U probably need to create a lot of tournaments manually, and ofc the creator needs to start the tournament manually, just to be sure that everyone sits in the right seed, but overall i really like your idea, Math Wolf.

The league might take longer, but if everyone has a chance at the title, would that be a problem? Since one of the problems in a league format was always that it takes to long to get up to A and to have a shot at the title, but in such a format everyone has a shot at the title anyways, so i think it wouldn't be such a problem if a tournament takes longer.

So the only problem i see, is that it might not be possible to create those kind of tournaments in WZ. Maybe a CLOT could do it instead, if it's not possible to do in WZ? I don't think it would be an option to manually create those kind of games in WZ, because the workload would be probably to much.

But anyways, those are questions that need to be solved to make it a realistic format, but if that's somehow possible, i think that would be a great improvement in the overall structure. Give every clan a chance to win the title immediately.

You're definitely onto something here, ChrisCMU. A format that reduces the drama would be great. The evidence suggests that a ladder would fail on this though.

So.... What is the only competition, played by most of the top players, that is almost drama free as far as I know? The AWP Tour.

Simple model would be to equate "clan" with "best-performing-individual-from-clan-in-each-tournament", and have a race each year as individuals currently do. Would need a team tournament series as well, of course. It would be much more fun than the status quo, and save a lot of people a lot of work. No rosters to choose. No subbing in and out. No pressure on people to play templates that they don't like, or to keep playing when they're too busy. And no potential for benefit from stalling.

Don't touch the AWP Tour itself, though. It's a fantastically designed event, and doesn't need contaminating with CL-style drama. But using it as the best available model would be a great idea.

Edited 7/18/2018 11:10:22

I don't think that would be a good idea. It's Clan League. So the clan should matter and not only 1 individual player or 1 great team of 2/3 people who could potentially get the clan all their points. If u can get a win with just 3 great players, that doesn't show the strength of a clan, nor it would be a strength indicator that makes their clan the best in the game.

U need a system in which clans show their strengths and their depth. Otherwise u don't need Clan League as a format, since we already have enough competitions which u could use to determine the best clan f.ex. at the end of a year like it was done before with the Slammy Awards etc.

Edit: I also think u would still need some kind of restrictions, since it wouldn't be cool if a clan doesn't get a chance to play in a tournament, because others send in 9-10 players. So u probably still need to restrict the tournament places one clan would get to 2 or 3 and then we could have again the same problem, that 1 clan could win it with just 3 players.

I think u need to keep a lineup and the slot limit. But switching it to a more open tournament format for all clans would be cool. Something like Math Wolf indicates or something similar to that.

I'm not a fan of a ladder kind format. I think that could result in to much games overall and personally i think less workload would be better for everyone.

Edited 7/18/2018 11:32:27

Seeding doesn't exist in Warlight, so such tournaments would definitely need a CLOT or manual. Manual creation would actually not be that much work, but it wouldn't be efficient, obviously.

Seeding rules would need to be closed form mathematical formulas for all teams based on the results of the clans overall and in the specific same tournament, and with a strong discount for second and third teams of the same clan.

Time could be an important issue. For up to 64 teams, we are talking about up to 13 consecutive games to be finished if I counted correctly. For 32 teams, this would still be 11 consecutive games. This is easily double the time as CL now, so stricter rules on vacations might be needed. Although, technically, a "waiting" team could already start new games against both potential opponents (who are still in an ongoing game) with only the game against the actual winner counting.

An additional advantage: clans with limited depth could choose to forego certain tournaments.