I agree with Farah. I don't know if there's many people overplaying games they clearly lost in the lower divisions. My gut feeling is that people are honorable enough to not be a big problem. They will still need the extra time though.

I think there's only a few clans that will realistically (re)join and potentially go to A long term. For the vast majority, it probably won't matter that much. I'm not sure if most (semi) competitive clans could even reach B reliably. From past memory, the only clans that would realistically do this are Masters, Icelandic Turtles, and French Community. Blitz too if they weren't in the qualifiers, maybe. With the latter 3, activity would be an issue though. To me, the biggest upside of having clans climb back through the P/R system directly is that they are forced to be active consistently, it reduces the chance of fizzling in a higher tournament.

On the other hand, I feel that its doubly unproductive to have a clearly strong clan (A-capable in other words) go back through the proving grounds. We would already know they are strong, they're only proving activity. So from that perspective, having them go back through the lower levels is wasting everyone's time. It's also a similar effect to "smurfing" in other games, i.e. high tier players specifically returning to curbstomp weaker ones on a new ranked climb. It wouldn't be intentional here. But the only team in the Qualifiers with a shot at fighting an A tier team is Blitz. Shove another A tier team in Q2 and either the Hawks or Blitz lose a spot they should have earned. This isn't fair to any of the other teams in the tournament, and probably pretty demoralizing.

If you were looking at making a larger division size, you could use these as flex slots. Clans wanting to dive back into the upper divisions could have mini-battles with representatives of current denizens in said division. You'd push the losing team to a lower division or keep both, depending on whether you want to expand the upper or lower division. If you add them, you'd need a cap on the number of "extra" slots. I don't think anyone but the Masters would "test" back into division A or possibly even B at this point.

There's better solutions out there I bet. This is the kind of scenario I was primarily thinking about earlier with the sports-themed setup. Currently I think that letting a high caliber team stomp weaker teams for several seasons is more disruptive than trying to adjust the higher competitions.

Just for the banter, could we have a super league where we put all the clans into a 20 RR. Cowboy will love it!

It's a clot, so we could make it as big as it needs to be. Imagine a 28 team RR EU tourney.

This would complicate the CLOT, but for speed you could have a self-serve real-time process:

- Individuals get all their pairings at the start of the league (e.g., "Player P has to play A, B, C, D, and E by [some deadline]")
- For each pairing (e.g., P and A), they have until [3 weeks before game deadline] to agree to a scheduled time slot for a real-time game on the assigned template. You'd need an interface on the CLOT site for either P or A to propose a time (or set of times, ideally) and for the other player to accept. At 3 weeks before the deadline, the agreed date/time final and can't be changed. Moreover, if they schedule the game before that 3 week period, then they have until 72 hours before the scheduled time to mess with it.
- 2 hours before the date/time players P and A agree to, the game gets created as a real-time match by the CLOT (this way, both P and A get advance notifications and the opportunity to join)

Then P and A play out the game in probably a couple of hours at most. This would simplify the optimization/scheduling challenge of a real-time tournament, where you're constrained by everyone's schedules, and just restrict it to the schedules of only a couple players at once. Even with extreme time zone differences (e.g., GMT and GMT+12), there are some compromise times that'll work out since no one's more than half a day apart and you could always find a mid-morning/late-night pairing over the weekend.

If either player is a no-show, the other gets the points. If both are no-shows, it's a double-loss outside extenuating circumstances/etc. where league management would get involved.

But:

- If by [3 weeks before game deadline] P and A haven't scheduled the RT match, you just create a multi-day game on the template for them to play out. Worst-case scenario, some games slip through and get played out the old way. If players prefer MD, they can also just ask for an MD from the get-go (through the CLOT interface) instead of having to wait it out.

- Substitutions would have to allow for some rescheduling period if they occur after the 3-week lock-in deadline.

I think this has a serious chance of reducing the number and impact of boot losses and of allowing players who don't want to make multi-month commitments to just play everything out in real time should they choose to. If you feel the same way and think that implementation is the only hurdle to this approach, then we could tackle that next.

Oh, and now you'll know the exact times that the major games will be played out (e.g., "the decisive Outlaws/SNinja match on cookies will be this Wednesday at 5:45 AM US Eastern time") so that could make Clan League easier and more fun to follow.

Edited 5/15/2019 21:11:41

That would be really complicated to upkeep, while interesting, I don't think we have a realistic way to implement that. Not to mention the large amount of testing required to make that CLOT work properly. Maybe a thought for the future, but without a testing outside of clan league we don't know how well it'd work.

After looking over many suggestions (including some from previous seasons), I have a pretty good list of topics that need to or are being discussed, as well as a few others.

Clan League is taking too long

Scheduling
The first and easiest solution is to implement a schedule. While the schedule in CL10 did not decrease the length of the league, I do believe condensing the schedule down can bring the league down to a half a year, potentially, if not less.
The Qualifiers drag on Clan League
The Qualifiers have the problem of holding up the divisions that come after that get held up by speed of play, vacations, and game length. While schedules will likely fix this to some extent, it cannot guarantee when C and D are able to start, and having an exact start date on these divisions certainly helps keep clan league from being bottle-necked. I'll put a run-over of the different ideas on a different post to keep this post from getting cluttered.
Vacations holding up Clan League
Should we implement some limits to vacations?

Substitutions should be increased

Increase the current count to 10
Probably the easiest solution. 10 is a lot after all.
Make substitutions unlimited
There is a case to be made that slot limitations and roster caps make substitutions unnecessary. After all unlimited subs decreases the chance of boots and non-joins
Make it so that lineup changes before the tourney begins does not affect the substitution count

Increase the time between template voting and lineup creation

Simply increase the time
Have templates picked out well in an advance of clan league without a vote
The advantage of this is that people will have plenty time to prepare for CL as well as their lineups. It does give away the voice of the clans in voting, though. To prevent templates from getting re-used templates could be forbidden from being played in concurrent seasons outside of "grandfathered" templates like EU and ME WR.
Have A/B clans vote for the templates the season prior
It increases the prep time considerably, but does mean that clans that promote from C will be exempt from voting.

Bring back the Mid-Season Registration

Should anything be done about the alt rules?

Right now there are a few players that are playing with their "non-clan league" account. How stringent should we be about these rules. Should we allow alts if they are fully disclosed to who they are? I mean the two season clan change ban pretty much eliminates the main problem people had with alts.

Preferred voting system for templates?

Right now I am leaning towards randomly and anonymously selecting a voting system from a list of about 4 systems. This eliminates the attempting rigging of the votes. If you're ok with that, what system should I use?

If you can think of any other issues please let me know

What if vacations weren't allowed but players got some some extra banked days?

We could go for banked times, to reward those who play quickly. But doing no vacation at all is not easy.

Edited 5/16/2019 17:33:39

I would like the idea of more subs. You know what harm, I think the length of the competition is crazy and I think given this is an amateur game for fun, the league should try to take that into account and not punish clans and risk boots/non-joins, which aren't in the best interests for all parties involved.

What if vacations weren't allowed but players got some some extra banked days?

Just a reminder that when discussing boot times, keep in mind we can pre-enter orders now and not commit. So a 3 day boot time, means you can go away for up too 5 days, 23hr. This at least for me, has almost made vacations unneeded and I use this feature a lot. (Maybe even abuse it tbh, through I did get burned and booted for it).

In terms of stalling in A/B for me at least, that is always about getting the next game at a more desirable time for me. (If I am busy, let me stall for ~1 week for eks.) A schedule would change that at least.

Also, the Q's are a good idea but have some major challenges, the new clans/ clan rep. don't know what is going on and current system is both complex, hard to explain, slow and un-intuetive. While not ideal, I would rather skip Q's and seeding and just randomly place the teams in C and D (or C2). (Maybe one promote from each to B?). At least, by far what took most time for me was the Q's (be warned cowboy)

I don't think CL has ever had a (real) problem with bad templates tbh. So whichever method finds templates should work.

Edited 5/16/2019 23:11:33

Ah, I wasn't aware of the Auto-commit feature. Now I know. Thanks :D

AFAIK CL has typically had the high tier clans choose templates, right? If you wanted to give the lower clans a voice but keep the quality of templates, perhaps the high tier clans (or players?) suggest templates, but the lower clans can join the group that votes? I don't think very many templates change each CL but weaker clans will have more trouble learning them than the advanced ones.

Well the question is not that the templates being selected are bad. People just want more time to prep their players and decide lineups. The processes I listed above are just a few ways we can go about this.

Please, add a rule against intenionally delaying of the league by not surrendering in completly lost games or with booted team mates without realistic chances to win.

Through my eyes this rule is already in affect (we had such rules in past seasons), but it should be stated more clearly.

I believe getting rid of the WarZone automation (the tournaments) and making it more manual with a good scheduling system in place, will greatly improve the quality of the league to the point that the other improvements/ideas would only be in the shadow of this great big improvement.

Agreed, but improvements overall are needed regardless across the board.

Use banked boot times. I can't currently critically think a correct banked time but from the top of my head 3 days and 3 days banked boot time.

Just make sure fizzer doesn't make changes to banked time during the event and your banked time gets set to 0.

This is the current agenda for us to talk about as a panel, if you wish to add anymore suggestions or ideas for improvement, please let me know soon.

As Cowboy said we want to more time for preparations and to decide our lineups. I would like to know templates 3 months before CL starts. It will increase tournament level and I do not see any obstacles against voting a few months earlier.

True