I kinda like the P/R element to it. It keeps the clans doing poorly honest as they’re still motivated to play well.

RT tournies are kinda tough. There are players all around the world that play and no matter what time you make it, it will be inconvenient if not impossible for some players to make it. Faster play emphasizes different skills than the 3 day boots. Players take clan league very seriously which is why you see all the vacations and the thought put into those games cannot be replicated in RT games. I will be the first to say that the time some of these games takes to move along is quite frustrating, but I don't think it should be messed with.

Under the current format, seeding isn’t really necessary and I don’t think changing it around to make it possible is worth it. Teams know the score...get in the top 2 of your division and you promote, end in bottom 2 and you demote. There’s not that many levels where a new clan would have to spend years to get to A.

As far as the qualifiers slowing down the league, I think the best way is to make the qualifiers, separate divisions that work into the next season rather than the same season.

For instance clan league would be:

Division A: top 5 from A plus top 2 from B
Division B: Bottom two from A, 3rd to 5th in B, and top 2 in C
Division C: Bottom 2 from B, 3rd from C, top 2 from both qualifiers.
Division D1 and D2: Rest of the clans remaining, seeded accordingly to the previous season.

This gives the advantage of no hold up of waiting on the qualifiers to end for C to begin. Disadvantage is that it takes a season longer to get to A.

Edited 5/14/2019 20:30:33

Please don't add a 4th division level. Every other solution is better than that.

Staying the same certainly would not. C is likely to drag out clan league, for at least 3 more months and it is a pain to have to manage a new division half way through the season.
Under this system plus the schedule, getting to A will take one more season, but approximately the same amount of time as it currently takes as one more season will likely progress. It's easier to manage and easier to grasp than the current system as well.
RT is tough to manage, let alone very controversial, and any other system will still force a division to wait until the qualifiers are finished.

RT tournaments: this may potentially be added to Clan Cup once that is up and running well, and there's a demand for that.
I would say you want to have it tested there first to see if it works or not before even considering adding it to Clan League. After all, if it fails, it could destroy Clan League, which is a risk you don't want to take before it's been tested elsewhere.

Qualifiers have never slowed down CL, let alone for 3 months. Nothing suggests that this season will be different. Slowest div A tournaments like Europe and Cookies aren't nowhere near half done. Cookies has 4 games completed out of 21.

So with that argument out of the window, the issue is that it's a pain to manage. Could you elaborate? Tournaments need to be created anyway, scorekeeping needs to be done anyway,. Just at a different point in time, no?

Qualifiers can take a different form, but to replace them with a 4th division? Please don't :/ Clans are too volatile for that. 3 divs is already a lot. Plus it's more interesting to follow now.

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As for my actual suggestions, I suggest to change default division sizes from 7 to 8. It won't take any longer if we go with a schedule.

Also give clans more time to submit their lineups. I think this time it was only 5 days from template voting to lineup submission. No reason for such rush. Just decide the templates earlier, even during previous CL.

Hmmm. A lot of good points. The more I think about it, the more I think that flexibility on "special" cases in CL placement is the best option. Easier to manage/fewer games. Having other competitions lets there be lower pressure competitions too.

Another factor that occurred to me about seeding (while I was lazing about in class). Seeding has to matter beyond being grouped into sets of 6. There would need to be inherent advantages to placing higher that encourage people to try after they locked in a spot. Its not just the clans doing badly. Elite clans need a reason to keep trying as well, once they are a lock. There's some "easy" ways to give advantages and incentivize continued performance, but they aren't easy to balance. I can hear all the arguing and drama already. So yeah. I don't think preliminary seeding is worthwhile to pursue anymore, not if the flexibility can be achieved elsewhere. Its easier to just make exceptions if a clan suddenly returns/loses a lot of competitive players/etc.

I think Cowboy's idea to hold qualifiers for the next division C is good. It seems like it would go much smoother. It'll be pretty rare that a new clan joins in the divisions that looks ready to fight for A, more likely that an old one returns. Clans fizzling during their first seasons (in separate qualifiers) won't affect the main CL either.

It might be an interesting experiment to do RT tourneys/Clan events, separate from the current multiday format. Its probably impossible to get consistent attendance even if held on weekends. It does give less skilled clans a bigger shot. I could beat Ryiro just because he'd be AFK and I'd show up. Activity is half the battle. :D

Qualifiers have never slowed down CL, let alone for 3 months. Nothing suggests that this season will be different. Slowest div A tournaments like Europe and Cookies aren't nowhere near half done. Cookies has 4 games completed out of 21.

That is actually very inaccurate. While cookies and Europe may not be half done, the qualifiers are still a month out of being done, if that. There are still games not even created yet. Throw in a week to set up C (if that, last clan league took almost a month to transition from the Qs to C), the time it takes people to join tourneys, and finding people that will be willing to run division C and D. (Plus the hope that both C and D finish reasonably), it's likely C takes longer than A by at least a month.

As far as the notion it has never slowed down Clan League, that is false.
Clan League 9 Division C outlasted A by over two months, in fact it finished 5 games sooner. A didn't even beat Division D2. This also ignores the fact FCC, Hydra, and Lufredd all collapsed at the end of Clan League, had they kept playing Clan League could've gone on into January.

In Clan League 10, A and C finished about a week apart with A slightly edging out C in length.
It is obvious that post-qualifier divisions can hold up clan league, sometimes for a long period of time.

So with that argument out of the window, the issue is that it's a pain to manage. Could you elaborate? Tournaments need to be created anyway, scorekeeping needs to be done anyway,. Just at a different point in time, no?

It's difficult to find people willing to run 2 or 3 more divisions in the middle of clan league at a random time (dependent on the qualifiers finishing.) It also means more CLOT work, finding new scorekeepers, giving time for players to be added from the clot, etc.
If the idea is to make CL as painless to run as possible, then the qualifiers as they stand are a bad idea.

As for my actual suggestions, I suggest to change default division sizes from 7 to 8. It won't take any longer if we go with a schedule.

Not a terrible idea, as it would make promoting easier as well. But there are two drawbacks. The potential on one of those extra games pushing Clan League to be even longer. But more so, it increases the workloads on players in an already exhausting league. If more people show support for an increase in division size, then I will consider it more seriously. Right now it's a bit on the fringe and needs a bit more debate whether it's a good idea or not.

Also give clans more time to submit their lineups. I think this time it was only 5 days from template voting to lineup submission. No reason for such rush. Just decide the templates earlier, even during previous CL.

Yeah, that's a definite, the process to get this CL going was definitely rushed.

I dislike the option of another division. It takes way too long to get to div A that way, which will result in less clan diversitiy, as good players may prefer to play in div A and therefore leave their original clan which starts from the bottom.

My suggestion:
Make 3-4 games at once for Qs and punish stalling on completly lost games with auto-losses on all other games in this tournament.

My suggestion:
Make 3-4 games at once for Qs and punish stalling on completly lost games with auto-losses on all other games in this tournament.

I think you could do this for division A and B, where people certainly know they're stalling. But in Q's there's new clans with newer players; they might not know they're stalling and it'll only serve as demotivation to automatically have games forfeit.

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