Hello everybody! It's September so it's time to start planning the next Clan League season.

What's Clan League?

It's the biggest community event on this site with over 600 players participating each year. All games are played multi-day, there's focus on team templates and of course, it's clan-based.
It's a promotion/relegation league with newcoming clans starting in division C, trying to make their way up to A.

We're playing on:
-six 1v1 templates
-three 2v2 templates
-two 3v3 templates
which makes it 18 player-slots total.
Each player can only play maximum 3 slots, which means your clan needs at least 6 active clan members to participate. It's recommended to have many more.

How to sign up?

There will be a proper sign-up thread after the exact templates are selected.

What's the purpose of this thread then?

First, we need to gather template suggestions.
Every clan who played last season is free to suggest their own. Preferably it's done by the clan contacts from last season, to avoid multiple submissions from the same clan.
What we need is a game link to a finished game on that template.
You can post them here or send me a WZ mail.
There's a limit of max 15 template submissions from a single clan, team and solo templates counted together, so that we don't get spammed by templates that nobody really cares about.

The CL panel will then select templates from the ones all clans submit. While it's not exactly a vote, if the same template gets submitted by a lot of clans, its chances increase.
We will also try to continue the tradition and include one team and one solo template that has never been played in CL before, while avoiding templates played last season.
Only skill-based templates with low luck element will be considered. No lotto.

Submission deadline is 30th September. Can be changed to a later date but don't count on it.

And finally, the CL19 improvements

There's been a lot of discussion on how to improve Clan League. They took place all around Discord, forum, CL-improvements group-chat and more.

Based on all the chats, we'd like to officially SUGGEST 5 improvements, listed below, and put them up for futher discussion. We're all interested in your feedback. Ideally all the discussion will happen in this thread.

1. Unlimited number of sustitutions, no rosters nor midseason registration.

Current way of handling substitutions is perhaps too overcomplicated. The midseason registration in particular didn't work as intended, since we only had around 20% games completed 'midseason'.

The other limitations would remain:
- you must be part of your clan when your game gets created;
- if you played a game for your clan, you can't play for any other clan this season.

2. Boot times reduced to 3 days base + 7 days banked.

Reducing boot times was a very frequent suggestion. Reducing the bank by over 50%, from 15 days down to 7, looks pretty drastic on one hand.
On the other hand, having 10 days total is still so much more than any other WZ competition offers, so it shouldn't be too controversial.
We could see how it goes for CL19 and perhaps adjust it again for CL20.

3. Reduce division sizes to 6 for CL20, probably means 3 relegations from A and B in CL19.

The main goal here is to reduce the season length. Instead of 7 rounds of games we would only need 5.

4. A path to superpromote a clan from division C to A.

The best clan in C would play against 4th clan in A after season. The winner would play in A next season, the loser in B.

While this is a promotion/relegation league in concept, we can't just let it run wild without any balance. We only play 1 season per year and based on what we gathered, most people like it this way.
This means that up until now, a newly formed clan started in C, promoted to B after a year, promoted to A after another year and only after 3 years could they possibly get a medal.
Multiday Warzone may be a slow game but 3 years is insanely long time for video game standards. And lets not forget we used to have divisions D and E before.
Now, to make it clear, most newly formed clans do indeed belong to division C, or B at best. But it does happen that a new, very strong clan forms. The new system would require them to prove themselves in division C, and if it turns out they are stable enough (don't dissolve after a couple of months) and are A-level in skill (beat an 'average', 4th ranked clan in A), they would get their chance to fight for podium the following year.

Of course, this idea comes with its own complications. What if we have 2 divisions C? Who's the best clan then? This would need to be figured out in advance, before the season starts or any draw happens, but after the signups, when we know the exact division layout.

5. Max 2 teamslots per player.

The goal is to stop this vicious cycle of the best players trying to carry the clan by playing 3 team templates, having 10 teamgames active at the same time, burning out, leaving, the next best player doing the same next season.

That's it for know. We're looking forward to all the player feedback and the template suggestions!

I like four of the five proposals. The reduced league size paired with the super-promotion and flatter league structure (A, B, C1/C2) feels like the pendulum swinging too far to drive team turnover however.

2 out of 6 relegating from A would be absolutely brutal. Next year will have all of Optimum, USB, Turtles, Masters, MB. Once we hit CL20, you would have one of these go to B? And another one has to defend their slot?

I suggest we stick to 7 per division, with 2 up + 2 down and the best team from C challenging A5 during the offseason. Six games is fine, especially when paired with the max two slots per player.

Overall, great proposals and I’m excited for CL19!

Edited 2025-09-14 13:57:06

May I pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease ask that the templates are announced asap

Are we supposed to discuss as individuals or are you more interested in discussing this with clan representatives? This could get quite messy if anyone can say whatever... but here I go anyway:

2. Reducing banked time sounds great for 1v1 games, although for a competition that takes this long maybe honoring vacations with some limitations set by the rules would be nice (perhaps 2 weeks/game max? enforced by disqualifying any offenders at opposing player's discretion)
I would even change the boot timer from 3 days to 2 days 12 hrs in 1v1s

Team games do require that additional time to communicate effectively, I personally would leave those as they are especially 3v3s


4. Superpromotion shouldn't force a clan to compete again after the season ends, that's not fun
C -> A promotion saves exactly 1 season, that's 1 year it saves, not 3 years

If it's say D or E to A then I guess that's warranted? But you are still forcing A to compete off season? I wouldn't sign up to that ever.

Maybe just superpromote clans that score insanely high like 80-85%+PC automatically? And still skip only 1 division?
As long as everyone understands that 4th position isn't guaranteed safety I think it's ok to demote a clan without that additional fight.

In a broad sense, I agree with Grimer:

1. Reduce 1v1 time but not so much for team games. My suggestion would be (1v1 3d+5 banked, teams 3d +10 banked, maybe even more for 3v3)

2. I do not like the idea of Superpromotion. The effort teams have put into getting to Div A has been rewarding and challenging. This opens up the competition to abuse (e.g. form a new Clan with some top Players purely to establish a Div A team after one season then abandon. The new flat proposal looks to address the supposed problem of teams taking a long time to promote (like every Clan had to do in the past). This flat structure means that a new Clan would only take 2 seasons to get to the top - there is no need to reduce this further, especially when considered in concert with point 4. below.

3. I am not a fan of the play-off idea. In addition to my comments in point 2 above, play-offs will extend the season and is in contrast with the stated objective of reducing competition time. I am particularly opposed to the idea of a worst performing Clan needing to play-off - this elongates the season for a Clan who have likely not enjoyed their season - after almost surviving then needing to play a whole load of new games. (This approach was removed in the English & Scottish football play-offs due to a lack of success - the play-offs retained to improve the experience and include more important games for fans but the bottom placed team was not included in play-offs). If we need fewer teams in Div A, having a loser play-off is just a bad idea.

4. I do not object to reducing the number of teams per division. In contrast to Leon's comment, I think that it would be good to ensure that some of the top teams will be required to play in Div B. I think that this will mean that the top Clans will always be competing to survive in Div A with a genuine risk of being relegated. It also means that Div B will always have at least one very strong team. This will obviously be a disadvantage to Harmony, but I am not making partisan points here.

5. Reducing the number of slots a Player can join from 3 to 2 has some merit reducing the stress on players who triple slot. Again, this will be bad for Harmony but it makes some sense to me in a lot of respects. Maybe allow triple slots in the bottom divisions to allow new Clans to participate more easily.

6. Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeese anounce the templates ASAP.

Edited 2025-09-16 14:41:20

If team games, especially 3vs3, have a reduced time limit, it would be nice if these are released in advance so that we can form teams and practice. Ty to organisers for all your hard work.

My votes/five cents on these issues:

1. 100% on-board with the proposed change.

2. Agree.

3. Ditto.

4. Disagree, or at least, disagree with the proposed method. I feel that clans that belong in A starting in C/D is a rare occurrence, and not one that requires a playoff at the end of every season to resolve.

I see this as being like a kid who skips a year level at school. They don't hold yearly exams to see which kids skip a year and which ones stay down, it's decided partly by the parents (who might apply for it) and ultimately by the school staff, who recognise that they don't belong in their year level. That said, no-one gets to skip either of the final two years of school (at least in Australia anyway), because you need those for your certificate.

Likewise, I don't think we need regular playoffs to decide super promotions, but rather just let the organiser/panel decide on a case-by-case basis to let a new clan start in B if it is THAT obvious they belong in A. No-one should get to skip to A tho imo, that needs to be earned by fighting in B.

5. Absolutely.

Edited 2025-09-16 14:39:41

`Team games do require that additional time to communicate effectively, I personally would leave those as they are especially 3v3s`

The thing is, teams don't use that time to communicate effectively. They use that time to stall the picking phase for no good reason and then play normally as if banked boot never existed.

I wanted to make an analysis and post hard data, but then I just checked 5 random 3v3 games from last season, division A, and literally all these games have picking phase lasting 2 weeks. This is the usual way to play in div A. Players who don't do that are the minority.

Futhermore, banked boot wasn't really meant to be used for teamwork. It was meant to replace vacations as a way to give players some time in case of real life emergencies, or at least lack of internet. Instead of having them autobooted.

If there's general consesnus that teamgames need more time, then maybe we could discuss having 4d base boot, but I think that banked time really should be cut down.

I can be very clear here. In the Harmony 3v3 Magna team, we used all of the banked time to work on our decisions. 4d with less banked time might work though.

Edited 2025-09-16 14:47:18

perhaps team games templates could be annoounced in advance? one week before 1vs1 templates?
enough time to find active players to practice

annoucing them a week earlier may solve many issues?

Edited 2025-09-16 15:46:44

bliss-machine, the best time to announce the templates was at the end of last season. The second best time is right now.