State Of The Game

in eSports
I have a suggestion.
Just hear me out.
With all of the teams falling apart and leaving FN-M this season.. I'd like to put an idea out there for next season. Lets do away with Main and just have one league again. I understand that a few teams would do major damage to the e-confidence of some other teams we have today but what if we could develop some type of system that will even the playing field a bit? If we can acheive this I do believe it will be a more enjoyable competitive experience for everybody involved.
I won't pretend to have something that's perfected & ready to roll out. I do however have a couple possible solutions.
- The current main teams, including iNv assuming they return next season will be considered tier one teams meaning they need to win in a more impressive fashion somehow. ----I haven't come up with possible ways--- help please
- A point system can be introduced that will balance this league better.
Point System
-beating a tier 1 team = 3 points
-beating a tier 2 team= 2 points
-beating a tier 3 team= 1 point Again--- NO details or thought has really been put into this--- help please
- We can also structure the schedule in such a manner that Main/Tier 1 teams are faced with a harder road to championship status. So for example, coN would play omerta twice but aPx would only play coN once during regular season. If Tiers are adopted then they can also help with the schedule structure.. So Tier 1 teams would mostly play other Tier 1 teams.
I do admit i haven't given much thought to the playoffs. I will say that at this point, the old way isn't working. We need to become more creative with the leagues for AAPG because we honestly do not have the teams or players to sustain if we keep our current set-up. If it needs to be designed to basically award 3 teams at the end of the season, then so be it. You will still of course crown the top team AAPG kings till next season but the other 2 teams can kind of win a silver & bronze medal, if you know what i mean.
Thoughts?
DISCLAIMER: It's Friday night, I have been drinking but i stand by my random blurb about my free game that i pub like a champ.
Just hear me out.
With all of the teams falling apart and leaving FN-M this season.. I'd like to put an idea out there for next season. Lets do away with Main and just have one league again. I understand that a few teams would do major damage to the e-confidence of some other teams we have today but what if we could develop some type of system that will even the playing field a bit? If we can acheive this I do believe it will be a more enjoyable competitive experience for everybody involved.
I won't pretend to have something that's perfected & ready to roll out. I do however have a couple possible solutions.
- The current main teams, including iNv assuming they return next season will be considered tier one teams meaning they need to win in a more impressive fashion somehow. ----I haven't come up with possible ways--- help please
- A point system can be introduced that will balance this league better.
Point System
-beating a tier 1 team = 3 points
-beating a tier 2 team= 2 points
-beating a tier 3 team= 1 point Again--- NO details or thought has really been put into this--- help please
- We can also structure the schedule in such a manner that Main/Tier 1 teams are faced with a harder road to championship status. So for example, coN would play omerta twice but aPx would only play coN once during regular season. If Tiers are adopted then they can also help with the schedule structure.. So Tier 1 teams would mostly play other Tier 1 teams.
I do admit i haven't given much thought to the playoffs. I will say that at this point, the old way isn't working. We need to become more creative with the leagues for AAPG because we honestly do not have the teams or players to sustain if we keep our current set-up. If it needs to be designed to basically award 3 teams at the end of the season, then so be it. You will still of course crown the top team AAPG kings till next season but the other 2 teams can kind of win a silver & bronze medal, if you know what i mean.
Thoughts?
DISCLAIMER: It's Friday night, I have been drinking but i stand by my random blurb about my free game that i pub like a champ.
Comments
More serious reply:
All your suggestions sound good. Some behind-the-scenes info you may be interested in --
Elo and Elo-like systems give more points for beating strong teams and less points for beating weak teams. FN has a system for this in place, though I have my doubts over how well anything at FN is actually implemented. I know, for example, their ranked ladder had serious bugs when I was still involved.
When I helped Krux set up match schedules for a tournament pre-main/open split, I used a Swiss System scheduler to try to pair teams more fairly like you suggest.
The fundamental issue is game growth. League rules changes are just plain going to have a minor effect if there aren't enough people around to populate the scene and keep it going. My recommendation for AA league admins would be to set themselves up for as much of a media blitz as they can muster for the actual release -- that'd be the time to start new open-enrollment leagues, promote league videos here, on Steam, on Reddit... There'll be a flood of people that aren't likely to stick around past a month or two (that's just how game releases go), but there's a small window of opportunity there to create growth.
The lack of teams is not due to lack of leagues or poor league design. Its because the game is uninteresting to play. Pubs are mind numbingly boring. There is nothing about that game that challenges you to learn, improve, or progress. Leagues are built on top of a game. In the case of AAPG the base is simply not there. No amount of changes to leagues is going to make people want to play this game.
My team has talked about dropping out of FN as well. Its not because of how the league works. Its because none of us are excited to play. Its an inconvenience to get 4 people on. It used to be that we'd have 5 or 6 people waiting in TS an hour before match time to get ready. Now no one even remembers when our matches are.
FN Specific complaints
The current FN default match time completely excludes the west coast. Its nearly impossible for me to get out of the office by 5, let alone be home and ready to play. On top of that teams are using NY/NJ hosted servers which add to the frustration of trying to play from the west coast.
EDIT: Just want to add this. Ask yourself this question if you have enough players would you rather 5v5 or 4v4? I would rather 5v5. You want to start off the full release with the correct competition setting so new players no what to expect. Some may go what comp is only 4v4? wtf? f that. So in my opinion we should start the full release version season 1 at 5v5, after this first official season we will be able to judge better on how many teams/players we have in the competitive scene. My MAIN argument I am going use about 4v4 vs 5v5 is: When we at 5v5 people wanted to do 4v4 so we would have more teams. We did not get anymore teams by going from 5v5 to 4v4 so why are we still at 4v4? The 1 thing that did get more teams was an Open league and Main league for the first season, but I think that was just word of mouth on the league. Maybe some novice teams thinking they stood a chance, so they played. But now we at back to the same place maybe the worst its been so far in these 2 years. What are we going to do now go to 3v3? Like lets wake up and believe that Full Release will generate a bunch of new players and we will have our proper competition settings figured out and such. It is not just up to the Dev's to generate new players although most of it is but not all, A solid competitive community can generate players as well. So bottom line we want the perfect settings set for full release we need every new player to know what those are! Not why is the europe side 5v5 and the NA side 4v4? "Oh cuz N/A side doesn't have enough players." does that sound attractive to a new player at all????? ANSWER IS NOPE!
MAKE SURE TO LIKE THIS POST IF YOU WANT 5V5 OVER 4V4 OR JUST POST A REPLY I WANT A BETTER IDEA OF WHAT THE COMMUNITY AS WHOLE WANTS ALSO REPLY WITH RULE CHANGES/SERVER SETTINGS YOU WOULD LIKE TO SEE CHANGED OR ADDED
BC, i do remember some of the stuff you were working with when we were head admins at FN. I'm just throwing ideas around and trying to generate something we can go on to improve league play. A 16 team league is just more interesting.. Now if we can balance things better within the league that would go far to help out.
Easy, I understand the frustration around not having enough healthy competition right now. We can go scrim a bunch of teams and just TK each other on purpose some rounds & still dominate. The only time we actually get a challenge is when were playing one of the 5-6 good teams in the game. I believe that you build a league from the bottom up.. Meaning, we do have a few teams that want to compete & want to improve. With one league, our best hope is that this will have a trickle down effect on other teams who are wanting to take the next step.
I also would like it to be known that i FULLY support league night being on a Sunday. I'd say that we should keep the default time 9-10PM.. But give the home team TIME choice & away team SERVER choice
But I suppose that might only be good if sound is better, since now if you do not cover a spot it is just luck of the draw if enemy comes there or not, you can;'t hear it.
_________________________
********Bam4D********BE ALL (THAT) YOU CAN BE!
________Army 1980_________
It's posted in eSports? :>
DOH!!!
_________________________
********Bam4D********BE ALL (THAT) YOU CAN BE!
________Army 1980_________
My primary point here is that the eSports development of this game is at the mercy of final release. Do whatever keeps things fun until then but personally I wouldn't even do another season. Host Sunday pug tournaments, host invite casted matches (just ask a few teams to play, pick matchups that will be fun and competitive), invite new teams to compete and cast them so they feel the energy of a big match, invite teams to pair up and cast an 8-12v8-12 on a FLO map. Do the simple things that don't feel like commitments, because no one wants a second job and right now based on everything I see and hear, leagues are sounding more like evening jobs than anything.
LETS GO PENS
Clearly the biggest issue facing this game, and its directly influenced by the fact that the game caters to the new! Instead we should be trying to win the hundred's of players that were loyal/loved the game in the past, bring the core back into the game and new players will come. Right now it seems neither is happening, the few new players aren't helping this game, meanwhile many current loyal players are slowly leaving making it very hard to form any sort of competition leagues.
Were a ship with a leak unfortunately, it seems to be only a matter of time.
#Support Comp Mode
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCN4YhM6jUB2MxVj8i3b9rhw
Agreed... I haven't played the game in over 2 weeks (been on BTF4) and when I came back to play I got angry so many times due to the lag spikes, bad hit detection, high ping players, random fps drop and so on and I haven't been back since. So unless there is new content being released and lots of bugs being fixed I'm probably not going to be playing anytime soon...
Give us a 7-0 lead in a 4v1 against a main team. Even.
This.
I will say that a little over a year ago, I hated the comp community. Most were self-centered [TOS Violation]. Fast-forward and see how differently everyone treats each other. 3rd ID scrimming coN, HvK taking a boot from vR and nx-jr. The mentalities has changed, and this is how you're going to build the comp user base. I love getting pointers from the guys who beat us down...it's much more constructive for everyone when that happens versus trolling.
I applaud the open teams that go 0-3, 0-4 and still show up every week to keep playing. But it takes the iNvs and the i9s being friendly, which I think we've seen over the last year or so.
_________________________
********Bam4D********BE ALL (THAT) YOU CAN BE!
________Army 1980_________
It's the people who bash the comp scene without experiencing it that gets under our skins.
#Support Comp Mode
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCN4YhM6jUB2MxVj8i3b9rhw
If you want to be the top, well...you need a lot of teams at the bottom!
The most active team on the EU ESL ladder is cK^ and the last 3 teams that join the ladder got imidiately challenge by them, which resulted in a very large victory (some players did not get much more then 1 kill in 30 rounds). Teams like cK^ should not challenge such new teams, and rather keep playing versus equal skilled teams. Hence the differentation between OPEN and MAIN/INTER and INVITE. There is really nothing good for new teams to get 0-15'd and as doogle said: "I applaud the open teams that go 0-3, 0-4 and still show up every week to keep playing".
There should be room for everybody. And if players that see a new team could reach out a give them a hand, I believe we would be able to fill easily 32 teams for the next tournament(s).
TWL's rungs system was good in that challenges always worked from the bottom up, never from top down.
I dunno about that. Just as someone who rings for several different teams pretty often, the amount of dislike towards other teams(or at least certain people on other teams) that I hear is kind of unsettling. Now obviously in any game, or really anything in life you're going to have people who disagree with or even dislike each other, but it just seems pretty silly when it's over a game's competition scene where there's not even anything to win. If there were money or other prizes on the line at least there'd be something worth arguing over.
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That said, that's not just a problem between the comp teams, that's a problem with clans in general regardless of what level they play at. I mean [TOS Violation], just look at Deman's thread. Some people take this game far too seriously. It's one of the reasons(and the biggest one) I won't join any clans. Much easier remaining friends with everyone when you're not in the middle of some stupid clan or competition argument.