Community sentiment on short TW CUP seasons

[Dwopple]

Looking to poll some quick, meaningful feedback on how players have felt about the short TW CUP season.

We traditionally see quite a lull in TW activity between leagues, particularly during the summer months with many taking vacations.

How has this 3 week regular season experience been for everyone? As a captain, my basing team suffered from some key no-shows where IRL obligations needed to come first + I likely could have drafted 1 or 2 different players to fill a skill position. However, with the short season it's a bit of a relief knowing this isn't going to be dragged out much longer and I can look forward to the next league.

What's the sentiment from others on having the short CUP seasons? With 6 teams per league the other option was to do double round-robin for a 5 week regular season + 2 weeks of playoffs. That format is more forgiving from a schedule standpoint when players need to miss a week or 2, but it does tend to handcuff and drag on for players on teams suffering from non-scheduling related losses.



Share your thoughts if you've got them!

[zidane]

Prefer the shorter season, its made the games feel more important in trying to make the playoffs. Obviously, no shows hurt more than ever in a short season though so that's the major downside.

[Rab]

1. We lost 2 basing matches in week 1 due to missing a player. There aren't enough weeks to recover from that. It's luck that we're probably ok.

2. If you're doing well, or doing terribly, remaining weeks in a season can feel pointless. Consider no-season formats, e.g. double-elim bracket.

3. We managed to have too few players per team again. Absences are too costly.

[Dwopple]

1. We lost 2 basing matches in week 1 due to missing a player. There aren't enough weeks to recover from that. It's luck that we're probably ok.

2. If you're doing well, or doing terribly, remaining weeks in a season can feel pointless. Consider no season formats, e.g. double-elim bracket.

3. We managed to have too few players per team again. Absences are too costly.

Your #2 is interesting. I don't have much capacity these days to think about new ideas, but if you have a more tangible example of the double-elim format I'd be interested to see it. Being a league, I like to keep it as inclusive and competitive for as long as possible without players feeling handcuffed.

#3 I agree with somewhat though I still feel like the right choice was made to have 6 teams without having too many players benched each week. Hard to adequately solve this problem, though the shorter season did mitigate the downsides of this particular point.

[Rab]

Your #2 is interesting. I don't have much capacity these days to think about new ideas, but if you have a more tangible example of the double-elim format I'd be interested to see it. Being a league, I like to keep it as inclusive and competitive for as long as possible without players feeling handcuffed.

example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qgS5vI8jX0

site for generating brackets:
https://challonge.com/

the scheduling is different to what we're used to. if both teams in a match are known the match can happen. if only one team is known they have to wait until their opponent is determined.

[RageRitual]

It's nice to have short seasons sometimes, especially since cups are not as inclusive as DT for some of our lower * players. I'm not paying attention to warbird or javelin but I think we should have went with 5 teams for at least base though. This would have solved the problems of no-shows and the panic-last second pick of a captain that clearly did not want to do the job.

There are pros and cons of short and long seasons, it's nice to have both throughout the year.

[beam]

Honestly this may be the worst thing that has happened to Trench Wars since Henry Saari got hired and I hope the TW Cup is retired forever (like Henry Saari)

[Dreamwin]

It has been really fun and working concept from my perspective. Pretty much every team still has a chance to make it to playoffs going into last week. I think Ogron's team would too if he didn't miss week 2 games for whatever reason.

As a captain, I much rather commit to 5-6 sundays at a time rather than 11 sundays. If you are a key player in the lineup, say one of the top 5 picks, your team is hurt no matter the season length. In addition, I think its way more likely that most players can show 5 sundays rather than 11.

It is a known fact that the player base is old and only getting older. Most of us have IRL obligations and can't reserve 11 sundays to play this game but might be able to do 5-6. Nothing takes more motivation out of you than to playing and committing for 8 weeks only to go out in quarter-finals due to no-shows, unlucky event of lag or just playing bad. The gap of signing up again is much lower if you know there is another chance coming up soon and you don't have to clear your schedule until christmas to participate.

+ More likely to get people involved
+ Better quality games
+ Every game matters
+ If you end up in the a bad team you dont enjoy, you can try to fight it out for a few weeks and reset
+ Forfeits / no-shows are less likely
+ Bigger chance for upsets / underdog-stories due to lower amount of games

- More administration with drafting / setting up new seasons
- This particular format isn't as inclusive but with the amount of signups there was no valid other option.
- I can't really think of anything else

It is obvious that the format needs to somehow alternate between seasons to include lower * players. Keep the seasons short, though.

At least, please dont do the TWL/TWDT hybrid ever again. The season lasted 2 years and ppl were ragequitting TWDT due to TWL games and other way around.

[MHz]

No strong feelings on the OP, but I do think TW Cup is a massive improvement on TWDT and wanted to bigup everyone involved. I especially like that I can just add whoever I think is the best, or the hungriest, and ultimately that will force people to improve, rather than being rewarded for mediocrity as they are in TWDT.

[LeeRomeno]

I think for this type of league short version was only way to go. I have been enjoying this league alot (even on bench most of time) as generally the games have been of good quality.

As for draft league, i generally believe that the VP system is outdated, majority of issues people have been having would be solved if u just make the system tier-based (top 9-10, mid 7.5-8.5, low 6-7). In jav/wb It would still give everyone chance to play (you need to stand out in your tier to get a chance), it would solve the issues of having no subs (mostly, for example 7 star not being able to sub in as only 6.5 is available) and reduce the effect of wrongly rated broken players (its much more difficult to make mistake between tiers)

Another idea related to DWs issue. Why not have another draft after main season, where all remaining caps draft for players who were in teams that got knocked out. It would keep more players involved in league and reduce the chance of key people missing playoffs and ruining season as you are bound to get at least 2-3 good additions in that second draft.

[bike]

Sup dogs. Bike big fan of this league. Lots of gratitude. Much fun.

Some comments/ideas:
* I think this league format is ideal and potentially allows for maximum player engagement. To max the # of players that get to play per weekend, I'd assess the # of signups for each league and max out the teams with 6 or 7 per team, and be flexible on game day if only 4 players show for 1 team, do 4 v 4. On the other hand, allow for 6 v 6 or 7 v 7 if all the players show (maybe spare a sub).
* League length: maybe extend the regular season to 5 weeks and have 1 league game per week. a 3 hour commitment on the weekends seems like a lot if someone wants to play all 3 leagues. 1.5 hours is more manageable. Also, with only 1 league game per week, you help eliminate players playing 'tilted' from the last match if it was a bad beat or whatever. It might also promote more 'hype' per weekend, e.g. do I get as excited about playing 2 different teams per weekend, or would it be more exciting to focus on 1? Probably 1...as it is with 2, I don't even pay attention to who I'm playing or know who it is ahead of time.

K love you all bye :-)

[Beast]

this cup felt like a watered down version of twdt, and needs to be improved a lot more, and a lot of people were missing, and never signed up in the first place it made it feel less competitive, and engaging.