This is the bat signal - let's talk about TWDT

[Mythril]

I'm unwilling to lead anything as the "head op". I'm just not going to have the time or energy. I've only offered my help because the alternative didn't look like it would materialize into anything. I have some free time over the holidays where I'll be able to jump start things. Wirah is also returning as of today, which is huge. Qan is on holiday vaca in a couple days, so dev work will be stalled for a few weeks until he's back.

But we still need a bigger league team full of competent and willing people. What claus did alone will only be replicated by a team, preferably one with him on it, but that's his decision to make. Someone like Ixador who's willing to volunteer his time creating content should be utilized on the league team if he's willing. Every contribution matters. If you're interested in contributing, reach out to myself, henry, wirah, or qan.

This is good input so far. Ratings will be done by myself (warbird), zidane (jav, base), and spezza (base, spider). We can send our ratings out to other players to reduce errors, but we should be able to accurately cover all the ships between the three of us. The messages will be sent out soon. If you guys could reach out to players personally through text, social media, etc., that's a huge plus. Cripple once sent out a picture of his dick to elite veterans in group chat and it had huge historical success in getting people to sign up. That's the true bat signal.

No major change is plausible or even necessary right now for this season. We can keep the big picture ideas in mind, but we're too close to the season. We already have a proven structure in place, so let's use it.

And before we get caught up in too much philosophy, let's keep reality in mind. As of now, here are the players who have confirmed they're willing to cap:

1. Zidane
2. Ease
3. Mythril
4. Spezza
5. Steadman
6. Tiny
7. Ixador

Potential captains to reach out to: Dreamwin, Trasher, Commodo, RaCka, Ogron, Kim(?), Skyforger, Attacks

It looks like the only possible scenario of a balanced spread of captains is a collection of six elite multi-shippers. And I think we've ran the co-cap experiment enough times now to know that it's not the most promising idea. I don't mind giving up my spot to another player like dreamwin, trasher, or commodo to reduce the thunder-heavy look of the caps. Although the inner-competition would be really interesting. Ease is also a bit reluctant, but fuck him.

[ogron]

1. Signups

If Henry Saari is going to be the head TWDT op again, I think there needs to be more accountability. I spent several hours making a master sheet for him to use to contact every possible conceivable player who has played leagues over the last 5 years. I don't see any work being done contacting players.

I manually ?message'd 400-500 players on Ogron1 to Ogron25 to get people to sign up in past seasons, privately messaged players who were online, and got others to contact players on facebook and whatsapp.

There is a chronic history of staff wanting power, but not putting in the work to make the game a success. If you're going to be in charge, you need to contact several hundred persons to get signups.

I've put my time in the tank, and done this five times. I'm not doing it again. We need TWDT Ops to step up, and should demand the progress sheet is updated. I'm sure plenty of players are willing to each take 50 names to message/contact. Get it done.

2. Captains

I think Zidane getting the #1 pick and selecting Ease was the death knell for variable skill level captains. The talent pool is not deep enough anymore to make that scenario viable. He triple crowned easily.

Keep in mind, Zidane got the #1 pick in 2013 when it was 8 teams, and finished last and missed the playoffs. Those days are over.

The captains need to either be all elite two and three-league stars (Ease/Dreamwin/Zidane/Trasher/etc.), or all one-league veterans (Attacks/Ogron/Thix/Major Crisis/etc.)

If that isn't possible due to a shortage of captains, you need to finally force captains to pick themselves again. No names, but some multi-league superstars who cap often threatened to quit if I implemented this a few years ago to maintain their edge. That type of selfish behavior needs to stop, the league can't sustain it anymore.


3. Format

I am personally not playing with anything less than 6 teams. Anything below that is a joke. Ditto playing less than 8s in base. 6s is atrocious. 7s is barely acceptable. I don't think this has been an issue since we've had borrowing in. There are rarely forfeits, and we have been able to play 5s and 8s properly. Seems like a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

I don't think anything should change in that regard.

I also heard from some little birdies there is consideration of making major structural changes, despite TWDT 2018 being a success. Don't.

Pro tip: TWDT 2018 was a success because it was a copy of the 2014-2017 seasons, and because a ton of people stepped up to contribute and help out.

That is a winning formula, and unless you have a singular vision and are willing to put hundreds of hours into implementing it, you should stick closely to it.


4. Ratings

There's one person on this planet eminently qualified to do the ratings properly.

His name is Zidane.

The ratings last season were terrible, and you need one person with an amazing eye for talent, usually a top-tier captain, who is active and knows everyone in the league, to make consistent ratings. It also helps if they know all the top players in each league and can get second opinions.

There is nobody on staff who comes close to those qualifications.

Mythril would be the next best choice.

The years we had the best ratings, Ease/Stayon/Mythril/Zidane were the major contributors, with one person making sure they were consistent across the board.


5. Final Thoughts

The two most important things are contacting people for signups and having a group of captains of similar skill level.

That's it.

You already have a good setup for the league and last year's ratings can be slightly modified. The work has already been done in terms of league structure. Just copy and paste.

Getting writers for Hot or Not, Previews, etc. would be great, along with someone doing Stats, but those are bonuses.

If the league is active and fun, someone will probably be incentivized to do them.

The key is signups and captains.

I'd like to see Henry Saari doing a lot more communication and showing his progress in contacting players to signup and getting a group of similar captains.

If he isn't willing to do the work, Mythril or someone else should be made head of TWDT.

The league looks like it's foundering in terms of signups. Get it done.


Good luck!

[Kim]

If I can just cap a jav team, I will sign up as a captain. So if there can be some kind of medium where multiple caps can run a TWDT team, I'm down for that.

[TheWordBird]

im sure Trench Zone's greatest minds will get to the bottom of this. lets pray for an answer everyone join hands nd ill turn on the bat signal *blows dust off* havent had to use this in awhile heh wait who tf is this noob aliaser

[Falconeer]

You heard the man, go sign up right now. I heard if we hit 150 signups falcconeard will be banished to hockey zone

Sure, if you guys get 150 sign ups in league I voluntarily will stop posting here for 1 year (for every year that you guys accomplish this). I'll throw in the discord TW/subspace server too.

One thing you can do is if you get activity stats on the population by name, and can discern unique individual people (so some sort of bot that is recording which people are unique and collecting usage data and then uploading that to an online database) then you can essentially auto-sign up the most active people who play the game to leagues. Then captains who pick them in the draft can contact these players and tell them they made it onto a league squad automatically and when and where the games are.

There will be people who don't show, or will say remove me from the draft. And then you can just program the bot to ignore these people next league. But overall the core league population will supplement whoever is a pub player/new who doesn't show up. I know that if I was automatically netted and put on a draft league and a captain in TW contacted me to say we have a game sunday. I would definitely show, and I'm sure many others would too.

I thought of this because me and wO made mighty cucks in HZ for the regular season... and when that season finished, our whole team was automatically signed up for draft league. We didn't have to individually go there to sign up... it was just like "Well your team was active during regular seasons so you're automatically qualified in the draft" And imo that is the right mentality... less work for everyone involved... what's more the previous Mighty Cuck players have about a 70% show to the teams they are on. So basically like 5 out of 20 of us never showed. Very good turn out.

[skyforger]

Would explore this

• Is it time we move to 4v4, 6v6 and utilize more of the population?
• Should we completely revamp twdt into forcing draft rosters into TWD rosters and turning it into a 24/7, more casual looking league?

But keep Sundays focused on classic TWDT/TWL approach. Weight those games way more heavy or even completely seperate Sunday ladder from the rest. Reason being zone was doing better when TWD was alive and generating daily action and undeniably also during TWDT/base cup/whatev seasons. Seems like a win win and the tools are already there to set it up.

[zidane]

You heard the man, go sign up right now. I heard if we hit 150 signups falcconeard will be banished to hockey zone

[Falconeer]

At least people are seeing that HZ is a success both in leagues and moderation... but maybe because it's still fun to play so there is less time or need for typing trash talk/trolling. You don't like trolling, then develop the zone and get active leagues going - if the game is fun then a balance between text and game-play is automatically reached.

I'm not apart of leagues, but anyone who played a league before for an entire season in my opinion should be able to captain. If you are doing anything other than that... like some sort of elitist only certain people are allowed to captain a draft league.... then that's fucked up.

Also if you have a draft league, you'll probably need to give every player an activity rating. This way newer captains will know if that player they are choosing is even going to be active and how active they will be. Perhaps through the league site itself players can input how much free time they have - which will increase the appeal they have as a "valuable" player for the draft. Maybe qan can even set up a tracker that logs peoples average ?usage over a week.

Good post though.

[Mythril]

In short news, I'm most likely going to be contributing to the league op team in hopes of helping this game recover some of its recent losses since the last activity spike. While Henry is very useful in many areas, communication doesn't seem to be his strong suit. And that's totally fine. Expecting a single volunteer to satisfy every demand of a league simply can't be the standard. We haven't had a one-stop-shop for league creation since Ogron got trolled out of his position back when some people decided to trade fake absolute morality for a dead game. But that's a different topic for another day. We need to be talking about the TWDT season that's apparently happening next month.

There are several conversations that are taking place in-game, at least on some veteran chats and in small staff circles. But these conversations would be far more useful if they were held on the public forums for everyone to consider and provide their own input. It seems both plausible for me to login and notice that many players are interested and concerned with the state of the game, and it's also possible to only logon the forums and assume the game is in apathetic free fall. There's a damaging disconnect in communication that needs to be corrected if we're going to get anything moving forward.

Where do we stand as a community? How do we compare to our lesser populated neighbors across the game? Well, HZ and SVS are still running highly successful leagues all throughout the year. HZ is in the pre-season of another draft league. They alternate from a draft league to a squad-based league, with very little down time between them (a month or so). Their forums are far more active and the community participation is on an entirely different level than ours. Go to rshl.org and check a single thread on their forums about a pre-season recap. Their culture shits on ours.

Here's the kicker: Hockey Zone only has a small fraction of our potential player base, and yet they're continuously sustaining their zone in ways that makes trench wars look wildly incompetent. So this begs the question: how are we missing the mark this badly? Of course, this is obviously a bigger-picture question that will require different leagues being set up and new ideas entirely, etc. Those are all being considered and are in the works to be released shortly. But for now, let's focus on the immediate concern, which is TWDT.

Where are the caps? What kind of caps do we want? Does it still make sense to run the same structure from last year? I've been in contact with zidane, ease, ogron, steadman, tiny, henry, dreamwin, and there seems to be several key questions being considered for this next season:

• What's the best way to balance the captains? Should we continue down the route of hoping 6 elite multishippers sign up to cap (ie. Ease, Zidane, Mythril, Commodo, Dreamwin, Trasher), or should we make all of the elite players available to draft and aim for 6 one-league specialists/solid multi-shippers as caps (ie. Attacks, Tiny, Skyforger, Major Crisis, Ogron, Thix). Or, is there a way of mixing the captains that would make more sense?
• Should we change the ratings formula for lineups?
• Are 6 teams even viable anymore?
• Is it time we move to 4v4, 6v6 and utilize more of the population?
• Should we completely revamp twdt into forcing draft rosters into TWD rosters and turning it into a 24/7, more casual looking league?

The key question being, where the fuck are you? We need people like you to get interested again, and we need you to contribute your ideas so we can actually run a successful league. Your input is appreciated. Please sign up for TWDT. Things are coming.