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**ogron** · 10-31-2021, 10:14 PM

TSL is similar to solo queue ladder play in e-sports.

You play as an individual. Everyone gets to play every game. The bot randomly sorts the teams, and you play a 5v5 jav or warbird match.

In TSLD, the ladder (or standings) sums your best 20 games in WB. This means there is no penalty for playing or having a bad game.

Ops schedule game times on weekdays and weekends, but are free to host TSL if there's a lot of players online who want to game. Some players play 70+ games in a season, some play 20. Ease finished #2 in TSLJ playing only 20 games, while others grinded it out. If you're really good you can become an all-star in few games. The more you play, the better your chances, but talent ultimately means the top players typically finish at the top (for seasons 1 and 2 -- I can't vouch for other seasons I didn't run or participate in, as they altered the formulas and participation plummeted, and I refuse to acknowledge their existence.)

I set the minimum for the TSL all-star trophy at $500 and finishing within the Top 10. That's an average of $25 per game. Anything below that means not enough top-tier players participated, and some grinders snuck into the top 10 without putting up strong enough performances to hit $500.

The formula is Kills + (Kills - Deaths) + $7 bonus for winning the match. So a 10-10 loss would be worth $10. Going 16-8 in a win:

16 + (16 - 8) + 7 = $31

If you went 16-8 in wins every game, in your best 20 games, your total in the standings would be $620. zidane finished a TSLJ season once with $734. let that sink in. By contrast, if you went 10-10 in losses every game, your standings dollar amount would be $200.

Your goal is to simply show up, play, and win with a good rec. Racka and Mythril have discussed increasing the value of the win bonus, so the formula may be modified for the coming season, but you get the idea.

Try to put together the best 20 games you can in WB and Jav and finish inside the Top 10 with over $500 and win a coveted TSL All-Stars trophy on the TWD website.

**ogron** · 10-31-2021, 10:14 PM

Basing Cup 2021 will be similar to Basing Cup 2020, but expanded to 6 teams.

6 captains will draft every active player in the zone. There are no signups. You may remove yourself from the draft by contacting me, as Ease and Spezza did last year if you have no intention of playing and don't want someone wasting a pick on you.

There are no star limits, teams can play anyone they draft.

Typically, every team makes the playoffs, but higher seeds get to pick their opponents (a feature TWDT has since adopted.)

This allows weekday Basing Cup games to be played, as euros often can't make those times, allowing them to participate on weekends and for the playoffs which are exclusively on Sundays.

Basing Cup 2020 was a huge success, and I am hopeful this expanded edition will be able to replicate it alongside TSL.

The draft will take place Sunday, November 14.

**RaCka** · 10-31-2021, 10:26 PM

TSL HYPE!!!!!!

**Dwopple** · 10-31-2021, 10:51 PM

LFG! let's keep it going ladies and gents.... TSLBC HYPE!!!!!!!!!

**saiyan** · 10-31-2021, 11:17 PM

I would have been so hyped if you used a proper ELO formula for TSL instead of using worthless personal stats. It would incentivize playing to win, increase activity and the average skill in here would go up significantly..

It would uncover truths you may not be aware of and finally give you some sort of objective, numerical measure about how impactful various players are in various ships. Gamescore isn't it.. Sorry to tell you.

Making people play for stats isnt healthy. There already is such a league that rewards that kind of play, its called ELIM.

Is it too late to change?

**RaCka** · 10-31-2021, 11:45 PM

Originally posted by saiyan View Post

I would have been so hyped if you used a proper ELO formula for TSL instead of using worthless personal stats. It would incentivize playing to win, increase activity and the average skill in here would go up significantly..

It would uncover truths you may not be aware of and finally give you some sort of objective, numerical measure about how impactful various players are in various ships. Gamescore isn't it.. Sorry to tell you.

Making people play for stats isnt healthy. There already is such a league that rewards that kind of play, its called ELIM.

Is it too late to change?

I think ogron is implementing a formula that promotes winning over individual record, even though individual record will still have an impact on your overall score, it’ll be significantly less than previous seasons to prevent players from ONLY playing for their individual records.

**ogron** · 11-01-2021, 03:46 AM

Originally posted by saiyan View Post

I would have been so hyped if you used a proper ELO formula for TSL instead of using worthless personal stats. It would incentivize playing to win, increase activity and the average skill in here would go up significantly..

It would uncover truths you may not be aware of and finally give you some sort of objective, numerical measure about how impactful various players are in various ships. Gamescore isn't it.. Sorry to tell you.

Making people play for stats isnt healthy. There already is such a league that rewards that kind of play, its called ELIM.

Is it too late to change?

saiyan in a perfect world, i agree 100%.

with 100,000 players each playing several hundred games, you could simply use ELO based on winning and nothing else and arrive at the most impactful players.

200 players playing between 20 to 60 games is far too small a sample size for elo be effective.

most multi-time TWL champions understand the value of luring, pressure, covering, leading fire to cut enemies off, funneling, not dodging into your teammates, proper spreading out, fighting for control of the edges of the battle lines in TWLD, fighting for control of the center in TWLJ, etc. but it is impossible to quantify those things with such a small number of games.

if everyone in Trench Wars played 500 games in TSLD you could use ELO. Whoever wins the most is likely the best.

cheating statistically is likely going produce much better results than ELO over 20 GP. this is what BPM does in the NBA. instead of doing an all encompassing on-court, off-court metric like RPM or PIPM/LeBRON or APM it cheats using boxscores and past priors. It just looks at boxscores, so it's basically not looking at winning at all.

Is BPM the truth of who is the best? No. It's not looking at winning at all, but the list of players is pretty good and the best players are generally near the top.

TSL isn't determining who is truly the best, it's measuring who puts up the best recs, and the best players can usually do that.

We can incentivize winning by increasing the Win Bonus, and Racka plans to increase that by quite a bit over previous ratings, but TSL is never going to truly measure who is the absolute best warbird or jav. Nor is it trying to. That is simply not possible when most players won't hit 50 GP, many will barely hit 20 GP, and a few will near 100 GP.

It's trying to let everyone play, let players with different participation rates all have a shot at making All-Stars (i.e., Ease hitting #2 in jav with only 20 GP when everyone else has 60), and be a mix of fun, inclusiveness, and competition.

If the win bonus is big enough, and you get 0 for not winning, there should be strong enough incentive to make winning plays that don't directly contribute to your boxscore in order to get the bonus to your personal rating in that game.

And for what it's worth, I've tried stuff like this before, and overcoming the small sample sizes using multi-year sample sizes, adjusting for lineup strengths, and completely ignoring stats and only looking at time won to see how many minutes per game each player is worth over a replacement player.

It just doesn't work. The sample sizes are too small, player talent changes over time, there's too much noise and wonkiness for it to be of any real value. Like Mattey is probably the player who, IMO, is worth the most ever in base, and he's #1 in shark, but Rodney is #3 and I promise on all that is holy that is not correct. megaman89 is also one of the most impactful spiders of all-time and he's way too low... good players tend to be near the top and bad players near the bottom but overall in terms of parsing true impact it's worthless. that list doesn't tell me much.

Maybe you know of a workaround, but for my part at least I've never found one that would make ELO or APM work in this game.

**ronaldinho** · 11-01-2021, 06:48 AM

too disgusted I'm still not going to play base, fuck tw im done

**Vehicle** · 11-01-2021, 09:18 AM

So I never played TSL and it does sound kind of fun. Why can't we have it for basing?

Edit: I'm also curious about how aliases are going to be handled? There are still tons of guys running around alt-nicked, I personally don't care, but I could see it wrecking some games?

**saiyan** · 11-01-2021, 10:01 AM

Claushouse A zone I refuse to mention has a system where it worked pretty well with a smaller population than TW. The only obstacle was aliases - which can be eliminated. You're right in the sense that the # of games required to calibrate would be a problem for people who aren't very active - but this doesn't have to be their league.

In my personal experience, it would take anywhere from 100-300 rounds/matches to calibrate your rating. That's one of the reasons why I said it would increase activity. The other reason is that I assume some of us are competitive and wouldn't like to see our name below some other names on a ladder that's precisely meant to determine who is the best.

Another zone went so far as to incorporate win margins into the formula and it became some of the most try hard space ships EVER. Its not totally necessary, but that's the way to go if you want to get the most out of people.

My main gripe with the current TSL format comes from the fact that the whole thing has no risk. If I understand it correctly you're literally just chasing 20 big scores with no risk involved because your worst scores wont count. I cant even call it a performance because that's something totally different. I'm one of these (apparently few) people who believes you can play excellent and get a humble score, but also drop 18 while playing like an idiot. I guess this league just isn't for me, which is no problem.

Regardless, I'll look into it further. Maybe it can be tried out in wbduel/javduel if anyone gives a shit.

**renzi** · 11-01-2021, 11:32 AM

Big props and thanks to Racka, og, and all for organizing and running all of these leagues back to back. Really good work all around. Looking forward to more 👍

**Turban** · 11-01-2021, 11:54 AM

I do like TSL as a concept, but it could use some heavy tweaking if you want to actually make it into a more competitive format. I have similar problems with it as Saiyan does.

As it currently stands it is essentially a fun league to kill time with the hopes of boosting activity, but I fail to see it as a competitive league and will be skipping it again. I am sure some like it though, and that's absolutely fine.

However might play some weekend basing cup games, those can be quite enjoyable at times.

**RaCka** · 11-01-2021, 12:29 PM

saiyan has some fair points that can definitely be fixed prior to the season starting. The purpose of this TSL is to keep activity healthy during the holiday season for the next month (Nov 14 - Dec 14). Running TWDT back to back seemed a little redundant and I feel like this is the perfect time to bring back TSL as a happy medium.

Turban I understand the hesitancy but the community can make the league as good or as bad as they want it to be (IE: check season 1-5 to see the drop off). The finals have potential to be as competitive as we want it to be, think about the possible line ups.

TSL checks all the boxes for where the game is at currently. EVERYBODY gets to play and the BEST 10 warbirds and javs get to compete for the titles. The season is 1 month long in total and can be a huge success if the community buys into the league.

**viop11** · 11-01-2021, 12:52 PM

gr8 pisitifity n vision ricki, i persinilly pribibly won't vs ne mitchis cuz i nefir haf a urge to blist any1, but i think your idea makes gr8 sense to keep zine actif durink christimis n jiwishi

i was jus windirink aftir tsl if you kniw if it will b twdt or twl? jus wondirink so i cud stirt 2 assembil ripitish if neetid so i dun get stuck with sum emo pipsqu1ks who r supposed 2 b core playirs becuz they haf sum tilint but leaf/piss away @ first sign of anything not goink their way. ty

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