TWD APEX - A modest proposal for the next stage of TWD

[LucifersWarcraft]

Proposal for TWD – Apex

Apex is a term used in math to describe the highest point of an object, in this case the embodiment of TrenchWars. TWD should always be the main focus, always. TWD is our bread and butter, it feeds and keeps people hungry for more at the same time. Apex is to be the legit “all inclusive” premier league for the remainder of the lifespan of this game. (Hopefully a long time!)

It was the brainchild of Beam and IxaDor to not only be easy for staff to implement and run with ease but also hassle free yet fun, predictable (people can always expect 2 seasons of Apex per year) and still competitive. For those seeking the most competitive aspects that TWD delivers, we have TWDT and other respective leagues that will be ran side by side of Apex to fill that void. I want to point out that as of this time Apex will not cover BASE/FD or SD divisions, primarily as they are much harder to get games for, especially BD. Good news is, talks are already in the midst that after the success of the Basing League of recent, that you can expect that to happen in between TWDT and the like. Staff are also encouraged to get ?go base games and other fun events going to fill this void. TWDD/TWJD are the easiest to get games for and Apex is about keeping things just as that; EASY!

The great thing about Apex is that it encourages people to play with their squads, their friends and rewards those who do the best for WITH their squad, no matter where their squad is located on the ladder in points. Apex will reward the top 3 squads from TWDD/TWJD, participants in Apex matches and winners of those matches. There is a lot of meat on the bone for Apex despite it being relatively simple and gives players incentive to log in and get gaming.

Key features for Apex Explained

• Each Apex Season will last approximately 6 months. At the start of the 5^th month per season, eligible players get locked into the squads they are on in order to qualify to participate in Apex matches. IMPORTANT! Any player who is eligible with their performance during an Apex season that leaves or joins another squad during the 6^th and final month will FORFEIT their stats. Players can not change squads within 30 DAYS of Apex games. If they do, their stats will be voided and that player will NOT be able to participate in Apex matches. There is ZERO tolerance for people who want to cheat the system and squad hop!

• The top 3 squads on the respective TWDD and TWJD ladders are rewarded a pixel medal of some sort in the colors of bronze, silver and gold. Players who compete in the Apex match are to be rewarded an Apex medal with the color of their division (blue for wb/bronze for javelin) and those who are victorious are also rewarded a Special Apex medal that is the color of the division in which they won on (blue for wb/bronze for javelin). A player could obtain up to 3 medals each Apex season! (1 for being on top 3 squad, 1 for playing in Apex games and 1 for winning in Apex games)

• Rating players on their performance will be done quite easily as to establish who will be eligible to participate in Apex games at the end of each season. We will be using the same formula that Claushouse came up with for us for TWDT. It works beautiful and is great for not just individual performances calculated but team as well.

• Activity Rewards for TWDD/TWJD matches are to be removed and the point system of old is to be set back into place. Playing with your friends on your squad is to be the reward and we want to encourage that. FEEDBACK NEEDED: I think if we are to reward anything extra as far as activity goes, we should reward squads that BORROW players. The reason behind this is simple, the team who borrowed a non squad member just ensured that person who logged in to play can do just that! Apex is all about keeping people playing, that’s why we are here right? Reward the cats who make TWD fun for everyone. It is a CHOICE for squads to allow borrowing, if Paladen doesn’t want to allow borrows, that is fine. If both teams allow borrows or allow a borrow, should both get +15 points added at the end of the match. 15 sounds like a lot but with the old point system, it actually will work out well. Winning with borrows is more often than not very hard unless the other team allows you to take veterans like Beam or Ease. Average players are usually hard to get wins with because they don’t team with you much or may not be active. I think it’s a fair incentive to motivate having everyone who wants to play play. What do you think? My vote is DO IT.

• Ladder resets will be done differently as we have seen in the past. Qan already assured me it is doable but this will be consuming for him to do so it’s not 100% certain to happen every time in the future. In past, when ladder resets were done, every squad on the ladder disappeared when they lost their points. It makes the zone look bad in my opinion and if you weren’t aware that the ladder just reset and only saw 1-3 squads on it, chances are you would think logging in to play Trench Wars might be pointless. Qan will do the upcoming reset and manually, painstakingly reapply each current/active squad on the ladder back on with 0 points. It’s not an easy process as it sounds, I won’t go into detail but trust me when I say it’s a lot of work and he already has a lot of work.. I will be monitoring the activity very closely and if games don’t pick up faster than before with the old way of resets, I will not ask Qan to do it again in the future despite how nice it looks. So please, spread the word, get active and play games when he does this for us!

• Weekly Prime Time games. This is something I’d like to do once a week, record it and post up on either the forums or the “Video” section Wirah will be throwing together. I plan on arranging set Prime Time nights sometime during the week (yet to determine, stay tuned) in which if squads sign up ahead of time, I will record the match and offer commentary. Prime Time matches will also get full coverage before their game, you can expect some Preview/Hype/Stat vids to pop up days leading up to the games. Eligible squads for PT (PrimeTime) must be close in points on ladder, rivals or the best in their division ie. Squad #1 vs. Squad #2. The point of this is to keep the hype and fun up year long, during league times and after. Depending on it’s success will determine if I continue this during the 2^nd Season of Apex, so if this sounds fun to you (hope so!), be sure to be active and if your on a squad with criteria I just listed, get your mates to schedule the time in to show up.

• Reminder. Apex while it technically has 2 seasons per year will not be listed as Season 1 or Season 3 or Season 5 or w/e. Each season is simply Apex Season 1 or 2. For pixel medals it keep it simple ie. For TWDD Apex Participant Season 1 – Warbird Apex I 2018 Best Player. For winners of the Apex games ie. TWDD Apex Winner Season 2 – Warbird Apex II 2019 Champion. State the division, a roman numeral for the season of that year and their achievement (Best Player/Champion) Squad medals will look like ie. TWJD 2^nd Place Squad Season 2 – Javelin Apex II 2^nd Best Squad

• Medal placement. Apex should be the best and final TWD variation. With that said, TWL medals should be removed from player names and Apex medals are to be earned in their stead. TWL currently reside in and outside of the players profile, they will NOT lose the TWL medals. They just don’t hold merit as they did because this is a new and improved TWD. This gives everyone a fresh slate once more and incentive for vets new and old to replace those shiny pixel medals for all to view. This is good too for establishing who is playing well in 2018 and beyond. Many older vets who have a lot of TWL medals haven’t been active, lost their touch or simply aren’t as good as they were. Apex is to be up to date and accurate as to who the best is now and going forward. I’d also like to suggest if we can keep TWDT on a regular schedule to be ran 1-2 times a year, at the same time, same rules, ect. that those medals could also go outside of the profile but with it being random and unpredictable at the moment, I think it’s best just to focus on TWD.

Here is sample of what Apex Medals will look like for TWD.org that I made for you using MS Paint.

• Squads the forfeit games should not lose points. This I did not go over with Qan but hope that it can be coded in to basically be the same function as to when both teams don’t have enough players in the arena to field a match. All too often people either make bad mistakes and upset their team by not adding a player fast enough or people leave, they try to cancel and the other team refuses. This needs to be fixed so the mentality in TWD is always about fair games. If you have beef with people, do it like a vet and beat them down with your skills or like I do and bash them on these forums! (Just kidding, that is unacceptable behavior and I am putting an end to my outburst from now on.) Really though, Apex as you see is about simplicity, competitiveness and fun. Nothing feels worse than making a mistake by not adding in time or worse, having your rivals snake you when you lose a guy.

That concludes everything for now. I think I hammered out the main points of interest, how it is to be setup, the expectations from staff and players and what we can expect going forward. Help me make this possible and let me know, staff know, that you support the Apex league and would like it to be the next, final variant of TWD going forward. The goal right now, today, is to get Apex started before TWDT semi-finals. I want to be able to get hype going, the word out to every veteran who’s just showing up for DT and their momma to know about Apex so they can have it to look forward to when TWDT ends. Just because the best league we have ends doesn’t mean the fun needs to! Let’s do this. With your help, we can achieve great things here and I hope I can rely on you guys as much as you can me. Much love, thanks for your time. Cheers!

-Ixa/Grasps

PS: I am exhausted and my girl is on here way home. I apologize for any and all typo's and once I get time later tonight will add more polish/clean this up. Also, please do not post here if you have not read and understand what I have proposed. There is a lot here as there should be, staff need this to be as concise as possible in order for this to work. I just ask that you give Beam and I the benefit of a doubt, read this fully when time permits and insert your opinion afterwards. Thanks for your understanding concerning my request and your time in reading this.

[beam]

Chatted with ixador bout this but I'll post here too.

First, a month of roster lock is too long and we had a huge issue with that for the twd cup so I think it should be a week or maybe 2 weeks tops.

Second, medals should be given to the entire roster of the #1 ranked team in wb and jav and then the winning players of the playoffs. I assume the playoffs are going to be some round robin format like twl was but there shouldn't be any participation medals awarded for this it should just go to the winning squads and only the players that actually played. For the twd ranking it makes sense to award the whole team because qualifying has always been a team effort.

I really like the prime time idea as it gives a reason to play during the week and air time is a good reward. This also presents a great opportunity to bring back that fantasy twl we used to have whatever it was called and have people able to buy players for the weekly match from the chosen teams. Alternatively you could maybe just buy player stock and it would go up or down every single twd match based on how they did then sell it any time the player isn't currently in a match. Not really sure exactly how it would work but just an idea.


Last, the world isn't ready to have their twl medals stripped. The twd profile page is full of garbage but the roster page has always been exclusive to twl medals to display only the most prestigious achievements. Once we gauge interest and this is a success we can rediscuss the visibility of the twd apex awards.

[LucifersWarcraft]

Hey guys, I just wanted to apologize that I am unable to edit my own post for some odd reason. Here is a screenshot to validate my claims, look closely to the left and you will that says in black bold "EDIT POST" and below that "reason for editing" and below that.. the text box that usually has the contents to be edited is blank. I had this happen before when doing a HON back in 2017's twdt, not sure if it's because of the length or what but it's unfortunate. Staff, if you can fix this that would be great, if it's too much work, don't even sweat it, Beam and I got this.



Speaking of the Beamir, as he posted, we had talked later after I had put this up and we decided on making some crucial changes to our proposal. Just to reiterate what he said those changes are as follows. Oh and I increased the font for you bro $

Changes to original proposal

• Originally proposed 30 Day Roster Locks to secure eligibility. This will be decreased to 14 Days instead.

• Originally proposed giving out 3 Apex medals per season end. Medals for squads 3rd through 1st place on ladder. Those who particpate in the Apex games were to get a medal and winners of Apex games were to also get a medal. We decided to keep things more competitive to; give 1 medal for the best squad for each divsion (TWDD/TWJD) and 1 medal for those who win Apex games. I want to note that the squad that is in first place at the season end gets a medal for each ACTIVE player on it. Say Paladen is #1 in TWDD but only 15 actually played games during the Apex season while the other 40 on roster were inactive, the 15 that played will be the only ones to get medals. I gave you guys an idea on what we were thinking for the medals to look like, for squad medals I'd use the proposed "Participant Medal" with the red stars and for Apex champions, they'd get the same one proposed, the 5 gold star medal.

• I suggested rewarding borrowed players as incentive for more people to play but we decided that these rewards should strictly apply to the borrowed player. Qan, if this is EASY to do for you, by all means but I took the initiative and thought it would be more work than it's worth and decided just to scrap the idea entirely, which for now we are doing. Ignore that suggestion unless Qan believes it to be an easy code, that's up to him if he wants to do it, we don't think it's important enough to bother the guy. Definitely remove activity bonus's though, just ignore the borrow rewards.

• Medal Replacement. This was solely my idea and I didn't run it by Beam before I threw it on here. Soon as we got together we both agreed that for now this is not a good time for this proposal and that TWL medals definitely need to stay put. I will note that if Apex becomes popular that this topic may come back up, not to strip vets of their accomplishments, just to keep the medals relevant to the games played, in this case, Apex. So for now, forget I mentioned it. I made a bad call putting it here and hope if it offended anyone that the intentions were with the best at heart.

• I didn't put this in my original post but I want to make clear that come time for our Apex games to commence, getting players to slot games will be easy, fair, won't require captains and depending on the amount of active squads will depict the amount of players chosen to compete. For instance, if there are more than 10 active squads come time for Apex games, we will round it up to 20 squads and instead of 1 player (the best) from each squad, we will have 2 players from each squad compete so that we can field two 5v5 games for TWDD/TWJD. If there are less than 10 (god I hope not but never know), say 7, 1 player will be picked from each squad then we will throw all 7 squads into a random generator and the first 3 squads that appear we will pick an additional 1 player from to compete. NOTE: Teams will be easy to construct and should be very equally matched as they will be #1 player vs. # 2 player, #4 player vs. #3 player, #5 player vs. #6 player, #8 player vs. #7 player, #9 player vs. #10 player. If 20 are playing, 1-10 will have their own game and 11-20 will have theirs. The way teams are made for 1-10 will apply the same way for 11-20 ie. #11 vs. #12, #14 vs. #13, #15 vs. #16, #18 vs #17, #19 vs. #20.

I think that about covers it for now. Yo Beam, can you elaborate on how "Fantasy TWL" works exactly? I vaguely remember it when I was a lil macaroni but I never did anything with it. It sounds very interesting, if you could just be more concise on how exactly we could implement it and more on what it is, that would be great stuff. For now I think the focus should be getting Apex started but we have a nice 5-6 months before the conclusion of Season 1 to get this worked in for Season 2. I love the idea, just not 100% sure how it will work. Thanks bro.

Anyways, thanks for your time everyone and I hope you find that you like this proposal and would like Apex to move forward. Again, our goal is to have this rolled out by Semi-Finals so we have time to build some hype up and reel in some of these vets before they leave until the next TWDT to stick around with us and keep things interesting. Have a great weekend. Cheers.

-Ixa/Grasps

[Dierienow]

You lost me at apex sorry. Try using words from this century, like TWD CAMWHORE, TWD 420, TWD JAIL HILLARY, or TW DTF (down to feed)

[Dierienow]

TWD KYS (Keep yourself safe)