TWL Season 25 Announcement

[RaCka]

TWL Season 25 Operators - RaCka, Lockdown, Tiny, & Dwopple


TWL Season 25 will have a start date of September 18th, 2022 with the finals concluding on December 11th, 2022. There will be no pre-season matches for this season.


Roster Restrictions

Rosters will be split, players can join separate squads for the dueling and basing leagues. There will be 6 teams for TWLD, TWLJ, and TWLB.

For a squad competing in ONE dueling league they will be restricted to 8 total members.

For a squad competing in TWO dueling leagues they will be restricted to 13 total members.

There will be a total of 12 players allowed for the TWLB division.


TWL Qualifications

TWL will be a mix of invitation and applications this season. If your squad does not receive an invitation but would like to compete in any of the 3 leagues please reach out to any of the TWL Ops listed above to be considered. This is the first time we are running TWL alongside TWDT so we would like to keep TWL as competitive as possible with the current player base while allowing an outlet for other players to still play competitively in TWDT.


Resolution Cap

The resolution limit for TWLD, TWLJ, & TWLB will be 1920 x 1200.

Regular Season

Every team will play each other two times during the regular season. (Double round robin)


Playoffs & Finals

The top 4 squads from each division will advance to the playoffs. The #1 seed will face off against the #4 seed and the #2 seed will face off against the #3 seed. If there are any tie breakers at the end of the regular season it will be determined by their head to head record in that division. If there is a head to head tie we will take overall score or time in those game as the tie breaker. In the unlikely event there is still a tie those teams will play each other in a single round tie-breaker before the semi-finals begin on November 20th at 1pm EST.



I'm looking forward to being apart of the team hosting this season and expect it to be a good one!

[Dreamwin]

Roster restrictions for this season will be 8 players for the TWLD division, 8 players for the TWLJ division, and 12 players for the TWLB division.

Do you mean there are split rosters for wb and jav too? Or just split between dueling and basing?

[zidane]

good question by Dreamwin.

also put down Evil for all leagues, get the ball rolling

[RaCka]

Do you mean there are split rosters for wb and jav too? Or just split between dueling and basing?

There's one combined roster for the dueling leagues. You then have the option to join any basing team you want.

[Lock]

8 players for the TWLD division, 8 players for the TWLJ division

There will be a total of 16 allowed players for a combined TWLD/TWLJ team.

[Riverside]

[SIZE=20px][B].

Imo,

Scheduling TWL games between TWDT games interrupts the flow for TWDT-only participants (that's me!).

To me, Sundays in TW have historically felt like "theres a lot going on" when 1 of these 2 leagues was happening.

As a participant of TWDT within the East Coast time region:

• 3 hours of leagueplay gaming is long imo. I compare it to the number of hours of leagueplay gaming in TW on days of the week other than Sunday: 0 mins/hours (there are no competitive leagues on other weekdays or Sat)
• 2-5pm EST Sunday (now an additional hour), every week, is a slot during the afternoon for me, of a weekend
• As a "ill prob show to 50-75% of games" participant, it becomes increasingly hard to sign up for leagues
• Im mediocre at 3 leagues so I have a chance at being added to 3 ships in TWDT. With this schedule, I would have to wait for the TWL games in each ship to finish:
• That means added time, every Sunday, where due to the expected time commitment (for me, as someone who enjoys 3 leagues), its situationally felt difficult to signup (or sometimes, see through seasons)

[Rab]

+1 as a twdt-only person I hate this schedule for the same reasons

[Dwopple]

Imo,

Scheduling TWL games between TWDT games interrupts the flow for TWDT-only participants (that's me!).

To me, Sundays in TW have historically felt like "theres a lot going on" when 1 of these 2 leagues was happening.

As a participant of TWDT within the East Coast time region:

• 3 hours of leagueplay gaming is long imo. I compare it to the number of hours of leagueplay gaming in TW on days of the week other than Sunday: 0 mins/hours (there are no competitive leagues on other weekdays or Sat)
• 2-5pm EST Sunday (now an additional hour), every week, is a slot during the afternoon for me, of a weekend
• As a "ill prob show to 50-75% of games" participant, it becomes increasingly hard to sign up for leagues
• Im mediocre at 3 leagues so I have a chance at being added to 3 ships in TWDT. With this schedule, I would have to wait for the TWL games in each ship to finish:
• That means added time, every Sunday, where due to the expected time commitment (for me, as someone who enjoys 3 leagues), its situationally felt difficult to signup (or sometimes, see through seasons)

Apologies, I didn't look super in-depth, but...

Looks like leagues for this schedule will start 30 minutes earlier than normal, but TWDT matches will start / complete within their "regular" 3-hour window, no? Dual-leaguers (TWDT & TWL) will have 1 extra timeslot than TWDT-only leaguers.

[Riverside]

Apologies, I didn't look super in-depth, but...

Looks like leagues for this schedule will start 30 minutes earlier than normal, but TWDT matches will start / complete within their "regular" 3-hour window, no? Dual-leaguers (TWDT & TWL) will have 1 extra timeslot than TWDT-only leaguers.

Ye

For a TWDT only player, it looks like its currently scheduled:

• 2.5 hours per week (15% decrease in time, relative to the past 2+ seasons)
• Often 1 TWDT match per league (then waiting for TWL game to finish per league), sometimes 2 TWDT matches (then waiting for TWL game to finish)
• Relative to the past 2+ seasons, this reflects a 40-45% weekly decrease in # of TWDT games
• TWDTB games start at 3:35pm right now, instead of 4pm in the past.

However: the time slots on this excel image are separated by 25 mins.

Captains adding players and League Operators preparing games can and often takes 5-8 mins.

Sometimes TWLD, TWLJ, TWDT and TWDTJ games extend longer than 20 mins.

Id be excited for 1 game per league... if it meant I didn’t have to wait, every Sunday, between wb and jav games (I don't have to wait for TWLB, cause my TWDT games wud b ofir).

[Dreamwin]

There will be a total of 16 allowed players for a combined TWLD/TWLJ team.

Thanks RaCka and LD for your answers. (and the announcement ofc)

If there is any room for feedback, my take is that the limits are too big. No one needs 16 players for dueling leagues. Top player base isn't big and this will ultimately lead into some players benching who would start elsewhere. I would suggest changing the limit to 10 and combine LD/LJ rosters.

[Zeebu]

25 minutes per time slot is aggressive. even if 3/4 of the games in each time slot hit their target, it doesnt matter. the schedule will move only as fast as final match in that timeslot allows. do we have any data showing that all dueling matches in a timeslot can be completed 25 minutes from arena message announcement?

I'm all for putting out a schedule, but if we dont have a line of sight or historical data that says we can support such a thing, why post an unrealistic one? Like I said, I'm not flaming it, I just dont think we have any relevant history that shows we'd be able to stick to it. Let's post a schedule that represents what will likely happen rather than wishes and rainbows. In all honesty, from 9/18-11/16 i'd put a sizable bet that the LB games in the 4pm slot will never, not once, start on time.

[Vehicle]

+! to zeebu's post. It was especially egregious last DT with games frequently starting an hour later than scheduled. Why say games start at 4pm EST when they literally never do.

[WillBy]

25 minutes per time slot is aggressive. even if 3/4 of the games in each time slot hit their target, it doesnt matter. the schedule will move only as fast as final match in that timeslot allows. do we have any data showing that all dueling matches in a timeslot can be completed 25 minutes from arena message announcement?

I'm all for putting out a schedule, but if we dont have a line of sight or historical data that says we can support such a thing, why post an unrealistic one? Like I said, I'm not flaming it, I just dont think we have any relevant history that shows we'd be able to stick to it. Let's post a schedule that represents what will likely happen rather than wishes and rainbows. In all honesty, from 9/18-11/16 i'd put a sizable bet that the LB games in the 4pm slot will never, not once, start on time.

There's a couple things we're trying to fix schedule overruns while maintaining a timeline thats been accessible to the majority of our players.

We've implemented shorter scheduled round times to reduce potential downtime and get the weekend wrapped as early as possible. This allows us to squeeze an additional round in each week without completely excluding our Euro (or NA Pacific) playerbase. We are avoiding the 3 extra rounds each week that this last season used because it became harder to control timing-wise and led to some drastically late games.

Speaking just based on random sampling of twdt.trenchwars.com, the longest warbird/jav matches typically take around 20 minutes of playtime and base can of course take 30 minutes. These generally fit into our time slots, and a shortened pre-match adding time will help even more. That is definitely something we are looking to implement this season.

With the structure of our matches not being a fixed timeline, it's impossible to schedule perfectly. This is why we continue to schedule base last, as it is the most likely to run late. I don't see merit in stretching the schedule to reflect worst-case scenarios in matches. It's better to start each round 5 minutes later than scheduled rather than building in extra downtime and forcing the last rounds to start 30 minutes later than the proposed schedule.

[Rab]

Would be interesting to see some data about EU players who want to play TWDT vs TWL. I suspect more EU players play TWDT and not TWL. So TWL might be something you could run at a later time.

[Dwopple]

Would be interesting to see some data about EU players who want to play TWDT vs TWL. I suspect more EU players play TWDT and not TWL. So TWL might be something you could run at a later time.

If anyone is waiting to signup for TWDT... please do so ASAP, thank you in advance!