TWL Free Agent Thread

[HellzNo!]

Imagine using handicaps, we could balance any game.

Captains agree to a death or time handicap before game

Wanna run three 10*s vs a bunch of 7-8*s? Fine, the 10s only get 7 deaths each.

Just an idea

lol this would be fun to experiment with. You could run 4v5 as well, with four 10* players against five 8*

[Cape]

Imagine using handicaps, we could balance any game.

Captains agree to a death or time handicap before game

Wanna run three 10*s vs a bunch of 7-8*s? Fine, the 10s only get 7 deaths each.

Just an idea

[Vys]

I think the level of stackness was set by evil before last twdt ended. Which in a sense forced the hand of other players.
When their foundation of their warbird lineup consisted of 3 10 star warbirds in racka, lockdown and mythril. Am i expected to team up with 8 star players? Or am i going to form a team to compete against their team?

I think it wasn't thought out enough imo. And tbh for future twls, I feel there should be a star limit of maybe 45 stars and players are able to leave freely until softlock is in place.

[Exalt]

All of you wrote a lot of words while nobody addresses the actual problem with TWL and the TW community as a whole, one that's been an issue since the very beginning and only got worse as the player pool got thinner:

Top players in this game stack and won't stop stacking. They don't want fair teams. They don't want real competition by playing against each other. They don't try to win with less, but would rather snowball with more. It's 2022 with almost nobody left in the game, and specific players won't stop and realize what they're still doing after a decade or more of this shit is bad for the game. How many bitmap images of a medal does it take to get people to play competitively in a willing manner, when thats the only way to keep the game they clearly love alive?

The funny thing is almost none of them won fuck all prior to like 2014, when the vast majority of the playerbase already quit or got too old and washed to give a fuck anymore. Many only remained the "best" over this period because they never took time off after 20 straight years of playing while the rest did. 2020 was when many people came back, while all the top players never quit so they could be number 1 terr or something with 3 total terrs left in the game. Any rational person would look at that and wonder if they are mentally okay when they brag and talk shit over it instead of being happy to have more people to play against.

People being afraid to speak about this has always been a problem, and I think most refuse to speak because those top players get nasty as fuck and completely unhinged when called out for their bullshit. Look at Cape's weird ass comment as an example. What normal, well-adjusted person talks like that? That shit is goofy.

Not everyone is like this obviously, but many are. Let me know when the top players decide to carry some scrubs into TWL and win rather than stack with 4+ other 10*s around them. That's some baby mode difficulty. TWDT proves winning with others can be done, but it has to be forced on these guys or they won't do it. It doesn't mean lessor skilled players don't have their own issues either though, because most are high on ego and short on brain cells. I'm just saying that many lose the ego when faced with 10* players telling them to stfu and learn how to play. Perhaps some could do that as leaders and challenge themselves for once.

[Ardour]

We need regular season so we know who out of Evil and Rapid will make it to the finals to face Divine in each league.

[Riverside]

I somewhat agree with Bike. There is absolutely no fucking reason to play for 2 months when the top 2 teams are set with 95% probability in dueling leagues. In base it seems that there are 4 rather equal competitors for the title. A league which requires 3 more players per team.

Yep. Im for skipping to TWL playoffs as well.

Alternatively, Id consider trimming the TWL season in half. I would use that time in the schedule to double the second half of TWDTs Season games.

If every team played the other TWL opponent once instead of twice (which i think is the case rn?), TWL Playoffs could finish when there's 3-4 weeks of TWDT regular season.

Some notes:

1. I appreciate that individuals are organizing these leagues. The League Operators and Supporting Staff members aren't being paid for this work.
2. There are league ideas that have been suggested that have the opportunity to promote more distribution of playtime, weekly competition and leagues winner parity. These suggestions are & arent structured the same as TWL, TSL, TWEL & TWDT. Some have been used within other zones of subspace, some not.
3. I would avoid hosting leagues or systems because "its been done like that before" or "TWL has been that way always". That holds little value relative to what notes from several members of the community have said about the negative consequences of TWL (via polls in the past and on this/other forum threads).
4. Within systemic decision making, the past can help with growth and learning, esp when the league is repeated (ie annually). TWL on its own leads to weeks or months of inactivity. TWL with TWDT has individuals on forums noting that TWL will be too long as is (not sure what the activity and communal consequences in the short and medium term will be).

[bike]

To Hellz and Zid's point: indeed upsets can happen and being the underdog is kind of fun. So yea I guess RUN IT.
At the same time, if you cut TWL short, then draft league could take up only 1.5 hours per Sunday, which is much more manageable for people, especially the European peeps I'd imagine.
We asking these elite euro players to stay up and be competitive at 10-11pm when they presumably have work the next morning? LOL WHAT

There is potential for 9-12 competitive warbird teams which means 45-60 happy players on the weekend from 1 league alone. Instead we have it with max 30 players, some of who probably aren't even enjoying it because they getting smoked like pancake. (Then again, I must say getting my butt kicked in javs is kind of hilarious so who knows)

Seems like a reasonable goal for League Ops is maximum fun for maximum amount of people - which likely means as many evenly matched teams as possible - right? Just as an example, on Best's draft team for wb, he has to decide between playing me/Exalt or Riverside/Zapata (more or less) - whereas we could all easily be playing on a team with talent dispersed across 10-12 teams.

Main point is: in both leagues we have people benching who would be happy to be playing. Clearly there is room for improvement. How can we get everyone playing who wants to be playing? Long-term thinking

...
Short-term fix...why don't some of the elite players with a pair of balls sack up and join a team that could benefit from their help - like saiyan to Ram Ranch, vys to Flapperz, Morph to Rocket, etc.

If you guys are so good why do you need to play with 5 other insanely good players? If you want an all-star game, arrange an all-star game. Racka and Saiyan cap it. one weekend mid-way through the season - you each pick your players or whatever you want to do (community vote who plays? AHHH HYPE)

Take one for the team and split up.
This stacking would never fly in professional sports. You never get teams like this.
Yes I get it this is a free game and we are all kind of nuts for playing it since we were 10-15 years old and logging 5,000+ hours on this thing (ok some of you at 15k+ that's okay though)
but still there is a simple way to make the league / game more enjoyable for everyone.
Share the wealth.
End these monopolies!
Free the stars.
Violence and Racka over here collecting stars like Mario,
but there's a whole kingdom that needs your star powers.

Thanks fam.

TLDR: can someone arrange an all-star game so all these 10*'s feel comfortable splitting up and allowing for a more enjoyable season for everyone?

Love, bike

[zidane]

the reason not to skip to playoffs right away is because this game is dead when there are no leagues. what's the point of rushing to end something when there's nothing else to do, what are we gonna do run dt for the 7th time this year?

also there's always those miracle shots at something weird happening

[HellzNo!]

As much as TWL regular season seems like a massive waste of time(skip ahead already to GSW v Lebron finals we all know is coming), I'm still enjoying the amount of activity both leagues being run simultaneously is creating. If you're fortunate enough to crack a lineup in either or both leagues, what more could you want? Yea the matchups are mostly lopsided in TWL, but part of the fun in that is trying to be the underdog team to pull off an upset. Otherwise it's still better quality games than TWD most nights, so what's the harm? People volunteered their free time to run this shitshow, the least we could do is see it through without bitching constantly for once...

[LeeRomeno]

I still don't get why we have those 2 leagues at the same time. If problem was playing with newbies, could have just hosted a hybrid league, draft style, but no caps and no VP limits. Would have resulted in much more competitive league (in all honesty, twlj/d is between 2 teams and twlb between 4), with potentially 8 strong teams and without VPs, best players for each team could play.

[Rab]

I would imagine the purpose of running TWDT alongside TWL was to keep entitled kids like yourself happy over the next few months.

TWDT with half the games and waits between games isn't good tho.

[saiyan]

Glad this thread is immensely off topic, and I would like to contribute to this off-topic-ness.

With the way teams are currently, why don't we just skip right to playoffs and allow every squad entry to playoffs? Do we need to drag this out 4 months? Draft I get continuing for months, since there is fine-tuning / tweaking / trading etc., but TWL doesn't really allow for that nuance as much. Then again, I am still seeing Rapid recruiting more elite players because they apparently don't have enough, but anyway maybe give them 1 more week then playoffs? Can we let squad captains vote on this? I'd be super content with TWL playoffs now-ish and let draft tourny run with all its nuance.

And going forward, let's try to emulate the NBA as though everyone is a rookie out of college. Note the NBA is 1 league; no one is asking Lebron to play in the NBA, the NFL, and NHL, although I'm sure he could - he clearly excels in one area more than others. In the same way, it is reasonable to have one draft per league (i.e. LD, LJ, LB), that way you get as many competitive teams as possible, then you can do away with the star cap or any talk of stars. Captains just draft who they think is best depending on who is still available and who vibes well with the team.

The issues I see with the single league drafts / no star cap format is 1. you get some caps who are way more skilled than others thereby giving their team an advantage from the start, 2. it would require a 3-league draft player to be on 3 different chats for their 3 different teams 3. more work up front for captains / devs. Anyway, trusting there is a solution to these issues (e.g. maybe 'elite' caps need to draft themselves first and a mid-tier cap could draft themselves reasonably 3rd or 4th, etc.) this would allow for all the good players to get playing time and like one 6-7.5* per team probably -- you get 10 balanced teams or so (at least in WBs). 10 balanced teams would be sick. Right? Maybe could even get 12 for wbs who knows.

love, bike

When TWL was first announced I imagined there would be 2 dueling teams that could realistically compete for a title and thus suggested to make TWL a quick tournament with no regular season. But now it's obviously too late to turn back.

I would imagine the purpose of running TWDT alongside TWL was to keep entitled kids like yourself happy over the next few months. But somehow having TWDT is not enough parity for you, and camping the "On The Move" dumpster has proven to not be an effective recruiting strategy for TWL. Now you've come to the forum begging the ops to end TWL ASAP... Do you have no shame? Pipe down and play the game lol...

[Turban]

It would likely be better to simply do something similar to what SVS did this season with them having pseudo-salary cap for teams combined with a draft format.

Initial draft order would be decided by the captains rating with a randomizer deciding tiebreakers in case of teams being at same overall rating value. This ultimately means top players would end up picking last in the first round.

After first round picks you would sort teams again based on their total rating (captain + player) and repeat this process until end of fourth round. Additionally there would be a rating cap which teams can not exceed for the first four rounds to further balance it out, but this cap would be lifted after all teams have five players and you can freely start picking players.

League matches would have no star limit.

[Rab]

Glad u all caught up with what I've been saying for 10+ years, welcum.

[ag$]

I somewhat agree with Bike. There is absolutely no fucking reason to play for 2 months when the top 2 teams are set with 95% probability in dueling leagues. In base it seems that there are 4 rather equal competitors for the title. A league which requires 3 more players per team.

100%