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Why I don't like having tiered leagues:
I'm one of the few people who actually played in TWL back when it was a tiered league, and I've also played in two other tiered leagues (Euro League SVS and Premier League SVS).
Old TWL is a bad example because back then even in the upper tier there were only 3 actual decent teams (Elusive, Siege, -Final-), so I will use Premier league as my example as the same problems manifested in Euro League and to a similar degree in TWL.
From my experiences with all three leagues, I never quite liked how it worked out. In my experiences, the tiers ended up being completely seperate leagues of their own. People in the 'upper' tier never really cared about the 'lower' tier and vice versa, even if they were in the same zone and saw eachother all the time, but just not in a league situation.
In fact as the community slowly split apart the problems became even worse. It remains a fact that most people want to play in the upper league. Therefore over time, the stacking of squads in the upper league became worse and worse to the point where teams from the lower league had absolutely no chance of ever even coming close to beating the teams from the upper league. In fact there has only been a handful of squads that rose up from the lower leagues in Premier (and earlier in the Pro League/Amateur League system) that ever succeeded in Pro. And half of these squads were made up of disgruntled Pro league players (more on this later). The fact is, the split in the community was greatly highlighted in both social and skill aspects.
The reasons are clear. Good players want to play vs the best teams. The best teams are only in the pro (upper) league. They can't play in a 'lower' team that has decent players and friends if they ever want to really have a game against the greats, or have a chance at a playoffs or championship that anyone actually cares about. Everyone also knows that teams try harder in TWL than in TWD. Magnify this by the fact that there are less teams to play, and suddenly every team in the upper league is not only skilled differently, but at a completely different level than the rest of the zone. No one else has a chance, and unless you're one of the few players that 'buy into' the upper stacked squads, you'll never get to play there either.
This problem is further compounded, because the upper squads usually just shuffle players, it makes it much much harder for anyone to get noticed and actually rise up as a player. Even now people will say 'he's only good in TWD because no one cares about TWD', but at least someone can concievably do really well in a TWL game and 'get noticed' even if they are on a 'crappy' TWL squad. In a tiered league, no one cares about the lower league, and even if they did 'a good player in the lower tier means nothing'.
Now you might say this isn't so bad for the teams at the top right? I mean now that the talent is concentrated, no one ever has to play a crappy, easy game. Well no. The fact is, even when you concentrate talent like this, the Elusives & Sieges of the world still end up winning most of the time. There is still just 2-3 squads that dominate and the rest can't keep up. But then again lower league can't even keep up with the rest that can't keep up with the top 2-3 because of my previous explaination in the paragraph before. Further that with, since there are so few teams, you keep playing the same squads over and over, league gets really boring fast.
Now how about replacement squads? Turnover in TW is pretty high, even in the so called 'top' squads. You always need to replenish squads. But how do you pick them? The logical way is to ask the best team in the lower tier to 'move up', and then pick some other squad to fill the hole in the lower tier. But wait! The lower tier is in mid-season (and no do you seriously think that the leagues would run staggered, considering how long it takes TWL to get running now?). How do you pick what the top team is? And even if it's clear, didn't you just screw up the lower tier? I mean the champion of the lower tier is no longer the champion right? They're just the 2nd best team that didn't rise up right? You can see where I'm getting at. Basically you're making the lower tier completely worthless as a league.
But that's not all. Over time, there will be upper tier pilots who get tired of losing all the time (or winning all the time). So they move to the lower tier so they can pick on 'easy' squads. And they do. Eventually a 'super squad' forms in the lower tier, a squad which constantly refuses to move up to the upper tier and wreaks havok on the lower tier. Is this actually good for any of the teams in the lower tier? Is this good for the upper tier, because now the squad that moves up is now the 2nd best squad in the lower tier, not the best, making them EVEN CRAPPIER, and more likely to be SLAUGHTERED in the upper tier and promptly request to be sent back to the minors.
I'm not making this up. This has happened for 6 seasons in Premier League. I saw it happen season after season.
Now here's where it gets bad. Eventually people at the top get really bored of playing the same people over and over, and the league slowly dies. No one from the lower league wants to move up, and while that league remains healthy thanks to an endless supply of newbie squads, the upper league slowly withers away, but is still too wildly skilled for the lower squads.
This is when TWL starts really sucking. Actually if Crome started TWL as a tiered league in season 5 and it kept up, that's how TWL would be right now, I guarantee.
So to sum up, why is a tiered league bad? Well there are only so many squads, so the upper league is small. A small elite league, makes the squads overpowered, and sucks talent from the lower leagues. Teams in the lower leagues slowly stop caring about the upper league until they don't even want to move up. The upper league slowly dies, while a 'super squad' of former upper league pilots dominate the lower league making that league kind of stupid too. But then again, hey no one cares about a league where teams are constantly being 'moved up' in theory to something better, so really you just end up with one 8-team league called TWL and a overglorified TWL-reject league.
I think this makes clear why TWL should stay non-tiered. TWD provides an equal opportunity for all squads to play eachother, and for newbie squads to train up. Having a larger TWL allows many more squads to be able to ENJOY playing. It also allows for new talent to more easily be identified, and for new squads to more easily have a go at it. Without a tiered system, we've had Spastic (a newbie squad at the time) win TWLB. We've had Rejected Basers and Mambo show they aren't half bad instead of being raided by talent by older squads which just happened to be in basing first. We've had replacement squads like -Solstice- introduce some of the best players in TWL today to the league. We've had TWL recieve increasingly record spectators for playoff games, games where most people there have played against these people and can fully participate and share in the experience.
For the record, while I've personally had squads that dominated TWL, I played for a great number of seasons for last place or lower half teams in Pro League. In fact I was a captain of a newbie squad in Pro League Season 1 when the league had 20 squads. Yet I never felt like I wouldn't have a fun time. In fact the whole challange for me and a great number of other squads was to show that we too could tangle with the big boys, and our 5-5 season showed that that season.
Imagine if half the people who posted on the TWL forum stopped coming. Half the people who played TWLM stopped playing. Half the people who watched games stopped watching. That would suck, and it will happen if you split up the league.
In conclusion I'm completely against 14 squads in TWLB or TWL as I've stated in other threads. 14 is already decreasing the population unnecessarily, I think 16 is perfectly fine. But even more so, I'm completely against TWL ever turning into a tiered league because I think that would be end of the league as we know it. Don't let people convince you that having games against the same 8 teams all season is more fun for all... it isn't.
I'm one of the few people who actually played in TWL back when it was a tiered league, and I've also played in two other tiered leagues (Euro League SVS and Premier League SVS).
Old TWL is a bad example because back then even in the upper tier there were only 3 actual decent teams (Elusive, Siege, -Final-), so I will use Premier league as my example as the same problems manifested in Euro League and to a similar degree in TWL.
From my experiences with all three leagues, I never quite liked how it worked out. In my experiences, the tiers ended up being completely seperate leagues of their own. People in the 'upper' tier never really cared about the 'lower' tier and vice versa, even if they were in the same zone and saw eachother all the time, but just not in a league situation.
In fact as the community slowly split apart the problems became even worse. It remains a fact that most people want to play in the upper league. Therefore over time, the stacking of squads in the upper league became worse and worse to the point where teams from the lower league had absolutely no chance of ever even coming close to beating the teams from the upper league. In fact there has only been a handful of squads that rose up from the lower leagues in Premier (and earlier in the Pro League/Amateur League system) that ever succeeded in Pro. And half of these squads were made up of disgruntled Pro league players (more on this later). The fact is, the split in the community was greatly highlighted in both social and skill aspects.
The reasons are clear. Good players want to play vs the best teams. The best teams are only in the pro (upper) league. They can't play in a 'lower' team that has decent players and friends if they ever want to really have a game against the greats, or have a chance at a playoffs or championship that anyone actually cares about. Everyone also knows that teams try harder in TWL than in TWD. Magnify this by the fact that there are less teams to play, and suddenly every team in the upper league is not only skilled differently, but at a completely different level than the rest of the zone. No one else has a chance, and unless you're one of the few players that 'buy into' the upper stacked squads, you'll never get to play there either.
This problem is further compounded, because the upper squads usually just shuffle players, it makes it much much harder for anyone to get noticed and actually rise up as a player. Even now people will say 'he's only good in TWD because no one cares about TWD', but at least someone can concievably do really well in a TWL game and 'get noticed' even if they are on a 'crappy' TWL squad. In a tiered league, no one cares about the lower league, and even if they did 'a good player in the lower tier means nothing'.
Now you might say this isn't so bad for the teams at the top right? I mean now that the talent is concentrated, no one ever has to play a crappy, easy game. Well no. The fact is, even when you concentrate talent like this, the Elusives & Sieges of the world still end up winning most of the time. There is still just 2-3 squads that dominate and the rest can't keep up. But then again lower league can't even keep up with the rest that can't keep up with the top 2-3 because of my previous explaination in the paragraph before. Further that with, since there are so few teams, you keep playing the same squads over and over, league gets really boring fast.
Now how about replacement squads? Turnover in TW is pretty high, even in the so called 'top' squads. You always need to replenish squads. But how do you pick them? The logical way is to ask the best team in the lower tier to 'move up', and then pick some other squad to fill the hole in the lower tier. But wait! The lower tier is in mid-season (and no do you seriously think that the leagues would run staggered, considering how long it takes TWL to get running now?). How do you pick what the top team is? And even if it's clear, didn't you just screw up the lower tier? I mean the champion of the lower tier is no longer the champion right? They're just the 2nd best team that didn't rise up right? You can see where I'm getting at. Basically you're making the lower tier completely worthless as a league.
But that's not all. Over time, there will be upper tier pilots who get tired of losing all the time (or winning all the time). So they move to the lower tier so they can pick on 'easy' squads. And they do. Eventually a 'super squad' forms in the lower tier, a squad which constantly refuses to move up to the upper tier and wreaks havok on the lower tier. Is this actually good for any of the teams in the lower tier? Is this good for the upper tier, because now the squad that moves up is now the 2nd best squad in the lower tier, not the best, making them EVEN CRAPPIER, and more likely to be SLAUGHTERED in the upper tier and promptly request to be sent back to the minors.
I'm not making this up. This has happened for 6 seasons in Premier League. I saw it happen season after season.
Now here's where it gets bad. Eventually people at the top get really bored of playing the same people over and over, and the league slowly dies. No one from the lower league wants to move up, and while that league remains healthy thanks to an endless supply of newbie squads, the upper league slowly withers away, but is still too wildly skilled for the lower squads.
This is when TWL starts really sucking. Actually if Crome started TWL as a tiered league in season 5 and it kept up, that's how TWL would be right now, I guarantee.
So to sum up, why is a tiered league bad? Well there are only so many squads, so the upper league is small. A small elite league, makes the squads overpowered, and sucks talent from the lower leagues. Teams in the lower leagues slowly stop caring about the upper league until they don't even want to move up. The upper league slowly dies, while a 'super squad' of former upper league pilots dominate the lower league making that league kind of stupid too. But then again, hey no one cares about a league where teams are constantly being 'moved up' in theory to something better, so really you just end up with one 8-team league called TWL and a overglorified TWL-reject league.
I think this makes clear why TWL should stay non-tiered. TWD provides an equal opportunity for all squads to play eachother, and for newbie squads to train up. Having a larger TWL allows many more squads to be able to ENJOY playing. It also allows for new talent to more easily be identified, and for new squads to more easily have a go at it. Without a tiered system, we've had Spastic (a newbie squad at the time) win TWLB. We've had Rejected Basers and Mambo show they aren't half bad instead of being raided by talent by older squads which just happened to be in basing first. We've had replacement squads like -Solstice- introduce some of the best players in TWL today to the league. We've had TWL recieve increasingly record spectators for playoff games, games where most people there have played against these people and can fully participate and share in the experience.
For the record, while I've personally had squads that dominated TWL, I played for a great number of seasons for last place or lower half teams in Pro League. In fact I was a captain of a newbie squad in Pro League Season 1 when the league had 20 squads. Yet I never felt like I wouldn't have a fun time. In fact the whole challange for me and a great number of other squads was to show that we too could tangle with the big boys, and our 5-5 season showed that that season.
Imagine if half the people who posted on the TWL forum stopped coming. Half the people who played TWLM stopped playing. Half the people who watched games stopped watching. That would suck, and it will happen if you split up the league.
In conclusion I'm completely against 14 squads in TWLB or TWL as I've stated in other threads. 14 is already decreasing the population unnecessarily, I think 16 is perfectly fine. But even more so, I'm completely against TWL ever turning into a tiered league because I think that would be end of the league as we know it. Don't let people convince you that having games against the same 8 teams all season is more fun for all... it isn't.
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