【 season 19 】 important dates

[Turban]

sorry for the lack of communication last month, i have been way too busy with various projects and work as of late and by the looks of it, that trend will continue until the end of January. anyhow, enough with the excuses. now seemed like the perfect time to announce the all of important dates for this upcoming season, such as the itself (have posted it to a separate thread), dates for the ladder lock and start of the season and so forth. there is less than a month remaining before we lock the ladders, so if you are going to create a team .. well, you better hurry as you need to get the minimum amount of games played to be eligible.

we are going to lock the ladders on September 7th at 11:59 PM EST. i will start sending periodical zone messages in-game once i get home linking to this thread.

once the ladders have been locked, we are going to send invitations to the top eight squads, as long as they meet the minimum requirements (which is 20 games played for javelin and warbird squads and 10 games played for basing squads). we will give the squad captains five days to accept the invitation. in the event of a squad declining their invitation, or if they fail to respond to the invitation on time, we will find a replacement squad (which will be the 9th seeded team based on the ladders during the period of which they were locked) for this season.

unfortunately it looks like we won't have enough basing squads for a full season at the moment. in the worst case scenario, we'll either have six teams participating and do some scheduling gimmicks (such as doubling their schedule to avoid bye weeks) or host a mini basing tournament to determine the final teams to join the league.

anyhow, we are going to have at least one week of pre-season and have another week reserved in case something goes horribly wrong the first weekend. when everything looks to be in order, we will start the regular season which lasts for 7 weeks plus the replay and all-star weekend. you can see the current scheduled dates for the matches, breaks, soft and hard lock dates below:

September 7th: TWD Ladder Lock & Invitations
September 14th: Pre-Season Week 1
September 21st: Regular Season Week 1
September 28th: Regular Season Week 2 
October 5th: Regular Season Week 3 (Soft Lock after this round)
October 12th: Regular Season Week 4
October 19th: Regular Season Week 5 
October 26th: Regular Season Week 6 (Hard Lock after this round)
November 2nd: Regular Season Week 7
November 9th: Replay Weekend / All-Star Weekend
November 16th: Winner's Bracket Quarter-Finals
November 24th: Loser's Bracket Quarter-Finals / Winner's Bracket Semi-Finals
November 30th: Thanksgiving Weekend (Break)
December 7th: Loser's Bracket Semi-Finals
December 14th: Finals
December 21st: (reserved)

in the event of the bots crashing during the playoffs, all games that have not been finished (or were in middle of being played) will be fully replayed. matches that already have finished (as an example, if a team won the first round in a best of three 50-47) before the unexpected server lag or bot crash will keep their results.

if you have any questions, please contact one of the TWL operators a message or reply to this thread.

tl;dr: one month to go. good luck.

[Turban]

i will post additional information and update some of the old threads later tonight.

[Turban]

i am going to be home in about two hours and will dedicate the better half of my evening doing TWL related things, such as getting periodical zoners running, testing the site and bots, updating old threads and creating new ones worth reading. it might be worth mentioning that we are looking into the possibility of adding one more member to the current TWL operator team. the team currently has a grand total of five members: myself, ricko, undercut, tsunami and katc with reckful, m_m god and beasty acting as the supportive unit.

i will post the seeded schedule today or tomorrow to this thread. stay tuned for updates.

[PrOnEsSim]

There even 8 squads in TWLB?

[Tsunami]

As of right now there are 6 actual squads left on the TWBD ladder (subtracting Dice/Brutal). Only 3 of those 6 have played the requisite amount of games (15) to be eligible. Assuming Royal competes in TWLB, that would potentially give us 7, if Cobra/Spirit/Paladen all decide to participate, squads eligible for TWLB. We would need one more squad to participate in order to field 8 squads for TWLB. However, this is overlooking the fact that some squads may decide to decline their invitation.

[Steep]

Last season there was a squad warhable getting invited with close to zero games played, players were even allowed to change squads after (soft)lock to make it happen. Is it time to throw the #of games rule to rubbish bin this year for lb? Nobody complained that they were in, and they had even some close games. There are potentially some inactive groups like sage willing to twl, but doubt they will get 15 bd games in one month...

[Rule]

Turban:

by the looks if it i won't be on thunder for various different reasons (such as them having way too many TWL operators and too much depth in their roster, combined with players that have no class at all

Two smods (reckful and yourself), Two TWL operators (Undercut, Tsunami), and more?

As we all saw last season Reckful personally gifted Pandora TWLB and TWLJ titles, upheld BS decisions, showed clear biases (LB was not even finished LOL/LJ had completely biased decisions made regarding laggots/forced subs) - and now has earned a spot on Thunder for his past contributions, no wonder your having trouble getting 8 squads together for TWLB. The TWL finals were a complete disgrace last season, and by the looks of things will be a joke this season.

That said good luck to all the genuine players/staff who are still in it for the authentic love of the game.

[ogron]

Nice work, Turban.

1) Hard Lock seems a bit late in the season.

2) Last season there were 6 squads qualified for LB as well, and TWL ops did a one-day Tourny for the last two spots and it was a huge success and a lot of fun to watch. I believe Value and Warhable won. Warhable upset Dudgeon and came close to beating several squads, and Value made the playoffs and lost to the TWLB champs 15-13 in the regular season.

There is always enough basing talent for 8 squads, if you just put those final 2 spots up for grabs, someone will claim them, and old vets coming back to the game late (i.e., Davy on Warhable last year, who will become a starter on Enemy this year) get to get back into the swing of things, and new players gain valuable TWLB experience.

I think another tourny for the final two spots would be a great idea.

[Turban]

we were also considering to have hard lock after round 5 matches had been finished, and in hindsight that would probably be the correct decision. however, we can still change the date(s) with enough player input and i'll talk with the other twl operators to see whether the pros outweigh the cons on that matter.

we could consider having a small tournament for the last two spots (or for the last remaining spot if we have 7 active basing squads), surely. good idea, forgot that was done last year.

[Turban]

Last season there was a squad warhable getting invited with close to zero games played, players were even allowed to change squads after (soft)lock to make it happen. Is it time to throw the #of games rule to rubbish bin this year for lb? Nobody complained that they were in, and they had even some close games. There are potentially some inactive groups like sage willing to twl, but doubt they will get 15 bd games in one month...

sure, this is worth considering. we can always adjust the numbers, or even scrap them altogether in basing, but for now we are going to monitor how the league develops and whether we are going to see more squads getting involved in basing.

That said good luck to all the genuine players/staff who are still in it for the authentic love of the game.

.. and i am a part of this rather rare group, thank you very much.

unfortunately you have managed to generate several false memories of the final weeked in TWL season 18 and seem to forget the fact that several of the calls made were favored towards the opponents of pandora. we even had fierce captains acting like complete douchebags and throwing ultimatums to have the TWLD final played now or never based on what i have read. i fail to see how the calls were favored towards pandora in this case.

during the TWLJ round 1, i was having heavy lag issues (330ms due to routing problems) and was going to forced to be substituted out. after floating for a good minute, and not firing a single bomb, my squad finally substituted me. it is the players responsibility to keep an eye for their lag and every competitive finnish player knows that there is a chance that you may get random latency issues during the weekends, thus you have to be prepared. moving on to round 3, maketso started to have severe lag issues for the same reason as i did (and was actually given 3 minutes of play time with 330ms and he was playing with his hearts content, constantly eating and shooting invisible bombs) before they forced the substitution. you say it would be fair to let him play and finish the game, but it would be nothing but biased if that had happened and it would have warranted an appeal followed by a replay. it was an unfortunate turn of events, but he knew there was the slim possibility of that happening and he could have prepared for it by having a VPN or proxy ready to be used. another case of no bias happening, fair decisions.

it is the squads and players responsibility to be prepared if the unexpected happens. your substitutes should always be ready to hop in at the moments notice, and your players should be prepared to fix their lag (especially when it can easily be done with one click of a button when using a cable connection) if a router starts lagging in the US.

not to mention that i actually informed the TWL operators, head bot developer and an upper staff member during the TWLB finals (before the 5 minute mark) that the bot would be crashing during the match if they let it ran. however, they decided to take the gamble and hope that dice would win by a margin of 9 minutes and 30 seconds or greater, which clearly did not happen. after a grueling 30 minutes of indecision, justice prevailed and there was a complete rematch of the round. that is as fair as it can get, although the game should have been replayed on spot when staff was informed of the bot malfunction. if anything, that call by staff was actually favored towards dice as they were banking on the players not to notice the bot issue, although the correct decision would have been to kill the bot, fix it and restart the match. you have to expect that the final series may last a long time. do you remember TWLB penetrate vs pirates? every round went 15:00-14:56, if you add in the extra time from adding the players and other shit that was going on at the time, you will see that the TWLB final lasted an equal amount of time that season.

this is the number one reason why i decided to step up and help with this upcoming season. i do not want to see another repeat season, filled with failures, lack of communication and ending with a grand finale of misfortune, indecision and servers crashing. i would gladly invite you to the TWL operator team to see what we are doing behind the curtains, but you are going to refuse that invitation as the current TWL operator team is filled with "shitheads", as you would say.

as an added bonus, could you list rules that were actually broken during the TWL finals (don't go with that sportsmanship approach, it would have been really unfair to let maketso play the final 8 minutes of the game and he himself acknowledges it) instead of making your responses based on pure emotion. what you may think is fair might not always be fair, and you have to realize that. often times you are correct with your decisions and reasoning, but there are times when you are about as stubborn as one can get.

anyhow, enough talking. i want to make this next season a good one as the past couple of seasons have been miserable to say the last. if you do not want to contribute and persist to be a nuisance to the zone, then go ahead and do it. i'm not going to lose sleep over it.

ciao.

[Rule]

sure, this is worth considering. we can always adjust the numbers, or even scrap them altogether in basing, but for now we are going to monitor how the league develops and whether we are going to see more squads getting involved in basing.



.. and i am a part of this rather rare group, thank you very much.

unfortunately you have managed to generate several false memories of the final weeked in TWL season 18 and seem to forget the fact that several of the calls made were favored towards the opponents of pandora. we even had fierce captains acting like complete douchebags and throwing ultimatums to have the TWLD final played now or never based on what i have read. i fail to see how the calls were favored towards pandora in this case.

during the TWLJ round 1, i was having heavy lag issues (330ms due to routing problems) and was going to forced to be substituted out. after floating for a good minute, and not firing a single bomb, my squad finally substituted me. it is the players responsibility to keep an eye for their lag and every competitive finnish player knows that there is a chance that you may get random latency issues during the weekends, thus you have to be prepared. moving on to round 3, maketso started to have severe lag issues for the same reason as i did (and was actually given 3 minutes of play time with 330ms and he was playing with his hearts content, constantly eating and shooting invisible bombs) before they forced the substitution. you say it would be fair to let him play and finish the game, but it would be nothing but biased if that had happened and it would have warranted an appeal followed by a replay. it was an unfortunate turn of events, but he knew there was the slim possibility of that happening and he could have prepared for it by having a VPN or proxy ready to be used. another case of no bias happening, fair decisions.

it is the squads and players responsibility to be prepared if the unexpected happens. your substitutes should always be ready to hop in at the moments notice, and your players should be prepared to fix their lag (especially when it can easily be done with one click of a button when using a cable connection) if a router starts lagging in the US.

not to mention that i actually informed the TWL operators, head bot developer and an upper staff member during the TWLB finals (before the 5 minute mark) that the bot would be crashing during the match if they let it ran. however, they decided to take the gamble and hope that dice would win by a margin of 9 minutes and 30 seconds or greater, which clearly did not happen. after a grueling 30 minutes of indecision, justice prevailed and there was a complete rematch of the round. that is as fair as it can get, although the game should have been replayed on spot when staff was informed of the bot malfunction. if anything, that call by staff was actually favored towards dice as they were banking on the players not to notice the bot issue, although the correct decision would have been to kill the bot, fix it and restart the match. you have to expect that the final series may last a long time. do you remember TWLB penetrate vs pirates? every round went 15:00-14:56, if you add in the extra time from adding the players and other shit that was going on at the time, you will see that the TWLB final lasted an equal amount of time that season.

this is the number one reason why i decided to step up and help with this upcoming season. i do not want to see another repeat season, filled with failures, lack of communication and ending with a grand finale of misfortune, indecision and servers crashing. i would gladly invite you to the TWL operator team to see what we are doing behind the curtains, but you are going to refuse that invitation as the current TWL operator team is filled with "shitheads", as you would say.

as an added bonus, could you list rules that were actually broken during the TWL finals (don't go with that sportsmanship approach, it would have been really unfair to let maketso play the final 8 minutes of the game and he himself acknowledges it) instead of making your responses based on pure emotion. what you may think is fair might not always be fair, and you have to realize that. often times you are correct with your decisions and reasoning, but there are times when you are about as stubborn as one can get.

anyhow, enough talking. i want to make this next season a good one as the past couple of seasons have been miserable to say the last. if you do not want to contribute and persist to be a nuisance to the zone, then go ahead and do it. i'm not going to lose sleep over it.

ciao.

As long as you keep the same outdated policies, rules and false beliefs the leagues are done. Has anything been done to establish new protocols for TWL playoffs should server crash?
Looks like you don't have to worry about robbing dice this season as its not around. As it stands it looks like things will be done "at your discretion" regarding who gets specced for lag - we all saw how that went in TWL semi-finals/finals.

I am not going to write five paragraphs back, we have already covered this in previous threads. I will laugh and continue to criticize you if I see season/playoffs games where known laggots like yourself (and others) are playing with horrible lag, stacking on the same old squads and ruining the outcome of legitimate results.

[Turban]

if the server crashes or we are having problems with the bot(s) then of course we are pushing back the playoffs to another date (although, if games finish with no problems / issues with server lag, those scores would remain) which would be announced when we know the shit is stable.

also, we indeed did see how it went in TWL finals. i was suddenly having serious lag issues in the first round and was going to be forced to be substituted, but i thought better of the situation and asked for a substitution myself without abusing the blatant lag that i was experiencing at that time. this has been confirmed by staff numerous times already. i was unable to fix that lag as i am on a wireless connection and using VPN wouldn't help me at all in this case. however, during the final round maketso was also experiencing the same lag as i was in round one and was forced to be substituted after allowing the captain(s) to find a substitute for four minutes. there was no bias and all rules were being followed. you can't ask for a rematch for UEFA championship league if a player gets injured and this exactly the same type of scenario. lizard fuel hosted the match perfectly, kudos to him. an unfortunate turn of events, but fair nonetheless.

would you have been fine watching me play the first round match for a span of 5 minutes with 330ms latency? no, there is no chance you would be happy with that. however, if maketso is having the exact same problem it is completely fine. yeah, that's what is called a biased opinion and that's why most of your posts have absolutely no merit. you complain about biased opinions yet fail to see your own flaws. no squad was robbed from their victories and if anything, pandora was actually screwed over by staff (by fierce and dice) during the TWL finals. that is a fact that one can't ignore while you have yet to state a single one.

if a player starts lagging at a crucial time, he should be given some time to fix his issues which is basically what happened in round three. maketso had four minutes to connect to a VPN or proxy, reconnect and have a good lag info again. he had plenty of time to fix a known issue that is affecting most of the finnish players at seemingly random times, yet he failed to do so on time. you can't demand a rematch because one of your players is having lag issues nor can you expect staff to let it slip through the fingers. squads should always be prepared for the unexpected to happen; if a player is lagging and is known to have random lag problems, you should have a substitute warmed up.

if we are going to start banning known laggots from the playoffs then the game will turn into a joke. you have to deal with players that have higher than usual lag; that's how the game has always been like and that fact alone will never change. even you have played with laggy players in the past seasons which basically contradicts everything you write, not to mention there has been several finals (since Season 5, which is when i started casually watching the games and still remember most) with a couple of players having lag problems.

while you can demand a lag-free enviroment for TWL, it's not going to happen. no "legitimate results" have been ruined and that trend is likely to continue this season. can you honestly say that it would have been okay for maketso to finish the game with constant spikes and an average ping of over 300ms? no, there's no way you can think like that, else may God have mercy on your soul. any logical squad captain and responsible substitute player would have warmed up prior to the match and dice had enough depth to replace a player like as maketso with several players on their bench.

sorry about another rant, but i'm getting kind of old with your ignorant posts. you seem to ignore all the facts. you don't want to recognize them at all. this may seem like a personal attack, but i'm honestly starting to think that you are arguing for the sake of arguing (which is technically what i'm doing at the moment) although you are severely lacking in your counter arguments.

can i ask you a favor? list all the policies and rules that you think are outdated and we will work from there. i'm going to be thinking objectively, as usual, and will remain unbiased. it takes a laggot to know one.

[Rule]

if the server crashes or we are having problems with the bot(s) then of course we are pushing back the playoffs to another date (although, if games finish with no problems / issues with server lag, those scores would remain) which would be announced when we know the shit is stable.

also, we indeed did see how it went in TWL finals. i was suddenly having serious lag issues in the first round and was going to be forced to be substituted, but i thought better of the situation and asked for a substitution myself without abusing the blatant lag that i was experiencing at that time. this has been confirmed by staff numerous times already. i was unable to fix that lag as i am on a wireless connection and using VPN wouldn't help me at all in this case. however, during the final round maketso was also experiencing the same lag as i was in round one and was forced to be substituted after allowing the captain(s) to find a substitute for four minutes. there was no bias and all rules were being followed. you can't ask for a rematch for UEFA championship league if a player gets injured and this exactly the same type of scenario. lizard fuel hosted the match perfectly, kudos to him. an unfortunate turn of events, but fair nonetheless.

would you have been fine watching me play the first round match for a span of 5 minutes with 330ms latency? no, there is no chance you would be happy with that. however, if maketso is having the exact same problem it is completely fine. yeah, that's what is called a biased opinion and that's why most of your posts have absolutely no merit. you complain about biased opinions yet fail to see your own flaws. no squad was robbed from their victories and if anything, pandora was actually screwed over by staff (by fierce and dice) during the TWL finals. that is a fact that one can't ignore while you have yet to state a single one.

if a player starts lagging at a crucial time, he should be given some time to fix his issues which is basically what happened in round three. maketso had four minutes to connect to a VPN or proxy, reconnect and have a good lag info again. he had plenty of time to fix a known issue that is affecting most of the finnish players at seemingly random times, yet he failed to do so on time. you can't demand a rematch because one of your players is having lag issues nor can you expect staff to let it slip through the fingers. squads should always be prepared for the unexpected to happen; if a player is lagging and is known to have random lag problems, you should have a substitute warmed up.

if we are going to start banning known laggots from the playoffs then the game will turn into a joke. you have to deal with players that have higher than usual lag; that's how the game has always been like and that fact alone will never change. even you have played with laggy players in the past seasons which basically contradicts everything you write, not to mention there has been several finals (since Season 5, which is when i started casually watching the games and still remember most) with a couple of players having lag problems.

while you can demand a lag-free enviroment for TWL, it's not going to happen. no "legitimate results" have been ruined and that trend is likely to continue this season. can you honestly say that it would have been okay for maketso to finish the game with constant spikes and an average ping of over 300ms? no, there's no way you can think like that, else may God have mercy on your soul. any logical squad captain and responsible substitute player would have warmed up prior to the match and dice had enough depth to replace a player like as maketso with several players on their bench.

sorry about another rant, but i'm getting kind of old with your ignorant posts. you seem to ignore all the facts. you don't want to recognize them at all. this may seem like a personal attack, but i'm honestly starting to think that you are arguing for the sake of arguing (which is technically what i'm doing at the moment) although you are severely lacking in your counter arguments.

can i ask you a favor? list all the policies and rules that you think are outdated and we will work from there. i'm going to be thinking objectively, as usual, and will remain unbiased. it takes a laggot to know one.

All laggots should be benched for TWL playoffs - You, Maketso etc , then we might have some fair results providing you don't fuck it up royally like last season. I am not interested in reading your lengthy, wordy nutter comments either where you talk about biases ETC - its clear what squad you stand behind. Just try not to fuck up the leagues again this season by playing yourself in critical games or running them to ground with your buddy Tsunami. Thank you.

[Crescent Seal]

[Dwopple]

I think we'll just be able to make the cut for 8 squads in LB. I mean, Spirit has enough to fill 2 TWL rosters at the moment... and there's plenty of capable starters on other squads who might have their lines pretty much determined. We are also roughly a month out from the start of the season.

Keep up the good work, turbman.