9 Team TWLD Proposal

[Turban]

if we are going to allow Paladen in TWLD, it would only be fair to also let Enemy participate as well to keep an even number of squads. this would make it far easier to make a schedule, as we wouldn't have random bye weeks (technically speaking, they would still play 1-2 games) for each squad. here would be our two options:

1) push the season by one week, making it an eight week regular season instead of seven.

2) make a more congested TWLD schedule by not extending the season length.

both have their pros and cons. either way, starting to head home soon to clean up this mess you guys managed to accomplish while i was sleeping.

[Jones]

blerp, every year it's the same thing happening. ladders are not good at determining who should be in twl and who should not.

if you check my past posts about this you can see i'm more in favor of letting in squads that "do not belong there". because 1. it's good for the zone. 2. there's only like 4 squads able to compete for the title anyway, so that means we are having 4 teams around that "waste everyones time". check that ego, let more squads in and just add basers or something. it's not like anyone from sweet takes a thunder lineup with beam in it seriously. so we will prolly add cres.

let paladen in.

[mtine]

I agree with u Jones 100%. But there is another issue here that prevents Paladen from playing TWL: caught cheating (getting fed) twice in 2 weeks. That's the real issue here.

[Jessup]

I hate to say but I agree with you cres. It really does pain me this has all happened. Also though many years now it's basically been the same squads and players over and over doing TWL.. but I do agree , quali's are not to be taken lightly. It's in the hands of staff now and all I can do is hope they decide to do 10's with Paladen and Enemy included. I personally think TWL would be more fun and have more excitement if it is expanded with 2 more squads in. We can then just all settle this trash talk in the gaming arena and make each other eat crow. I hate when stuff like this happens. I explained the scenario about why I think it wasn't fair all of us to be cut off because of something an aliaser did behind our backs. If we are allowed in though it definitely is only fair that Enemy should be added too since rules are being bent. I didn't really want special treatment nor did I desire special scrutiny.. but I'm resting my case now and leave it to staff and will keep my fingers crossed.

[Flew]

Why don't we try and get hzers to maybe form a squad. This way we can kind of add another squad to twd and have a sub squad incase of a rainy day for twl. (Paky Dude will stop showing after week 2). So have Paladen and Enemy make LD and maybe drive interest for hzers, by telling them about twld and how fun and competitive it is? If it's possible, I'd like to maybe cap a squad for them, and no I'm not Fork=). Maybe if someone wanted to step up and help me that would be awesome.

P.S. Wiibimbo sounds terrified of Paladen making twld and Jones just roasted you hard Cres.

[veetee]

Just make TWLD/LJ 10 squads each. More squads = more fun.

[mtine]

Ok, next TWL: all who participate get into TWL. It has been said.
I still don't agree with this decision tho. It pains me to say but we did our job, played nice and fair (except the cheating part where we didn't cheat) and now all of a sudden 2 more squads get in? Should've told us this at the beginning so we would only get 20 games and then just play DDs all days long and not care about rank. Meh too tired for this anyway.

[unreal]

I expected this gonna happen. So let me get this straight:

1. Paladen gets fed by Play and then whine about getting points back?
2. Paladen cries because we didn't dd them today (because we were already #8 and they were way below us) so that is our (Lego's) fault?
3. Paladen gets Thunder to feed them the last minute before the cutoff while clearly staffers were watching and people admit they got fed yet again and now they should be rewarded by getting another LD spot?

I think I made myself pretty clear here. Paladen has been on for a very long time, that much is true, but by showing today's and last weeks unsportsmanship makes me question the premises of this game and its structure and people that run it. Just to make another point:

tl;dr Cheating is ok, as long as you are Paladen. NO to Paladism!

Yesterday's "unsportsmanship" was nothing to do with any of Paladen, the people running and playing in Thunder decided to do it on their own accord. Obviously I can't say the same about Fork, or Eren who doesn't seem to get any mention in any of the wrongdoing here. People shouting their mouth without knowing all the facts? Never! Believe it or not, the vast majority of Paladen had no idea, are innocent, and were shocked when we found out. Not only because most of us are honest players and don't cheat, but also it being so close to lockdown, and that certain other squads have been blatantly feeding with nothing being done when reported.

To summarize the game against Thunder, this is how it went:

In round 1, Weak appeared to esc-Q after recouping enough health while I was chasing him into bottom left corner, to evade the shame of being rushed and successfully killed by me (not that I would have landed, since I miss most shots anyway :laugh, and then noticed RaCka was there just floating around, typing this:

P (RaCka)>should we feed u guys into twl?
P (RaCka)>Cant decide
unreal_> no
P (RaCka)>need an answer paladen
P (RaCka)>willing to go 0-10
unreal_> Gave you an answer

After that point (presumably after some team messages advising him to do so, who knows) snsd sooyoung started floating around the arena in the same manner, giving away kills, so I specced and decided to contact staff since it's clear they weren't playing. The first staff member to respond was Undercut who I didn't want to speak to since he was seen feeding the day earlier in Dudgeon alongside Zizzo and thought it was likely my complaint would be swept under the rug and ignored. Weak continued on as normal, resulting in his nice rec, which was then deemed to be "proof" that Thunder weren't feeding us the round.

Round 2 seemed to continue the feeding, and they must have known at this point it was obvious, and staff must have seen the screenshot they requested and started messaging them, causing RaCka to send two more messages:

P (RaCka)>what do ido
P (RaCka)>staff going nuts

They started playing relatively normally, but then came another deliberate decision to feed us when Heaven got subbed in while afk for Weak (5-1), giving away free kills (3 of them I think) until he noticed and started playing but ultimately the round was given away, as well as genuinely lost in the end when Heaven was 1vs2 and then 1vs1 but still trying to win.

and even though i do think that a fair amount of your players knew that Fork was also the captain of Play

I've got no idea what evidence Turban has other than assumption. Being in the same squad doesn't automatically make you an accomplice or some all knowing entity like Q from Star Trek. jebass might have known for all I know, but that's as far as the circle goes I think. Fork and Eren seemed to make the decision themselves to do it.

Speaking of double squashing Jessup was on sweet and Paladen once I found out what was happening now this Jessup kid joined not even a month ago and acts like if he owns Paladen and is pointing blame on other people you can't even stick to that trash squad you are a known squad hopper and trash.

Alongside this and the other post you seem to have a lot of misguided information. Jessup wasn't on both squads at the same time. I made Jessup rage quit Paladen a few weeks ago in a heated debate, and I also left something like 10seconds before he did. I momentarily tried recruiting people from pub to form a new squad but ultimately there's not enough players. He joined Sweet, and then rejoined Paladen recently. You're just using this thread as an excuse to troll.

[Ephemeral]

Ok, said I was never posting in the forum again but this issue epitomizes most of the decisions the zone faces so I’ll make a liar of myself and post this.

TWL is supposed to be a premier league; qualification was never supposed to be easy, the ‘bar’ was set high for a reason. WTF does low population have to do with this? Making decisions based upon the fact that it might lose players is simply wrong. It sucks, but not all decisions are easy and sometimes trying to find some solution that makes every happy is the worse decision you can make.

The decision is, and this should have been thought through months ago, do you lower the bar for TWL qualification so that everyone plays? IF low population and getting more ppl to play the zone is the objective, then make the decision this way. But if TWL objective is as described in the website, “Trench Wars Leagues ("TWL") is the premier competitive league in Trench Wars. It is designed for serious squads which are interested in competing against the best in the zone.” then get serious and enforce the rules even if it means players are lost.

IMO a really harsh decision would be to disqual Thunder completely from TWLD and ban a few players. A less harsh approach would be to remove points/disqual them from 3-4 games and ban a few ppl. Yes, penalizing everyone on a squad for the actions of the squad sucks. But the message that squads need to be careful who they recruit needs to be sent, as well as letting everyone know that rules matter. It also sends the message the the qual processes still really does have value and is not something that changes based upon how desperate the zone is for players.

The flip side is the simply all allow to play in TWL. Change the TWL mission statement to ‘everyone plays for fun’ and let’s just move on. Slap racka’s hand, tell him he was a bad boy and let Thunder off the hook. Allow Pal and Enemy in, and any other team which wants it.

Frankly this weekend was a cluster fuck. Having TWDT running while TWL quals ended was a disaster waiting to happen. If a fucking event/league cannot be run during off-peak hours the real question and decision is ‘should we even be doing it’? If shit can only happen during the few prime time hours per week then either schedule it out so things can co-exist and not compete with each other. But it lame to expect the ‘lesser’ squad to every be able to compete when things are done this way. Again, we try to make these decisions in the context of ‘saving the zone’ and this only results in ‘bending the rules’. Are they ‘rules’ or just ‘guidelines’? Players are currently behaving in a way where they know they only get a wrist slap for breaking the rules, so why burn time pretending that this isn’t happening?

We can simply put it out on the table. The zone is so desperate for players that we will tolerate anyone acting anyway they want. All rules, zone or league, are simply legacy overhead which gives staffers something to make themselves feel important. The drama and time suck they represent is just part of this wonderful online game.
Eph

[Paky Dude]

lol 2pac, we would have made twl in 8th seed you guys lost your 3rd player and paky told bwp to leave lego just to join for a game so he could end up leaving envy and join back with lego. In my eyes that's wrong. and in that sense we would have made twl fair and square but no another squad has to be unfair.

I'm all up for Paladen qualifying for TWLD... Hell, I even gave Paladen a fair chance in making TWLD with the last game we played that would've eventually knocked us out of TWLD had we lost. I did not tell BWP to join for one game, I clearly asked in public if anyone wanted to join since Zyzz decided to rage quit. I had no idea till AFTER the game that he was favoring us so we don't forfeit. Although, no rules were broken it was messed up, BUT we did play most of round 3 WITHOUT him and had the lead throughout that round.

I had to do whatever to win that game by stepping up and carrying round 2 and round 3 so please don't say Envy lamed Paladen out on anything. If at all, you guys should be thanking us that we gave you guys an opportunity because we could've just sat in our #7 spot. Yet, I still DD'd with Zyzz (newbie) vs one of your better lineups (Let, Dour, Rj and Jessup)

[olde]

Never seen ppl cry so hard just to be destroyed all season. W/e let the bums in. All they gonna do is feed free wins.

[Exalt]

this is something we also wanted to avoid, but due to the lack of web developers we were unable to get our proposed new rating system (which would have rewarded squads for overall activity, a high average rating and much more) implemented on time.

we also wanted to change TWD on a fundamental level to allow friendly matches to be played which would not affect the rating of a squad, however the standard !challenge would have remained as a ranked game. it would have served as a practice mode of some sorts. player statistics would have still been saved, matches would still display all that glorious data, and it would be up to teams to decide whether they wanted to make a serious match or a fun one.

other things were also proposed regarding the qualification format, but most of them were half-assed ideas that no one bothered to finish.

i should be home in about 3 hours to do some dirty work.

I didn't know about this, but I like the ideas. I'm not so sure friendly matches will increase activity though, unless a few things are added. What I think is it should allow squads to use a player from outside the squad and/or allow non-assists to accept/challenge other squads to friendly matches. There are plenty of times a squad only has 2 players who aren't afk, but could find a friend to play with them. There are also times when a squad has no assist/captains online, but a lot of members are. Just my $.02

[Paky Dude]

I completely agree with Ephemeral, enforce the correct rules.

But then again, I remember when the squad "Build" qualified for TWLB but didn't get in because Pascone decided that we weren't competitive enough shows how much staff abides by the rules

[Exalt]

TWL is supposed to be a premier league; qualification was never supposed to be easy, the ‘bar’ was set high for a reason.

I'm sorry, but there is no bar when 8 squads make it and there are only 10 total squads. TWL qualifications using TWD started in 2002 when TWD was created, and there were about 50 squads in every division. All of them were active. Many had a shit ton of players on them, and people would fight for TWD arenas at all hours.

The situation is far different these days. To even call TWL "premier" now is an insult to past years and past champions. It really is. At this point, the game is about keeping it alive and active, rather than keeping anything "elite." There is nothing "premier" left in this game. This attitude needs to stop anyways. People know whose good at the game and who isn't. Winning TWL is still winning TWL, but everyone knows the difference. Why don't you?

Remember, this is 2014 not 2004.

[Turban]

@ eph: i would like to move away from punishing an entire squad DURING the qualification period and rather hit all the involved individuals, at least somewhat hard with a ruler, on the fingers. we simply do not have the player base anymore to support losing more squads and lessening the competion. also, there are no clear rules about how to handle situations like this at the moment, and its something that should/could have been added this season. TWD has its own separate rules which only state that games where people/squad feed only gets voided with no further action required.

ultimately we want more competition, as that is what TWL is truly supposed to be about.

however, if ANYONE breaks rules during the season, don't expect to get off the hook that easily.