“It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
I think Yaluzans seedings are the most optimal right now. The one 2 March 2015 looks best (with prem Div and Divisions 1-4), except for aDm in Div2. I would keep an eye on natural erection as they got potential to get a lot better really fast, so maybe they can get switched. Also Gief is same or higher level than aDm and are seeded in lower Div. Thats the only problem I see with this seeding.
TkM is being completely remade (Other than dark angel) Their players stopped playing / are joining other teams. it will consist of Dark Angel and good pub players(To my knowledge)
And there is only a 50/50 chance they will actually play this season. I will be sure to get the final word from Dark Angel on sunday because that is the day I will be finishing the seedings.
from a perspective of div 3-4 is sephys solution3 @bottom right far better
please consider splitting up div 3-4 into div 3 4 and 5 like sephy did gives more balanced games.
Because United Lowbobs is equaliy good/bad then Der Blanke.
(cant say anything about urban myth or Sled Team one its hard to schedule vs USA teams
about his majesty ship cant say yet they want to play kinda early)
But we Der Blanke played equal Games with Adm and Tawsome too so you should favor the 5 divison solution3 from sephy at the bottom right.
(vs Funny Bubblers it felt kinda equal even if the score was not)
(never played the French Team ES and never played acv cause they want to play to early)
Long story short please make 5 divisons to split up the low div teams better.
IMO you should just kill prem division all together and make a bigger div1 and div2. Right now in the proposed prem div you have 4 teams and 1 troll team that probably wont even play any matches.
We have titus and hera's team at prem level even though we hardly play anymore. Simba's team is at a high div 1 level. They definitely have potential. YGG below Simba's team and then add another team or two. The only reason the old Prem div worked so well was because, at the time, all 4 prem teams were pretty equal. That's not the case anymore so having a bigger div would be fun imo.
It sounds selfish, but really could care less about you guys in "prem". This scene is too small to give you quality games in the same quantity as for lower divisions. Unless a massive influx of old "prem quality" forms teams to play with you, you're going to have to be satisfied with a boring season with whom ever wants to "try their luck" in prem.
It's either that or you disband your team and scatter to different teams to populate to scene with "better teams".
Teams get better playing better teams. The more teams playing against each other, the better the teams should get. I'm all for condensing the divisions so there's more teams to play, but if you're worried about how playing harder teams would affect your playoff standings, maybe we could just have like 2 matches outside your division per season. I dunno -- I'd like to play matches against the top Div 1 teams as well as Prem teams. Lets face it, basically only 2 teams don't make playoffs in each division anyways (with teams folding).
The scene is small so why divide it even more. Creating more small divisions makes teams never want to scrim or practice outside their respective divisions... which is really dumb.
To be honest, no team has a premier level of play anymore. Not Titus nor Hera's new team. The level of team skill in prem last season was a joke compared to the NS2WC period. So basically were all bad now and just want to play for the love of the game. Divisions should be bigger (at least 6 teams per div) so there are plenty of practice partners and your not playing the same team in matches ever other week.
Edit: I agree with what lome said. Bigger divs will help teams improve much easier. The 6th seat in div 1 can benefit from scrumming the first or second seat and so on. For whatever reason, scrimming outside a teams division is a scary endeavour and is rarely tried.
Teams that want to try their luck or participate in this fantasy of "getting better", should advocate it so to the staff so they could play in divisions higher than they are used to. But they shouldn't be put there just so the other teams in said divisions say so.
Your ideology is fit for a healthy scene with ~10 adequate teams of approriate skill levels for each division, not what the situation is now.
Im all for making bigger divisions but it really doesnt make any sense to artificially make them bigger. For example, I dont think it would make any sense to fuse NHL and beer league together because of the skill difference. But if the NHL players would be split among the beer league teams, that would naturally lower the skill level at first but then there could possibly be more teams of equal skill to compete against each other, which would naturally be much better in the long run for the community. So, actually, I think Ioits's suggestion would just make bigger divisions with more competition. depending of course how the players would be split.
Of course, I know that everybody wants to play with their own teams and friends, so Im not saying that top teams have to disband. I just know how frustrating it is to play when there are only 2 teams to play against of which one was on the other side of the atlantic. For me, the lack of competition actually killed the interest for the game for a while. So, personally, I much prefer playing in environment where there are many teams to play against which keeps the game more exciting.
The argument that "teams get better by playing better teams" is valid, but not always applicable, especially in a game that is losing its player count. For example, nobody could beat Archaea before they disbanded to other teams which created multiple strong teams in return. All of which were arguably weaker than Archaea.
Redistribution of players is not necessarily a bad thing, I agree. But it's a difficult choice for prem players to make because everyone wants to play with people similar/better than themselves. I myself do not want to bear the burden of carrying a team worse than me because I'm not a carry player. I fix mistakes and fill in gaps where the team needs me and it suits me to play behind strong players. It's like a Defensive Midfielder in football (soccer). I'll sure up the gaps and make simple plays so that the world class strikers can bang the goals in.
Part of me thinks that prem players complaining should redistribute themselves. Part of me thinks that's ridiculous and that the quality in div 1 is good enough and has the potential to be better and compete but for whatever reason have a defeatist mentality and don't want to play.
Also Godar improved drastically and Nexzil always somewhat kept pace, albeit were always obviously behind.
Most people have the same issue, there's people you want to play with and you're most likely stuck with respective skill level of said players. On the other end you have higher division people gasping "how can you not improve by now so we would have more teams to play against", and on the other "i don't want to play with those folks, i would rather have fun with these guys".
I don't even want to know how many of lower divisions play with "atmospheric settings", laptops, or handicap themselves in other ways. Personally i have the people i want to play with, most of them are just too inactive due to RL issues, or just loosing interest in the game. In which ever case, it's not like there has been any reason to be active for the past 6 months anyways.
As much as we call this a competitive scene, it feels more like a matchmaking system that people join in for laughs.
Combine Premier and Div1 or just scrap Premier all together. There's no point in playing a season 6 with 3 teams in premier. Divs should have 6 - 10 teams in them so you get a good distribution of games and don't play the same team every other week. Just adding 1-2 teams to premier isn't the best solution because the teams will probably just fold like in season 5.
I'm not sure what's wrong with having a large div1 and just allowing everyone to play one match? Sure, most of the div1 teams are likely to lose to Titus/DIY, but the challenge then becomes simply taking games from them. Winning even 1 or 2 of the rounds could put a team at a big advantage over the other teams. And if you really have a problem with potentially losing a match, then guess what -- you only play that team once!
The problem about that is that people won't be motivated to play because they want to win. What's the point in playing a season if you have no chance at winning the season.... I guess that's the opinion of some people and it should be understandable for everyone
Personally I feel that sephys solution #3 is the best layout there.
It will shorten the season a little making it easier to plan for team leaders (thus hopefully reducing the need to continue a season months - and months - after it was supposed to end due to teams being unable to get their match times + dates organized.)
Not only for more ease, but the skill difference in the divisions is much less noticeable, I believe that with #3 the likelihood of "stomp" matches is pretty low, and also if we were to keep the structure, it makes it a little easier for new teams to enter comp... Div 5 would be a nice entry point for many teams wanting to get a little more serious.
I'm not a fan of having more but smaller divisions. Basically winning a division with only 5 teams is no real fun. I can understand why prem div wants to merge prem div and div 1 together...
new seeding :
Prem
Do it yourself
Titus Gaming
Lucky Chams
Yggdrasil
Ryan Mitchell
DoctorsWithoutGorges
SHAFT
el'pheer
HBZ
Handwashers
Eclipsed
tau-9
The Leftovers
Destiny's Child
TkM
Div 2
TAWific
Natural Erection_
Get Spit On
GIEF ROBOT
RadicaL_GER
FunnyBubblers
AustrianDeathMachine
TAWsome
Eternal Squad
A Certain Vermin
Der Blanke
Urban Myth
United Lowbobs
TAWtaly Clueless
RAWR
His Majesty's Ship
Sled Team One
