I have to agree with milehighmilitia, I feel like the match defaults should be soft-defaults and the deadline should be at the end of the week.

I talked to a CEVO admin yesterday about this and they said that for main, it's somewhat of a soft deadline and that as long as both teams agree, they can reschedule it past the deadline.

I agree.

I know once ESEA starts we're going to have to probably double book some matches on days.

However, it will make us to be on a tight schedule. Just would suck if someone had some emergency and couldn't get someone on the roster fast enough or notify a backup in time to play. So it might be safer overall to do an end of week sort of thing.

I only could schedule our week 2 matches on monday or tuesday...

we have no one holding our hands like other esports
you would think tf2 leagues would collaborate and manage maps/days together at the same time
but no, we are just going to twist and squirm,
and drag everyone under our little special tf2 shitraft and drown.

http://stream1.gifsoup.com/view/119112/shithawks-o.gif

We did reach out to ESEA in an attempt to coordinate our map rotations because we anticipated it would be hard for teams playing in both leagues, but they weren't interested in collaborating. We thought we might have been able to just copy their map list, but it wasn't available, nor were their match dates at the start of the season. They ended up extending their registration period anyways, so I guess it would have thrown things off either way.

On the topic of scheduling, we add the matches to our system roughly 7 days in advance and players receive an email as soon as a match is added to their schedule. The reason that we have the deadline times on the same night as the default match night is so that we can be sure matches are complete before we schedule the next round's matches. If we extended the deadlines for each match and continued to schedule matches based on current team records, teams who consistently scheduled their matches late (after the next round of scheduling) could potentially manipulate their strength-of-schedule and receive easier matchups. This has been an issue in some of our other games.

With that said, I'm going to brainstorm with our TF2 team on how we might improve our scheduling procedures in divisions that are scheduled week-to-week. In the mean time, if both teams can agree to an time and date for their match that is past the deadline, create a support ticket and one of our staff will be happy to manually extend the deadline for you.

Thanks,
CEVO|Pipher

It just seems like we are behind a week already from the get go. We have to cram in both of our week 2 matches like this monday and play our week 1 match tonight. I think that's kind of the issue, the schedule came out and teams were already late.

Could you elaborate? Is this a scheduling issue on the site?

in my experience thus far there is no point in adding matches to the schedule a week in advance since they wont get played until the following week anyways. Having the deadline be friday morning for both matches would allow you to schedule matches for the following week on friday and would open up one additional day to viably play matches.

Edit:

No, not a scheduling issue with the site. Its an issue with the way matches are assigned to teams and the days they are allowed to play these matches. Essentially the way it is set up forces teams to play matches on monday every week since it is the last day that is allowed to play that match on. It seems like we are "behind a week" because we are constantly pushing up against match deadlines imposed by CEVO for matches that would typically have 5+ more days to play.

I like the idea of how CEVO runs the schedule to be honest. Each Week you have the entire week to complete your match, if you can't do it, then the following Monday is the default date. I'm good with that. The default time is terrible for west coasters though, and should be changed ASAP.

The problem came when the schedules were released and unlocked on Friday 21st. It should have been on a Sunday night, and the week 1 default should have been the following monday giving a full 7 days to get it done before you hit the default times, week 2 the same, the one after and so on.

Instead schedules came out on Friday, and although the week 1.1 match was given extra time to complete, the rest was not. So essentially we have to complete all the week 1 and week 2 matches in the first 9 days just to get caught up. This wasn't really explained to any of the schedulers as far as I could tell, some don't check the site often or even reply to our offers.

We should have had those 9 days for just the first weeks action, then 7 days from then on. Hope that made sense.

TLDR: 9 days were given to complete 4 matches, and the offer system does not force people to reply, and the default time is 6pm pst wtf??

What we'll do is if both team captains agree to reschedule after the default match time and post it in the match comms, we'll manually reschedule the match to the agreed time.

We're looking into next season having default matches being Wednesday/Following Monday instead of the current Monday/Wednesday.

Yo fog those are the same days.

They are, but Week x:1 would be Wednesday, and Week x:2 would be the following Monday

Just to hijack this thread a bit...

Our team leader accidentally made me the leader of our CEVO team, removing his leader privileges. How do I give him his leader privileges back?

my cevo> manage events>roster

from there you can make someone captain

http://cevo.com/account/events/ > "Roster" for current season
edit: dammit dagger

thanks!

should have kicked your whole roster for drama.

i renamed the team, that should be drama enough

Yeah so, huge issues with match scheduling so far this season. For the most part they've already been mentioned in this thread. Overall it's been smooth so far, until some real pissmops come along and really highlight the issues with how things are now. There's some classy people out there, folks.

9pm EST is too early of a default time for matches. Many teams, mine including, are barely able to get to their computers at this time so we can start to warm up and get some scrims in. Nobody wants to play matches right then right away. TF2 is played generally between 9 - 11:30 pm EST. ESEA has default match times for 10:30 EST and this is way better.

The offering system needs an overhaul as well. Here's what happened with this team we were supposed to play, Team Café. Some time well in advance I made them an offer for the default match day at 10:30 EST (I like to keep it consistant and almost always offer default day at this time, aping ESEA). They didn't respond for a long time. Then 40 or so minutes before the default 9pm time they go and reject my offer. This sets the time back to the default time. If they hadn't then I'm not sure if my offered time would have been the one either, since they didn't accept it. That's a good question actually: What happens if they neither accept nor decline? This hasn't come up for me yet in the season. Anyway this was like 8:30 or so pm so I was already in TF2, warming up, goofing around and getting ready to start scrims. A bunch of my players weren't even on since, again, we start at 9 and some people get to their pc right then. So yeah, I didn't have the opportunity to see my email that was telling me they rejected. They showed up at 9pm into the client and reported a ffw. Ninja'd it out right from under us. Later on as we're preparing for our match (at presumably 10:30) we check the team page and the match is over and we're sitting pretty with a FFL. The rules currently cater to these asswipes and their unreasonable schedule and love for FFWs. The system should reward me for taking initiative and offering match times, and trying to come to an agreement. The other team needs to be forced to respond to my offer within 24-48 hours and counteroffer or at least the default time can't be so unreasonable. It should not reward the kind of behavior that went down here.

>>> http://pastebin.com/UyBGtPVQ <<<

But yeah nobody can help in this case since the rules are the rules, and they're just playing to the rules. Doesn't really matter that the rules are unreasonable. This is why people hate lawyers.

Also, the rules make it sound like you could be disqualified from the season for 2 forfeit losses and that's rather harsh, especially considering we now have this BS one lingering with us. 3-4 would be a bit more reasonable.

Anyway, I really hope some changes are made in the coming seasons. I'm not a fan of ESEA as a company but there's little reason to not copy most of their procedures unless something is blatantly bad since they've been molded over years to be effective.

Yeah, the "Lobby All Stars" got a FFW from us using the same method, rejecting the offer right when it would let them claim the win. We laughed and then played a scrim (and probably got our asses kicked) to make up for the lost night.

(clarifying, a scrim against another team that doesn't operate like that)

I agree with this so much. The worst part is when another team decides to completely ignore what time you're asking for, so you are stuck in the dark. So that team has no idea what day/time you're playing. It could be that you're playing a joke of a time (6PM western) or playing the time you said. They can decide it at any time.

That really sucks Jaguar, sorry that happened to you guys. Off the top of my head, something simple that would prevent things like this would be:

Default time 10 EST
Team A proposes different time.
Team B has 24 hours to reject it; if they don't, match time is changed to proposed time.

Right now, like you said, the system seems to favor a team that chooses not to communicate or make a fair effort to find a time that works for everyone. It should facilitate playing video games, not getting FFWs.

I've gone through a lot of trouble attempting to schedule matches. I always add captains a week in advance to start figuring out the best match time, yet still run into captains that fail to talk to their team enough to know when they can play. Anyways, I've attempted to reschedule every match for 7:30 pdt this season and have come through about half the time. We've received 3 FFW already, not because we think they will count as wins, but because the other team has failed to respond to me via steam, and when match time comes 2 or less opponents show up.

I know this isn't directly CEVO's fault but a system that favors a more active captain makes sense. If a proposed time is between 6-8pdt and is never denied, it should become the default time. With the current system a team can take a FFW by simply ignoring all schedule proposals.

Also, changing the default time to 7:30pdt would mean I would never have to reschedule.

honestly fucking pathetic on their part. at least think of a good lie if you're too scared to get shitstomped

9:54 PM - slinky: and two of my players has church or something on thursdays

sorry jag

Slinky was more than willing to compromise and figure a solution in that chat log you pasted, but you kept attacking him and insinuating things. Of course he tells his team and his team thinks you're a giant arrogant ass hat and decides to take the ffw. I honestly don't blame them at all.

I agree the current system should be changed to fix these sort of things, but it was your own fault that you got that ffw. You even said you were on at the time and you knew they hadn't accepted yet, and I'm assuming you already knew the current default match times. It was all on you to check it, but you didn't and you could have prevented it all.

Idk if somebody is on my friends list I would message them before getting the ffw

Good on slinky and them for not putting up with your shit. http://pastebin.com/rDhQirNj

seriously though, a default time of 6pm pst is comical. This is something that should be at least pushed up an hour, to avoid this sort of thing.