Going into the final week, before the schedule was released we thought it was a 100% lock that we would play Goblin Zone. That would almost certainly have been the match that determined who got the last playoff spot but instead we somehow got the team two spots above us (chell) and one spot below us (bludhaven), but not the team one spot above us (goblin). By the way Goblin Zone would have been the least recent opponent out of those 3 teams along with being tied for the closest record to ours. No idea how we did not play Goblin. If I were on Goblin I would also be pissed, but from our team's POV, I am very glad we won out. On the bright side we will both be in the GGL playoffs anyway, from what it looks like.

edit: we’re both in the regular playoffs :)

It feels like whatever autoscheduler that is being used to "make things more fair" in theory ends up making things overly complicated and clearly doesn't work well. IIRC ESEA used to assign schedules 4 weeks ahead of time (twice a season) which meant you wouldn't have weird shit like playing the same team only a week after you played them last, maybe something like that could mitigate these issues?

I looked back at ESEA seasons and most seasons they had IM start with ~20 teams, where 3 or 4 max would die, leading to a situation where you played every single team in the div and usually didn't have rematches, I wonder if it'd be possible to restructure things slightly to try and have ~20 teams in adv? Last I played in S11 it started with only 11 teams and had 9 at the end of the season, whereas this season started with 15 and ended with 12. In ESEA the IM playoffs were also top 8 teams, which I feel like there's an argument for--it meant the more middle of the pack teams could at least have some hope of making playoffs, and it makes scheduling contentions like this not nearly as big a deal. Given how long there is between seasons you could probably extend playoffs a bit and do top8 double elim if people really wanted it as well. Maybe it's worth doing a poll of advanced teams to see if they'd want to do top8 next season?

Another potential scheduling thing that I heard but haven't seen discussed much is the idea that when a team dies, it's an advantage to the teams that have already played them, as the other teams either get forfeits, or get matched against better teams in the future (generally it's not the top teams that are dying). If there are going to be forfeits for teams that play the dead team, it would probably be the most fair to mark all previous matches they have played as forfeits as well, so a team that lucks into being scheduled against a team that just died doesn't get as negatively affected by it.

The idea that dead teams get fully removed from the scheduler with RGL means teams that didn't play them yet will have to play 16 matches vs real teams, whereas other teams get a free win obviously. IMO the best solution to this is to keep the dead team in the schedule until they've played each team once (then remove them), or somehow otherwise ensure that the amount of forfeits that teams get is even over the course of the season. Alternatively, if a team dies in the first few weeks you could just remove their previous games and have the teams that played them be rescheduled to play alive teams (therefore everyone gets to play the game more).

In a perfectly healthy league, none of this would be an issue which is why it worked so nice back in ESEA. Given the state of TF2 and the lack of team/players right now this suggestion would be a scheduling nightmare on so many levels.

The best way to deal with this problem is to keep it as simple as possible. Make Head to Head results the most important factor in determining seeding for tied teams. That way, teams can die as much as they want early or late in the season and it doesn't matter at all. If the tied playoff teams are still alive at the end of the season, you simply look at the H2H results and you have a clear winner. If they are still tied, you can use the % Rounds won as the next tie-breaker.

oh for sure agree with u on head to head it was just a separate comment on how it's a bit bizarre how there's RNG on when you face a team before or after they forfeit, us old heads obviously just think things should be the same as they were in ESEA cuz it just worked (schedules going out for 8 matches at a time and making it fair that way instead of a system which requires admins to notice and override fuckups, like scream mentioned he failed to do) but i think its still valuable to look at other ways of handling forfeits and stuff

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zdSnm2lNxA

watch Hone the Rat go BEASTMODE

This is because esea only had 3 divs. Whereas rgl has 6. This is because people have voted to want more divs with closer skill levels. even if you account newcomer and amateur being what ugc was in the past (a free place for lower-level players) The majority of IM represents what used to be low-mid ESEA open. if you moved all of them up to main, and move like 8 teams from the top of main into low advanced, Both Main and Advanced wouldn't have had any repeat matches.

Id like to add that I don't think moving all of them up would be the answer. Keeping the lower teams in IM in their own division and keeping them on the 1 match per week schedule to allow for a lower team count could be good. We could also just try to move up some amateur teams into IM. Amateur started with like 52 teams this season.

ggs guys, we got chell team to 3rd place

#chellwidenuking

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1002792607799320666/1133279270844764210/chellwidenuking3.png

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1108245118290493471/1133996508937715732/yLu9EX1.png

wait, with how ridiculously strict the sandbagging rules are in rgl, how did they let stock and phone mainclass in advanced lmao

not that I have a problem with it because I think sandbagging is good, but still

the last time we played we got 4th in advanced

both are currently rostered and phone is paid up for the 1st place advanced team, and both have a recent history of logs scrimming/playing with that team. the season youre talking about was almost 2 years ago and had very strong teams in 1st-3rd, what exactly are you trying to prove lol

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/002/473/531/9f2.jpg

if you get 4th in the division I think you should be able to play it the next season you play

am i being trolled right now

the rules are if you don't get top 4 in invite or win the division in a recent season you don't get banned how is this confusing