Thanks for the suggestions. We've toyed around with both of your ideas quite a bit actually.

1. We will certainly be limiting the # of teams in Platinum this season but we are not going to have an incredibly small limit such as 6 or 8 teams like ESEA invite. It really depends on how many teams sign up for the league but we are going to be more careful of who gets in this season.

2. It's funny you mention having our big games on a day other than Mondays because this is something I have personally struggled with for two seasons now. I can't count how many times I have tried to get players from our bigger teams to play on either sunday or tuesday, but the reality is 9 times out of 10 both teams can only end up playing on Mondays. We are pretty flexible about match nights. Teams can play any day in between when schedules are released on Wednesdays and Tuesday night. It just turns out that Monday's work better for most players. I am still going to try and get our casted games played on a different night its just history has proved this to be a bit more difficult than you would think.

INF

stop signing your posts
we know who posted it
its at the top

I didn't say move the big games out of monday. I said move all the other games out of monday so that you only have big games on monday.

what's up with the ugc site? why has the site been down for like over a week without even a redirect informing people what's going on? I hope it is getting a massive overhaul the site really needs a makeover.

Some stuff involving hosting company is making it so ugcleague.com is down so they are currently using ugcleague.net.

Aww you are making me tear up! :>

Ah, I see. Same thing still stands though, most of the people in our league have gotten used to the Monday evening deadline. If anything, since only 1-2 games are being casted per Monday it would make more sense to move those games to a different night to increase viewership. But like I said before, I've tried this and always end up being told the teams cant get their entire roster ready for a day other than monday.

Yea, hosting company got bought out by a bunch of russians, then disappeared and left us high and dry. www.ugcleague.net is the current place holder. We can't do any redirects yet because we do not want to move the domain until we have most recent databases.

Top teams do scrim a couple times a week or so, I'm sure they can play on dates other than Monday for extra viewers. I haven't talked to my players about this, but I would personally be up for having good games on different dates.

Good stuff. I will most certainly try and give teams as much notice as possible when I know eXtv or others are going to cast games. Hopefully we can get some games on Sunday's or Tuesday's to get lots of viewers who are normally busy playing on Monday.

The problem you're having is just that you haven't offically stated anything about different dates for casted games, so everyone assumes they're always playing on Monday. If you organized with eXtv at the beginning of the season which games they would cast, then teams could better prepare. For example, let's say each Platinum team signed up for two weeks they could play on Tuesday (with only two teams picking any given week). Each week, the two teams that signed up play against each other (and the rest of the match scheduling is edited to make this work). Then they would know at the beginning of the season which weeks they're playing on Tuesday and eXtv would know from the beginning which match they're casting each week.

I know that may not be realistically possible, but a similar system that tells teams from the beginning of the season what dates they will be casted would make it a lot easier for the teams to be there.

you seem to be forgetting Tangerine as being a really good team, well, when the play SRS anyway.

whatever you do, best days to have top teams play are monday, monday and sunday. Yes, emphasis on monday because later on the week 6s players have esea scrims and matches.

i dont see how you're going to reset platinum without reseting all the leagues, you'll have truly good teams that didn't make the platinum limit down in silver or w/e and they'll roll through and no spots in platinum will be there to move them up, i think you should gradually move teams down to silver that do extremely horrible as to not upset the balance of the next lower bracket.

double post.

the problem with platinum division is that there are a bunch of like "legacy teams" that get to remain in platinum forever because they were like 7th place 3 years ago or something

a tin team, gun runners, DMS, etc.

they just dilute the division and increase the number of players running around with completely undeserved egos

We're getting there. We haven't been able to play as a full team for weeks now due to our increasingly hectic schedules. Until we can do that regularly we won't be able to compete with the upper-tier.

Another team to watch is Team Player. Big Puff does tons of work on that team and they have a lot of talent to back him up. Also, the rumor is the Looking aren't coming back. And regardless of the talent on Gorgeous Gamers, it seems like nobody even knows what classes they're going to be playing. They probably wont take it serious at all. They'll be good, but less of a threat for off-classing and not practicing.

That said. Please god make platinum smaller. It's so easy to get fucked over and not make playoffs just by having a tough schedule. It happened to us in Season 6 and in Season 7 (though it didn't matter) we got 4th by fucking around and losing a couple. We ended up not having to play many good teams. Go back and look at about half the teams that made playoffs in season 6, and you'll see they almost entirely played the bottom ten teams during the season.

The only way to make Platinum anywhere near fair is to have as many teams play each other as possible. It's way more acceptable to get last knowing we played everyone in the div than to get knocked out of playoffs because some team we could crush didn't play anyone competitive.

There is no problem with resetting platinum. If a great team gets move down they will make it back up the next season because they are clearly better than every other steel team.

On the other hand, the big pack of the lower half of platinum aren't that much better than steel teams. I remember ifa squared beating most of those teams in scrims

That's why the Silver division exists now.

the problem with silver is that it's a good middle ground for new teams with potential that aren't quite great yet or for steel move-ups that would get raped in plat, but a lot of teams that were in plat before deserve to be moved down to steel as well, because they can't handle plat either really, but they aren't being moved down

Summer was much more relaxed than Fall/Spring. Teams were allowed to sign up for what they wanted. Some chose Platinum and realized they didnt fit. In a few days we'll go over who does and doesnt belong in Platinum.

I fully agree that a majority of the teams in Platinum now really dont fit. One of the biggest problems at this time is that the people interested in Highlander in former seasons (or tf2 in general) are slowly bowing out to other games. CS:GO and GW2 came at pretty rough times for my team (looking handsome). We lost over half of our roster to other games and most likely wont be coming back for this season. Now that there is steep competition that would actually be fun to play against (mts/gorgeous gamers) full on stacking some talent, it just doesnt like it will go down.

So some great points Scholar. The first one is for sure being worked on (and I agree), the second one is a pretty tough one. We've openly said on the UGC page to try and get high tier matches moved to Sun/Tues and it never seemed to pan out except maybe once. Maybe this season will be different.

I really hope the players make the effort in UGC to help make the league more competitive and well-respected. That is the only way these suggestions will work anyways.

for the 100th time. Leave platinum on monday, move the other kiddies out of monday.

When you talk about changing the official match day for the entire league, the only people with valid complains are going to be the busy ones. Who is busier? the platinum players who happen to play 6s (majority of them) or the remaining 3 leagues who scrim like everyday because they have nothing else to do?

Scholar, one of the problems with moving non-Platinum match nights to Sunday is that it messes with scrim schedules. Most teams don't scrim Friday/Saturday because some team members have other things going on during the weekend. Sunday is one of the big scrim nights for just about everyone, allowing teams to make their final adjustments for Monday's game.

If you moved the match night then other teams would have to figure out a new practice schedule. The teams that don't care to scrim will be watching Highlander casts, but many that do like to practice would end up using Monday as a scrim night, meaning that the viewership of the HL casts wouldn't go up by quite as much as you expect.

Just my 2c

Agreed with Scholar. Seems like it'd be the easiest way to ensure some real viewership for the casted Plat matches. Most people in lower divs aren't playing 6s as well (or at least higher levels) so the change to Sunday shouldn't really screw them up all that much. If they need to make final adjustments do pregame scrims like everyone else.

Why not just have the plat matches happen an hour later? So everyone else can finish their matches and then watch the plat people play? Then it becomes more of an event. People will finish their games and want to watch how the plat players did it and what they did the same or differently than their team.

Also, I think there should be requirements to each division. New teams can choose Steel or Iron to start in, unless they can show that the players on their team meet the requirements of Silver/Plat div. Number of seasons, results for last season, number of invite players, etc. I was talking to some silver teams who should be steel teams, but they said they wanted to play silver so they could get a cooler looking medal when it was over...

So i had been thinking about it.

Suggestion to UGC version 2.0:

Next season, create a new division above platinum. The top 8 teams on platinum from this season get moved up. An then you only move/demote one team per season into this new division.

This would be the most fair way to "trim plat" without having someone hand pick the teams. And YES, 8 teams is ideal. Dont be a little bitch admins

The real advantage I see to having the casted match or matches of the week being moved to sun/tues is extv having the option of bringing in someone who's a bit more knowledgeable about HL to give their commentary. Because personally the extv HL casts have been nearly unwatchable for me except on the rare occasion salamancer does the cast. The very limited knowledge the normal casters have about the metagame and even the teams is just a huge turn off.

As for making the league smaller.. I've been wanting to do that for a while now. In S6 for us (bonus) the only game we would look forward to playing every week was our prematch scrim against GG.

Why 8 teams in the top level is good:
Even power of two, makes organizing playoffs incredibly simple.
Low number, everyone can keep THE BEST teams in their head easily. 16, the next power of 2, is much harder.
Large enough to make playoffs and double elimination interesting.

I really like this idea -- you have a ton of people playing highlander at the same time on Mondays anyway, why not just push the upper-tier matches back an hour? Would definitely be more of an event and I can see a lot of teams watching the streams together in mumble.

UGC is trying to coordinate 2 top plat teams to play on this Tuesday 9PM EST. We will see what happens. This will be a good example to see if our top plat teams are flexible enough to play on any other day besides monday 9pm est.