New format for SL4/ EABL2

[beefheart]

Proposal: Make 2 seperate leagues. One for european based teams (EABL), one for US based teams (SL) and let the winners of each fight over the "world cup" in a home and and away play off series.

Dougies difficulty: Some teams are very mixed.

[Wyrd]

What if one were to make a mixed league*, what would be the problems that would need to be addressed in order to make it as equal as possible for all participants, so that the winner could truly consider itself the best of all? And possible solutions.

Match times
Make it so US vs US games, and EU vs EU games can be played at times convenient for their location, and only have EU vs US games played at a reasonable compromise time.

Home and Away
Try to have a US server that is as low ping for Europeans as possible for US home vs EU away games, and vice versa. Perhaps for games with clans with a large Asian and/or South-American content vs EU, the default server would be a US one where the Asian/South-American ping would be similar to the EU players' ping?


Any other fairness issues?


* I'm in favour of a mixed League because you'd get to compete against all the clans, not just the locals. And also perhaps a runner-up clan's playstyle works much better against the winner and many other clans on the other continent than against their own, making them undeserved losers.
It sucks that that does create more issues to fix in order to make it fair. For convenience sake I mostly focused on US vs EU problems because they're the largest playerbase.

[Caz]

Maybe this isn't pertinent to either league (I'm not aware of how EABL did things), but my idea would be to instead of the 'regular season' being a series of tournaments, to instead do divisional or group play as the regular season with the playoffs being tournament-type. Here's how I see it happening...

• Allow teams to choose a 'home field', a server of their choosing.
• Try to have the groups or divisions mixed, i.e. not having an all-n. american division or all-european division
• Home and away sets for division/group games
• Possible interdivisional/group games ensuring that each team gets an equal amount of 'home' games
• Division winners (and possibly runner-ups, depending on how many/how big the groups are) make the playoffs in a seeded format based on regular season standings
• Have the playoff tournament be a 'best of #' style, with the higher seeded team getting the extra home game

This levels the lag issue in the regular season, and since everyone would be on equal footing, makes the home field advantage in the playoffs justified.

[Spartan]

Originally Posted by Caz

Maybe this isn't pertinent to either league (I'm not aware of how EABL did things), but my idea would be to instead of the 'regular season' being a series of tournaments, to instead do divisional or group play as the regular season with the playoffs being tournament-type. Here's how I see it happening...

• Allow teams to choose a 'home field', a server of their choosing.
• Try to have the groups or divisions mixed, i.e. not having an all-n. american division or all-european division
• Home and away sets for division/group games
• Possible interdivisional/group games ensuring that each team gets an equal amount of 'home' games
• Division winners (and possibly runner-ups, depending on how many/how big the groups are) make the playoffs in a seeded format based on regular season standings
• Have the playoff tournament be a 'best of #' style, with the higher seeded team getting the extra home game

This levels the lag issue in the regular season, and since everyone would be on equal footing, makes the home field advantage in the playoffs justified.

I like the idea, theoretically. It works for every major sport in the U.S., works for the FIFA World Cup, etc. The only problem is: we may not have enough teams to make divisions worth it, especially in EABL. But, I could see this working for SL4. For example, currently there are 10 teams registered for SL3 round 2, and that would probably give us 2 divisions of 5 teams. Each team would get an equal number of home and away within the division, and I could see a scenario where the top 2 teams in both divisions advance - giving us a 4 team playoff. This could work imo, as it gives clans a chance to face off in transatlantic battles while not screwing over the mixed teams (tVo n ball)

[Dougie]

I'm still sticking with my original thoughts the sky league as a tournament shouldn't change its structure of playing outside US servers, but I also think all teams should be able to play in it. There is only one issue I have with it at the moment, which is that it only looks at determining an overall winner. The smaller teams will be unlikely to pick up points (other than an appearance point) as they will be very unlikely to get far in the playoff systems. I would like to see a league system that does help placing teams in a better position.

This has lead me to look further into the idea of a global divisional league structure. Teams would be given an opening rating (perhaps based on taking an average ladder ranking of a teams top 6 players as well as recent performances in team competitions eg. SL and EABL). Groups would be no more than 6 teams, so based on the current teams in SL3, we could end up with a league like this:

Division 1
Twisted
Ball
Aces High
Arr
tVo
AIR

Division 2
Eight Ball
Team this Team That
Reapers
Football Club
Cyber Ballers

All teams would face each other once in a home and away system in a league that would be played over 2 months. Top two playoff to decide overall winner and Promotion and relegation playoffs could be added.

The other option is as I suggested before, to have two regionalised groups, and then have playoffs after. So again based on the SL3 teams, groups would probably be:

US league:
ball
Aces High
tVo
twisted
Reapers
Team this team that

EU league:
Arr
AIR
Eight Ball
Football Club
Cyber ballers

I will draw up some pros and cons for both these ideas, but in either case, I definitely couldn't do the administrating of the league alone, and I would be happy to get a number of people on board to help out.

[Seadog]

I support the "home & away" idea and teams should play two (bo1) games like in soccer. The overall goals scored determine the winner (eg: away goal is worth x2).

Originally Posted by Dougie

I'm still sticking with my original thoughts the sky league as a tournament shouldn't change its structure of playing outside US servers, but I also think all teams should be able to play in it. There is only one issue I have with it at the moment, which is that it only looks at determining an overall winner. The smaller teams will be unlikely to pick up points (other than an appearance point) as they will be very unlikely to get far in the playoff systems. I would like to see a league system that does help placing teams in a better position.

This has lead me to look further into the idea of a global divisional league structure. Teams would be given an opening rating (perhaps based on taking an average ladder ranking of a teams top 6 players as well as recent performances in team competitions eg. SL and EABL). Groups would be no more than 6 teams, so based on the current teams in SL3, we could end up with a league like this:

Division 1
Twisted
Ball
Aces High
Arr
tVo
AIR

Division 2
Eight Ball
Team this Team That
Reapers
Football Club
Cyber Ballers

All teams would face each other once in a home and away system in a league that would be played over 2 months. Top two playoff to decide overall winner and Promotion and relegation playoffs could be added.

The other option is as I suggested before, to have two regionalised groups, and then have playoffs after. So again based on the SL3 teams, groups would probably be:

US league:
ball
Aces High
tVo
twisted
Reapers
Team this team that

EU league:
Arr
AIR
Eight Ball
Football Club
Cyber ballers

I will draw up some pros and cons for both these ideas, but in either case, I definitely couldn't do the administrating of the league alone, and I would be happy to get a number of people on board to help out.

[Dougie]

Originally Posted by Seadog

I support the "home & away" idea and teams should play two (bo1) games like in soccer. The overall goals scored determine the winner (eg: away goal is worth x2).

interesting idea. So we play the home and away in one match, and give the result based on the overall score? This would mean that ties are possible though. I don't mind having ties myself though. would the bo1 games be first to 6, or perhaps over 10 minutes?

[rojo]

Originally Posted by Dougie

interesting idea. So we play the home and away in one match, and give the result based on the overall score? This would mean that ties are possible though. I don't mind having ties myself though. would the bo1 games be first to 6, or perhaps over 10 minutes?

Booo @ timed matches.

[Dougie]

[bump]

Before I start a new league thread, I want to open the floor to people on a couple of rulings. Firstly:

"Matches will be played at 1-2 a week. There will be one spare weekend on the penultimate week to move any fixtures that require rescheduling. Matches will be a given an initial scheduled time."

For the next league I will be setting up, teams will provide a preferred time to play their home fixtures and I will attempt to accommodate the schedule accordingly. This will give a loose idea of when scrims can be organised, but should your opponents need to move the scrim time, then it will be up to the teams to rearrange the schedule around the given date. Any teams that have a large contingent of players playing in APL should let me know, then I can try and work around the APL timings for their fixtures.
The other option is to have a fixed time of play, which would have to be on saturdays (sundays will be for APL). This would be much easier for me to organise, but hardly ideal for everyone.

"With regards to applicants wishing to take part, this will now be open to european based clans only."

Speaking to rojo and unbreakable yesterday, I was rightly made to feel very bad about telling them that tvo would not be part of a next EABL cup. They are an excellent team, and I am grateful they helped by taking part in the first league giving us some great entertainment on the way. Therefore I propose, opening up the entrants to all teams who wish to enter.
Currently the invited teams are:
{arr}, AIR, FC, -={8}=-, WoF, BBQ, LF and FT.
I was originally planning one league where everyone here plays everyone once (either home or away).
If we allow other teams to enter, the structure would likely change to small "seeded" prelim groups. After these initial groups, the top ranked teams would go into one group to playoff for the cup in a league, and the rest into another league to playoff for the plate. One small thing to note here, the cup would no longer be the EABL cup, and will need to be renamed.

any thoughts are welcome!

You can read the full set of rules here

The competition will start on saturday 14th April.

[rojo]

Originally Posted by Dougie

[bump]

"With regards to applicants wishing to take part, this will now be open to european based clans only."

Speaking to rojo and unbreakable yesterday, I was rightly made to feel very bad about telling them that tvo would not be part of a next EABL cup. They are an excellent team, and I am grateful they helped by taking part in the first league giving us some great entertainment on the way. Therefore I propose, opening up the entrants to all teams who wish to enter.
Currently the invited teams are:
{arr}, AIR, FC, -={8}=-, WoF, BBQ, LF and FT.
I was originally planning one league where everyone here plays everyone once (either home or away).


The competition will start on saturday 14th April.

I just wanted to make address the comment that I made to Dougie yesterday so everybody knows and where it stands. I'm unsure of what Unbreakable said so I cannot comment on that.

I did not fully realize this, but there are a dominant number of European teams. In light of the server nonsense threads of the past, playing on European servers (for ball at least) would likely be the way to go. My original thought when Dougie suggested we (tVo) wouldn't be invited I immediately thought that we had a 50/50 split of European players. Looking at our roster, we definitely have dropped to 75 NA/ 25 EU. So I think my comments were misguided and I apologize for this Dougie.

Also, the number of teams to participate in this league would have more than doubled if tVo, ball, and AH play in this league which would make this quite an endeavor. The last bit of complication would be the timezone differences and APL which all 3 of these teams have a number of members playing. Coming from tVo's perspective, we probably wouldn't be able to schedule a match during the week, and would have APL on Sundays, which would leave us only Saturday to play matches. We had this problem last EABL as well when we couldn't get players to show up when we needed them to. So would tVo sign up for this? Certainly. Can we meet the commitments? I don't know, that's on our players.

So perhaps my reaction was out of line, but I keep coming back to the time frame. If EABL begins in April with the teams as is, then it would last... 1.5 months? Without a playoff? APL would probably finish halfway in between there. Would this effectively kill of SL (if someone is planning on admining it)? Also I keep coming back to the fact Altitude isn't a big enough game to split the player base based on region to effectively have multiple region-based leagues.

Of course, I could be totally wrong, but that was the basis behind my reaction. I can understand there was a lot of resentment to the European Server issues last SL, but now its plain to see that EU ball teams are in the majority and perhaps us US teams need to reconsider some of the outcries of yester-2 months ago.

Sorry if there are some terribad sentences in there. Blood sugar was at critically low levels during the typing of this post.

[elxir]

well since {arr} is the only one that is worth competing against, there are technically two US ball teams and one european team

[Tekn0]

I've been informed that this (April 14th ) conflicts with APL.

Could we adjust this so we don't clash with APL?

[classicallad]

Originally Posted by Tekn0

I've been informed that this (April 14th ) conflicts with APL.

Could we adjust this so we don't clash with APL?

It;s true, a lot of players have both a ball and tbd clan. Overlapping means that attendance may fall. CCN's saturday worked well imo.

[Tekn0]

Originally Posted by Dougie

The competition will start on saturday 14th April.

14th April is not Saturday, so I think he meant 16th April Saturday? Dougie can you confirm this?

[Dougie]

Originally Posted by Tekn0

14th April is not Saturday, so I think he meant 16th April Saturday? Dougie can you confirm this?

Yes, thats my fault there. It is indeed saturday 16th April, which is the date i had in mind!

Originally Posted by classicallad

It;s true, a lot of players have both a ball and tbd clan. Overlapping means that attendance may fall. CCN's saturday worked well imo.

This requires a little bit of flexibility, and as APL is the most important tournament, I will try and schedule games around when needed. Most of the games in the first EABL cup were played on the sundays as most of the teams did not have many players taking part in APL4 at the time. However TvO did. And they struggled to put out a team on a couple of occasions. Am I right in saying APL lasts approximately on sundays between 5pm GMT - 9.30pm GMT? If so we could schedule some games at 4 pm GMT and 9.30pm GMT on sundays to help combat this. I am also happy for games to be played on saturday and midweek if teams are available to do so.

[sunshineduck]

Saturday is probably better. Most players don't want to sit through an entire day of tournaments, especially since the two tournaments are for completely different modes.

[VeRiTaS]

Originally Posted by Dougie

Am I right in saying APL lasts approximately on sundays between 5pm GMT - 9.30pm GMT? If so we could schedule some games at 4 pm GMT and 9.30pm GMT on sundays to help combat this. I am also happy for games to be played on saturday and midweek if teams are available to do so.

Well it doesn't start so early ... I think the earliest game starts around 6-7 and till 10-11 GMT

[DMCM]

Is EABL really happening in April?

[Dougie]

Originally Posted by DMCM

Is EABL really happening in April?

admittedly, I am completely behind schedule with EABL as I've been busy at work, plus I'm spending time organising the USA v WORLD tourney. I'm still hopeful on EABL (or something equivalent) getting sorted.