rescheduled match to 11 tonight instead of 1030 @production

RYAN!!!
these guys are all homies and will definitely be a solid team

Also I think the pick/ban system for the regular system should be rethought (but maybe other people disagree: I made a twitter poll out of curiosity). The concept of home/away is interesting I guess but it seems to give the home team way more power than they should have imo. Currently the home team bans 2 maps, then the away team bans 2, then the home team picks from the remaining 3.

In theory this seems like a decent idea, and it's very similar to the ESEA system (3 bans each independently, then randomized). The key difference is that in the majority of cases, the away team simply bans the two maps they want to play least, and then the home team effectively gets to pick from the remaining 6 maps.

If the home team happens to read the other team poorly and bans maps that the other team was going to ban (say, via and granary), despite knowing that they will never have to pick those maps if they don't want to, it can be the case that the away team gets to do two meaningful bans (say, banning snake and gully which the home team is better than them at). But even with this, the home team wasn't going to choose those maps anyways, the home team can always effectively choose between 6 of the maps which they want to play.

ESEA's system was interesting because you didn't know what maps the other team was going to ban, you could risk leaving a chaos map (clearcut, via, gran, etc) in if you think the other team will ban it, but then you run the risk of them preferring to ban a map you are really good at and then you get RNG'd into the map neither team is very good at. This gave good teams incentives to actually play the new maps so they can use their bans meaningfully and avoid playing the maps that their opponents were best at, instead of avoiding the 'unfun' new map which in reality might not be that hard to figure out (e.g., ascent practiced propaganda and was solid at it).

edit: given all this stuff to talk about I think there should definitely be either a specific invite survey or a meeting like the LAN one, there's a ton of variables to look into as well as this such as how many maps. The ESEA system had 9 maps which I think worked better but maybe they prefer to keep the number of maps consistent with other divisions (understandably). Usually the 3 maps would have some overlap anyways so having 3 bans out of 8 isn't too crazy, and even if they don't overlap, randomly choosing between the two remaining maps that both teams want seems fair enough.

This is an interesting idea but the thing is with the current system there are only so many points to be gotten out of a match for both teams combined, which balances things out. This is good because every match can only shift the total points in the system by 3, whereas with your suggested system a 5-4 match would shift the overall rankings by 4. I mean if anything this goes against the idea that you reward dominance, because if two teams want to screw another team over their best bet is to just have close games and get as many points for each other (e.g., 5-4 both ways yields 4 points for both team total).

You don't want close matches to be disproportionately good for both teams, I can see potentially rewarding getting to golden cap like this and giving a pity point or something, but even still it just throws a wrench in the whole system. If you're going to reward teams for getting rounds, you should penalize them from dropping rounds. The solution I see is simply adjusting it so that the wins matter more, which there are many ways to do such as making each round count for 1/6th of a point instead, so if you lose 5-4 you still get 0.66 points (instead of 1).

As everyone else has said W/L and head to head are definitely better metrics for seeding, but points as a third way to break ties makes sense. If you start off poorly and choke at the beginning and fix your stuff in the second half and come back second half, the only thing that matters at the end of the day is the very last round if you won or not (I mean you're not going to say that the pats coming back from being down 28-3 is less of a win lol)

2nd half stats (accidentally re-execed config so it didn't auto upload)
ggs

Agreed with most of the points on here but I will say that just because both via and clearcut are koth maps doesn't mean they are really that similar, via you can get by with a full time sniper and everyone sort of knows the map, whereas clearcut sniper doesn't really work at all. I'd be open to trying reckoner, I actually didn't mind the flow of it playing in sweden (although we sucked at it lol) and pugging in eu on it is fine. Clearcut currently just functions as that one sort of chaos map that most teams haven't practiced, and even more prone to upsets as it's koth.

Also, not sure if this really makes sense (given 8 maps is probably needed for other divs to do weekly maps) but maybe it would be possible to try going back to 9 maps for invite. It made playoffs bans make more sense, currently one team gets an extra ban from the other and is just in a better position. If there were another map it would be equal, only choice is if you are confident in a map to choose first or you want to see how the other team picks and then go from there.

Also I'm assuming this will end up happening already but if it's not planned, RGL should definitely do a survey of team leaders or something to see what the consensus is (also with regards to what maps to add and such)

What will the timeframe be for the tournament on Friday and Saturday? For any NA people who want to potentially play it would be good to have at least a rough schedule so we can see what the time zones would make it look like.

Is a rat; heals people; is spell NEET in eldritch horror.

Fr tho he does seem to legitimately want to improve at the game, have watched a few demos together and definitely is willing to admit when he fucks up and stuff which is good (ahem, rktBaitEgo)
Not sure about the swap up ur entire roster mid season theory tho lol

hey

4 thousand gumballs

REECE!!!!

idk why im even bothering posting here but i just want to point out that confirmed cases =/= true cases
i think we can all handle some minor inconvenience of having to take online classes if it means any possibility of slowing the spread

definitely better to overreact and be on the safe side rather than have people not take it seriously enough and let it get out of control (but ironically, the better it is contained the more people will look back in hindsight and say 'look it was overblown! it wasn't a big deal' when in reality it was but preventative measures were taken to mitigate it)

Yea I'm gonna vote for biden anyways if it comes to it in the general, but I lowkey hope he loses so they will finally realize the 'safe choice' doesn't win elections when you have to inspire new people to get out and vote. Granted, I'm sure whatever happens they *will* blame it on bernie and anyone who voted 3rd party, and their collective cognitive dissonance will prevent them from ever admitting any fault of their own for alienating all of the young people who wanted Bernie.

My hope is that if he doesn't get the nomination, Bernie can at least talk with Biden and get him to shift his platform further left on certain issues at least. If we can get him to budge on tuition free college, or legalizing marijuana, or maybe $15/hr minimum wage, I can see Bernie getting the left to unite behind him. But the sad thing is this probably won't happen, ironically the exact people who use the buzzword 'unity' every other sentence in order to try and smear Bernie seem to be completely against compromising and uniting around core progressive policies.

The unfortunate thing is that Biden's record on TPP and cutting social security and voting for the iraq war (and on and on) is so bad that even if he claims to support whatever progressive policies Bernie gets him to, it will be a pretty hard sell. The thing with Hillary was at least people believed she would do some of the things she ended up claiming once they shifted the platform further left, and she was a woman so naturally she would fight for women's issues (whereas Joe said he thinks a woman shouldn't have control over her own body and roe v wade went too far....)

Hopefully enough people realize how dangerous Trump is that they don't let him win again, but honestly 4 years of Biden-supported fracking and lack of real mobilization to address climate change would potentially be worse for our environment and progressive issues in the long term, cause it would most likely follow with another republican in the future. Even if Trump can't run, he can endorse whoever does and campaign hard for them and pretty easily rally all of his supporters to get behind them. Moral of the story is young people need to get the fuck out and vote, disenfranchisement and voter suppression is a big obstacle but we have the numbers we just need to turn out. Hopefully we can avoid all these nightmare scenarios and not have to vote for either Biden or Trump lmao.

ok thats actually a super cool album cover brock have some awful posts but gotta give him some credit

As I said on twitter I totally agree that the W/L should take precedent for sure. Of course I would love to go to LAN but it really just doesn't make any sense and is super backwards to not count head to head at least. I agree with lucrative and hayes in keeping the points system in some form because it does give an interesting new spin to things, dead time suddenly does matter because if you slack off and drop two rounds that could hurt your playoffs chances given a tied record for example.

Hard to say points should be more important than head to head though, rat jail beat us twice (partially due to unfortunate timing playing them the very first roster and with a different roster from the end of the season, but that's our own fault obviously). Given this, it would be especially unfair if we made LAN over them, compared to h5 who we most recently beat 5-2 and narrowly lost to 4-3 at the start of the season (compared to 5-1 and 4-3 wins for rat jail).