sounds like it's time for Unc League where at least half players your have to be 30+ or married

The learning curve to even play AM from scratch is so tough that we're effectively filtering out anyone that won't spend 15-20 hours a week learning the game. The newbie cups are probably our best way of getting new players into the game, and they even make that time requirement explicit. It's no surprise that we lose people to burnout, or just employment. How many players have we lost because they're not willing or able to spend that much time? It's a huge bummer.

I also think that match quality is pretty bad at the low level. We get 8 matches a season, and usually 3 of them are competitive. Everything else is just a wash. It's not a great experience!

We could make a lot of gains on player retention by focusing on the segment of the playerbase that wants 6s to be a part of their lives, but has a limit on how much they can dedicate to it.

Never Doubt Griff

at this point it might be easier on our anticheat teams to just ban demoknight

DukeNukemsDick

you and i might be the only people who remember TWL lol. i don't recognize you, but it looks like we have some mutual friends from back in the day

why did they want you off commentary?

also if i'm looking deep in my heart and being SO forreal, if you request an admin look at your gameplay to prove you can play in a lower div, you should have to pay 5-10 bucks, i'm sorry

#freejustjazz

great write up. i heavily agree with you, especially with the idea that contesting for podiums doesn't indicate that you're too strong for a division. making restrictions about strength of team instead of the individual is also 100% on the money. there are a couple parts of your proposal i think you could shore up though.

• alting is an unfortunate reality, particularly at lower levels. i don't mean that as a boogeyman, an AM team got banned last season for it. so i like having automatic skill decay, but i would maybe scale back how far it goes. it wouldn't be appropriate to let arekk play AM by default, for instance. making it a maximum 2 div drop might work, and then still allow for admin discretion for weird situations.
  
• you didn't address it, but HL-based restrictions could relax quite a bit. the most common restriction i see in AM is like "cannot play heavy" which on one hand, great we don't have to fight a perma-heavy. but also who cares, let them play heavy. i have a friend who can't play AM medic because she had IM HL experience. let's ease up on those restrictions quite a ways.
  
• you're right that team strength should guide restrictions. my team would dissolve if our players were individually sorted into skill divs, even though as a team we're consistently 4-4 in AM. i don't know how you can allow for this team-based evaluation while also letting players see their individual restrictions before signing up. those seem at odds with each other. maybe if you had elo for every player at every class and then allow people to calculate if their team would meet elo thresholds? that might might work but would be a big undertaking. speaking of which,
  
• my only fundamental concern with the proposal is how much work it might take. all the other small policy stuff can be ironed out and squabbled over. volunteer time is already at a premium, like it hasn't really been possible to schedule NC/AM matches on mondays, since schedules rarely get posted early enough. the more admin-intensive the solution, the more i'd worry about feasibility. specifically, i think the stuff in Restriction Trigger 3 is the most likely to be time-intensive if you get into cross referencing logs, direct observation, etc. as i understand it, the proposal is to say "no restrictions unless the admins prove out a case." if this only happens once or twice a season i think that's fine, but if 10 teams require attention then it seems less feasible.

all those criticism aside, i do 99% agree with you and would prefer your proposal over the current system. i would love to see you strengthen the proposal in the few ways i mentioned, but even if you didn't, i think it's good enough to try. there's a limit to how unrestricted you should make the league (AM simultaneously has too many player restrictions while have too big of a skill differential between the top and bottom teams), but i don't think you would approach here. thanks for writing it up

nope

he got role restricted to medic it's not a big deal

honestly if a team wins a div, i don't see any issue with them playing that div again as long as they weren't stomping

i feel like admins should assign your team a div with no restrictions, and then you should be able to negotiate class restrictions to get into a lower div. like "you're placing us in advanced, but can we play main if jeremy plays soldier and monica plays scout?" probably a huge headache for admins tho

this is our year no question

the way you describe yourself reminds me of friends who struggle with a fundamental lack of self-love. fear of failure, lack of motivation, etc was all downstream. i hope this isn't the case for you but i would give it some thought