I think delays are gonna be the theme of post season discussion but before I get into that I wanted to talk about maybe creating a permanent recruits division. Maybe opt in or maybe have league officials place as necessary. I think it's a disservice to force newer players/lesser skilled players to play games against people way out of the league. All it does it hurt player retention as why should you play when you're going to get beat constantly.
In part of having recruits stick around I also suggested breaking away from the ragl tradition of 2 games per opponent. If only 5-6 players fit the recruit bill, then they'd still play a total of 22-24 games, just against the same opponent multiple times. This way they still get the same number of games but hopefully more closer games.
Now onto delays. .won
.won wrote:
The issue is, and has been for years is this is a very small@hobby league and it’s global. There’s no way around it. So you are either strict and a bunch of people drop or you try and be a bit more open and get games delayed etc
is correct. Either officials are strict or they are lax. The more strict you are the more likely you're going to either disqual players or deter away players from signing up. IIRC Dang hadn't played in ragl in part due to not likely the long season format. It could be possible that being more strict also attracts players because they know the games will get done in a timely manner, but I see that as unlikely.
The more lax you are the bigger the crowd we can get but the extreme is pretty much what happened this season. My first season game was like 10/18. My last regular season games was like 11/15. In about a month I played what was supposed to be like an 2 month season. I then had to wait another month(through unfortunate delays that I too was a part of) to play in the finals which is entirely not ideal.
If we wanted to look into the delay system there are options:
we could limit delays to 1-2 weeks before they expire rather than the delayed forever. This would force players to play or get striked.
Originally, delays had to be reapplied every week. This at the minimum forced players to keep in contact which could be marginally helpful.
We could also rework the delay system so that you only get 1 or 2 delays to start with and you don't get them back once used. Then for every 2 matchups played you get an additional delay. This would also force players to play. It rewards active players who actually needs a delay. If you coupled it with time limits of delays it would really force people to play.
I don't think any of the delays were malicious this season, but they really sucked the life out of one of the better seasons we could have had.