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Seeing as I casted both the semi and the grand final, I feel I should comment based on the casting side of things, 10 days between the quarter finals and grand finals is far too long.

It would be great to force the quarters on sunday-tuesday, semis mid week and finish off the grand finals on the weekend tbh.

Finally, the ‘curse of first seed’ is explained.

Complain about Muuki’s tone all you like, but he’s right. Organising scrims after the regular season ended was a complete PITA. The only prem team still scrimming that we weren’t scheduled to play against was Strong Opinions, and I imagine things only got worse after we were eliminated.

Obviously, teams and players have to take some responsibility for their own scrim schedule, but it would be nice if the playoffs could be restructured to encourage them to do this.

Quoted from Muuki

[…]the prem poll of which 50% of people voting on arent in the playoffs, 12.5% are eliminated in first round and 12.5% are the winners? did you ask prem players in both gamemodes when you introduced swiss? i’d really just like to see the reasoning behind all the decisions you make

not to mention that roughly 4 players deal with playoff game scheduling and this affects every division, tjis season had s-o playing vs a mix for warmup and so are bauer in mid, how is this a good thing that doesnt need changing in your eyes?

Quoted from Steve!

[…]
Nobody (or at least no admin) said that

[…]

Swiss isn’t played in prem

[…]

Logic and poll results.

[…]

Yes. So? Would you rather we just ask the top 3, letting a group of ~5-10 (let’s be realistic at least half of these people wouldn’t give a shit, the other half just goes along with what their team thinks)?

———-

With that in mind, seriously: we are more than happy to revisit the playoff structure, and thanks for bringing up that you don’t like it.

Proposals of how long you’d like the playoffs to last and how many games a week would be welcome, akin to what Maxi said earlier on this page. And they’d probably do more good than just arguing back and forth on tangents like who is involved in the polls.

i guess my wording was bad, i mostly meant that not everything should be decided by polls, especially if it concerns league structure (my point about swiss).
prem players are prem because they are (arguably) good at the game, not because they understand league structure

I think this season is proof about the playoff structure needing a freshen up – Whilst it isn’t Admins fault teams don’t practise, or teams aren’t as available during this time, by changing the system to Muuki’s suggestion will help eradicate this problem.

I feel like 1st seed almost isn’t an advantage if you don’t play a match for 3 weeks, and with less and less teams having incentive to practise, plus the map picking system giving you only a slight edge.

Change right now would be good, to both the structure of the playoffs and rules behind map picking. I think for picks the best way would be to reduce the amount of maps that can be eliminated to one for the lower seed, so the top seed will have a chance at picking a particular gamemode.

And the only reason playoffs weren’t discussed in detail last season is usually people whine about unlocks/maps, but most people seem more content with unlocks/maps this season than previous (Borneo is the worst map but there is always going to be 1 contentious map, so it isn’t as controversial).

Sarcasm aside, we look at the polls as they’re a good indication of what the top players want: and as you said Goreston, hopefully the answers in those polls are based on some critical thinking, as well.

Obviously, however, and this hasn’t been stressed enough I guess: we don’t just blindly follow these. For example, the solemn vow in 6v6 was basically a 50-50 split (and a very slight lead for “towards”) if I remember correctly, but we chose to consider the controversy and think logically about how it affects the meta game, and ultimately decided to keep it away from the whitelist.

The playoff system has worked for us logistically and complaints about it haven’t been brought up until now. Now that it’s in our attention, we can focus our discussions on the area and ask players what they think: not to listen to them blindly, but to always make sure what we think is best for the league aligns with what the players think.