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Quoted from Taka

Can I use this chance to ask why the 5 week season is necessary anyway? The argument I’ve heard is that in a div with few teams, having played most opponents before the regular season ends means the swiss system can only give you relatively unfair matchups. But mathematically the closer you get to Round Robin the less random is your scoreboard. And right now down here in Open with 33 teams you can only make playoffs if you lose no more than 1 game. So all you can do is hope that over 5 iterations you don’t meet 2 or more of the teams that are better than you. (If you technically deserve 8th place, the chances are 28,19% to fail on pure bad luck. Yes I actually did the math). Meanwhile UGC has an 8 week swiss season for the 10 or so teams in australian plat and those standings are really fair. So what speaks against bringing back the 7 week season until high has less than 8 teams?

What you are suggesting is essentially going back to a RR format. Which again is an option but not one that we think is the best.

If you have a large swiss group system you can have every team play fair games as in every team for all weeks of the season will play teams with essentially the same record for the entire season. Making every game close and fun. You need a minimum size of the league for this to happen otherwise you end up where the top team is playing a bottom team in the last few weeks and the games have much less significance and fun for both teams. This is a shared issue with RR, that some of the games will just mean less.

As swiss has the potential to both sort teams accurately and give all teams a season full of close and fun games irrelevant of where they place in the end it is superior to RR for our purpose. Or at least it was when we adopted the swiss system back in Season 8 as we had far more teams so we could be sure that every swiss division would have enough teams to let most if not all teams have a fun 7 weeks.

The situation has obviously changed since then (Season 8 Open had more teams than the entirety of Season 12) and we have tried to adapt the system by trying both 3 tier 7 week and 4 tier 5 week systems. Obviously all options are compromises and I dont think the current system has had long enough to completely call it a failure, it has allowed us to do three highlander seasons a year which is not an option with 7 week seasons.

In conclusion swiss system does not just trend to wards fairer games with less teams. With a large swiss division such as in previous seasons of HL(S8) and 6s(S20) most teams get fun and fair games. With a RR system it is “fair” in that every team plays every other team, but every game is not the same as lineup and maps change let alone factoring in drops and defaults which are far more significant in RR.

The issue is we are trying to fit what we think is the best system, swiss, to a shrinking player base with already not enough teams to run a proper system. If signups keep trending down then harder compromises will be made to try and run the league best we can but it will not be easy. The only solution that will please everyone is to get more team signups.

Quoted from CanFo

In regards to the suggested solution of giving teams that received a default win an extra match / cancel their bye week: How do you propose to handle teams that received 2 default wins? What about teams receiving 3? Or 4?
I’ll admit that this is more unlikely but in order to make a rule change like that, you need to come up with a fair solution to that case.

It is a difficult one, teams can only play the people the system puts in front of them and if by chance they get a bunch of teams that die they shouldnt be punished for it. There is always the contentious issue where teams feel they are being scammed out a game because a team denies mercs or whatever aka default hunting. However if we were to say allow 3 default mercs or any amount of mercs it defeats the point of rosters, it defeats the point of team vs team rather than mix vs mix. If a team dies or has to give a default the majority of the time it is down to that team being poorly organised or not wanting to play in the first place. Those are internal team issues and not ones that I think can be fixed by league structure.

As far as i know, the fairest thing is that everyone playes against everyone. this really makes the game balanced since you will REALLY know who is the best one. And please notice that on a 6 team division like prem, having 5 weeks with swiss system is same as round robin.

Just pick 2 top high teams (invision and lucrosa both have prem players inside) and put them in prem, pick 2 top mid and put them in high. If you decided some top teams should just go higher rank it would make it easier, stop top team being able to easily win everytime, every season.

Again on round robin, why cant you do it in open, where you have 30 teams? high and mid has around 14-15, 7 weeks shouldn’t be that bad actually. since you will just face half of the division.

About the bye-week and default, this might be a halfway solution. Only 1 free game, it is incredible that you can go to playoff with just 1 game won playing.

Quoted from Erupo89

…(invision and lucrosa… ) and put them in prem,…

And who exactly would enjoy the games where they are getting mercyless crushed against actual prem teams?

If you don’t end up playing vs the better teams, how will you plan on improving? Playing vs the same High teams you’ve been consistently beating all over again? It’s not fun to get rolled but better teams expose your weaknesses and you learn more from them than just playing the same teams you’ve been winning vs over and over again.

Also, I really don’t get the whole ‘we should get a def win if a team drops in the season even if we lost that game’ thing. If you lost that game fair and square then I really don’t see why the outcome should change, especially if the reason they dropped was because of an admin decision regarding team nicknames and profile pictures and not on their own behalf. The system isn’t flawless but it works and doesn’t punish teams for the other team not showing up.

Quoted from Erupo89

As far as i know, the fairest thing is that everyone playes against everyone. this really makes the game balanced since you will REALLY know who is the best one. And please notice that on a 6 team division like prem, having 5 weeks with swiss system is same as round robin.

Just pick 2 top high teams (invision and lucrosa both have prem players inside) and put them in prem, pick 2 top mid and put them in high. If you decided some top teams should just go higher rank it would make it easier, stop top team being able to easily win everytime, every season.

Again on round robin, why cant you do it in open, where you have 30 teams? high and mid has around 14-15, 7 weeks shouldn’t be that bad actually. since you will just face half of the division.

About the bye-week and default, this might be a halfway solution. Only 1 free game, it is incredible that you can go to playoff with just 1 game won playing.

hmmmmmmm maybe thats because we are in the middle of a 6s season have u thought about that????

Quoted from Ignis

hmmmmmmm maybe thats because we are in the middle of a 6s season have u thought about that????

I don’t think he did.

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