CommunityFortress

Hey guys, the other admins and I have been talking about how we are going to manage this season and we came to the following conclusions.

Qualifiers: Placement for teams will be handled by Admin decision primarily. We have decided already that the following teams will be in Division 1: Epidemic, Mesr Needs a Mousepad, Mouse pad or bust, Space Jam, Squigglin with Squiggle, Rofl Stomp and TF2 lesbian gamers. Teams that are not ready that will be moved to division 1 if they get ready are enigma clan, GGG and Pulverize. This brings us to 10 teams, we want to have 12. Those other two slots are open to any team that sends an email to an admin or contacts us on gamesurge. We will assign a qualifier to a team on division one and if you do reasonably well, you will be placed. You do not have to necessarily beat the team you play, but demos will be requested and if it seems that you gave them a fight, you will be placed. We will not give qualifiers to everyone for the sake of being able to get through them. Please be serious when you request a qualifier.

Much more after the break

Divisions: If you look at our competition page then you will see that we have 4 divisions with teams in them. Division one is self explanatory. It will have 12 teams by the start of the season and they will be competing for prizes. At the end of the season, the top 8 teams will be assigned to playoffs (which will take place immediately after the season). More information on playoffs later. Division 2 is a little different. Again, looking at our competition page, we can see that there are two divisions lower than div1. While they are under the header of Division 2 and 3 Conference, this is due to a software limitation and not representative of actual placement. Both of these divisions are considered division 2 conference so all teams are looking at playing for a prize. These divisions will be assigned by taking all the ready teams not in division one and randomly drawing them evenly into their two divisions.

Anti-Cheat: As most of you are aware, TWL does not have a client. Because of this, we will require every member of every team to record a demo during their match. Every week, we will take a few team, selected at random, and view their demos for signs of cheating. This is independent of reported matches, where we will still pull demos and take a look at the complaint. This is to ensure that all games are fair and we feel it is a necessary measure with the introduction of prizes. In addition to this, an admin may choose to sit in on any game for any reason. We will likely ask to sit in on the semi finals and finals during playoffs.

Playoffs: Playoffs will be done slightly differently than they have been done in the past. Typically, we do a single elimination tournament to determine the winners. This season, we will do things differently for each division. Division 1 will have a double elimination tournament between the top 8 teams. Each team will have one week to play their match and due to the fact that we cannot delay playoffs for teams that do not want to or cannot schedule. Division two playoffs will go a little differently. We will take the top eight teams in each of the two subdivisions and split them into four groups of four. These assignments will be done through random draw and will be independent of the team's performance in the regular season. Then the teams will play a round robin group stage lasting 3 weeks, every team will play a match every week. The top team in each division (tiebreakers will be announced later) will go on to play in a round of 4. The top two teams will then fight for first place and the bottom two will fight for third, if they so choose. Football fans will recognize this system as being very similar to the World Cup system. Both of these playoffs will take 5 weeks to complete and will begin immediately after the regular season.

Rule Changes: Part of the poll (that you all should take) is changes to the rules and format of the matches. While I am not ready to release the results of the poll yet (it closes next Sunday), I can tell you that a format change is almost guaranteed at this point. We are aware that the standard TWL config is broken and we will be releasing a new config in the next few days for use on cp_prolane and ctf_deliverance. For the new season, all new configs will be written based on the new format for matches. Also changing this season will be the implementation of harder removal guidelines. Now, if a team has two forfeits in one season, they will be dropped down to the Not Ready division and will not be allowed to return to the league. Teams will not be allowed to join the league once it is underway. There will be no exceptions to this rule.

I will now take a moment to address a few complaints and suggestions sent to us by poll and by email.

hurry up with the season and don't take 2 months to make the brackets for playoffs. The main issue I've had with twl in the past is taking forever to get anything done, whether its taking 3 weeks to play 1 qualifier match or 4 weeks to get brackets up or pushing the season start back multiple weeks for no reason.

There will be a concerted effort to have all actions done as quickly as possible. Matches will be scheduled no later than the sunday of the weekend before they are due to be played. Playoffs will be seeded and bracketed the week directly following the season if at all possible. Last season was plagued with admin issues and other problems, but we aim to make this season flow much more smoothly.

Not sure if it's possible to fix the TWL config, but it would be nice if it didn't break when two teams are tied and time runs out.

This is being looked into and we will have a functional and tested config in action before the season starts.

And Hawkeye made this point a while ago.

As far as standings, the site records the wins and losses, but those standings do not really count as far as playoffs. Those are actually done by the pairing system used behind the scenes that really didn't necessarily match the website.

The website simply needs to be what the is lived off of for playoff stuff so it is obvious for everyone, and nothing happening behind the scenes.

It is my understanding that the TWL site does not have the software to actually rank and schedule matches, but I do know that we do not have the power to manually move teams up and down on the rankings. The TWL site goes purely off wins and losses, but does not handle forfeit wins or similar situations. The link to view the off site software we use will be provided so you can view the league as it goes on. As we continue, it will be made clear on a weekly basis the rankings of the top 8 teams in each division in a posting either here or on the TWL forums. If, at any time, you wish to know your individual team's ranking, please contact an admin by email ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) or on gamesurge in #twl_tf2.

Thanks for hanging with me through this long post, have a cookie n.n