Warrior General Games

The idea was spawned by this thread. http://goallineblitz.com/game/forum_thread.pl?thread_id=5067565&page=1

With the removal of regions and the creation of the WL, rivalries have gone the way of the Dodo. Removing the mixture of competitive and non-competitive teams with the Elite/Competitive/Regular structure have left the teams stretched way too thin and have made far too much lateral movement to make rivalries possible. Here's what I propose:

Structure
Instead of having competitive/elite/normal leagues, lump leagues together into new leagues of 4 divisions. Each division will have 8 teams. Each season a team in a division will play each of the teams in it's own division. Then it will play 3 teams from each of the other 3 divisions. These will in essence be the balancing of Elite/Competitive/Normal. 1 division will be the Elite Teams, 2 division of Competitive Teams, and 1 division of normal teams. Teams will move fluidly between these division, but never outside of their league (without a request being filled from support). This will keep teams playing the same people throughout their dots' careers, allowing rivalries to spur.

For those who like non-wall of text:

Elite Division -8 teams
Competitive Divisions - 16 teams
Normal Division - 8 teams

Playoffs: The top 4 teams from each division would play each other for the divisional championship. Then the victors from those would go on to play the champions from the other division. Elite would play Normal, Competitive would play Competitive. Call these Conference Championships. Then the final league championship would be the winner of these 2 matches. That's a total of 7 .gifs given instead of 3. Everyone loves an E-peen boost.

Promotion/Demotion: So, here's how the promotion/demotion under my league structure would work. The playoff teams from normal would drop out the 2 lowest teams from each competitive division. The playoff teams from competitive would drop out the lowest 8 from the elite league, allowing for maximum fluidity of the league. Everyone will play everyone else, a lot.


Thoughts? Ideas to improve?

wow, almost a week without a single post in support of or tearing it to shreds.

http://bit.ly/zvhUo7 (ForeverAlone.gif)

The old Regional Leagues were in reality just a different set of words. No matter you call it AAA or European Pro, it's the same teams. The sorting is only different because people choose a different league, or just can't cut it against the current game's competition levels so they reset.

Originally posted by SikoraP13 DTD
wow, almost a week without a single post in support of or tearing it to shreds.

http://bit.ly/zvhUo7 (ForeverAlone.gif)

= 0 Cares.

+1

Originally posted by RiverRat2
= 0 Cares.

but you were never relevant in the first place, so there is that.

Originally posted by Phantom Of The Opera
but you were never relevant in the first place, so there is that.

And you are?

This is just shuffling chairs on the titanic.

Semi-Pro Elite is made up of teams that have played against each other for at least 4 of our 7 seasons with these dots....some may have been together all 7 seasons. We have history with each other, have produced the longest league threads in each age bracket we moved up. What more could we have wanted from a rivalry point of view....and yet it still does not hold a candle to the old days. The reason is simple....back in the old days with regions and A/AA/AA, winning mattered. If you won, you moved up. Plain and simple. Playing teams over and over again does not create a rivalry. The teams have to genuinely care whether they win to have rivalries, and so long as there are age-based (or level based) leagues, there will be 0 cares minors, and rivalries will feel empty.

The other issue is that there are simply not enough teams nor is there enough stability in the number of teams to do things differently. Again, using Semi-Pro, we started off with 9 leagues in Rookie. We had so many quality teams in Prep, that I argued that Bort would make 2 Elite leagues (he only did one). However, as the seasons have gone by, we have watched many of our "rivals" gut, and now there are barely 30 competitive teams in the whole age bracket. This is not likely to get better over time, so it is hard to do more than have 1 or 2 leagues that are sorted by competitiveness.

Only true rivalries are created in the forums, the rest is meh.

I always got a kick out of random people that I've never heard of with a team in the same league as mine acting like we're rivals just because we play every season. I could split the games 50/50 with them and every game go to triple OT and still not give two shits about them or their team. On the other hand, there are teams/owners that have never beaten me that I'm almost obsessed with beating because we've had flame wars in the forums and I want to humiliate them.

To illustrate my point...

People don't want to beat Chocolate Blaze per se but rather want to beat Dpride.

Originally posted by Dub J
Only true rivalries are created in the forums, the rest is meh.

I always got a kick out of random people that I've never heard of with a team in the same league as mine acting like we're rivals just because we play every season. I could split the games 50/50 with them and every game go to triple OT and still not give two shits about them or their team. On the other hand, there are teams/owners that have never beaten me that I'm almost obsessed with beating because we've had flame wars in the forums and I want to humiliate them.



this is true, but I'd argue if you get the same people in the same sets of forums year after year, forum activity will improve because you won't be dealing with new people every month or so.

Originally posted by SikoraP13 DTD
this is true, but I'd argue if you get the same people in the same sets of forums year after year, forum activity will improve because you won't be dealing with new people every month or so.

only if you keep the moderators out.

Originally posted by uncflunkie
This is just shuffling chairs on the titanic.

Semi-Pro Elite is made up of teams that have played against each other for at least 4 of our 7 seasons with these dots....some may have been together all 7 seasons. We have history with each other, have produced the longest league threads in each age bracket we moved up. What more could we have wanted from a rivalry point of view....and yet it still does not hold a candle to the old days. The reason is simple....back in the old days with regions and A/AA/AA, winning mattered. If you won, you moved up. Plain and simple. Playing teams over and over again does not create a rivalry. The teams have to genuinely care whether they win to have rivalries, and so long as there are age-based (or level based) leagues, there will be 0 cares minors, and rivalries will feel empty.

The other issue is that there are simply not enough teams nor is there enough stability in the number of teams to do things differently. Again, using Semi-Pro, we started off with 9 leagues in Rookie. We had so many quality teams in Prep, that I argued that Bort would make 2 Elite leagues (he only did one). However, as the seasons have gone by, we have watched many of our "rivals" gut, and now there are barely 30 competitive teams in the whole age bracket. This is not likely to get better over time, so it is hard to do more than have 1 or 2 leagues that are sorted by competitiveness.

From what I saw during my play in the old Pro format, winning equaled who had the most higher level dots. I don't recall any rivalries that exceed what I see now. Smack talk in the forums usually settled in around some team everyone thought sucked, but had a full roster of the highest level dots. Which of course is the reason we switched to level based and now age based leagues, that old format just wasn't good for the game.