[iCTF.I] Thoughts on Season

[RickJames]

I felt that this was one of the best, if not the best, iCTF leagues I've ever played. It felt fresh and exciting

Good things:
- Map elimination. Makes matches closer- You don't have one team winning ds 8-0 and then losing duku 1-5. All matches this season relatively close, and that's a good thing (except when it gives massive overtimes).
- 3 map reg season matches. I love getting rid of the ties, this is maybe my favorite improvement
- Coverage. Goes without saying how epic the streams were and how nice it was to see highlights from the stream, nick's movies, and other clips people made.
- Prizes! Big motivator for putting the time/effort into a season.

Things to change:
- Imo, countdown on timeout should be lowered to 15 or 10 seconds. 30 is just too long. I don't really like full autopause in iCTF for the reasons PACO gave in the other thread (although it's necessary in mods like DOM and 1v1)
- Maplist: Wasn't bad this season, but could definitely be improved. Mesmerize is the worst map on it, imo. Acrony, duku, klondike are all easy to turtle. Not saying they 100% need to go, but seems like the evidence favors it. Just my opinion, but I think the current list without those 4 maps would force teams to be more versatile (smaller list = less maps that a team can eliminate) and would prevent a lot of headaches.
- Website still needs minor improvements (trade system, sign-in link so don't have to do it on forums, etc)

[diff`lx]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKPAxkJ ... ubs_digest

What's with The Offspring - Want You Bad featured in this video of Bleh? Can't believe this hasn't already been brought up.

[ramdrop]

Here are my thoughts.

Good things:
- A lot of players signed up, new and old, promotion was excellent, can't be faulted.
- The loss of ties is pretty good, making it BO3.
- Coverage, nice to see lots of people around to cover this, great videos and artwork.

Bad things:
- Timeout countdown, should be reduced considerably.
- Maplist needs to be looked at, after 1/4 finals, I can see Mesmerize dropping next season.
- Overtime. 80 minute maps are ridiculous, call each map win 1 point, first to 2 points wins. i.e. after a map tie, 1-1 in points then next map is match winner. I must have played at least a new whole map week in overtime this season...

I feel that the scoring system needs to be looked at as well, the majority of the teams have starter defenders and turtling is becoming increasingly popular, if you want fast paced action, I think you should award teams that cap more flags.

[maestroLOQ]

Good things:
- overall activity (players and staff and streams) was good. Keeping the scene alive!

Chances:
- 3 weeks and then season over for half of the teams is way too short; 1 small misstep is byebye.
- I don't like that dev teams don't play any role at all anymore when group is done, 70% of the community (the dev teams) deserves to play more.
- maplist of 11, but only 5 were played (duku/mesm/Klondike/broken/command). acrony/pryx/grudge a very few times. ds/rune/complex not at all.
- deleting 4 maps on forehand is way too much. better have a maplist of 8 good maps, and each team can delete only 1 map.
- eliminating maps gives a bit tactics, but forcing a maplist each week is probably way more funny/challenging
- the play-off brackets should be known before cup, in the stage where captains and groups are drafted, also draft immediately the play-off spots, until final
- unprofessional staff: before/during matches no or very late admins around for setting servers/helping out, the elimination tool bug
- funfactor is not very high: flaming turtling stupid attitudes. big chance to look into and make it nicer.

the better you will have solutions for the bad things the easier you can copy this to UT4 later, making it a big hit.

another pov:
4 groups of 5 (since 3 wars is simply too short, some players even only play 2 wars and then byebye, not interesting)
1st place proceed but doesn't play first playoff week,
2nd and 3rd place proceed and play each other after groups, winner proceed the next week to the nr1
in that same week when nr1 are not playing they could play a practice match vs a nr4 of another group: it's at least another war for fun and worthy byebye for the nr4.

this I like more: another pov2:
4 groups of 4
after groups: 1st vs 4th of other group, 2nd vs 3rd of other groups, winner proceeds, this adds 1 more matchweek with all to play for!
after that you get the quarter finals.

[JD]

I agree with Loq, I played 1 match this season. I wasn't drafted for first map, second map I played, and third I was tied up with something.

I appreciate all the effort the admins put in, but in my mind there are two main issues:
1) Devs just don't have a big enough impact.
2) The chase, fallback, laming, 3D

Need to find a way to fix those for future seasons!

[Morpheus]

needs sprinta

[Shotman]

Here my thoughts from the sidelines,
- ICTF and Duel or Die should have been on a separate day. I think it is unfair for those that want to watch/play Duel or Die have to wait later in the day to do so. So in other words if you are having a tournament and league happening at the same time, make the matches in a different day.
- I liked how Development was on a different day than regular matches. I feel this just makes regular players have to wait a long time for the dev matches to finish up. They will end up forgetting or falling asleep (looking at you Unrealshots).
- Lack of admins, this was just ridiculous. Seeing team captains calling for admins to set up a server. It should really be set a half hour before the match.
- Maplist. This was slightly improved but needs to be more improvement. I think we should try to push for new maps that instead of old maps.
- Season was very short. I wanted it for it to be extended a tad bit. Maybe ICTF season should start around September with Signups opening in july and ending a week or two before the first match.
- Overtime, this must be the biggest issue. We should either have a time limit, take OT out or implement some kind of a twist in OT.
- Laming, admins really need to talk about 3D, backshooting and such of when it is allowed to do so.

Those are my thoughts so far.

[kevinsan1ty]

I haven't fired up UT in some time, so grains of salt and all that.

Seems to be too many players signed up, but not enough captains. If there was a better balance between the two (either less players or more captains), I think the admins could get more creative with things. They could lower the salary cap, so more mid-range players could get in meaningful games. You'd have less teams with monster defenses and monster fraggers in front of them roaming mid. It's tough to admin more teams than the league already has, though. There are lots of players that SHOULD be captains.

The gametype itself is just broken, though. 5v5 IG CTF was always played like DM that happened to have a couple of flags on the map, but everyone wasn't capable of 30 accuracy, so no one really cared. The fact that there are rules for laming in a pug channel with top players is really all you need to know about the nature of IG CTF.

[rain]

[kylewins]

games have been very close for my team and everything has been thoroughly enjoyable so far

I really like the map selection this season, I feel it allows you to definitely play to your strong suit or expose another teams weakness every week

[MP/5]

[JD]

[MP/5]

[Lineage]

Sniper had dev matches in the playoffs. If you won, you could influence the map choice of the opposing team for the regular matches by eliminating a map from the list. Having a map elimination system as it is currently kind of negates that a bit, but I thought it was an interesting idea at the time to make dev players feel included and to have a vested interest in the playoffs, aside from the possibility of winning a trophy while on the bench.

[JD]

MP/5 I honestly thought that was the scoring system. I don't see why dev players aren't held accountable for no-showing?

You are not a dev player, obviously you are going to feel as if dev's have enough impact. You say we would need 80 committed players for dev playoffs, but there are more players who joined that are considered dev players (less then 750). Im not invested in the league, you're right. It is hard to be when you play 1 match the entire season... When a dev player improves during the season, the season is over. What fun is there in that?

dev playoffs would have been good. Winning team could have got a VETO and if a map was picked they could VETO it. Maps make a big difference on matches especially when you have a frag heavy team vs a team that can run the flag...

[kud]

sniper season next plez

[kevinsan1ty]

Get more captains or less signups, then lower the salary cap for each team. Play sCTF instead of iCTF with powerups. Force unrealshots to play blindfolded.

[d3R]

[kud]

btw depending on the map 1-3 caps can easily be had before a READY dev player is able to connect to the server. A cap can be sealed before a timed out player is disconnected from the server, and even the lag from loading ACE can result in a cap. Autopause should have a 5 second fuse and be limited to once, MAYBE twice per team/map to keep it from being annoying. Being "triggerable" by any player on the team is good, as opposed to waiting for a lag out.

only problem with dev playoffs is leaning on your allstars to play potentially 6 hours of UT (because come on, overtime?). Get the allstars out of the dev playoffs at least. It depends on team size, but pure dev playoffs might be nice. I'm thinking similar to div 1 vs div 2 from clanbase. If teams aren't large enough to support purely 5 player dev teams, maybe combine the dev lineups of 2 teams for the dev playoffs. Combining the best of 2 dev teams would give some really interesting matches I'm sure.


also re draft: I previously suggested only instituting draft round caps until the captains are balanced out, after which captains could draft only the best players pug style. The captains CAN be equalized after 1-2 rounds. I don't know if mid-range players are still going undrafted, but if so that's a solution.

[d3R]