Current situation and the future

[Beer Hunter]

Hello there DSBers!

Once again we're in a tight situation, the Prac League has not met the expectations of the players and as for the show ups, it has not been that great for the staff either. The last two weekends in a row both scheduled games have been forfeits and we are extremely concerned, third weekend of forfeits is not an option.

Therefore, it seems our best option is to cancel the prac league for the time being, longer the organized league is inactive, the harder it is to pick up the activity afterwards. We can try this league again if the activity and interest towards this kind of league gets bigger or perhaps we will try a different format next time.

Now you might ask if this is the end of all? We're not done yet, we still have a chance. For the next 3-4 weekends we will be arranging normal practices on Sundays and some sort of events will be hosted as well, based on the player requests who are online during Sundays. The games will begin around 18:00GMT and end once the players have had enough for the day/night.

Next league will be Back Alley Brawl League (BABL), the registrations for this league will begin immediately, however we're making this easy for the squads this time: the squads from Prac League will transfer automaticly to BABL, feel free to change your rosters accordingly. You may ask why BABL? We thought about this for a while, thinking our options which are running short at this point, it was either Team Combat League (TLC) or Back Alley Brawl (BABL) which might draw players at this point, however we leaned towards BABL for the very reason that it has been our most successful league in terms of show ups, player registrations and even gaining interest from other zones. TLC is a good format and definitely can be tried again but the problem with that league was the fact that newer players did not like it very much, it was more of a showdown for the more skilled players who've played this zone a long time and manage to play with the short amount of specials available on that league.

On terms of shrinking the league, we're down to the smallest we can get. Squad size of 10 with 2-3 man team required to play and yet we still fail to get show ups, this is really concerning, if we need to shrink again, it would mean 5 man team with 1 playing at a time, what kind of league would we get out of that? Not quite sure but we might fall to that if the activity does not pick up. Perhaps some sort of team duel league could be arranged with that kind of set up, where 5 weekends of squad vs squad games where the winner is decided by 1vs1 duels of some sort or some sort of goal oriented game, however this is just a quick peek to the future, not something we are hoping for. We'd like to be able to keep running BABL, possibly TLC and attempt some sort of Prac League in the near future with a bit of different set up, perhaps like the Sector Brawl idea was discussed sometime ago.

To get some interest and extra activity to practices, we will reset the practice ranking system in the next few days, hopefully before the weekend. The old rankings will be saved to our server, however we might not be able to display them in any form later on as we are lacking coders who could possibly make this kind of thing to work, but just so you all know, they will be saved.

Please feel free to discuss, share your thoughts, comments or ideas.

[Seriel Killer]

Do a dueling league or schedules mix BAB games...

[Detector]

Same maps for BABL 5? Like in the latest 2 previous BABL?

[jim the chin]

Does this mean you're coming back from retirement again?

[Tembest]

No offense, but why would we show up when...

...all squads proceed to play-offs anyway?
...games will be rescheduled if we don't show up?

The matches serve no purpose.

[Ssseth]

What about playing for fun, whatever happened to that?

[Tembest]

What about playing for fun, whatever happened to that?

It's not particularly fun when every match is a butt rape. The population is too low to have any decent matches.
On another note, playing for fun (for me) means that I can show up when I want and play what I want.
I don't schedule to show up at a certain time to play for 20 minutes if there's no meaning to it.

Besides, we all play more or less for fun these days. No one takes the league seriously anymore. I guess half play because they still
like it, and half because they do not want the zone to die. But when you remove the incentives for showing up, the show ups will
naturally be worse.

[kemi]

What Tembest said,

And Ssseth it is not fun if it doesn't matter... :/

[Detector]

Does this mean you're coming back from retirement again?

No, it doesn't. The only zone I once played more than any other zone was DSB. So many players left from DSB to TW and everything went downhill for DSB, just like all the jedis escaped Coruscant from SW: Episode 3. Similar things happens, nothing can change that.

[Ssseth]

Hmmmm, perhaps if I played I might actually have a chance at being decent due to lack of competition. I never was very good.