The Elite Forum
The Big Three Plus One => General Chat => Topic started by: Pauliwood on July 27, 2020, 06:55:34 am
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2020 Summer League wraps up this week and as such, there's plenty that can be examined and discussed. Many changes were implemented this year and while I would overall call things a success, there's always room for tweaks and improvements. I would like for people to post the things they liked and didnt like and why as well as possible suggestions that could be used in future events. Cal and I intend to do a league review in the near future and having a thread of posts and points to go thru would be valuable for that discussion. Thank you for your time and participation in making League a successful and fun venture.
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I might share some more thoughts later, but here's a few random initial ones:
Daily Bonus - I really enjoyed the new system, it got me to play some levels I otherwise wouldn't have and it made it worth playing a level even if I could only slip in to the single digit points.
Weekly bonuses - Some of these were proper top-drawer, the focus on team-play was what made these good. Particularly loved the 'All missions' week. My most epic gamer moment of 2020 was waiting by the boat and entering frame perfectly to sneak a 1 second PB on Frog 00 and get Team Turnip across the line. Spending the Sunday that week chatting with BK while we chased PBs that were good enough across each mission might be the most fun I had all League.
One or two fell a little flat though, the bar for last week (5x PBs for at least 5 team members) was a little high.
Player drop-off - Not sure I have any way to fix this, and it might be recency bias, but there feels like even more player drop off this year than last year. Might be explained by having more teams.
Day 1 bonuses - Invest A was the perfect Day 1 bonus. I think the rest should be random, but next year I think that cherry picking each level for Day 1 to build hype is a good idea (probably not Invest A though). Would stop something like Deep Sea A/SA falling on Day 1 and counting out a big section of the player base too.
Sheet - The League sheet held together well, and thanks to the flat bonuses was never more than a day or so out. Our boy Sharp actually got to have some sleep this year. All good things.
Suggestions for next year -
Mergersconsider mid-season mergers. Letting two captains merge teams (combining current points and taking the best 6 players forward) would be an interesting idea. Fraught with danger and potential to manipulate, but might be a way to maintain engagement for players that are active.
Newer player incentives - For newer players (thinking about GamerGirl and Psycroptic for example) there hasn't been a lot of direction provided for them in League on what to play if the Daily didn't suit. Players with the skill to chase dailies on all levels are at an advantage here.
Last year the 50% weekly bonus was a useful way to target levels if not going for the Daily, eg. going for Archives 16 in the 'Marathon or sprint' week.
Thanks to all League LLC staff for another enjoyable League.
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Loved the !What weekly. Turbo League when? :nesquik:
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Unfortunately I tend to focus on the negative effects of league and I have some thoughts and constructive ideas to share about it but I'm going to hold off on highlighting any negativity for now.
The best parts about league are still true:
- New players will play tons of different levels, testing the waters and finding what they like, perhaps finding a level they would not have expected to have fun with.
- Established players will play levels they actively dislike, and might end up finding something about it that they do enjoy, but if not, at least they've improved their time on a disliked stage that they would likely not play otherwise.
- Player/Team interaction and strategy sharing always peaks, not to mention the camaraderie! We've seen new strats, new untieds, tutorials, and TONS of streams which extend to benefit all players including outside of league players.
I'll post again later with deeper/constructive thoughts on the logistics and everything, not gonna drag the thread down early :)
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I've always used League as a means to an ends, those ends being my own personal goals (better GE times in 2018, full PD timespage/sub-3 club in 2019, just playing PD again this year lol), so I've never really cared about how the league overall goes, who wins, etc.
That said, this league brought several positive changes compared to the last couple that I participated in.
-Two months is still the correct time frame, any longer is too long and any shorter the daily bonus system doesn't work.
-The daily bonus system is much better than the previous daily doubles, much less disparity compared to the old doubles system, and more players are able to take fuller advantage of it.
-I liked the new weeklies, "All Agent" or whatever is dumb and boring, glad to see those put aside. There's more potential in this style of weeklies I expect to see explored further next year.
-Teams seemed closer in ranks for longer, more competition makes League better, part of this has to do with no more percentage based bonuses (may they never return).
THAT said, there are still a few things that I think could be improved.
-For a community that likes to chide me for not having many world records, League still does not reward those who bother to grind them out enough. This is coming from a guy that has hardly played for many records over two years of being in The Elite. If I feel this way, this makes me think this is still a problem.
-While the flat daily bonus is a notable improvement from the percentage based one, it still feels hilariously weighted towards players who have not played many levels. The motivation for me to say, improve my Dam 00 1:59 by one second on a given day, is going to be much lower than someone who only needs to luck out with a 2:05 to get that sweet 25 + 6 point bonus. I don't have any ideas for solutions to this, but it is something to be considered.
-The new bonus system encouraged players to get as few as 1 (one) point on the daily level, and then not touch it again. This may be a personal thing but I hate that. The points that you really care about in League should be the ones that will still exist once League has ended, in this case leaving a lot of people with a bunch of single-digit times (or even pointless times that still got the bonus because they were worth 1 point for an hour after being achieved). Again, don't know how to fix this, but we need some way to encourage people to go for *good* times without leaving a system to be abused.
-Too many teams imo, many teams didn't even bother using a single swap this year, that, in my eyes, is a bad sign. We need a hard cap. I get that the community is really active, but I feel like too many teams lagging far behind the frontrunners is demotivating and holds back some players from actually achieving what they could.
#makeDuelworthpointsagainbutdontincludeitinLeague2021rememberLeagueonlyexistsfortwomonthsoftheyear
Cheers
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(https://i.imgur.com/VzQH1Xf.png)
Kudos to the staff for organizing League this year, and to all mates who participated, and made it fun and healthy. This is the first time I have captained and taken League seriously since 2016, so I have quite a bit to say. The good:
I liked the !what weekly a lot. It felt refreshing to see LTK/Turbo outside of the generic three difficulties. A lot of the weeklies were great. I'm glad I waited so long to play CS PA just so our team could steal victory from BSB on the !last24 weekly. :nesquik: One that fell flat was already mentioned: the "5x PRs worth points by each players", but ONLY because of when it was the weekly, not the weekly itself. In general: significant improvement from last year. As always, it was great to see people grind the games more, particularly PD. A lot of impressive times from HOT new players. Shoutouts to Will, Perna, Qwerty, gamergirl, even some fellows like Henrik who PB'd on levels they haven't touched in over a decade.
Here are my comments & suggestions for next year:
1) Have a lower cap for captaincy, and perhaps include a bar for being a captain (just a small one - I don't think it's a good idea that anyone who wants to captain can just become one). It seems like some captains weren't as engaged as others and that possibly lead to players on those teams not feeling motivated to play as much. Of course, captains need to be prepared and choose players they know want to play too! *looks at self*. Maybe fewer teams and more players on teams could be a thing.
2) Try to have a Dedicated Discord League Bot, primarily to reduce the amount of effort needed to maintain the leaderboards, add bonus points, and minimize errors from manual work. Perhaps someone could volunteer to create one, but if they do the bot would need to be ready at least a month in advance to ensure it works properly with whatever functionality is needed for bonus points and whatnot. The bot could also engage in a League specific channel too, posting something like "<Player> just got <PR> for their team <Team> to get a +50 bonus!". You could even have it spit out stats and graphs! Obviously, this would be a lot of work initially, but even a fairly basic bot would be useful to start off with, and with good design the bot could be reused for subsequent Leagues fairly easily.
3) To me it seems like League was mostly over by the 6th week - I haven't looked at the stats for this, but it seems like the overall rate of PBing went down significantly and people were either burnt out or just lost interest in playing (especially the DBs) - perhaps since it was clear who the winning team was with not much that could be done to change the outcome. Not many focused on the daily/weekly bonuses at that point but instead just played whatever levels they felt like playing. I want to say 6 weeks (as we did in 2015/2016) might be a more ideal timeframe, but two months might be good too with some changes: incorporating a lot more non A/SA/00A/PA in the last 2-3 weeks, maybe having a PowerPlay week where captains can choose an additional player, or something similar to engage players more and possibly add a bit of unpredictability.
4) I think a better system needs to be in place for both World Records & Untieds. Untied slays deserve consideration too. I obviously wasn't a fan of untieds being tiered in with regular WRs, because no matter what, untieds are unique contributions to the rankings and therefore deserve an additional bonus. Since a significant number of untieds are achieved by the same old top players, an even larger bonus could be awarded to incentivize new players or level specialists (based on rank, number of existing WRs, or some similar metric) to grind for them too. For almost every player, there was no incentive to grind for an untied since ~200 points seems like a small reward for the likely number of hours they would have to invest. The same idea could work for World Records and/or untied slays too. I think everyone can agree that GE untieds are significantly harder to achieve too, so perhaps a multiplier based on the game could be looked into. One concern is obviously a new strategy being discovered by a single player and hoarded to cheaply open the doors for several untieds, but I don't think that will ever be an issue and it could be dealt with separately even if it does happen (no shenanigans clause?).
All of that might seem needlessly complicated, so even the "2x based on agreed upon tier" multiplier from previous League(s?) would be good. But I would definitely consider an extra buff for GoldenEye, and possibly another for multiple-second untieds.
5) This ties in with Flechr's point: "While the flat daily bonus is a notable improvement from the percentage based one, it still feels hilariously weighted towards players who have not played many levels. The motivation for me to say, improve my Dam 00 1:59 by one second on a given day, is going to be much lower than someone who only needs to luck out with a 2:05 to get that sweet 25 + 6 point bonus. I don't have any ideas for solutions to this, but it is something to be considered."
I mentioned this early on in the League channel, but how about a flat daily bonus based on the number of points the record achieved by the player is worth at the end of the day? So maybe +25, +50, and +75 (or whatever seems suitable) based on how "strong" their final daily bonus PB is. That will encourage both new players to keep pushing for a good time on the level, and top players to focus on the daily bonus instead of trying out all sorts of levels where they feel like have a chance at gaining more points. It will be difficult to set a general point range across all levels, but I don't see why this couldn't be set up on a per level basis too. Wouldn't be much work if a League Bot does most of the manual bonus calculations so more of the creative work is left to the organizing staff.
I thought it was incredible that Sammo clutched Statue A 2:19 on the day it was a daily bonus. Myself for Rescue 2:31 & AB 1:41 too. :nesquik:. I feel like these types of records deserve an additional bonus just because of how hard it can be to clutch, so a bonus based on how strong the times are seems good to me.
6) I know this was talked about a while ago: could a Monthly or even FORTNIGHTLY be a thing? Not sure what they would have, but it might be nice to have things to do outside of the daily & weekly.
7) This is a minor point, but worth mentioning: try to make sure no team suffers in a weekly just because of players they initially drafted. There was a "most N/A to points" weekly and for a moment I thought no player on our team had any N/As. If a captain can pick/drop for this then it's probably not a big deal, but I feel like this is worth mentioning anyway just in case.
I had significantly more time to play this League because of the pandemic + WFH. I'm not sure how available play time was for other players, but if we take data from this league to analyze for the next one, make sure that's taken into account as well.
I think that's all I & Leosco have to say. Until next time, mates.
On another note: did any team even utilize their voice channels on Discord? :nesquik:
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This was my first year competing in league, and I honestly had a great time doing it. Overall and in general, I think that everything went great! The weeklies were really creative and fun to play, the new DD system fixed some problems with last years system, and league motivated me to play levels I otherwise would have never touched. As Cal already said, one of my favorite league moments was scrambling for the missions weekly and clutching out 3 goldeneye PBs in one sesh. The team focused shift was really a welcome feature.
However, I also believe that some things could also be improved. For example, I think that there were too many teams. This led to there being very little room for add/drops (at least in my personal experience). I'd propose maybe having 6-8 teams of 7 players or something in order to allow more freedom in picks (just a rough idea, no clue how this would pan out in practice). I agree with ace's suggestion of having a requirement of sorts for captaining (1500+ points, top 50, etc.). I don't know what this requirement should be specifically, but I'm sure that something fair could be drafted up.
Other than this I didn't really have any negative views on league, and I'm keen to see how next year goes!
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Overall I really enjoyed league this year. I think making the daily bonus give a flat 25 points was a fantastic change in particular. However it could still be potentially interesting to have some weeklies give some sort of small point modifier, for example maybe PB'ing on a certain difficulty could give a 1.2* bonus (not a very interesting example), or something more left field like runs achieved under certain conditions or with certain cheats on giving a bonus.
The !what weekly was a really cool idea, but as someone who only knows one game and doesn't know LTK/DLTK I didn't feel there was enough incentive, and perhaps it could be expanded on. Others might disagree though.
Something that kinda sucks is the fact that each level and difficulty is only picked once, meaning if you want to play a level and it hasn't come up yet, it's best to wait. I'm sure this has been discussed before, but maybe daily bonuses could be independent of what's already been picked.
The big team weeklies were brilliant, but they were too late in league, so most teams had inactive players. A simple fix would ofc be to just do them earlier in league, but maybe some sort of mid-league team consolidation would be a more interesting solution.
I think that's everything I can think of. I really had to rack my brain for ideas and criticisms though, because overall it was fantastic. Big thanks to everyone who organised it. If it were the exact same next year I probably wouldn't complain.
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This league basically addressed everything about previous leagues that made then unappealing. I really liked these bonuses as opposed to "all GE points" and similar for the weeklies. I was also a big fan of the daily bonus system, which really gave players an incentive to learn a level from scratch. For a lot of complex levels that you might only get pity points, the daily bonus helped out a lot.
I disagree with other people's complaints about too many teams. Anyone who wanted to play on a league team had the opportunity to do so, which I see as a positive point.
This is perhaps mostly a failing of the captains themselves, but the teams were stacked such that the final standings were decided very early on, which can really decrease the motivation to play for a lot of people. I can understand why others are saying things about needing to meet some requirements to be a captain, because there was quite the divide between the top players with a team and the baddies with a team as evident in the final standing, although everyone who did have a team is involved in the community enough that it's hard to straight turn them away.
2 month length is good, although it did really slow down towards the end just because of how set most of the standings were.
Overall, a great time!
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Huge thanks to Sharpeye and Pauli for all their efforts organising it.
I was a lot busier than I expected to be with work and I was picked up in week 4? - the one with the epic weekly anyway - so I didn't see a great deal of league. I think the main achievement this year were the weeklys which made teams actually a team, rather than a team of individuals. And daily dough was inspired.
Personally I thought the !what weekly was super crap, but clearly ace found it really good. I think there's lots of league changes like this which some people will like while other people won't - it's just not possible to make it perfectly balanced and to everyone's tastes.
Changes I'd consider making:
- Weeklys' teamworkness tweaking. The amazing weekly worked I think because a couple (or even 3) players couldn't completely carry the team, but at the same time a single player couldn't drag the whole team down. I forget half of the weeklies (is there a full list somewhere?), but none of them came close to the missions weekly. I know it was the end of league but even if the 5 pbs weekly was at the start I think it would have been pretty bad. If you minimise single players being able to drag a team down, you maximise incentives to pick new players :)
- Tiered (:nesquik:) Daily dough. It would need a bit of looking at because maybe it's super unbalanced but the idea is to get more reward if you pbed starting with more points. i.e. if you go 0 -> 100 then maybe you get 100 + 25. But if you started on more than 50 points, maybe you get +40, so 55 -> 65 gives you 10 + 40. So the dough rises with your starting points.
- Split GE and PD. Not a new idea but PD is still OP. I'm thinking something like 4 weeks GE then 4 weeks PD. Still one league but GE players can just play GE, and PD just PD, or both both. On game changeover day have a re-draft or something: declare players that you are going to keep 1 week before, and all others go into a pool (with non-picked players) for a 2nd draft. It keeps league long for people with more time but lets people with less time be more focused. It doesn't split the games into seperate leagues entirely, but it keeps GE more relevant. Having the easier low points in PD in the 2nd half will keep league more competitive. You could always water this down and have 3 weeks, 3 weeks then 2 weeks of both or something.
In general the best league so far.
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- The flat bonus instead of percentage for dailies was great. It was very beginner friendly for league and I was encouraged to fill out my GE times page and found many levels I enjoyed. Some levels I don't think i ever would have tried if it was double points for daily because it just wasnt worth for me to play and get 6 extra points. And players dont have to kill themselves everyday trying to max out their daily double points since they just get a flat.
- I liked every single weekly except for "every player on the team needs 5 prs"
- I think wrs were in a good spot for points, maybe a small buff, like 25+ points across the board for tiers which I don't think is too much of an issue since the boring 4 are not wrs and war 25 isnt one either(defection 5 still kinda free though). I hate tiers, but its the only relatively correct way to give much more grinded for/better records a boost.
- I liked taking away the 2x bonus for untied though. Ace could have single handedly won the league(an event made mostly for new players) with this amount even though i know he is an outlier for this. Also there is the idea where a new gamebreaking strat could come out and whoever just is the first to get it(by possibly luck), is rewarded way too heavily.
- Everything being changed to a flat bonus has just been better(dailies, weeklies, wrs, untieds)
- I feel newer players are rewarded more than veteran players but thats what league is all about. The veteran players have the advantage of teaching the new players on their team though which i think is a powerful thing that some people forget(but will admit, it isnt as strong as having a blank times page)
- Too many captains, should be capped at 8. Just give everyone else 1 more pick.
Had a lot of fun improving my GE rank and points a lot, and cranking out a couple PD wrs. See ya next year. #nWd4life
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I see there's a lot of people talking about incentivizing scoring better times over many times worth less points and I have an idea.
You know how at the end of a game in Overwatch you see a replay of The Play of the Game - what if we had some system that decides the best time(or times, could be top 3) of each week and awards that player with +100 or some other value. Pauli could for example choose someone fitting in secret like Greenounet, Vitor or Icy who doesn't play in the league but is able to judge times across both games who could pick out the winner of each week. Or just whatever time is worth the most amount of points idk.
Also, Mario Party bonus star system :)
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I'll drop my thoughts in here, cuz why not.
Even though I've been over a decade now in the Elite, I have never been very involved with it, never really thought I could actually fit in at all until perhaps this last year and a few isolated brief moments in the past. League isn't an exception, I had never actually known what it was about until this year, and never was part of one until now. And I have to say that I really liked it. I have always been the kind of player who gets bored easily with everything, doing things like "if I don't PR in 5 minutes, I'll choose another stage or I'll just stop playing". But league actually gave me a reason to learn/play levels I never thought I'd care about, or even like (e.g.: nowadays strats on CI). That competition ambient, the commitement with a team, getting rewarded by PRing... those things sure help. I also liked how most people will help you if you ask for it, even if they are from a rival team.
It was May 16th the first time someone (anonymous) actually told me about league and told me I could be a candidate to be picked. My first thoughts were, of course, that I wouldn't really be a good option, since "I doubt I can PR more than 4-5 times during league", and man, was I wrong... Had someone told me that on July I was going to get 45 PRs, cut several minutes of my total, and even get a few system WRs by just playing a daily session for 20ish days, and I would have never believed them. I honestly didn't think I was capable of PRing that easily, it seems that all I needed was motivation, a reason to play, and league has been one. Unfortunately, work and health go first, so I've only been part of the league for the last few weeks, but they were really fun weeks for sure. I ended up being in a great team, and got to met great people in there.
I want to thank everyone involved, and in particular, the organizers, who did some hell of a good job. I would have gone crazy this tough month if I hadn't had PD to free some stress, so thanks for giving me a reason to play, and thanks for using your own free time on behalf of other people.
Now for specific aspects of the league, I don't have knowledge of past leagues to make comparisons, so I'll just give my brief opinions. I personally liked how the things were done, in general:
- I think 2 months is a reasonable amount of time for this, and I liked to have 1 level of each game per day, as well as the weeklies.
- I like how the daily bonuses have worked. I can understand thinking that better times deserve more points, but I can't really think about an easy fix, and the way it is right now, seemed nice, definitely encourages new players to play. Even though some people might see this as a bad thing (because it discourages better players), I for example grinded Extraction Agent for a 3 points time just because there was a decent daily bonus associated, since it was obvious that the time was going to die anyway so there was no point to go for it without the bonus.
- I don't really have a formed opinion about WRs, because I'm not at WR level, but they didn't look bad to me, although the tiers should be readjusted after each untied.
- I liked the weeklies that I had the chance to meet (even the impossible one near the end :nesquik:). Actually I would have liked to have more weeklies, perhaps monthlies or something, since side challenges always make the thing more fun. Speaking of side challenges, I liked the WOTD weekly, I would like to see more "side events" in future leagues (certain cheats, (D)LTK, random challenges... Whatever).
I think that's all I wanted to say. Next year I might consider joining again, although I'll be of less use, probably, since PRing becomes harder and harder with time. See you at (D)LTK League :).
#ProjectB, #DuelForPointRanksAgain.
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I think we should hand out some flair on the forums for all the winners, but I'm wondering: Do they all have a forum account yet!!!???!
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I think we should hand out some flair on the forums for all the winners, but I'm wondering: Do they all have a forum account yet!!!???!
Obviously its me
The other profiles are:
Tharixer
Redscreens
leo_perna
Banz
DontTouchtheDoor
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And Craig? Is this the right Craig? https://forums.the-elite.net/index.php?action=profile;u=3078 (I'm assuming it is...)
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Oh yeah you are correct