what is the closing date for signups?

31st August

Maybe you should let Kye read it and then tell you 8) !

I am guessing he is a better reader?

Much Love !

Are we using the summer cup mod for season 3?

Patch 30.08.?

loller seedings...gg

yeah the seeds are allllll fucked up for North America at least. 5 out of the 8 div 1 teams don't even exist.

@ritual No, the summer cup mod is for the summer cup.
The reason there still are teams, currently non-existing, on the seeding list, is in case they should come back for the season. Ignore them for now, they will get removed if they don't sign up for the season.

Ah, bummer. The summer cup mod has been great for balance imo.

I agree, but we should have the official patch in time for the season.

it still says "gamerkazte" in the first part

@Smaragor Shouldn't it? As far as I know he is still in charge of the gameservers.

On another note, we might bring in 5 more maps to the map pool. The first one, which is rather certain is ns2_docking. I would like to see a NSL version of it, but Mendasp isn't around anymore.

The second one is ns2_tanith - originally by ssjyoda. Jonacrab have, with some help from Mendasp, textured the entire map and made balance changes to it. Here is the workshop link for the new version: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=170821529

The third one is ns2_turtle, which is getting a major update soon, hopefully in time for the signups to close. That is a possible candidate as well, go check out the changes to the layout in his topic:
http://forums.unknownworlds.com/discussion/comment/2126448/#Comment_2126448

The fourth map is ns2_icarus by Lazer, which was supposed to be played in season 2, but was removed due to lack of update on significant bugs. He updated it just as the season had begun. It deserves another playthrough.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=100257009

Finally, ns2_biodome, which is coming with the official build the 30th of August.

I encourage every team to pcw/scrim on these maps to find out if they have any problems and report them to the mappers. Or worst case scenario, report to us if you think we need to exclude any of them.

swalk he ment that it is gamerkaTZe and not gamerkaZTe!

Fixed

no Australian/NZ team ?

Seems not. :(
http://ausns2.org/showthread.php?673-NSL-Season-3

We have our own league launching after the content patch.

You could still play both, I saw some talk about playing in the NA league. It would be interesting to kind of(ping) see how the australian/NZ teams scale with the american teams. It would also be more skill balaced than your own league since there are more teams participating.

TBH I think it's absolutely silly that we're doing an NA and an EU division... If we mixed the two together, there would be a lot less of a skill gap problem between teams, and there really are almost too few teams to even have an NA division :/

There would be more teams overall if every team in AU did decide to join Swalk. But as you can see, no one wants to join the NSL league. Not after how poorly handled the events in Season 1 and 2 were.

Pings and timezones don't make it viable for most either.

+1 ritual, that was not a real pb in summer cup. The only problems was regular schedule pbs.

+1 to ritual

@ritual I did already consider that, looking at the S3 signups, the scene have shrunk to about 1/3rd of what we had in Season 1 and 2. So unless we suddenly get a load of teams joining from UWE's advertisement(in-game, social media and at the event at i49 this weekend) of the league, which is still nowhere to be found, I think we are going to put everyone together in one big league.
I am assuming the various cup results we have should be enough information to mix the seedings together as well.

Playing NA teams is definitely no problem for us. Ping is easilly playable and just good to play some more teams. Aus pings are a little crazy though but certainly wouldnt mind playing them.Its not like we are spoilt for choice of teams to play.

@swalk, happiest day of my life :D

That, or he may have just single handedly killed half of the scene.

I admit it, I told every dead team to stop playing.

as an observer, pings and fair play are sometimes not always aligned. If AU teams joined in, should they be paired mostly vs west coast teams? If they are against an East, i think a gentleman's agreement would be to play on a west server. similar for EU, if a west team is playing an EU team, play on an east server. CAL used to have a rule that the avg team ping had to be within a certain range. Perhaps this could be something to talk about.

I spoke with Flatrectomy, he is going through texturing his remake of ns2_caged. He hopes to be finished before the signup deadline, like ns2_turtle. Please test this map as well. It's mostly greyboxed in it's current version, but it should be fully playable.

Well, dear swalk. There was concern of having to play against murican teams when ensl changed to nsl. Maybe like autralians we get competing league, where you only need to play teams in your own region. Could be maybe called Ensl.

We tested turtle, but we want to see the b3. The b2 in not perfect at all.

"Closest average ping" rules and the like are bad, and not actually fair at all. The only option that makes sense is one map eu serv one map us serv, each server being chosen to minimize ping difference.

Agree with turning it into one collective league (as most know I do by now). This game is gonna be dead soon anyway, may as well squeeze the last life out of it while we still can.

Dear vartija. There is currently concern that the divisions will be even less skill balanced than the divisions of season 2, due only have one third of the amount of teams signed up for the coming season.

Putting together every team in one league will help this issue. If we stick to regional split leagues, we will have less interesting games and more stomps. And from what people are telling me so far about this subject, you seem like the only one arguing against it. If there is a majority of teams that really want to stick with regional split leagues, we will do that. But people need to voice themselves, I can not read minds.

In preparation for putting together everyone in one single worldwide league, I have done my best to mix together the seedings of the different regions based on results from the cups. At the same time I have removed any teams I know have disbanded. In case any of those teams will come back for the season, they will have their old seeding back.
But currently this is how the divisions will be for the season. This can and will still change as we have 5 teams that are currently "Unseeded" and there might be more teams joining up during the coming week.
http://www.ensl.org/articles/746

Good work, swalk. I disagree with having such a small top division, though. The difference between the top and bottom teams in that division is unfortunately quite large. With this few teams signed up, it might be better to just have two divisions. If more sign up, say 45, three divs with 15 in each sounds good to me.

Well if I make it any larger, the skill difference will be even larger as well. Also, if I were to increase it, it would have to be an even number. And make two groups, for the season not to last more than the 10 weeks. I can't just make 15 team divisions and make everyone play everyone. It would possibly result in lots of bad games and it would definitely take way too many weeks.

Everyone doesn't have to play everyone, so 15+ team groups with a ten, or less, week season is perfectly possibly. See my suggested league format outlined here: http://www.ensl.org/topics/893

I'm happy to explain it further if you want me to, that post is just a rough outline.

Yeah, I read that. Seems like a wierd and overly complicated format to me, but that's just my personal opinion by reading the post. I haven't tried it, which means I don't know the algorithm/exact format either. I wouldn't completely dismiss it, but I can't quite figure out what to do with it. And I'm not sure it would be a positive change to have that high of a skill difference in some of the matches.

I know blind put Zefram on the task to create a ladder running alongside the league and during off-seasons, not sure how far ahead that project is. I know this is not exactly the same thing, but to me that format you suggested seems like a mix of both. The plan is to have both a ladder and the season format.

It's hardly complicated at all. You don't even strictly speaking need an algorithm, the matchups can be done manually. It combines some of the advantages of a ladder with the necessities of a league format and reduces some of the problems associated with a standard league format (namely that of some teams having to play an entire season in the top division without a realistic chance of winning a single match and the problem of teams folding during the middle of a season, creating weeks with nothing but forfeit matches).

I'd much prefer not to have to do all the matches manually for every team, every single week. The workload I get from the season is intense enough as it is. If I were to do this in any case, I would need some form of algorithm, random matchups doesn't quite work. It would be too messy and not make much sense. Still when having an algorithm I don't see how this can prevent disbanded teams from causing forfeit matches. When the divisions has an even number of teams, everyone has an opponent. When one team drops, it will always cause forfeit weeks.

Fana is right, we need to know how the ladder system is coming along.

Ask Zefram. Most of the work is creating a ruleset I believe. The system have been on the website the entire time, just never had any contests created as a ladder for ns2.

The workload is your own call, of course, but I don't think this would be as much effort as you fear it will be.

As for preventing disbanded teams from causing forfeit matches: Dead teams would simply not be scheduled for further matches, meaning the max "automatic" forfeits each week would be 1 if there is an odd amount of "live" teams, and 0 if there is an even amount of "live" teams.

@Fana, I agree the map/server works better than avg ping, however after seeing one of the summer cup matches have issues with west vs UK, the avg ping could have rectified that situation I guess better, amongst other compromises. I hope the game does not die soon. Hvor er Norsk optimisme? Jeg er fra USA, men arbeider i Norge for sommeren

IMO let the top division be hardcore, 2 matches per week. But allow for reschedules, and say after 3/4 of the season is done, they need to make sure that if they rescheduled any that they need to get it done or else t'is forfeits.

@Fana Having to create all the current weeks matches every week will frustrate me. I like to do it with an algorithm and then be done with it. It is the single most tedious thing about creating the contests. Call me lazy, but I know how frustrated I would be if I had to do this every week.

I still don't quite get the format you're suggesting, with that method you would end up having some teams play eachother more than once per season and others not? It doesn't make any sense in my head in terms of fairness within the divisions. One team could get 'lucky' and meet a team they can fairly easily beat 4-0 twice during a season. Stacking up that teams points. This isn't the only bad scenario I am imagining with that format.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss-system_tournament :)

Btw, there is a NZ team. Weird.

Add to my link : I want to speak with you about that in pv :) This is completely adapted to the DIV2-DIV3.

Thanks, Bladou. What I'm suggesting is essentially a swiss system tournament, but with playoffs for the top 8 teams.

I also think the format should be changed to one map a week, instead of the current two.

Yeah that cleared up some things Bladou, thanks.

"The principle of a Swiss tournament is egalitarian in nature and is not designed to determine who is the strongest player in a group."

I'm thinking this might not be the best option for the season. Maybe the ladder?

No, with playoffs it is just as accurate for skill differentiation as a round robin league system. Don't get hung up on whatever wording some wikipedia writer used.

I agree with Fana. I'm pleased he is so keen on this ladder!

Of course, I agree . A 7 round swiss with playoff would be nice, isnt he ?

ladder

The system Fana is describing is NOT a ladder. It is the system that CAL (and later ANSL) used to schedule matches during season play. It worked as follows:

Teams are ordered in standings by previous season's ratings. Each week the teams are scheduled vs the next rank team that they have not yet played. So in week 1, Team 1 plays Team 2, Team 3 plays Team 4.

After week one, the standings are updated and the schedule is made again by the same criteria. So say Team 1 and Team 3 were victorious, then Team 1 would play Team 3, Team 2 vs Team 4.

Its really not complicated, and, depending on your schedule creation system, should take less than 5 minutes each week for making the schedule.

The problem occurs when teams postpone their match.

I fact, TEAM 1 play vs Team 3 in the first round in Swiss system :D. If you have teams 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8, the 1st pairing will be :
1 - 5
6 - 2
3 - 7
8 - 4

Ladders are awful. Time will prove Fana correct. As time has with every other attempted ladder system for every low player count team game ever.

Ladders aren't interesting. They get stale almost immediately. Good luck getting challenges sent and accepted 2 weeks after its launched.

I made simulation, and a 7 round + playoff by 8 seems to be a good way.

Look at this (I used fake ELO for the program)
http://rtempleur.free.fr/

@Golden Less than 5 minutes? Probably more like 30 minutes to create 15-20 matches with this site. On top of that comes the calculation of who plays who.

This site is not ideal for this format and I can't be doing it manually every week. I would get fed up with it and I don't want that. Neither would any of you, because me being fed up with it will result in matches getting posted too late or not at all.

Also, I still don't think this is the best format for the season in any case. The skillgap in the matches becomes too huge and round robin is more precise in terms of getting a "true winner" of the group. I am sticking with the round robin format.

As you wish.

That's pretty cool, Bladou.

"true winner" of the group

Nobody cares about that. Playoff results is the only thing that matters. That's how it's always been and that's how it would still be with this system.

The actual effect of using the swiss system would actually be lessening the skill gap, not widening it as you claim.

Is there anybody willing to volunteer to help swalk do the scheduling each week?

EDIT: Bladou is willing to do the pairings, so swalk won't have to do any extra work. So lets go go go! Anyone reading this who would like to see this league improve and create a more enjoyable experience for all the participating teams, please speak up, otherwise I doubt anything will happen.

(i could do the pairing, I made the complete tournament in 5 minutes :D)

+1 make it happen

I like the sound of the Swiss system. +1

The plan is still to have the round robin format. The site is not ideal for the swiss format. Bladou have no clue what it is he is agreeing to. No offense, but it is a huge task. The commitment to do this at the same specific time every week, for 10 weeks, with the condition of the site, is too much to ask from anyone imo.

From what I can understand We have the new homepage about halfway finished. But we lack a php coder, I'm not sure why blind hasn't gone public with that information. We need someone to take over from the previous person making it. Maybe we could incoperate the swiss system in the code of the new site and have it in season 4, if we get a coder. The plan was to have the new site ready for season 3. But as the creator stopped working on it, that did unfortunately not become reality. Again, from what I understand, we have all the artwork we need for the site, we're "just" lacking most of the encoding of it.

The coding is 95% of the work, not 50%.

I think you're making this sound a lot harder than it actually is, but if you're not even willing to let someone try, then I guess that's that.

Another season of pointless and frustrating games for 25% of the teams. Yay.

disappointed

@Fana Some of the coding is already done. I've coded myself, not php though, but I am aware that the coding is the majority of the work. The website is still estimated about halfway done.

Alright, I just misunderstood you then.

there must be some nerds out there who know how to make websites!