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[samath]

Hello everyone!

[Note: I wrote this before the season started, but never actually posted it! I think it's still useful to see the mindset that the moderators are taking to this season, even if some of the statements are a little old.]

Season 29, the third season in this era of the big (200+ player) league, starts tomorrow. Since expanding the League by advertising directly on the client, we have spent our first two seasons mainly just keeping up. Now that we've gotten our feet under us and developed almost all of the systems we need to operate at this scale, we'd like to spend the next season focusing on minimizing the problems that arise during the League.

What problems are we talking about? Well, here's some of the feedback we've gotten the last two seasons:

A couple players in my division were not responsive to messages trying to schedule matches and would stand me up for our scheduled matches. It became too frustrating to work around people who were poor communicators and/or not respectful of others' time.

Players should be consistently in contact via discord or forum if they want to participate. Some players have been very difficult to get a hold of.

There needs to be more stringent requirements for players to keep a pace of games. It was super frustrating to have no one interested to play in the early weeks and then need to jam everything in at the end. I'd much prefer a consistent pace.

once again, there were some issues with scheduling and one group member vanished entirely

player dropping out was a bummer, but was handled well by anders

Two drop-outs from my division, which was a shame, but I guess that's a natural consequence of trying to attract new players by advertising the league more widely.

In all, we had to remove 37 players, nearly as many as the 41 we removed last season. It is indeed a natural consequence of reaching a larger audience, but it's still something we can improve on. While most of these pains were felt in the E and F divisions featuring many new players, we even had desertions and complaints about scheduling as high as C. Now, to be clear, most of the feedback we've gotten has been positive, and we have a similar percentage of players returning for season 29: 75%. But I bring this feedback up because we recognize two serious problems here that we'd like to spend next season focusing on: reducing the number of players who vanish, and keeping everyone in consistent communication.

Pursuant to the first goal, we're introducing a new check-in form at the beginning of the season. It's been sent to all league players via the usual sources: the private message you received, and pinned in your Discord channel. Everyone must fill out the check-in form in the first week of the season or risk being replaced by a player on the waiting list. I will continue to nag everyone who has not filled it out about every other day until you do.

Included on that check-in form is a series of commitments you're making by signing up to play this season in the League, that we expect all players to take seriously. Most of these are centered around communication. It's completely fine, for instance, to have a week or two during the season where you are unable to play, as long as you communicate this with your moderator and schedule your matches with opponents at other times. We're also trying to be more clear about the need to actually schedule your matches; spontaneity is nice when it works, but the default method is to contact your opponent, offer a few potential times that work for you, and then communicate back and forth until you settle on a time that works for both.

On a final note, I'd like to thank Burning Skull for his many seasons of moderating for the League. He will be taking a (hopefully short) break starting this season, but he'll remain in the loop as an adviser of sorts, along with assemble_me and drsteelhammer, both of whom hope to return soon but cannot do so just yet. And of course, I'd like to thank the other moderators who are continuing this season: Anders, Gazbag, gloures, Seprix, tracer, and volfied. I consistently hear good things about each of you as moderators, like that comment about Anders above.

SamE