Dominion Strategy Forum
Dominion => Tournaments and Events => Dominion League => Topic started by: samath on July 21, 2019, 03:24:11 am
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Hello everyone!
Season 35 has begun and will run through Sunday, September 1st. Log into Discord, meet your opponents, and schedule your matches!
As moderators for the League, we're constantly looking for ways to make the League better. We have many ideas ourselves, but we also strive to make it easy to offer feedback through the Returning Form every season. We read carefully over all of those responses and reply individually to anyone with substantive suggestions.
This season, we're even expanding the use of the Returning Form to poll continuing League players on some possible future changes. These are topics that have been raised with the moderators that we don't all agree on, so we're asking your thoughts.
That said, the Returning Form isn't always well-tuned to the timing of when new ideas pop into your head. It's also only once a season, and the best ideas are sometimes worth acting on more quickly than that timing affords. So we'd like to highlight some additional options (new and old) for presenting your ideas to the moderator team, depending on what you feel comfortable with:
- Reach out to any moderator individually, preferably on Discord. If you're unsure which one to reach out to, a good default is the moderator of your division.
- If you have a complete idea that you'd like to present, just reply to this post (or any future newsletter posts like this one). This guarantees that your idea won't be lost in the constantly flowing stream of Discord. We'll discuss all such posts before the next season starts, as we do with Returning Form suggestions, but the more well-thought-out it is, the easier.
- Starting in the coming weeks, we will hold a number of Town Halls to gather feedback on suggested changes to the Dominion League. These will be dedicated periods of time for any Dominion League players and fans to discuss topics that the moderators would like more input from the community on. More information will be forthcoming when we announce the first one.
- For urgent matters, you can still use the Dominion League Hotline (http://tinyurl.com/dominion-league-hotline) to get in touch with a moderator ASAP. This is still the best solution for any mid-match disputes.
Rules Changes
We have a handful of rules changes to offer for the coming season. All changes are now logged in the Rules and Regulations Changelog (http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=18438.0), which used to be in a private moderator subforum but which we have moved to the main Dominion League subforum.
- We have changed the rules around the final tiebreaker for Season 35 to require a short match between any players tied after both tiebreakers. We are also interested in hearing your feedback on this rule change -- there is a question in the Returning Form about this solution.
- We have further clarified the rules around undo's by moving them from the FAQ into the main rules document. We are striving to keep any operational rules in the main Rules & Regulations document while relying on the FAQ as a secondary resource.
- We have also clarified the process for amending the rules to specify that it requires a majority vote of the moderators.
- If you haven't heard, the online client will soon be releasing a banlist feature allowing players to ban a small number of cards from appearing in their matches. The default for Season 35 will be for this feature to be in the same configuration it currently is (only Possession is banned), although players can choose to play games with kingdoms respecting their banlists once the feature is released if they both agree to. We will be holding a Town Hall to brainstorm further clarifying rules for subsequent seasons once the feature is released.
- We discovered that despite existing since Season 1, there is no mention of the Championship Match in the official rules, so we added a complete description.
- And finally, starting this season, we are releasing outlines of all of our meetings, including all votes that took place. In just the rules portion of this season's meeting, we voted 40 times! The minutes are posted as the second post of this thread.
Moderator Churn
Season 34 was unfortunately the last for two of our longest-tenured moderators, Burning Skull and tracer. Both have meant a lot to the League in their time as moderators: Burning Skull's 32 seasons of experience as a player and nearly as many as a moderator adds gravitas to any discussion, while tracer set a high bar for how attentive moderators should be to their divisions. In fact, it was seeing the bar tracer was setting that inspired the moderator bot assistants across the League with messages modeled off of his. We will miss them both dearly.
In their place, we have recruited new moderators Apostolosoruler and nottoobad. Welcome them!
SamE
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What follows is the agenda for the rules portion of the Season 35 moderators meeting, along with all votes taken during this portion.
- Changes to the rules document itself
- Living document/Google doc
- Make Rules & Regulations change log public
- "Tighten up" and make more precise
- Will handle on a case-by-case basis.
- Amendment process
- Motion to add Amendment section postulating that moderators may change the rules by a majority vote of all League moderators for a given season
- Motion to add a comment to above section that exceptions to the rules can be changed mid-season (by a majority vote) if and only if all directly affected players agree to such a change.
- Community relations
- Other ways to collect feedback beyond Returning form
- Agree to allow players to submit feedback that we will look at via newsletter forum post replies
- League Fan role question in Returning form
- Add "Would you like the League Fan role?" to the returning form for non-returners
- Town Hall meetings
- Town Hall meetings as an option for challenges on which we need creativity
- Dedicated feedback Discord channel
- No dedicated feedback channel for now, reassess next season
- Dedicated moderator liaison
- No liaison for now. Revisit if there is substantial disagreement between players and moderators
- Changes to League structure
- New tiebreakers
- Add the third tiebreaker before the "final tiebreaker"
- Result: NO (4 dissenting)
- "Add the third tiebreaker?" as a question for the returning form?
- Result: YES (2 dissenting)
- What should the final tiebreaker be? (approval votes)
- 2-3 game playoff (9)
- 4-5 game playoff (4)
- 1 game playoff (3)
- Coin flip (2)
- Coin flip, but flip ahead (and announce) (2)
- 6-7 game playoff (0)
- Allow concessions in tiebreaker match
- If one player is non-responsive within a reasonable time (48 hours in worst case, likely 7 days), give the win to their opponent
- Results of previous two votes go in the FAQ (as opposed to the rules).
- Result: NO (2 dissenting)
- If both players are responsive but mutually unable to schedule, they may mutually agree for a coin flip instead
- If both players are non-responsive, we flip a coin
- If both players are responsive, but one is completely unavailable and does not wish to concede (votes)
- Give the win to the available player ( 8 )
- We flip a coin (1)
- Add the above poll to the returning form?
- If both players are responsive and available at times but not available at the same time, we flip a coin
- Expand A (or other divisions)
- Using SamE’s informal discord poll (“Fully-fleshed-out options that have been proposed so far to cover the case of more players returning to a tier than there are spots at that tier and above,” Monday, July 15, 16:13 UTC), moderators voted among themselves between the two most popular options: “1) Expand to however many seven-player divisions are necessary with two demotions. Divisions would stay at 7 until there are fewer returners than leavers,” and “0) Of course, there is also the status quo option of just encouraging these players to return at a lower level.”
- Result: Option 0 (unanimous)
- Add the same poll between options 0 and 1 to the returning form?
- Should we hold a Town Hall on division expansion?
- Way for 2nd place to promote
- Need to see a complete proposal to assess properly.
- Seeding
- Proposal: Ask in the returning form about what aspects of the general philosophy of seeding people find relevant
- Poll longer season breaks in the returning form?
- Result: NO (1 dissenting)
- Longer/shorter break between seasons
- Infeasible on the moderator end to shorten it. Will discuss lengths of breaks at a future Town Hall.
- Changes to matches and games
- Scheduling issues
- Encourage people to friend their League opponents on the client in Discord Post 2
- Ban list
- When the banlist feature comes out, respect banned cards in League matches by default
- Banlist default on the returning form
- Default for current season is to have only Possession banned, but of course players can mutually agree to respect ban lists.
- Result: YES (1 dissenting)
- Banlists are not allowed to be changed within a match (except by mutual agreement)
- Once the banlist feature is live, have a Town Hall about it.
- Undo rules
- Undo rule details should be in the official document
- Keep content of our undo policy
- Reword undo policy to emphasize the default and pre-match discussions
- Changes to moderator technologies
- Week 2 stats and spreadsheets meeting
- Will try it out this season.
- Bots know about scheduled matches (for internal tracking)
- Will see how difficult this is to implement.
- Week 7 daily bot messages
- No change to messaging pattern. All late match communication handled directly by the moderator, not the bot.
- Changes to moderator responsibilities
- Increase transparency
- Several plans already in the works, see later votes.
- Separation of duties
- Unclear, will be handled on a case-by-case basis.
- Conflicts of interest
- Already minimized. Unclear how they could be further reduced.
- Selection of new moderators
- Add a line to the Moderation section that new moderators are chosen by a vote of the previous season's moderator team
- Selection of new administrative moderator
- Future arrangements might be different from the current one given moderator availability/skills.
- Retention
- Will discuss at a future Town Hall.
- Miscellaneous
- Make #announcements read- and react-only for non-moderators
- Result: NO (1 dissenting)
- Include the championship match in the rules
- Post list of moderators and their divisions somewhere - #announcements proposed
- Should there be a rules committee?
- Adding the agenda + votes of the moderator meeting to the end of the newsletter (as a reply)
- Require the agenda and votes to be recorded in every season going forward (put this in the rules)
- Don't post anything additional about player who were dropped outside their division channel
- Table discussion of "spreading out" new players to next season
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Currently, a When2Meet schedule is posted in the division channel only late into the season (I don't know the exact mechanics.) I don't see why it shouldn't be there the whole season. It's easier to write the times I'm free on a spreadsheet-type thing than it is to describe it with just text.
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Currently, a When2Meet schedule is posted in the division channel only late into the season (I don't know the exact mechanics.) I don't see why it shouldn't be there the whole season. It's easier to write the times I'm free on a spreadsheet-type thing than it is to describe it with just text.
We would like to facilitate scheduling as much as possible, but there were a few reasons why we did not pursue this solution: The when2meet interface become unwieldy when there are so many columns of dates. Also, players may not know their schedule far in advance, or their schedule will change, but they forget to update the when2meet.
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Currently, a When2Meet schedule is posted in the division channel only late into the season (I don't know the exact mechanics.) I don't see why it shouldn't be there the whole season. It's easier to write the times I'm free on a spreadsheet-type thing than it is to describe it with just text.
Here is an example (https://www.when2meet.com/?7957119-kQILZ) of what that would look like. Does that look like something you think you would use?
I have also looked into the idea of doing a days-of-the-week when2meet, but those do not support different time zones.