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 to get in touch with a moderator ASAP. This is still the best solution for any mid-match disputes.
Rules ChangesWe have a handful of rules changes to offer for the coming season. All changes are now logged in the
Rules and Regulations Changelog, 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 ChurnSeason 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