To no one's surprise, given world events, Season 39 will be the biggest League season ever! We have crossed the 300 player mark for the first time to 315 -- our previous high was 281 in Season 32 (Winter 2019). And that's even before counting the 17 additional players we've invited off the waiting list.
Correspondingly, we are now up to 51 divisions: 1 A, 2 B, 4 C, 4 D, 8 E, 8 F, 8 G, and 16 H. Yes, the original plans only called for H to go up to 12 divisions, but these increased numbers don't necessarily indicate a broader skill range than before, so there's no impetus to add an I tier.
In addition, we have also expanded in another way: This is the first season when we are actually implementing a rule change passed a couple seasons ago, allowing for 7-player divisions if enough players return to a given tier. For instance, in the A1 division, E.Honda rejoined after taking last season off, and with the other six players remaining, we expand the division to 7 players.
A similar story occurred in C, when we had 5 returning players for only one spot. However, we've also hit our limits in E, F, and G, but rather than moving nearly all new players into H, we've chosen to expand those tiers to nearly-ubiquitous 7-player divisions, including inviting nearly the entire waiting list at this point to join. If all of them do, we will only have one division in each of E, F and G with only 6 players, the division with the most difficult time zone differences.
7-player divisions mean more Dominion for everyone involved! It's six matches in six weeks, so really try to keep to about a one per week pace. We will be especially proactive moderating these divisions since there's more to catch up on if you fall behind.
For the A, C and G divisions, at the end of the season, only 2 players will demote from each 7-player division, so there could very well be 7-player divisions in that tier in the future. However, we will no longer be promoting any additional players into any tiers with 7-player divisions, so if/when anyone leaves (or more technically, if more people leave than return), they will go back down to 6.
For the E and F divisions, because these are taking place in an unusual circumstance, we have decided to anticipate potential future growth and by default demote three players from each of these divisions. Nothing is certain at this point, especially months away, but given that we could see greater than usual shifts in the number of League players, we would like to offer how we anticipate we would deal with those:
- As the default, if future seasons appear to be around this size, we will keep this structure and promote only the 1st place finisher in each H division. If this holds, we wouldn't have to demote 5th place finishers in 7-player divisions in E and F.
- If the number of League players goes back down, we will additionally reduce the number of H divisions, offering some additional promotions to 2nd (and maybe 3rd) place finishers in H in the process.
- If we see another big increase in the number of players, we would expand G to 16 divisions. This is the situation that would require additional demotions from E and F to make space and put those extra players in G. We would also likely see the 2nd place finishers in H promote in this cirumstance, too.
Given these potential changes, we will be publishing the Promotion Rules tab for a new season along with the signups. We've gone ahead and done that for this season (see
the Signups post), which was that same table you've already heard of. You'll see Season 40's in its Signup post when it goes up in a week, and so on for future seasons, but here's a sneak preview:
The highlighted boxes are subject to change, currently set to the worse of their two outcomes. As with many things in the coronavirus era, we'll be playing this by ear. Stay safe, everyone!