[quote author=Fastidious link=topic=26.msg272#msg272 date=1219273876]<br />[list]<br />[li]Too much bullshit, over competitiveness[/li]<br />[li]Need an admin who: is around a lot to deal with crises[/li]<br />[li]Need an admin who: adapts rules quickly to fix things[/li]<br />[li]Need an admin who: takes chances mixing things up with new seasons[/li]<br />[li]3v2 / 3v1 games suck[/li]<br />[li]Demo penalties suck[/li]<br />[li]Scheduling a game is a new nightmare every week[/li]<br />[/list]<br />[/quote]<br /><br />I get the impression that a lot of IDL players share Fastidious&#039;s concerns, and I want to kind of go down the list and explain my understanding of why things are the way they are.<br /><br />[b]Too much bullshit, over competitiveness[/b]<br /><br />I think there&#039;s two kinds of IDL players:<br /><br />[list]<br />[li]Players who play to have fun[/li]<br />[li]Players who play to win[/li]<br />[/list]<br /><br />There&#039;s no point in telling a player they&#039;re &quot;being too competitive&quot;.&nbsp; The only thing IDL can do is make rules that make competition fair.&nbsp; You can totally debate all day on what is &quot;fair&quot; or not (3v2s, 2v2s, server agreements, time of day/scheduling), and you can lobby for rules against stuff you think is lame, but complaining that someone is &quot;too competitive&quot; is being obviously butthurt.&nbsp; You and your opponent had the same rules, and you were out competed.&nbsp; Tough.&nbsp; In fact, I&#039;d say that players making the IDL competitive isn&#039;t the problem, people making the IDL personal is.<br /><br />[b]Need an admin who:[/b]<br />[list]<br />[li][b]Is around a lot to deal with crises[/b][/li]<br />[li][b]Adapts rules quickly to fix things[/b][/li]<br />[li][b]Takes chances mixing things up with new seasons[/b][/li]<br />[/list]<br /><br />I might be wrong, but aren&#039;t there 3 admins (Ralphis, Fastidious and Humanbones)?&nbsp; I know whenever there were problems with the demos Ralphis would leave it to Nostar and me to resolve it.&nbsp; Maybe the problem is that the &#039;leadership&#039; structure of IDL isn&#039;t as obvious as it should be.&nbsp; In any case, the answer is probably more than one admin.&nbsp; Having one guy hanging around all day every day isn&#039;t feasible... even if it is, that one person is probably extremely maladjusted (I&#039;m looking at you nostar!) and would benefit from input from normal people.&nbsp; Anyway, I thought there were already multiple admins, and if there aren&#039;t, there should be.&nbsp; Whatever the case is, this stuff should be public so players know how to resolve issues that come up.<br /><br />Also, IDL has almost no rules.&nbsp; The few rules that do exist are always adapted to the current situation (Bloodstrike&#039;s demo issue is a good example), and I honestly can&#039;t think of a time where Ralphis didn&#039;t arbitrate effectively.&nbsp; I don&#039;t really see what could be done differently or more &quot;quickly&quot;, but I&#039;m open to hearing some examples.<br /><br />IDL has also changed pretty drastically over its 4 seasons, from creating the mid-season draft, to increasing the numbers of teams and games, to running the pre-season draft live, and even creating a demo upload system.&nbsp; I think it&#039;s easy to forget that there are things about IDL that are waaaaay better than they used to be, just because some stuff currently sucks.&nbsp; Everyone&#039;s got their little list of &quot;5 things I&#039;d change about IDL&quot; and I think we&#039;ll talk about that stuff after the Masterbowl, but it&#039;s a little disingenuous to insinuate that Ralphis hasn&#039;t &quot;mixed things up&quot;.<br /><br />[b]3v2 / 3v1 /2v1 games suck[/b]<br /><br />Yeah, they do.&nbsp; But the alternative is forcing a team to play without some of its players, even if they didn&#039;t do anything wrong and they showed up.&nbsp; Let&#039;s take a hypothetical situation (sorry, it&#039;s kinda confusing):<br /><br />Team A has two &quot;premier&quot; players, and two... &quot;not-so-great&quot; players.&nbsp; One of the &quot;not-so-great&quot; players has lag problems, and has basically dropped out of IDL because it&#039;s pointless for him to keep showing up.&nbsp; During Week 2, the other &quot;not-so-great&quot; player forgot to demo, so he has to sit out the first round of Week 3.&nbsp; Team A&#039;s Week 3 opponent is Team B, which has 3 solid players, but none are as good as Team A&#039;s top two.<br /><br />Here are the problems:<br /><br />[list]<br />[li]It isn&#039;t fair at all that Team B should be forced to play a disadvantageous 2v2 game against Team A (which they&#039;ll probably lose... forcing them to risk more on offense in the subsequent games and possibly costing them the entire match), when Team B didn&#039;t even do anything wrong.[/li]<br />[li]Team A can consistently do this to other teams that are similar to Team B using the excuse &quot;Player C isn&#039;t around, and Player D&#039;s connection won&#039;t stay connected for more than a few minutes&quot;?[/li]<br />[/list]<br /><br />Fundamentally, if your players aren&#039;t showing up, or if they&#039;re failing to demo for whatever reason (forgot, corruption, etc.), the other team shouldn&#039;t be punished by cutting its team down.&nbsp; A good real life example is when BBS played MAD Week 7 (ODA04); MAD would&#039;ve crushed us in a 3v3, but they graciously agreed to play us 2v2 and we were a lot more competitive than we should have been.&nbsp; Sure it was great of Doomguy to do that for us, but nothing about it was &quot;fair&quot; in the larger sense.<br /><br />So while I agree that unbalanced games are pretty lame, it&#039;s nothing compared to manipulating the other team to play with a weaker roster with &quot;attendance issues&quot; or &quot;demo problems&quot;.&nbsp; Sure there&#039;s a few things that can be done administratively, but you end up dealing with player attendance, which is complicated.&nbsp; It is [b]NOT[/b] as simple as just disallowing unbalanced games, in fact, I&#039;ll bluntly say that&#039;s stupid.<br /><br />[b]Demo rules suck[/b]<br /><br />This issue is actually very simple for me:<br /><br />[list]<br />[li]Cheating sucks 1000x more, because it cheapens the competitive nature of the league[/li]<br />[li]As long as Ralphis/Doomguy/MadV/DeathBR1nger (anyone else?) are in the league, servers have to be unadvertised.[/li]<br />[li]Not everyone is listed on the banlist for cheating, and there&#039;s no reason the ZD administration should dictate IDL membership (if someone is banned for cheating it&#039;s a little different).[/li]<br />[li]Kilgore&#039;s software detection doesn&#039;t operate on unadvertised servers, so without some other kind of anti-cheat motivation, we&#039;re just asking for cheaters in the IDL.[/li]<br />[li]Most players have [b]never[/b] had a technological problem with their demos or auto-demoing.[/li]<br />[/list]<br /><br />And this &quot;the demo rules are punishing the innocent&quot; thing is going way too far.&nbsp; There are 258 demos and there have been 7 demo infractions (of which 2 were Bloodstrike), meaning there was a 2.71% demo infraction rate in the IDL this season, which is pretty damn low.&nbsp; If you just take the &quot;bad/corrupt demo&quot; infraction, there&#039;s a 1.6% demo infraction rate (4).&nbsp; If you consider Bloodstrike should have uploaded his first demo, received his first &quot;your demo is corrupt&quot; notice, and not played until his demoing worked again, it goes down to 1.1%.&nbsp; I mean, 1.1% is better than God does with humans (so is 2.71% for that matter), so I don&#039;t know what you want from us.&nbsp; Requiring a demo from a player for every game they play is the only thing that prevents cheating in the IDL.&nbsp; Any compromise on what we currently have makes it easier to cheat, and given how low the demo infraction rate was and how easy it is to auto-demo, I [b]really[/b] don&#039;t see the argument against it.<br /><br />[b]Scheduling a game is a new nightmare every week[/b]<br /><br />Yep, and dealing with player attendance is complicated, especially if you don&#039;t want to allow unbalanced games.&nbsp; It sounds as simple as &quot;Ralphis should have made consequences for not scheduling games&quot;, but trying to find which team was at fault for not scheduling is really hard, and figuring how how to penalize a team for not scheduling is even harder.<br /><br />Like I said, everyone has their &quot;5 things I&#039;d change about IDL&quot; list, and we can talk about those later.&nbsp; I just think we should chill with some of the &quot;IDL SUCKS!!!!!!1111!!!&quot; stuff because a lot of the problems can&#039;t be solved with just a little tweak.&nbsp; I know I&#039;m personally guilty of saying that Ralphis should have put teeth in the game scheduling rule, but after thinking about it I realized it wasn&#039;t that easy.&nbsp; I also think there were a lot of really positive things that happened this season, and we shouldn&#039;t just gloss over those.&nbsp; Buck up!