I&#039;m usually the 1st one to say that IDL is about competition, and I think it is -- usually the people who are the most dedicated do the best, and I think that&#039;s fair.&nbsp; And I think this applies to everyone up and down the chain:<br /><br />[list]<br />[li]Captains choosing players and coming up with strategies[/li]<br />[li]Players learning how their teammates play and working to be successful together[/li]<br />[li]The entire team working to communicate clearly about what&#039;s expected, when practices and games are, and when they are available to play[/li]<br />[/list]<br /><br />I think that&#039;s the basis for an IDL team.&nbsp; Sure every team/captain has their own style, but in the end these things have to happen more often than not or the team will fail.&nbsp; I think that a lot of things have happened in the league so that the odds are in favor of teams succeeding.&nbsp; Franchising helps build solid foundations for teams, and avoids uneasy matchups.&nbsp; Draft order that&#039;s based on prior season performance helps ensure a balance amongst the teams, and so on.<br /><br />But despite all this, there are still teams that fail - and having been on more than one of these teams I can say it blows; it blows real hard.&nbsp; I don&#039;t have a solution for this, in fact I think it&#039;s just something that&#039;s going to happen every season.&nbsp; I do think that the most common cause of this is bad attendance (as much as I hate that word); teams that don&#039;t practice and don&#039;t show up for games lose, plain and simple.&nbsp; Some teams can get away with that, but they&#039;ll lose against more talented or more prepared teams - and every season there&#039;s a team that&#039;s both talented and prepared, so you can&#039;t expect to win it all without spending some time and effort.&nbsp; I also think that&#039;s fair, even though there&#039;s only so much a captain can do to get his players on.&nbsp; The IDL administration is always quick to recommend and grant player substitutions in the case of poor attendance, but captains know that replacing a player like midian with a player like Ladna doesn&#039;t solve anything, so they just resign themselves and hope that the situation fixes itself.&nbsp; As much as I&#039;d like to fix this, I&#039;m just not sure what to do.<br /><br />My point is that IDL, despite having problems, is overall pretty awesome.&nbsp; For almost 4 years it&#039;s been the scene of the most competitive CTF that Doom&#039;s ever seen, its players increase in skill every season and it&#039;s produced some amazing, unforgettable moments.&nbsp; It does take a lot of effort to run and maintain, but overall I think it&#039;s worth it.&nbsp; We just need to remind ourselves every once in a while that even though it&#039;s not perfect, IDL is still a lot of fun and without it, we&#039;re stuck with lame clan wars (that never get played).<br /><br />That said, the board is always looking to make things better.&nbsp; Things we&#039;re talking about right now are:<br /><br />[list]<br />[li]Expanding to 12 teams[/li]<br />[li]Repealing the franchise system[/li]<br />[li]Making the season shorter or longer[/li]<br />[li]Changing from 3v3 to 4v4 (or some other configuration)[/li]<br />[li]Setting up a system to pick the maps for the season, like community voting or something[/li]<br />[li]Banning games that aren&#039;t 3v3 (so 3v2 or 2v2 games aren&#039;t allowed, any team that can&#039;t get 3 players on forfeits, meaning double forfeits are possible)[/li]<br />[/list]<br /><br />I&#039;d like to know what everyone thinks about that stuff, we&#039;re kind of curious as to what the players think we should do.