_Osiris_ said:
Not a fan of moving the promotion play offs to just before the next WNL. The point of playoffs in esports and real life sports is a chance for the current team to cement their place in a different league for next season. Teams can then strengthen or might lose players based on where they know they will play.
Using football as an obvious example you dont play the play offs before the start of the current season because thats insanity.
Imagine being a captain of the team playing for a spot in division A "hey come join us we might be in division A as long as the team we are supposed to play doesn't go and get a ton of new players just before the season starts screwing us over"
Playoffs are supposed to be a reward for playing well one season, If the reasoning is that teams might change and players might get added well welcome to the world i guess? Might as well re evaluate every team just before the next wnl and resort them all into different divisions based on who joins and leaves
As we have said before, our biggest goal with the Warband Native League was to stabilize teams and thus the scene as a whole.
We don't want to see teams picking up loads of players because their old team just secured a spot in a higher division, you are actually punishing the old players who have achieved that goal by increasing their competition for playtime within the team. That in turn increases the risk of those old players leaving the team because they fear they won't get to play anymore, which then can, in the worst of cases, completely change the face of the team. Then, as we have said in response to a question asked at the start of the tournament regarding this potential issue, we would have to consider whether that changed team still qualifies as the original team that played in the WNL7, or as a new team.
In an ideal scenario, the current teams would stay together, and just continue to play until the next season. Unless some players suddenly start to massively under- or overperform, the difference in strength between the bottom and top runners of each division will roughly stay the same, regardless of whether we play the promotions ahead of next season or at the end of this one.
In a more realistic scenario, we see a lot of teams either not coming back or completely changing their roster, which case the results from last season don't count much in terms of estimating the team strength for the next season. And that is, in our opinion, the biggest danger when running a division based system: Ending up with unbalanced division that produce stomps.
Playing the promotions right before the next season rather than now will greatly reduce that risk because big changes in team strength are unlikely to happen inbetween the promotions and the actual season. Or in other words: The estimate we will get then will be far more accurate than the estimate we got half a year go, which will then result in more well balanced divisions and more evenly balanced matches.
I can see it might be frustrating for certain teams who wanted to get the promotion matches out of the way right now, but we fear the potential frustration of players having to play in badly balanced matches is far greater.