About Division Restricted wars

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Félix

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Because I'd rather not make a new thread on this

Division Restricted Wars: I understand newer people want to improve or learn the game, so finding a lower level early on is fine, but whats the point in being an established team for more than 6 months and you're only looking for division restricted wars, all it does it make sure that teams never really improve, and the game will stay the way it is. Back when I played MKW in 2011-2014ish, it was so fun being like a d3 player but warring the higher ranked teams in D1, because it was a challenge, and even though I kinda expected to get smacked, I always thought you could do something, because its Mario Kart and shock remains broken.

Probably the most tilting thing to me because the excuse "would rather not get smacked by a d1 and even d2 (???) team is so annoying to me lol

I will start off with that quote from Nato, who would rather not take a thread about this, so I will do it.

For those who are in the community for years, you definitely noticed that there is a (new) trend in the last months/(the last year?) to only look for division restricted wars in war chat.
That wasn't the case in the beginning of MK8d, and on the past games. Actually, back in the days, it was so rare to see clans looking for Division Restricted wars. The fact there are more teams than ever on the game (we reached the largest amount of inscription in a MK tournament recently) could explain this change, but I want to address some words about this recent trend because I think there are good points about it, but also bad points.

Nato's quote above illustrate quite well a bad point about it. As a mid/low division clan, I think this is good to play most of your matches against teams of your skill level, but you should never forget that playing sometimes against an opponent of an higher skill range than you makes it a challenge for your team, and you can learn and see different ways to play. Of course, if you spend the war complaining about your opponents' luck and you keep your eyes closed on what actually happened during the match, this is useless for you.

From a personal experience, my team was in Division 3 in the last season, and I always try to have around 25% of our matches played against (much) stronger opponents than us. Fixing realistic objectives during the match can help to make the match more enjoyable too (for example: winning 4 races, trying to do a better 4-race-GP than the last one). I also think this is not healthy to play against (much) weaker teams more often than (much) stronger teams, and I try to make sure the former ratio is less than the latter one. If you actually have pleasure to win by a lot against weaker teams than your team, and you keep declining higher teams wars, I will say that it is problematic and unhealthy for your team progress.

However, there can be good reasons for weaker teams to decline wars against stronger teams. When I ask why a team doesn't want to face us, they often bring the point that their players will get discouraged if they lose by a lot. I can understand and I acknowledge that playing too often against stronger teams is unhealthy for the team's moral too, which is why I think the 25% ratio I mentioned in the paragraph above is a honest and realistic number that every teams that wants to progress should aim.

Another reason I see is the stronger teams making fun of the weaker teams after a match. I can understand how terrible you feel when you just got crushed and your opponents trashtalked you after the match, while you made the effort to play against a stronger team. Don't get me wrong: this is shameful, and this should not have its place in the community.
Here's a recent example (out of many, unfortunately):
Above, we can see Valyria losing by a lot against Nasty Raid, and Origin taunting them after the match. Note that I don't know if any other stories happen between the two teams, or even just before the match, which is why @Origin might want to clarify the situation.
Even if their opponents didn't receive the message, this "story" is disgusting. Exposing a weaker team to lose by a lot against your team that way should be much more damnable than it is actually seen right now, and I would actually encourage staff to look at these kind of cases of a closer look, as I've always felt that making fun of weaker teams should be problems that are taken more seriously.
 
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Nato

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The reason I didn't feel like making a whole thread on this is I felt that it wouldn't have any success, so maybe this changes things. In MKW it was so fun to play vs teams better than us because if you did manage to win it felt so good, and if you lost I thought it was still fun to play. Being a D1 team since 8u and more recently seeing "Division X -> Division X 6v6" is so tilting because basically it then comes down to this

- Weaker teams are only wanting to war people at or below their skill level
- Better teams rarely war, and when they can war, they have to go through the tedious process of having 90% of teams not wanting to play them, which leads to them barely warring, or having to settle for warring star clan (sorry guys its true its literally how it is), and that same warring vs 2-3 teams gets really really boring
 

Ferg

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Not gonna lie, I agree with this. We are the only team that war a lot, so I can see why it would get annoying playing us. Then again we're always playing to improve both of our teams. Regardless of skill level, I like playing anybody to see teams improve off the the experience. But this statement 100% agreeable
 

Kay

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Generally I agree that lower Division Teams should accept more opponents from higher Divisions but lets be realistic. A Team that is already established for a longer period of time would probably not have an issue with warring stronger Teams due to them being much closer to each other as people (can figure more out as a Team) than a newly made Team. So I encourage all longer running Teams to get out of their comfort zone and war against higher Division Teams to make progress as a Team together.
On the other hand I don't think it will work as great with newly made Teams due to the people being more distant to each other as they start off, and losing by a lot to higher Division Teams will not help them keep running that Team and build chemistry to each other.

Going to my second point, during MKU Seasons I think it is fine to search for restricted wars, but not outside of MKU Seasons.
I feel like it is important for Teams to get used to the environment they play in during the Season and figure out optimal strategy to win their Division (that also means not playing against Teams from lower Divisions) ideally any Team during a MKU Season should try and play as much as they can vs. Teams in their own Division for practice. Playing lower Division Teams than yourself will not help you improve if that is your ultimate goal. So if you can't find a Team from your Division to war, then try and look up a few Divisions maybe 1 or 2 but I wouldn't make huge steps, cause at some point the skill gap would just be too big.
 

Jack

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now that we've established that it's a problem from all the posts above (Felix, Nato, Ferg, and Kay) who all bring up interesting points, i think it'd be a good idea to now throw out ideas on this thread to fix it, because this affects every team in a negative way one way or the other.

I'm going to introduce a topic I suppose might not be popular but we might as well throw it out there. I believe it's important to throw out ideas and discuss them. If you've been in the war chat at all, you'll know most teams are European, and most of these teams search around 21-22 CEST, and 20 & 23 CEST for some. Outside of these times are pretty dark though, I remember a time where we had to delay a war an hour since nobody was searching and the other team didn't want to play us. I can't recall perfectly however. I think outside of popular warring times (where division restricted wars could be potentially more welcomed), we should have anonymous war searching.

Outside of popular hours, anonymous war searching would be open and should be encouraged to use. A bot can send a message in another chat (separate from the normal war chat) where you add it to your server and do like a command like '!search 6v6' and then somebody could react to the message from the bot with a checkmark, when a war is accepted the team that originally searched would do like !sendfc 0000

Would this work? I think so, would people use it, not sure. What problems would arise, what problems would be solved, and how can we fix the new problems.

New Problems:
• Teams might avoid using the new war searching system to assure they do not get destroyed by a higher division team.
• Teams could potentially get angry when they find out what team it is, (even if it's irrational to do so in my opinion).

These are serious problems, especially the first one. How do we overcome this though? As we've established, there are popular hours. The majority of teams are European and these times are available for them to try to gather and use the old war chat, but what do we do about the growing but still significantly smaller American player base?

Problems Solved:
• Teams will no longer not accept wars because of certain teams.
• War searching will be easier and more clean overall. (More QOL then a problem in the past, but still).

I think this would be an interesting thing to at the very least try out, since there's no harm in it. Especially for teams that don't war during popular hours then just can't play. Obviously there would need to be a mentality change for some teams to be open to this, but I think it could potentially come with time. As I've said, the old war chat would still be open and justified to look for div restricted wars during popular hours, since there are a lot of teams searching. But if your team is warring outside of these hours, would this be a good idea?
 

Rookie

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Not to pile it all on, but I have a few comments. The culture has changed a ton in the last decade, and I kind of miss what it used to be. Though MKU exceeded WCL in teams recently, the community still doesn't feel as active as it once was. I think it's honestly important to note that this thread also won't do anything unless people view it, so I hope people feel free to spread the discussion around so it can get to the eyes that maybe need to read a little bit of it.

It's been a while but I want to reiterate that the D1 team I'm in currently, started in D12 of WCL. Back then we never searched for wars for specific division ranges, and it still ended up that most of our wars were vs teams similar to us in skill level. Most teams want to play teams around the skill level of their own. It's true for top teams as well. But I think people should be open to playing different teams of course. We live in a timeline where teams who are able to war prefer to not play at all over playing a higher level team.

For us, we expected to lose these wars, but saw it as an opportunity. This was one of our scrims during our season in D12:

RHttvVi.png


I saved all the pics from this because kc was in D1 at the time and I played well. It was exciting to me. Now let's be realistic about this war:

They were not using an optimal lineup for the match. It was a way bigger deal for us than it was for them. But the thing is, not every team is going to be using MKU lineups in scrims. They may want to give more players playing time, but rarely can now without getting punished greatly for it because only teams around or above their level will accept matches from them. One of my best war memories from 2010 though had nothing to do with WCL, it was being able to have a match where we competed with some of the big boys of the community. We did this somewhat frequently knowing we were going to lose, but it honestly helped us adapt to certain playstyles better.

I also want to emphasize if you can record gameplay, it's incredibly useful to watch footage versus stronger teams. You'll see things that you can't get away with versus tougher competition that you've been conditioned to assume you can do. It may be hard to watch, and include a lot of fails when you're forced to improvise more, as tougher teams will make you go off script more. But the good news is that you can adapt and make changes to things you find that won't work in certain scenarios. When you never challenge yourself, you're not only being complacent, but you're not rewiring your brain on any subpar decision making, because you're not being punished for things, ever.

It is important to tell people you don't just naturally get better because you play better people. But if the experiences change the way you see the game, then it'll be useful. Just compare footage between different types of opponents. Quite literally the difference between tier a and tier b in lounge these days is that opponents make collecting coins incredibly hard, it feels to me personally. In short, challenge yourself, and think about the game and losses. In the races that are fun to watch (the ones that go right), find out what went right. Recruiting stronger players isn't the only way to improve!
 

Teeples

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now that we've established that it's a problem from all the posts above (Felix, Nato, Ferg, and Kay) who all bring up interesting points, i think it'd be a good idea to now throw out ideas on this thread to fix it, because this affects every team in a negative way one way or the other.

I'm going to introduce a topic I suppose might not be popular but we might as well throw it out there. I believe it's important to throw out ideas and discuss them. If you've been in the war chat at all, you'll know most teams are European, and most of these teams search around 21-22 CEST, and 20 & 23 CEST for some. Outside of these times are pretty dark though, I remember a time where we had to delay a war an hour since nobody was searching and the other team didn't want to play us. I can't recall perfectly however. I think outside of popular warring times (where division restricted wars could be potentially more welcomed), we should have anonymous war searching.

Outside of popular hours, anonymous war searching would be open and should be encouraged to use. A bot can send a message in another chat (separate from the normal war chat) where you add it to your server and do like a command like '!search 6v6' and then somebody could react to the message from the bot with a checkmark, when a war is accepted the team that originally searched would do like !sendfc 0000

Would this work? I think so, would people use it, not sure. What problems would arise, what problems would be solved, and how can we fix the new problems.

New Problems:
• Teams might avoid using the new war searching system to assure they do not get destroyed by a higher division team.
• Teams could potentially get angry when they find out what team it is, (even if it's irrational to do so in my opinion).

These are serious problems, especially the first one. How do we overcome this though? As we've established, there are popular hours. The majority of teams are European and these times are available for them to try to gather and use the old war chat, but what do we do about the growing but still significantly smaller American player base?

Problems Solved:
• Teams will no longer not accept wars because of certain teams.
• War searching will be easier and more clean overall. (More QOL then a problem in the past, but still).

I think this would be an interesting thing to at the very least try out, since there's no harm in it. Especially for teams that don't war during popular hours then just can't play. Obviously there would need to be a mentality change for some teams to be open to this, but I think it could potentially come with time. As I've said, the old war chat would still be open and justified to look for div restricted wars during popular hours, since there are a lot of teams searching. But if your team is warring outside of these hours, would this be a good idea?


This isn't a terrible idea but I don't think it would work. Teams could just refuse to play still and nothing would happen. The only way this would work if there were punishments for ditching which there isn't really anything that can be done about it. The only way around it would be an ELO system for scrims but that provides a lot more negatives than positives and failed completely hard during 8U and I think it would again.

If there was some way to punish teams for ditching it could be worth a try though.

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I also want to express how much this hurts NA based teams. I'm sure the EU teams probably don't feel it as much as the EU scene is way bigger and they can search EU afternoons and EU evenings and there are tons on the table but when you're an NA based team this isn't the case. Especially when you're an older team, like mine for example. COVID helps but the reality of the situation is people work and have commitments during the day so lots of people can't even play until 5-6pm EST on weekdays from NA if they work. This makes it actually borderline impossible to get good practice in with MKU lineups and even just to war in general. I'm lucky my hours are 7-3 and not the standard 9-5 otherwise I would miss out on the 4/5pm EST war slots during the week which is usually the only times my team can play during the week. Finding anything NA evenings is extremely difficult to have anyone accept us or be interested in playing us outside the same two teams. It's actually objectively less playing and practice time if you're in this situation and when I have to move to 9-5 the game will borderline be unplayable at the team level bar Saturday/Sunday which is honestly really tilting.

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But the thing is, not every team is going to be using MKU lineups in scrims. They may want to give more players playing time, but rarely can now without getting punished greatly for it because only teams around or above their level will accept matches from them.

^^^ I can't express this enough too. Everyone sees a high division team search and just assumes the MKU boys are coming out! I can't speak for every higher division team, but we have a lot of people in ARC and usually have a wide range in our scrim lineups unless we specifically are searching for Sky/Terra practice than that's the Lineups that will be pulled out.

Like the table rookie posted too, you might catch a higher division team with a weaker lineup, or even a bad day with a good lineup, or best yet just outplay a team in a much higher division and surprised yourselves. Winning a war you thought you had 0 chance at winning going into it are huge confidence boosters for growing teams.

Giving a shoutout to Melodya also with this, the teams grown a solid amount and they have been one of the not top division teams that have consistently not ghosted us or even contacted to play us on multiple occasions for practice. It's really refreshing and honestly, that motivates me personally when teams do this.

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I like Felix's philosophy as well, try to get 25% of your matches against higher teams you normally wouldn't play. Don't need to even start that high, could do 20%, could set up one war a week as kind of a test to see how much you've improved the past week.

I can say with confidence that the newer teams that have been climbing up fast the past few seasons are unironically all teams that haven't ghosted us a lot for wars, who would have thought.

Also, anyone that belittles teams for challenging themselves please actually just leave the community, thanks, you are an even bigger issue.
 

Jack

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This isn't a terrible idea but I don't think it would work. Teams could just refuse to play still and nothing would happen. The only way this would work if there were punishments for ditching which there isn't really anything that can be done about it. The only way around it would be an ELO system for scrims but that provides a lot more negatives than positives and failed completely hard during 8U and I think it would again.

If there was some way to punish teams for ditching it could be worth a try though.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I also want to express how much this hurts NA based teams. I'm sure the EU teams probably don't feel it as much as the EU scene is way bigger and they can search EU afternoons and EU evenings and there are tons on the table but when you're an NA based team this isn't the case. Especially when you're an older team, like mine for example. COVID helps but the reality of the situation is people work and have commitments during the day so lots of people can't even play until 5-6pm EST on weekdays from NA if they work. This makes it actually borderline impossible to get good practice in with MKU lineups and even just to war in general. I'm lucky my hours are 7-3 and not the standard 9-5 otherwise I would miss out on the 4/5pm EST war slots during the week which is usually the only times my team can play during the week. Finding anything NA evenings is extremely difficult to have anyone accept us or be interested in playing us outside the same two teams. It's actually objectively less playing and practice time if you're in this situation and when I have to move to 9-5 the game will borderline be unplayable at the team level bar Saturday/Sunday which is honestly really tilting.

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I appreciate the response, there's no doubt that it was a flawed idea. I was just trying my best to throw ideas out I suppose. I think a mentality change is needed though.
 

Teeples

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I appreciate the response, there's no doubt that it was a flawed idea. I was just trying my best to throw ideas out I suppose. I think a mentality change is needed though.

Yeah, there's nothing wrong with giving out ideas. I don't think you were around 8U but this is pretty much what happened.

There was an ELO system and you could agree for wars to be "ranked" or "unranked" so it wasn't random even (which is worse than what you suggested". Teams would just choose to not play ranked wars if they had a bad LU or be hesitant to accept ranked wars against better people.

Your idea eliminates the latter in the sentence above but the former I think would be an issue unless every war was forced to be under this "ranked" system but then that kind of defeats the whole purpose of scrimmages imo and would just make everything a sweat fest and teams always trying to just use their best LU and would cause lots of internal strife for many teams I can imagine. And unless we could punish teams for dippting a random system with no ELO wouldn't work since the teams we try and make use it wouldn't.
 
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