New MKU Format for Season 7

[Nato]

Some of you may have not noticed, but the 2nd post was updated by Lez for a french translation

 

[Teeples]

I appreciate the time and work staff have put into this. I have hopes that this could be the right way to shake things up for MKU League.

A few thoughts:



I was getting real hard reading the first half of this given that I always wanted indivs to be gone, but back when I was MKU admin everyone instantly dismissed the idea. Then I kept reading and I was kinda bummed.

I've been saying forever that if noone kept track of indivs publicly the overall level of play would instantly skyrocket, because there would be zero motivation to score well and everyone would actually do what they were supposed to do to make the team win. Since the beginning of this year I have been using tables without indivs that show the race scores instead and it's been very well received by the team. We also went from starting 0-3 to beating AU within a few weeks though I won't claim that it was all due to that.
If you really want to keep track of how well players are actually doing for their teams... instead of tracking indivs you could track the overall win percentage of everyone on a given team.

The community would really just need to get used to it, that's all.



Another thing I've always wanted but could never convince enough people to actually get it implemented. Really happy you're finally doing this.


Lastly, I really don't want to talk about the potential negatives too much at this point, because it's all just getting started, but there are mainly two things that I'm worried about. First, dropouts. Dropout teams always suck, but they suck even more in a format where every place in ever conference actually means something and where we have playoffs. I'm really hoping that the dropout rate can stay low or even go lower to make sure this rather complicated format actually works on full steam.

Second, the two matches per week thing. I'm aware that there are lots of teams that would have little trouble gathering their players for 3 and a half hours instead of one, but others probably would. Especially teams that are less active outside of MKU and mainly just play that one match every week will feel the difference between that one hour everyone can sit down and mute their Sunday evening movie for (or have lunch early or whatever in other countries), but four hours is a pretty huge commitment. It's not a big deal to have that for World Cups and such, because that's a once-a-year thing, but having that every week is much different. You basically have to plan your Sundays around MKU now when before it was just that one hour in between. If teams drop out due to this we could obviously run into the issues I described above. For now I'll just hope it all works out, so I guess just be aware of those risks and make sure teams are too, because a proper preparation and communication will be more important than ever.

We can consider win percentage as well. My concern would be the board would just be filled with people from the best team and not show much. I keep won percentage stats for ARC too and I think keeping more detailed stats for your own team is a great idea just unsure if you in percentage for individuals would translate well to league format. I'd encourage teams to this though with themselves. Individuals are still stats and preserving history and records is very important imo so we want to keep them will just not emphasize them on the table which implies they are as important as the team effort. Sports leagues have stats you can look up as well.

The two matches thing is the one thing I have skepticism about personally and made me nervous suggesting this. So far the majority of feedback I've seen has been positive though so I'm optimistic. We are most likely going to switch the first match from 6:30 to 7:00 UTC which means only 7-9pm UTC will be used for mku which is two hours instead of one (so like playing CTWL). I'd like to believe teams can pull through with this extra hour in order to progress the community. Time will tell what happens I suppose.

 

[Athaway]

I thought I said that on my first post but guess not, I have a suggestion about teams getting 4th in their conference or losing quarters finals, especially with conference format. Things like sudden step up from a team, or the skill gap between seed 1 vs seed 2 is larger than seed 2 vs seed 3 could end up with a conference being stronger than another one, and imo that's not a good thing for powers rankings and finals results when tiebreakers for 5-6th and 7-8th are just regular season record.

For now I see 3 options

1. Keep the "better regular season record" system

2. Match for 5th/7th place (BO1)

In this option and in our D1 example, wf star and ARC gets to play (either W9 or W10) a BO1 to get either 7th if they win and 8th if they lose, that could create more accurate results.
For xi and HD, they're playing a BO1 either at the same time as semifinals or W10 to get 5th or 6th place.

3rd. Mix of both

There's one thing that isn't used (?) yet, and it's the head-to-head match (in the example, wf and ARC gets to play between W6 and 8 in the regular season).
In this scenario, if, let's say, wf star have a better regular season record AND beat ARC in the regular season, they don't have to play the BO1 we speaked about earlier and they auto get 7th place.
Now, if HD have a better regular season record to xi BUT xi beat HD in the regular season, BO1 for 5th place would happen

Leaving W10 (and W9 for 4th in conference) open for a third of teams playing this competition is honnestly a shame imo and the 2 options I proposed could solve, even if it's a bit, that

 

[Jotabe]

Traducción al español incorporada en el post 3.

 

[Daxx]

That's definitely an interesting change, but I'd like to give my two cents on it:

- Current MKU format needs to stop. 10 weeks is way too long, it's boring, we've been playing this for years now, it just ran out of novelty after such a long time. The new format looks good but it would be as long as our current system if I read that correctly and to be honest 2 months and a half for a tournament is way too long. MKC is doing a good job by hosting relatively short tournaments, I think 5/7 weeks would be a good start, eventually what would be the best imo is to make tournaments over weekends just like MKBlog does sometimes, per exemple hosting a 6v6 tournament over 1 or 2 weekends could be an interesting idea that could maybe get the japanese players to play as well, which would mean a bigger playerbase with a lot of competition at every level. I am not saying this should be the norm, again what I like about MKC is that you guys host a lot of different tournament types and formats and that is definitely good, and that's why I think alternating between this new league (but shorter if possible) and tournaments over weekends could be very interesting, might even be an instant team tournament, that would be nice as well. But 10 weeks imo is definitely too long, you can't see the end of it, and that new format doesn't look applicable at lower divisions the same way as higher divs, because it's too much to ask for new competitive players. What would work best for lower divs is to keep 1 match a week on Sundays I think, maybe you could rework how it's done but I think if you would want to apply this to relatively new competitive players you need to start off easy with them and don't ask for a big commitment, which is why keeping a match a week is essential imo, maybe in a different format than current MKU league though, up to you. I'd really like to see tournaments over weekends tbh, it's pretty hype to advance and see who you're going to face next, and one last point that is very important for me: waiting 7 days inbetween matches kinda ruins the hype compared to a tournament that make matches happen one after another, I think it's definitely way more hype to have matches less spread out over weeks and weeks. To go back to the main topic, removing indivs is good and this new league is almost flawless imo

tldr: 10 weeks is too long, making different tournament types is nice, please try to host team tournaments over 1/2 weekends (on the side or not), could even be instant team tournaments, different formats are nice to play so keep up the good work

 

[Jack]

That's definitely an interesting change, but I'd like to give my two cents on it:

- Current MKU format needs to stop. 10 weeks is way too long, it's boring, we've been playing this for years now, it just ran out of novelty after such a long time. The new format looks good but it would be as long as our current system if I read that correctly and to be honest 2 months and a half for a tournament is way too long. MKC is doing a good job by hosting relatively short tournaments, I think 5/7 weeks would be a good start, eventually what would be the best imo is to make tournaments over weekends just like MKBlog does sometimes, per exemple hosting a 6v6 tournament over 1 or 2 weekends could be an interesting idea that could maybe get the japanese players to play as well, which would mean a bigger playerbase with a lot of competition at every level. I am not saying this should be the norm, again what I like about MKC is that you guys host a lot of different tournament types and formats and that is definitely good, and that's why I think alternating between this new league (but shorter if possible) and tournaments over weekends could be very interesting, might even be an instant team tournament, that would be nice as well. But 10 weeks imo is definitely too long, you can't see the end of it, and that new format doesn't look applicable at lower divisions the same way as higher divs, because it's too much to ask for new competitive players. What would work best for lower divs is to keep 1 match a week on Sundays I think, maybe you could rework how it's done but I think if you would want to apply this to relatively new competitive players you need to start off easy with them and don't ask for a big commitment, which is why keeping a match a week is essential imo, maybe in a different format than current MKU league though, up to you. I'd really like to see tournaments over weekends tbh, it's pretty hype to advance and see who you're going to face next, and one last point that is very important for me: waiting 7 days inbetween matches kinda ruins the hype compared to a tournament that make matches happen one after another, I think it's definitely way more hype to have matches less spread out over weeks and weeks. To go back to the main topic, removing indivs is good and this new league is almost flawless imo

tldr: 10 weeks is too long, making different tournament types is nice, please try to host team tournaments over 1/2 weekends (on the side or not), could even be instant team tournaments, different formats are nice to play so keep up the good work

tbh i get where you're coming from but i dont see 10 weeks ever going down

 

[Teeples]

That's definitely an interesting change, but I'd like to give my two cents on it:
Current MKU format needs to stop. 10 weeks is way too long, it's boring, we've been playing this for years now, it just ran out of novelty after such a long time. The new format looks good but it would be as long as our current system if I read that correctly and to be honest 2 months and a half for a tournament is way too long. MKC is doing a good job by hosting relatively short tournaments, I think 5/7 weeks would be a good start, eventually what would be the best imo is to make tournaments over weekends just like MKBlog does sometimes, per exemple hosting a 6v6 tournament over 1 or 2 weekends could be an interesting idea that could maybe get the japanese players to play as well, which would mean a bigger playerbase with a lot of competition at every level. I am not saying this should be the norm, again what I like about MKC is that you guys host a lot of different tournament types and formats and that is definitely good, and that's why I think alternating between this new league (but shorter if possible) and tournaments over weekends could be very interesting, might even be an instant team tournament, that would be nice as well. But 10 weeks imo is definitely too long, you can't see the end of it, and that new format doesn't look applicable at lower divisions the same way as higher divs, because it's too much to ask for new competitive players. What would work best for lower divs is to keep 1 match a week on Sundays I think, maybe you could rework how it's done but I think if you would want to apply this to relatively new competitive players you need to start off easy with them and don't ask for a big commitment, which is why keeping a match a week is essential imo, maybe in a different format than current MKU league though, up to you. I'd really like to see tournaments over weekends tbh, it's pretty hype to advance and see who you're going to face next, and one last point that is very important for me: waiting 7 days inbetween matches kinda ruins the hype compared to a tournament that make matches happen one after another, I think it's definitely way more hype to have matches less spread out over weeks and weeks. To go back to the main topic, removing indivs is good and this new league is almost flawless imo

tldr: 10 weeks is too long, making different tournament types is nice, please try to host team tournaments over 1/2 weekends (on the side or not), could even be instant team tournaments, different formats are nice to play so keep up the good work

I get what you mean. Shorter tournaments work really well when done right. I think the best solution is being able to run a league format and have tournaments pop up as you recommended.

The current format is definitely stale dated and boring and the winners are usually decided early on. This format is hoping to make the league portion more exciting as there will be elimination matches and teams always have something to fight for unlike at the moment where if you lose the first two weeks what's the point. We're hoping to juice up the old format to make it more modern.

I've always been a fan of tournaments like agility and stuff that run over 1-2 weekends, I think these are extremely healthy for the community too and we definitely plan to run more stuff like that and I hope more frequently. It's difficult at the moment with amplify running through saturdays and MKU happening atm on Sundays (one more week). There is a solid break between MKU this season and next so maybe something could come out of that early April on Sundays. I'm not sure whats planned however.

The ideal smaller tournament imo would run over 2 Saturdays but this would need like 4-5 matches per day (Sat-Sun only if nothing else going on). I think we need to keep the main league as the total teams signing up for it are always more, some teams never play in the short tournament formats (I don't know why) but the numbers are always significantly less but hopefully that can come to improve. Being able to get some Japanese teams would be really nice too as it seems they are integrating with the western scene more with lounge and stuff.

Which would leave the main league Sunday and quick tournaments on Saturdays I personally think is the optimal solution, but we won't be able to that until around after Easter. The main league I still think is a necessity and needs to stay but it definitely needs to be revamped which is why we are doing that, because it is boring. Lots of teams only play in the league format or prefer it and it gives some teams better matchups (every short tournament every low div team that signs up has to play very high teams first bit since that's the way seedings work for that stuff) and early round blowouts in tournaments are much worse than the kind of blowouts you'll see in this format now and then. Weaker teams would also see their tournaments end instantly and never get to play as much. I don't think 10 weeks is too long if it isn't the only option. It tests teams longevity and depth as well which shorter things can't which is interesting.

I do agree we need to shift the community focus on getting more shorter tournaments out though and try and get more teams to sign up for these kinds of things. Hopefully, more short team tournaments will be pumped out in the future but Saturdays and Sundays are kinda locked up for the next while (Early April Sunday's I believe are free atm though).

 

[Jack]

I get what you mean. Shorter tournaments work really well when done right. I think the best solution is being able to run a league format and have tournaments pop up as you recommended.

The current format is definitely stale dated and boring and the winners are usually decided early on. This format is hoping to make the league portion more exciting as there will be elimination matches and teams always have something to fight for unlike at the moment where if you lose the first two weeks what's the point. We're hoping to juice up the old format to make it more modern.

I've always been a fan of tournaments like agility and stuff that run over 1-2 weekends, I think these are extremely healthy for the community too and we definitely plan to run more stuff like that and I hope more frequently. It's difficult at the moment with amplify running through saturdays and MKU happening atm on Sundays (one more week). There is a solid break between MKU this season and next so maybe something could come out of that early April on Sundays. I'm not sure whats planned however.

The ideal smaller tournament imo would run over 2 Saturdays but this would need like 4-5 matches per day (Sat-Sun only if nothing else going on). I think we need to keep the main league as the total teams signing up for it are always more, some teams never play in the short tournament formats (I don't know why) but the numbers are always significantly less but hopefully that can come to improve. Being able to get some Japanese teams would be really nice too as it seems they are integrating with the western scene more with lounge and stuff.

Which would leave the main league Sunday and quick tournaments on Saturdays I personally think is the optimal solution, but we won't be able to that until around after Easter. The main league I still think is a necessity and needs to stay but it definitely needs to be revamped which is why we are doing that, because it is boring. Lots of teams only play in the league format or prefer it and it gives some teams better matchups (every short tournament every low div team that signs up has to play very high teams first bit since that's the way seedings work for that stuff) and early round blowouts in tournaments are much worse than the kind of blowouts you'll see in this format now and then. Weaker teams would also see their tournaments end instantly and never get to play as much. I don't think 10 weeks is too long if it isn't the only option. It tests teams longevity and depth as well which shorter things can't which is interesting.

I do agree we need to shift the community focus on getting more shorter tournaments out though and try and get more teams to sign up for these kinds of things. Hopefully, more short team tournaments will be pumped out in the future but Saturdays and Sundays are kinda locked up for the next while (Early April Sunday's I believe are free atm though).

Thanks for the explanation you could have just explained that we can't do that