FFA Masters League

Hey nerds,

I wouldn't say that this is the most motivated I've ever been, but I can't deny, that setting up FFA events brings some joy to me. Thus, I allowed you to push me into some Team Battle Royale 8 shenanigans. We all love TBR and while it can be super stressful, I just hope it'll be like the last one, which wasn't.

What is TBR? It's a team event, where all participating players are being drafted into their teams by four team captains. Throughout the month of September, teams seat their players for the daily FFA games scheduled. While the majority of matches will be regular FFAs, we also include other modes (e.g. random hero, no chat, random spell, team ffa etc.). Every team has access to two shared Battle.net accounts, so matches are played anonymously.

When: Sep 8 - Oct 15, 2024 (tbd)

Please sign up via the tbr-8-sign-up channel in Discord. We reserve the right to decline players that are unknown to the community or do not meet the trustworthiness threshold.

Remarks: As you may remember, we hosted the vast majority of TBR 7 matches via Flo. Due to some drama around the visible lobby ping, we transitioned to Battle.net for crunch time matches. We have yet to decide how to handle hosting in TBR 8

We may not be able to host via W3C due to visible ping in lobby and the map pool.

It's always a bit tricky to maintain "map pool hygene" in TBR. As usual, I will provide the map file subfolders before the event and hope everyone can paste it into their folder pathes.

Cheers,
HighTac

When can we expect TBR 8? The FFA scene is very active, and we all prize this team ffa tournament to play. It would be nice if it was organized, and that information if we could expect...... with love and respect,thanks

...Leluaami, aka The Evil Kid. With three victories in the regular season and an unforgettable performance in the grand final, the young Finn reached the pinnacle of FFA. He's the third FML winner from Finland, following Rain and J33. Hopefully, for FFA and Back2Warcraft viewers, Lelu does not retire.

Thank you to all participants, to rulaZ and Ponty for all the admin work and to all the streamers (Neo, Ghost, ToD, Ponty, etc). All in all, this season went really well. I wish there'd been fewer subs, and in retrospect, we should have been more strict when it came to registrations and no-show disqualifications. It was the first time we took the TBR approach to FML scheduling. From an admin perspective, it was a full success, considering how much work and headache comes with scheduling threads usually. Matches were fun overall and especially the playoffs delivered.

I mentioned before, that I don't enjoy the Discord chat on most days. It's fine to use it as a stress relief valve from time to time, but having non-stop flaming or feuds is tiring. If you don't like other community members, block them, if FFA stresses you too much, take a walk outside or reconsider your mental approach to the game. Also, we saw multiple occasions in the last two months, where players approached admins with requests á la "you can't allow this player to sub", "you must implement this rule", blabla. Very often, decisions aren't as easy as they may seem to the outside. Sometimes, it's not black and white, but a grey area and repercussions must be thought through. Admins do their best and we ask everyone to respect and accept decisions.

Regardless of what I wrote above, this certainly won't be the last FML event I organize. I will go on a hiatus for some time though, to focus on real life duties. It seems that many community members need a bit of a break, but as we know, FFA always returns. RulaZ and Neo will continue their weeklies and hopefully the ladder will remain somewhat alive.

Cheers,
HighTac
 

<3

Hi everyone,

We made it through five weeks of intense FFA and crowned the Harmless Simps as our Team Battle Royale 7 Champion. Congratulations to the winning team. Your glorious name will be immortalized in our Hall of Fame. Your path was smooth early on, but turned more and more rocky throughout July. After Ravenclaw tied points in match 33, we witnessed four tense tie breaker matches that you had to play with your captain sayso being absent. You kept calm and held together as a team.

Kudos also to Team Ravenclaw, which made an incredible comeback and almost sealed title number five. Thank you to all players and captains for making TBR 7 possible.

Conclusion

While not reflected by the participant count, TBR 7 felt more exciting than the previous TBRs. It might be, because FFA is more popular these days thanks to many streamers, an active W3C ladder and Back2Warcraft. But also the meta seems to have changed and we see a lower share of boring sit and chat fests. Eventually, and I repeat myself, it's up to the players to play FFA in a way that attracts viewers and new rookies. Having that said, the level of drama spiked too unfortunately. I admit that some feuds and emotions are interesting, but it shouldn't cross a line and overshadow the fun. The line can be difficult to draw at times, but some community members like to test it more than others.

Reflection

The three biggest points of criticism were:

1. Player Guessing / Revealing
2. Tie Breaker Format
3. Excessive Toxicity

The player guessing situation felt most annoying to me. No case was like another and they were all facilitated by rule book gaps and the general issue of visible pings on Flo. Uncertainty is a bit of a lose-lose-situation from an admin standpoint and we'll try to avoid it in the future.

The tie breaker format was not ideal, but I also accepted that there is no perfect two-team tie breaker in FFA. The preteam one in TBR 6 was great, but required many players to be available, which was not the case this time. In retrospect, we should have just gone for regular no-chat FFA without the race aspect that allowed teams to know who is who. This was an oversight on my side that shouldn't have happened. Prior to the tie breaker, RulaZ came up with a timer / micro arena / custom map format that I vetoed. I'm not a big fan of custom maps or "1v1 FFA" and was sceptical if we could come up with workable map files on short notice. I felt bad for not liking this idea and think we may want to give it a try in the future, if there is time to prepare and test maps prior.

The toxicity one leaves me a bit clueless. I do think that every few days there are insults in Discord that clearly cross a line. No admin has the capacity to constantly track 3-5k rows of chat per day. Most community members should be mature enough to know when enough is enough. Still, some players have polarizing play styles or character traits that make them a frequent target and in the end, everyone has a different opinion about acceptable insults. We activated the time out feature in our Discord and will make use of it to calm things down. 

Outlook

Last year I thought TBR 6 might be my last event, as I expected not to have any spare time after becoming a father. Extending my parental time helped to run TBR 7. While TBR 7 was more exhausting and time consuming than TBR 6, I am willing to run one more FML season, before I have to get back to work. I hope we can feed off the current activity level. However, I do not have the motivation, nor time for endless discord discussions and to moderate each line of chat. If you have a problem with that or can't respect admin decisions, please don't sign up.

Cheers,
HighTac