FFA Masters League

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