tussio says

Seems to me there are a lot of people being affected by only a few sub par players. While I think more people should have the opportunity to gather, these certain few are preventing anybody from gathering. So bare in mind that this is the opinion of a very middle of the road player who doesn't expect to play in high skill gathers as they're currently proposed, but I'm also not sensitive.

So what if the casual gather is replaced with high skill gather with the big difference being that there's an added vote feature. Just like there's the option to vote to regather, what about an option to vote to remove a player from the high skill lobby and just move them to regular lobby? This way it takes the tediousness of inviting out but still lets a majority rule kind of thing to police potential problem players out. Is abuse a likelihood? Maybe, but let abusers be handed out gather bans as per usual.

Maybe a vote remove player option is added to regular gathers too but maybe something like 8 votes are required in normal gather whereas maybe just 4 required in high skill gather.

I'm sure I haven't elaborated as I'd like but posting from my phone is a huge pain.

there are already troll captain picks, troll regathers etc... so whats to stop people troll kicking someone?

So Tussio, you want everyone to have access to this gather and expect people to vote on everyone they don't want? That's too open, and secondly that creates a very toxic environment of people voting to kick people. It's also hard to get people to vote on things while waiting to play.

The problem is over-regulation and now you're trying to add more rules to fix it.
Gathers worked fine in the past didn't they?

The problem is really the crack down on "player abuse", people like Bubba are vital to an ecosystem like this, the noob flaming keeps the rookie herd thinned, the rookies that stick through it become better players and eventually find their place.

Lots of rookies join nowadays because its a safe place, I used to spec a ton because I knew I'd sandbag and get flamed if I joined certain gathers.

RIP Bubba #TheHeroWeDeserve

paddy says

The problem is over-regulation and now you're trying to add more rules to fix it.
Gathers worked fine in the past didn't they?

The problem is really the crack down on "player abuse", people like Bubba are vital to an ecosystem like this, the noob flaming keeps the rookie herd thinned, the rookies that stick through it become better players and eventually find their place.

Lots of rookies join nowadays because its a safe place, I used to spec a ton because I knew I'd sandbag and get flamed if I joined certain gathers.

This might be the first intelligent thing I've ever read on the ENSL!

Amen to that brother! B)

Bubba the Noob Hunter. But yeah Bubba is a necessary evil imo. For the most part he kept the no rookie pub clear of faggots. And is the sudden overpopulation of shit on the gathers after Bubba gets rebanned a coincidence? I THINK NOT.

kash, I know this, but that's why I advised fit gather bans to still be handed out for abusers. Additionally, the hope would be that higher skilled players would be more interested in getting a decent game going than troll voting one another out. Like you said, troll captain votes and regathers occur in the current system, yet the system still exists. I don't see people too alling to have gathers as they are now removed...

Deck, tbh I don't /want/ anything. As I said, I have no anticipation of playing in these proposed high skill gathersgathers, just offering an idea of a solution that would need less babysitting than the invite idea. Also, this hating on players like gaben is not toxic? You said yourself you forsee the invite system being too exclusive. This at least gives ppl the option to join and if it's deemed by majority that they're not up to par, then they have to wait in normal gather lobby. Imho, that's slightly less exclusive than som invite only business. It also removes the problem of not being able to accurately pool current or past div 1 or prem players or players who are skilled enough but not currently on a team together.

We all have generally good enough ideas of one another's skill, this would simply empower those in any active highskill lobby to remove those who aren't capable of staying competitive at that level. Personally I dont think that's anything to be offended about. There's still the regular gather.

Edit: +1 for bubba
Without snakes in the garden, the mice and voles will overrun the plot.

And tussio, it's often far more than just a few: http://imgur.com/2oIRNmX

Fair enough, just trying to come up with an easier solution..

Deckard says

So Tussio, you want everyone to have access to this gather and expect people to vote on everyone they don't want? That's too open, and secondly that creates a very toxic environment of people voting to kick people. It's also hard to get people to vote on things while waiting to play.

Well it would be for higher level players wouldn't it? If you're afraid of getting shit on and insulted go play casual gathers. If your afraid people won't vote and they don't then they aren't allowed to complain.

Add a warning that your competitive experience may change when playing this type of gather before hand to make sure B)

And if you're afraid of toxicity, get off the internet, go back to pubs, make a safe space gather were no insulting or bm is allowed?

Let me reiterate my proposal incorporating some small updates based on the great ideas in this thread.

Create a League Gather and an Open Gather, both 6v6. When you open the main gather page the Open Gather is the one shown by default and anyone with an account in good standing can join. For the League Gather, any number of players may join who are active roster members on a team in the top division in the most current season. Additionally, as a temporary/stopgap solution, up to 4 slots may be claimed as "automatic invites" first-come first-serve by any player who can represent either > 9 score/min or > 2000 skill (these numbers are very simple to tweak both now and going forward). This is just an coarse approximation of people who would broadly be reliable invitees. But remember, this last part is temporary and its chief merit is that it can be implemented today while we grow a more robust solution.

A legit thing you could swap in place of the automatic invites above would be the password idea loMe and turts have detailed a bit. I think that would also work Fine as a temporary system but has higher overhead that I consider safely avoidable.

And indeed, meanwhile development goes forward on a system that's just like the above but replaces the temporary "automatic invite" system with a full-fledged invite link generator. The details on this can evolve as part of the process but broadly speaking I'm seeing that each div 1 player in the pool can generate up to 1 one-time-use, first-come first-serve special ensl.org link that is good only for the current gather (and only if it's not full, obviously). Policing any abuse falls to the gather mods as it does now.


Nightsy says

Make it div 1 only and it will never ever start :)

I think we may all be surprised actually. There are currently 60 active roster members of season 9 div 1 teams across a variety of timezones. These people play div 1 at all because they enjoy top-level competitive rounds. When a solution is in place it may take a little push initially to get the ball rolling but if the games become reliable they'll fill.


Simba says

What about teams that used to be div4? They would have had some REALLY bad players on their team for a while. But that team has undergone roster changes and gotten better. Now they're in div 1, well guess what, their entire roster history is now eligible for div1 gathers!!! Because there is no EASY way to cross reference past players with the dates they joined/left the team with the dates a team was in div1.

I'd anticipated many of these problems but to be fair not this one. Finding useful pathologies like this is very helpful. I'll echo phone, Cr4zy, and Deck that we should be fine to sidestep this by focusing only on the most current season as in my amended proposal above. And this could evolve as needed in time.


Cr4zy says

If someone gets invited they're allowed to join in the future.

I disagree with this one part. It adds to the technological weight of the solution, increases the impact of trolling, and enables people to amass disproportionate influence. Over the course of 100 gathers they get to create 100 permanent slots. I think in the long run that would just degenerate to the current gather system and I'd think we're better of keeping the hypothetical invites one-time-use as originally proposed.


tussio says

what about an option to vote to remove a player from the high skill lobby and just move them to regular lobby?

Probably you are right that this would be effective, at least in the short term, but I agree with others that it creates a weird Lord of the Flies toxicity and I think we can do better.


paddy says

Lots of rookies join nowadays because its a safe place, I used to spec a ton because I knew I'd sandbag and get flamed if I joined certain gathers.

Good insight. Healthy forests have occasional fires but there's also danger there of course. Part of the core problem is a cultural shift and I think the most realistic way to address it will be to update the community process.

Just talking with somebody and I wanted to underscore a thing: we could all agree I hope to reject any system that ends up stiffing people who are trying to play or lowers satisfaction overall. That'd be really fucked up. Of course since the game pretty much requires strict multiples of 12 players (or arguably 14 or whatever) there are always gonna be some number of people who have to wait a bit. But any change that exacerbates that is bad.

One thing to realize is that the current system already stiffs people and disproportionately it may tend to be the players who are most senior or most skilled. That's kind of fucked up.

But a fix doesn't have to help some at the expense of others. A good change should be good for everybody. The goal as I see it is to get more satisfying rounds at all levels so that that can lead to the system being more active at all levels etc.

Starcetereus says

And tussio, it's often far more than just a few: http://imgur.com/2oIRNmX

Honestly, I think we need to keep in mind that many of these players that are lower skilled are playing gathers to get better in the first place, and a skill differential doesn't justify treating them like shit.

Unless I'm missing something and every single person in that picture is a huge troll, there's really nothing funny about that picture, it's just players who want to play a 6v6 to get better, they have a right to play as much as any of us, we were all in their shoes at one point or another.

Obviously, having this many new people playing gathers justifies a need for high skill gathers, I just urge everyone to remember that we should treat everyone with respect, and that includes the lower skilled players who have good attitudes, or else there won't really be a comp scene to speak of in the future if no new players feel encouraged to play here due to elitist attitudes.

If there was a gather for all players that are active in the current season in a team, take this season, all players from div 1 - 3 can join and play, anyone that creates a new team wont be able to join as they are not in the current season. Stoping new players from outright joinning the gather without being on a active team in the current season.

Now if someone was to join a active team during the season just to troll the gather, then just remove the whole team for X amount acording to the rules.

BUT while also having this invite feature and can maybe set a limit like above elo? spm?

This may also give extra incentive for others to join a team and get playing in a season.

I told you all Bubba was our dark knight, but no one would listen.

#FreeBubba2016, he'll make gathers great again

Have Div 1 gathers that includes all active div 1 players, and either persistent or week long invites. Also have competitive gathers that includes all active competitive players from all divisions. And have casual gathers (6v6) that allow people not on teams or on teams deemed inactive (if they haven't registered in the current season, or the most recent season). Also could work out on the gather page that when someone joins multiple gathers, they're automatically removed from the others when one of the gathers they're in starts, and I mean actually starts as in teams picked and everything. Would be very annoying to rejoin multiple gathers because one of the people in another gather left because he was voted captain.

What bubba did was make gathers an unpleasant experience for new players.... he wasn't "making gathers great" he was "destroying the possibility for gathers to grow".

New people are good, and while they may spoil the experience of the elite few, they are the next generation of competitive players... and everyone started at the bottom, so everyone should be willing to let other people start there too.

so, can we stick to the ideas of how to make gathers better for everyone, instead of suggesting stupid shit like inviting back bubba?

You have to admit people found a creative way to somehow bring bubba into the conversation. I also don't think the solution is to have people around that make players feel like crap for playing.

Star, your idea is to have 3 gathers. It sounds good, but is just too many gather options. The problem is, if all comp players can join a gather, the casual one is never going to be played or one of them won't be played. It's a waste of webpage space. The current gather allows for comp and casual players, that is how the non high skill one should continue. It's the only way to bring new players into the gather world.

It just comes down to how exclusive are you guy's going to make the high quality gather and how you are going to handle invites which I don't like. Can we shift focus on if invites should be part of this? I think most agree current div 1 players should be automatically added to the allowed list. The question is do we expand it past div 1 and how do you handle invites. I prefer div 1 only, and an approval process for past high skill players or some kind of criteria for you to be approved.

I think it would be good to have more opinion's on if people think you should be able to invite anyone you want or criteria for being added in. If this happens, it's going to change how gathers work...might as well collect more opinions from the gather community on this. Can lolme, yaluzan or someone give us the possibilities you're thinking of so far? If you outlined the different approval/invite ideas maybe we can get a clearer sense on which is the best option.

Another possible solution is to have two gathers, one just as before, open to anyone, first come first served. The second gather is also open to anyone, and is not limited to just 12 people, but actually unlimited (so its really a pool of available players), and has maybe predefined eligible captains, and they can simply pick from this large pool of players to make teams, then lower skill players like myself can still apply but probably won't be picked to actually play unless there is a shortage of higher skill players to make up the numbers.

You should be allowed join both.

This would mean regular gathers could continue, and when there is a sufficient number of high skill players for a high skill gather they can go ahead and do that too.

P.S. I understand most of the proposed solutions require coding work, so I'm prepared to volunteer to help out with this, since the original developers were awesome enough to open source their code! Legends!

^Paddy that is the best idea I've read so far regarding a more open system. I have a couple questions though. How would the captains start picking teams if it was open to unlimited amount of players...when would the cutoff take place when the captains had to start picking?

Your idea makes sense though. It avoids a lot of the issues: admins wouldn't have to worry about approvals/invites, and you wouldn't have to worry about criteria for joining.
Your idea is also good because it basically keeps the process very similar to how it is now, just weeds out the players that are at the lower skill level.

The potential issues would be: coding, when would captains start picking teams, and would this ruin the normal gathers? If unlimited players were sitting around trying to play the high skill gathers, would all those players that don't get picked want to play in the normal gather with other players that missed the high skill gather? Or would everyone just sit in the gather pool for high skill if they were decent at the game, hoping to get in, and therefore stopping a normal gather from ever starting?

That's why I still like the exclusive div 1 only gathers. With approvals for past high skill players. People not in that div 1 group would know they aren't going to get to play in those gathers - so they hopefully would fill up the normal gathers most of the time. It's a potential win win. The only players it wouldn't be great for would be the high skill div 2 or 3 players or no prior div 1 team players that really wanted to play in the high skill gathers. I think it's still better for those players to not get in though, because it guards against favoritism and still keeps the normal gathers going which is necessary to keep the gather community going well.

[deleted]

infamous says

I told you all Bubba was our dark knight, but no one would listen.

#FreeBubba2016, he'll make gathers great again

+1

paddy says

Another possible solution is to have two gathers, one just as before, open to anyone, first come first served. The second gather is also open to anyone, and is not limited to just 12 people, but actually unlimited (so its really a pool of available players), and has maybe predefined eligible captains, and they can simply pick from this large pool of players to make teams, then lower skill players like myself can still apply but probably won't be picked to actually play unless there is a shortage of higher skill players to make up the numbers.

You should be allowed join both.

This would mean regular gathers could continue, and when there is a sufficient number of high skill players for a high skill gather they can go ahead and do that too.

P.S. I understand most of the proposed solutions require coding work, so I'm prepared to volunteer to help out with this, since the original developers were awesome enough to open source their code! Legends!

Any help is welcome in my book. You can contact chris, sephy, or jiriki about those things.

I'd also have some interest contributing code but it'd be in vain until we've reached one consensus or another

paddy says

Another possible solution is to have two gathers, one just as before, open to anyone, first come first served. The second gather is also open to anyone, and is not limited to just 12 people, but actually unlimited (so its really a pool of available players), and has maybe predefined eligible captains, and they can simply pick from this large pool of players to make teams, then lower skill players like myself can still apply but probably won't be picked to actually play unless there is a shortage of higher skill players to make up the numbers.

You should be allowed join both.

This would mean regular gathers could continue, and when there is a sufficient number of high skill players for a high skill gather they can go ahead and do that too.

P.S. I understand most of the proposed solutions require coding work, so I'm prepared to volunteer to help out with this, since the original developers were awesome enough to open source their code! Legends!

tf2 gathers worked like this for a long time.
• any number of players could join
• picking wouldn't start until two people volunteer as captain
• you had to be approved to captain (sounds like a lot of effort but it isn't - you only have to give that privilege to their account once)
• the best 10 players got picked by the captains. the captains often agreed to both pick one lower level player.

turtsmcgurts says

tf2 gathers worked like this for a long time.
• any number of players could join
• picking wouldn't start until two people volunteer as captain
• you had to be approved to captain (sounds like a lot of effort but it isn't - you only have to give that privilege to their account once)
• the best 10 players got picked by the captains. the captains often agreed to both pick one lower level player.

This makes me like Paddy's idea more, good info turts. Do you think enough people/the right people will agree to be captains in order to make this work? Also, I don't know if this community has to adopt picking one lower level player, but it's nice to know that info. The idea sounds good because it makes it a more welcoming community, but would it lead to bad games and people being upset at that one player?

Once an idea is approved by the admins, can we get the coders together to see how long what you guy's come up with is going to take?

Paddy's idea is good, maybe even add a vote option to it? Start gather that requires 12 votes?

IMO all that's needed is a hive time restriction on the classic gather. Most of the people in question have >100 hours. Those that don't match the requirements can play casual until they do, in the meantime getting better at the game. I made sure I was at least half decent before I started playing gathers because I know how frustrating it is to be a liability on a team.

^ I don't think this should be decided by time played. If hours played resulted in how good you are at this game, a lot of people would be better. Sure, there are a bunch of good players that have played the game a lot, but playing the game a lot doesn't automatically translate into being good enough for a high skill gather.

I think the point of this is to give the highest level of players a good gather option. The gameplay in this game has a huge drop off when players on your team are of lower skill. I just hope that before the change is made, the admins are considering the negative effects an invite system could have on the community.

Starcetereus says

There does seem to be an epidemic of bad players who are just dead weight ruining gathers nowadays. I have noticed a lot of people that used to gather regularly just don't gather anymore. So whether or not you have high skill gathers, a portion of the community will be alienated from gathers. The problem with having high skill gathers though is it may kill normal skill gathers, which will alienate people in div 2 and div 3 who are not necessarily part of the problem. Also there is the question of those that aren't good shots, but have friends in high places. I can foresee these people getting invited to the high skill gathers simply because they are friends, while more talented players sit in a never filling normal gather. IMO, a not perfect, but far more fair option, would be to institute a way to give gather players mob rule. Player-voted temporary gather bans could be a good way to get the people who completely ruin gathers (one way or another) out before it even starts. Of course this can be abused, but IMO it's a far better option than establishing high skill gathers, killing off normal skill gathers, and alienating all the medium/low skill nsl players, all because certain people kill gathers.

I agree 100%

The fact that this suggestion is even being taken seriously says a lot about the toxic nature of some in the community. This type of gather would only serve to alienate the community which was my fear with having an invitational system on the other thread. Now it wont only alinate new players looking to improve but also many who have played for years.

I am not div 1 but I highly prefer to gather when I see a lot of skilled players in the que. this is the only way I can improve my game. Yet I will be blocked. I do not troll and am not dead weight on a team yet I will be blocked. My only option will to play with equally skilled (although I find that in div 2 the skill gap is huge.) or lower skilled players making it so I will never find a challenge.

furthermore I feel the seedings are really messed up (there are a lot of "div1") players that are honestly just average div 2 skill or even highly skilled div 3. I also know of many div2 that play closer to a div 1 level. They would be screwed while the overated players would get all the practice further solidifying the divide.