Ladle-4/Feedback


 * 2020 02.31, 29 September 2006 (CDT)
 * Haven't started, one day to go, and the preparation, redesigning of wiki, simplifying procedure, hasn't increased the numbers of participants. My impression is, a lot of good players just want to turn up on the night and play. They don't want to plan, organise or anything. Kind of like anarchists, which is why maybe Anarchic Wanderers seemed to work. As for lack of clan presence, I think there are only two clans this time, that may be because I didn't advertise, but that is a bit of a lame excuse. So... although I hope we have a few good games tomorrow, I don't think it is going to run very smoothly. This is through no no fault of the system, nor even the players because that is just what they do. The idea of designing a system which is flexible enough to deal with no preparation on the part of the players... hmmm...
 * I think all that is required is that you have just one person on the team organised enough to stick down names etc. On the night, it just depends who turns up. But if they don't use IRC, this could be very tricky indeed. Still, with the brackets set, it might just work...
 * Finally, it doesn't take a month to organise this. It should if there are a lot of players and a lot of activity in the challenge board, teams meeting up and practicing and so on. But Tronic Monkeys haven't had one game together, and I haven't got contact details for most of them... Most of the other teams seem more solid though. But a month? Not needed.


 * 2020 17.01, 1 October 2006 (CDT)
 * Got kicked out of AST for some reason while recording the first match of the finals... pity we won't have a recording of the game... Tronic Monkeys were a bunch of monkeys, badly organised and not enough skill, so we lost in the quarters against WPN, the better team without a doubt. I saw and recorded most of Steve Taylor v proNoobz in the semi and that was some game. Impressive. Everything seemed to go proNoobz way on the breaks...
 * Rounds are too short, at least not for the actual match, between the two quarters, one started on time, and the other about half an hour late. Mad and manta mentioned timing, and said it wasn't clear enough.
 * Some players were very critical. Some get stressed. That's because some players are just not getting together on time, or people are trying to organise while playing... which is difficult to concentrate.
 * On the whole, I think it demonstrates that people can self-organise. I mean, 6 teams playing matches in under three hours. That's not bad.


 * Meriton 17.27, 1 October 2006 (CDT)
 * IRC worked well to agree on servers IMHO. All in all, it was well organised (and definitely worked better than last time). The few areas for improvement:
 * I think we need a rule to deal with incomplete teams: At the official start time of the match, WS had 3 players. We waited 20 minutes to start (they had 4 by that time). Even then, some actually suggested to wait an hour (!) for spidey to emerge. The actual match took less time than waiting for it ...
 * The issue about many ordinary players joining a server while a match is in progress remains unresolved. It was particularly bad as WildWest in our first match. My instant chat that asked them to leave was used every couple of minutes. Less, though still annoying are spectators how persist in chatting while a match is going on. Even worse was the question about the current standing that was asked every few minutes. Please, if you want instant news, delegate one person to watch the game who announces intermediate results in IRC.
 * I'd like to play best of 5 to increase the proportion of playing with respect to waiting time.


 * Durka 17.30, 1 October 2006 (CDT)
 * Well, WPN killed the Tronic Monkeys in the first round. Then, the second round started almost immediately. We should have gotten like a 15 minute break...my brain was fried. The second round we played against the Holers. They completely slaughtered us. They took every hole possible. Sasha went thru our middle it seemed like every time. We never really got a rythm going. One of our clanmates (not to be named right now) got kicked out of the clan due to his behavior during the Ladle. All in all, it was much better organized than the previous Ladles. Great job 2020 once again!

Alex 
 * 2020 - i asked you to leave while we were sorting out our teams but you didnt. i never kicked you though.
 * if you want my full response, read the General forum.
 * That's cool...I was there to record, that was all, and the reason i didn't answer was a) your teammates were asking for me to stay and b) if i responded i would have spoiled the recording... As it happened, an autoban occured for one reason or another, and I couldn't complete the recording of the first match or the second... sorry. it's a learning experience for us all --2020 03:37, 2 October 2006 (CDT)
 * Just hit an instant chat key between every two rounds. You should be safe then, as nothing interesting is happening anyways.—Wrtlprnft 09:04, 2 October 2006 (CDT)


 * Lackadaisical 1 October 2006 (CDT)
 * I think it needs to be regulated what happens when one team has less players than the other. When SteveTaylor played against pronoobz we had one person on the sideline because they had one less so we could play 5v5, but when pronoobz played against Holers, holers insisted on playing with 7 people, which seems to have been a problem because well.. they only had five. In the end psyko and me subbed for pronoobz (which in hindsight i shouldn't have done because i was already on another team, but pressure was high and people seemed to get really stressed out because there wasn't any play.)
 * And there was a consensus about the minimum members a team needs to show up with, which was five. I think the lack of someone who is harsh enough to dissapoint four people by disqualifying them hurts the way this 'rule' is handled.


 * eggcozy 1 October 2006 (CDT)
 * I strongly suggest we instate a rule allowing teams to play with any number of players up to the max number. No rules about team imbalance, no rules about teams having too few players. If we put the max at 8, there should be nothing to keep a team from fielding 8, even if the other team shows up with 6. In a soccer match, you don't lower the number of players down from 11 if the other team shows up with 9. It is the problem of the team if they can not get their players to show. I am sick of teams whining about the number of players who are on the other team whether it be too few or too many. My team should be able to play, even if we only have 3 or 4 players. Each team should have the freedom to play with however many players they want to play with, as long as it is not more than max. I sat out of our first match this tourney. There was talk of letting me in ... 2020 offered, then Garisimo, probably our best player left. This is just silly. It should not happen.


 * The problem is that most competition servers have enforced team balancing enabled, and usually there is no admin at hand who could disable that on time. Meriton 12:08, 2 October 2006 (CDT)


 * Luzifer 2 October 2006 (CDT)
 * All in all, I liked the Ladle (it was my first one). But I agree with egg about a rule about what happens if one team shows up with less or more players than the other one. The suggestion from egg sounds good to me. About the communication: I think the main-problme was that most players didn't read the wiki and/or were on IRC. I read the wiki and when the Ladle started, I knew where I had to play and against which team. Except of one player (who didn't show up), our team was well informed.