Armagetron Fortress League

Armagetron Fortress League
The AFL is a seasonal competition that runs as a round-robin tournament. The regular season consists of a series of games with each team playing every other team followed by the playoffs, culminating in the ultimate championship. It will run in the fall and spring of each year and two champions will be crowned every year.

League competition, for anybody who's not sure, is that style of play where you play regularly scheduled games against a known list of teams. At the end, your team gets ranked against the others, and you play for a championship title.

In the community, we have had a number of good tournaments, but the one thing they all had in common was that they ran more or less in one day. While this is fine for a tournament, it is fundamentally different than league play. League play adds a new dimension to the competition. It requires you to be at your best as often as you play, to watch the schedule and practice with your team. One week your team might decide it needs to work on its best defense because it's playing the top-ranked team. The next week you might switch out your goalie so your regular goalie can go push a grudge against someone on the other team. There's drama, excitement, love, loyalty, honor, and all the other stuff that makes an epic.

That epic has finally come to Armagetron, and some would say it is overdue for its arrival.

Summer Competition
This summer, in the month of July, we intend to run an abbreviated season. It will run for the 4 weeks of July, with a miniature playoff going down in August sometime. The schedule is being worked out now, we'll have more information on it as it becomes available. For now, we're planning on no entry fee, teams will have to follow all rules even though the scheduling will not be able to pit every team against every other team twice as is planned in the longer seasons. The winner gets to say they won.

Fall Competition
The league's official startup will be in the fall of 2007. The fall season will require an entry fee which will go to pay any expenses incurred by the functioning of the league. The fall season will be a complete season, where every team plays every other team twice. It will be a round robin tournament, essentially, where the regular season is the seed round for the knock-out portion of the tournament. We are planning for the playoffs to consist of the top 8 teams from the regular season, and we hope to expand to 16 teams asap, but we'll probably never exceed 16 teams in the playoffs. Instead, we'll find some other way to rank teams so that there are 16 for the playoffs.

It will no doubt be a lot of fun, so get your teams organized and get ready.

Discussion of the Entry Fee
I hate to have such a fee, but I think that for the league to survive and grow, some way of collecting money to make certain expenses will be required. We hope to use the money to first provide trophies of some sort (t-shirts are planned currently) for winners of various awards, secondly provide quality servers for the competition, and thirdly to compensate league organizers for their time spent organizing and maintaining the league. Fourthly, if some large corporate sponsorship were to occur, as with other leagues, profits would be shared with the teams themselves as well as server administrators who have volunteered their servers for the competition. Teams are free to seek their own sponsorships, of course. The entry fee will be for the whole team, not for each player. So a team that only manages to put 6 people on their roster will pony up the same fee that a 10-person team pays. I'm sorry for the disparity here, we'll try to keep the actual fee as low as possible, just remember that we want to build a long-lasting league, and I'm not convinced it can be done without some money coming in to finance the league.