Regarding Advanced for this upcoming season
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This is an opinion article. I do not speak on behalf of any RGL admins.
We are approaching the end of the offseason, and as we’re seeing teams flesh out their rosters, we are getting a much clearer picture of where teams will be attempting to play in the higher divisions.
For this upcoming season, Advanced will very likely be returning to 8 teams in order to allow the division to be round robin. Round robin is often considered the optimal tournament structure which allows each team to play against every other team once during the regular season and allows the best seeding into Invite–the top division in the league. However, things are starting to get very complicated due to the overwhelming interest.
Currently in the offseason, there are at least 16 teams attempting to play in the division–double the maximum amount of teams in an 8 team division. There is expected to be an Advanced qualifier and possibly an Invite qualifier.
My predictions for who will compete in the division(assuming all invite teams live)
- Inquisition’s team
- maxie’s team
- Firefly’s team
- Marker’s team
- BBL’s team
- Townze’s team
- lee’s team (1st place main)
- (qualifier spot)
Qualifier teams:
- Ta5k’s team
- yate’s team
- Sunnyy’s team
- Best performing team out of the remaining teams
Although I am personally against it, it is possible for the division size to increase to 10-12 teams and transfer it to a swiss system to accommodate more teams.
I do also believe one or two invite slots will potentially open up if a team dies, which will then give Advanced teams an opportunity for another slot
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hopefully we will not repeat the 14 team issue from last season again.
I honestly would prefer to keep Advanced RR and just move the extra teams to main. That is the obvious consequence of removing challenger in the first place. You cant have heavy competition and also be lax at the same time. At least this issue will be minimized next season if the regular season is expanded.
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If there is 16 teams then it should be a easy fix of adding two RR divisions. Plus all the ground work is already present. There should no reason why the second highest division should be Swiss.
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hopefully rgl will simply reintroduce challenger because there was no good reason to remove it in the first place! here’s to a good season for rr challenger and hopefully advanced!
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Curious why my team would have to play qualifiers but Inquisition’s team would not. We both got 5th (lost playoffs round 1) in advanced last season
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@Sunnyy it was a mock draft. Nothing to be taken seriously.
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@Constantly said in Regarding Advanced for this upcoming season:
Although I am personally against it, it is possible for the division size to increase to 10-12 teams and transfer it to a swiss system to accommodate more teams.
If you’re considering having 12 teams in Advanced just bring back Challenger and have 2 8-team rr divs. I don’t know a single person that liked that Advanced was Swiss last season (and while 14 teams didn’t help, I think it was the structure and not the team count that was the real problem).
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@Sunnyy Like Johnny said, it’s a theory off my opinions. I should also clarify that this is an article I wrote as a personal opinion piece. This does not represent RGL decisions or thought process, though I did try my best to cover their potential angles of approaching the division.
But if you want to know why I have my opinion as the way I do:
- they have won the head-to-head in scrims against your team.
- they have won the head-to-head against your team last season
- they had a better W/L record last season
- they have an overall higher team experience at the upper end of advanced, and have made playoffs adv season 9.
- they are scrimming invite teams and are trying to compete in Invite, but will likely be in Invite quals(they aren’t able to play in two different quals at once!)
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@ethan said in Regarding Advanced for this upcoming season:
hopefully rgl will simply reintroduce challenger because there was no good reason to remove it in the first place! here’s to a good season for rr challenger and hopefully advanced!
Okay, I’m actually going to challenge this way of thinking and ask what advanced 2.0 actually accomplished for format health
The only reason old Advanced needs to be round robin is because you want the optimal seeding into Invite to support the top division. RR + Double elim playoffs made for the BEST way to determine placements for teams and see who deserves that guaranteed slot in Invite. RR is without a doubt the best tournament structure–but why does mid-high main need it? At what point do we just make every single division round robin?
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push low adv teams atm into main and make adv 8 teams oh my god!!11!1 woohooo u did it no need 2 add another div, and youve raised the skill cap of main again lfggggg!!!
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@Constantly it’s not needed ideally every division would be RR.
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that’s actually a pretty good point but i think the biggest good thing that new advanced does is slim the skill gap in main
main has always had a really big gap in skill throughout the whole div and if you are forever locking advanced to 8 teams you’re introducing many overloaded teams to that div
that said, thats not really a huge deal. especially if admin staffing is a concern, i wouldn’t have a problem with just keeping advanced rr and calling it a day.
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@Constantly preciate the article and the spot in adv next szn, i agree adv should be round robin, whether or not chal exists doesnt matter much to me either, whatever works best for keeping adv/inv competitive im here for
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@humphrey gonna be honest, a huge reason why I predicted your team would receive a spot was because I was under the assumption that pup and hael were still going to play on their respective main classes. As the roster is right now it feels closer to your s9 team, which isn’t bad by any means, but I feel like the spot could potentially open up for one of the other teams