Good Day,

After finishing the custom cup, I have a few things for discussion:

Is the objective of the custom cup, to just have an interm out of the norm tourney to carry some teams over before season 4? Or is it a tourney to allow teams and map developers to play some rounds and get feedback in hopes that a few maps eventually are competitive ready to enter into the standard map cycle in seasonal play?

If it is the latter, than there are a few things I want to mention:
-There were some teams that were double booked on maps, wouldn't it be more beneficial to have teams be able to play all the maps in the lineup?

I understand holding teams to a strict schedule is a nightmare, however, there are a couple of issues, in that having euros/aussie/US teams playing each other really just leaves the weekend to play, and one of those weekend days was the Superbowl, which did create a slight scheduling issue. I figured, under the latter above impression, that the cup was a lot more relaxed and therefore the objective of getting the maps actually played is more of a benefit than double forfeiting, or awarding one forfeit win to a team, to get the playoffs started. Especially since a few of those forfeits, the teams were scheduling with each other to play during the week, one of which was a west coast team vs euros, and they were actually going to play it at midnight PST. Which is a hell of dedication to getting the game played in my opinion. This would still allow for the weekend to get the playoffs played. Perhaps a Wed deadline or something would have been more suffice. All in all I understand you do not want anything running into the World Cup weekend and rightly so, but the feedback for the map developers I think is the most important purpose for this tournament, so getting the last 3 matches played should have been allowed with a weekday deadline.

This guy is on to something.
The original purpose of the Custom Map Cup was to have teams play as many of the maps possible and get some feedback for the mappers so some of the maps eventually could be added to the season cycle.
Having matches played is always better than forfeits especially in a cup like CMC, even if you have to bend a deadline. Unless you would have to move the playoffs across a x-mas break or something ofc.

i gotta add an other point here:

i was suggesting Zefram after looking at the groups of this custom map cup that he should put all 5 american teams into 1 group and the 3 european teams 1 australian team and the canadian team into the other one.
(or maybe seperate between west and east cost @usa teams and put the east cost guys to the euros)


that would increase the chance of actual played matches because of lesser chance for crosscontinental play.




I could unterstand Zeframs point ofc with having as fair games as possible for as good feedback on the maps as possible.


BUT in that case we wouldnt need to play tanith and eclipse twice and prison and yana not even once so i dont let this count

unless the people that decieded on the groups have allready there opinion which maps need more testings then the others.



ALSO now we end up with 3 matches unplayed because of the hard scheduling times what could have been (maybe) prevented with less crosscontinental play ?!




(BTW im feel kinda sorry for critisising so much i appricate the work you doing for free and stuff but only from critisising things can improve thats my experiance)

AU/NA matches are a lot easier to play compared to EU/AU matches.

That's a good idea but separate EU / AUS / U.S is not in the NSL mind I guess.
We need to change something, that's right. Everytime the same problem. Forfeit is always bad, we have to change that. More time to do matches? Idk... Ping & time is really bad. But rating by continent seems to me not necessarily the most interesting idea, but I confess I do not personally have other ideas

I am guessing you do have clean up weeks already in there?

Why not make it 2 clean up weeks .. 2 weeks with no regular scheduled matches should mean the morons should be able to agree on a time to play the matches they failed to play. .. If not it is just really sad!