Name: esdf
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Posts: 4658
Let's start off with the most obvious. It's called a DRAFT, but it isn't one. One would think that taking part in draft means playing with a random team against other random teams similar in skill level. On the other hand this draft lets you register and play in a premade team which is no different then other cups & leagues. What is wrong with that is the fact that you can stack your team and defeat the whole purpose of the draft. Next point I'd like to make that this particular cup had skill limitation imposed on participants, basically - you had to be a shit/average player to take part. The initial level requirement was level 6 PER PLAYER, then 1-2 days before the cup it was changed to level 6 PER TEAM AVERAGE. This opened the door to 2-3 top players picking up 1-2 baddies just to drop their team level average. While talking about levels, it's important to say that level requirement to play in a CTF tournament is based off of duel & clan arena stats/match history. Pretty brilliant system, isn't it? :)

So, what happened? A couple of stacked teams signed up just because they had 1 bad player in their team that dropped the average level to 6 and plowed through the teams this cup was made for. When actual draft or low skilled teams played each other, it kind of produced fun games (score-wise, e.g. z1s vs CZA). I wouldn't want to blame it too much on the players tho, they obeyed all the cup rules and it's pretty obvious who is the real reason why this draft got fucked up.

How to make it better? First of all, if your website is not ready to host a tournament for a certain game mode, then don't host it. Learned that on ESA (that had real tech issues tho). Trying to skill restrict a CTF cup based on DUEL/CA stats, that's just a sad and halfassed effort. When you announce a DRAFT cup then make it draft, not a regular cup. I'm aware that making it a real draft might have required admins to do some actual job, like seeding the players and manually making the teams, but it had to be done. If nothing else, you could've asked some of the ops on #ctfpickup and I'm pretty sure they'd help you out. No excuses for being lazy just cause the site can't do it for you at the moment. Also, the rules. Once you make the rules - stick with 'em. It was supposed to be a lowskilled CTF draft and level 6 PER PLAYER fit in to that whereas level 6 PER TEAM AVERAGE totally broke it. Last and not the least - the casters. While ins and ddk work good together on duel/tdm, they're horrid on ctf and have no clue on how to cover the game mode. I've no idea why one of them wasn't paired up by zoot, at least the guy casted a ton of ctf before and still plays ctf. Ddk and ins are not ctf players, and don't even casually play it (aside from 2-3 pickups a month by ins). Can't expect them to contribute anything relevant to the tournament.

That's about it for my rant.