On 6-team PLs

[Amaranth]

I've received and heard many complaints about the structure of 6-team Premier League tournaments lately.

I think there are many occasions where 6 teams is simply optimal due to the available playerbase, and it's worth it to spend energies optimizing the 6-team PL format rather than just saying "skill issue; find players for 8 teams".
So, I thought I'd try to come up with format tweaks that offer solutions to the problems that have been raised.

Problem 1: The 5-week season
5 weeks is, quite simply, very short. Teams don't get much time to gel and by the time they do, the tournament already ends for many of them. A 5-week season gives little time for teams to grow in or out of shape, and fluked wins and losses can heavily impact the final standings.
A double round robin (= playing each other team twice) leads to a 10-week season, longer than even SPL/SCL, which is obviously undesirable for more casual, unofficial PLs.

Problem 2: The 1st seed bye week
Taking the top 50% - three teams - and putting them in playoffs results in giving the first seed a bye week. Many people (Leru but also others) argue that this is a disadvantage, as disconnecting from the tournament for a week tends to be harmful for team momentum and investment.
However, 2 team and 4 team playoffs are just as awkward: advancing the top 2 directly to final feels really bad for 66% of the teams, especially in combination with the 5-week length, and leads to teams giving up after a bad start, even just starting off with a single loss is enough to make top 2 look really daunting due to the short season length. Advancing the top 4 leads to the opposite issue, where the first 5 weeks feel pretty irrelevant to any team that starts off well, and the whole thing feels pretty trivial until it's sudden death playoffs.


Proposal A: Two Conferences
Teams are split at random into two conferences of three. Teams play other teams in their own conference x2, and teams in the other conference x1, for a 7-week regular season.
As far as playoffs go - the two conference winners could head directly to finals, or you could have conference A's winner play conference B's second place and vice versa in the semifinal.

Pros:
- Fixes problem 1, with a 7-week season
- Fixes problem 2 with either of the possible playoff formats - in either case, races within a conference should be more open to the end given that there are more direct head to head series within each conference that you can use to make up ground.
- Likely to generate fun, healthy, competitive rivalries

Cons:
- 10% of the time the three strongest teams in the tournament will be drawn into the same conference and one will be unable to advance. 40% of the time, the two weakest teams will be drawn together and one will get a free ride to semifinals by being less trash than the other.
- There's no way that I can find to avoid some teams having pretty awkward schedules; see attachment for the cleanest solution I could find, and note the Vaporeons schedule (W2 then W5 against the same team, W3 then W6 against the same team - no way that I can find to split these rematches further apart)

Schedule example, cross-conference sets in bold

Proposal B: Just Run It Back
Add a Week 6 and run back the match ups that were drawn for Week 1. Add a Week 7, run back the match ups that were drawn for Week 2. Keep going or cut it whenever you like. A 7-week example schedule here:

Pros:
- Fixes problem 1, and even allows for a flexible number of weeks
- Simplest of the proposed solutions by far

Cons:
- Doesn't really address problem 2 much, though I think heading to a direct top 2 final is not as bad with a longer season (you're not immediately doomed if you start slow etc)
- Much like proposal A, luck of the draw could have a real negative impact on qualification scenarios

Proposal C: Belgian Pro League Moment
Literally stealing from professional sporting leagues here but hear me out:

Each team plays each other team once. After 5 weeks, the bottom 2 teams are cut. However, rather than going straight into a playoff bracket, the four remaining teams play another round robin, adding another 3 weeks of play for an 8-week "regular season" (though the worst teams only play 5).
The points from the first five weeks carry over, but they are halved. This means teams are fully incentivized to do well in the first half of the season - both to qualify of course, but also to get a leg up for the final part of the season - but even a team that qualifies in 4th place is not so far off that they can't mount a comeback in the final three weeks if they do well.
Taking from the last GSCPL as an example:

After this regular season, the Death Scythes and the Wii Fit Wolverines would be immediately eliminated. The other teams play on for three more weeks against each other - the Machamps start with 4 points, the Vaporeons with 3.5 points, the Tyranitars with 3 points, and the Raikous with 2.5 points. Wins still award 2 points, ties still award 1 point.
At the end of those three weeks, the top 2 teams advance to a standard final.
(notice how in the actual tournament, in Week 5 the Tyranitars used a troll lineup, and the Raikous/Scythes didn't even bother playing out their set, because playoffs were already decided. 5 week format leads to stuff like this all the time. also notice how in this proposed format neither of these things would happen.)

Pros:
- Length is perfect
- Playoffs are perfect
- The teams that get eliminated after 5 weeks are probably the ones that are happy to be done with the tournament since they did miserably
- Literally everything here is good

Cons:
- A little complicated to explain, people will no doubt misunderstand and take time to get used to it (skill issue)

---

Ultimately it's down to individual communities to pick the format that they think is best, but I think it's useful to have this debate and these solutions discussed in a visible public forum. I would be happy to hear out any feedback on my proposals, or any further proposal of your own to improve the 6-team PL format - it's a necessity for many of our communities and it could use some care.
Thank you for reading

 

[Volk]

Cool ideas. I have a little bit to say about each proposal, so I'll share some thoughts.

Proposal A
In general, I don't like Conferences, but they actually work pretty well here. Also, this problem you acknowledge is actually a pretty easy fix.

- 10% of the time the three strongest teams in the tournament will be drawn into the same conference and one will be unable to advance.

Just take the top team from each conference (#1 and #2 Seed) and two wild cards (#3 and #4 Seed), i.e., the two next best teams by record. While this does mean one team might get a free ride, it does more or less guarantee that the top four teams all make the playoffs. It also ensures that the two best teams play in finals, as the two strongest teams should realistically be the #1 & #2 or #1 & #3 Seeds, two matchups which never occur in the first round of playoffs.

Proposal B
I don't love this one. Granted Conferences have basically the same issue, but this one just "feels" more arbitrary, especially if you just go straight into finals with only two teams.

Proposal C
This seems cool and is probably the most "objective" option, aside from a simple double round robin. Biggest issue that I see is just the length disparity. It's one thing if your team plays 5 sets and another plays 7 sets and it's another thing if your team plays 5 sets and another plays 9. So really, this only sort of fixes the tournament length issue, as a full ⅓ of teams are stuck with the same problem.

All fine ideas though. I think RBYPL could be a testing ground.

 

[Jirachee]

Personally I like proposal C as it removes the problem of teams not caring once they're out. It's also just an interesting format in general which will no doubt get people to care.

At the minimum though, we should be looking to get rid of tiebreaks in the current format. They drag out those tournaments to immense lengths and add very little substance. In ADVPL for exemple, you had 2 tiebreaks between the last week of the regular season and finals: the first seed Daves had to wait 3 weeks in between games. That's absurd. Obviously players will quit caring about what's supposed to be a fun side tournament if they have to wait so long between weeks.

The fix IMO is easy: just make it an odd number of slots. In such a short setting there is no need for the nuance of draws to keep the race close. By getting rid of tiebreaks you ensure that tournaments run smoothly and that no one loses interest.

 

[avarice]

Proposal C sounds most appealing to me since Smogon rules being not the easiest to "get" is already an occurrence. I'd say the majority amount of the time whenever playing for an oldgenpl there's at least one person on the team that ends up asking how it works with the current 6 teams anyway.

At the minimum though, we should be looking to get rid of tiebreaks in the current format. They drag out those tournaments to immense lengths and add very little substance. In ADVPL for exemple, you had 2 tiebreaks between the last week of the regular season and finals: the first seed Daves had to wait 3 weeks in between games. That's absurd. Obviously players will quit caring about what's supposed to be a fun side tournament if they have to wait so long between weeks.

The fix IMO is easy: just make it an odd number of slots. In such a short setting there is no need for the nuance of draws to keep the race close. By getting rid of tiebreaks you ensure that tournaments run smoothly and that no one loses interest.

I really dislike the notion of getting rid of ties though. Yea, they are not trophy tours but they have customs as prizes, and having no tie to go for would lead to more games unplayed, hinging on how relevant bd remains for the format decided I guess? Personally think if they don't deserve the "nuance" of tying they shouldn't have prizes to begin with. If a tiebreak is merely a dead week for those outside of the teams then honestly I don't think there's much interest to lose in the first place. A rare double tiebreak instance sucks but does not happen frequently enough to justify this type of change to me.

 

[BigFatMantis]

Proposal C is the only one that sounds appealing. Simply put if your team sucks you just don’t want to play it out more than 5 weeks usually, so extending the season for teams that no longer care sounds awful and this proposal is the only one that addresses that. There’s plenty of tours where in the final weeks some teams get a rather easy ride into the playoffs because they played an opp that doesn’t care in the final week or two and sometimes can’t even bothered to play games - extending a 6 team PL to more than 5 weeks is going to make this even worse unless it’s Proposal C that we go with here. It’s also probably just a better format objectively speaking than what we have now with little to no drawbacks, whereas Proposals A/B might be worse in practice than the status quo.

 

[dex]

As someone who managed two teams to first seed finals in 6-team team tours and both times lost due to the rust incurred, I think bringing up this issue is great. The current situation of 3 teams with first seed bye is not acceptable nor fun. The bye week seems more and more like something to be avoided, as this isn’t a sport like football (American or otherwise) where the extra week of rest is beneficial.

Proposal C makes the most sense for allowing bad teams to bow out early while ensuring a zero-bye week playoff system. The top 4 round robin is essentially the playoffs for the concept, and it’s a nice way to circumvent the weirdness of top 4 playoffs and the less-than-exciting feeling of top 2 playoffs.

 

[Expulso]

I personally like the 5 week regular seasons, and I don't think there's a need to phase them out altogether. It makes those tours a nice change of pace because they're lower commitment and thus easier to get into for any number of irl reasons. The stakes can also feel higher with 5 weeks because every week is so relatively important. Adding weeks to a tour doesn't necessarily make the tour a better experience; I remember a NU Snake Draft at the end of SS where pretty much nobody cared about the tour but tiebreaks dragged it out to 11 weeks and everyone involved in it constantly complained about that.

Different communities can do different things with these tours and I don't think there's a need for any one-size-fits-all solution. Can we just try each of these proposals in different subforums and see how they go? I personally wouldn't like to see 5 week tours totally disappear, especially because 6-team tours often have low activity or interest that isn't conducive to a 7+ week tour. However these options are probably a good fit for some subforum tours with higher interest so let's just try them next time the oldgen PLs roll around.

 

[ninjadog]

I don't think there is any problem with 6 team PLs to be honest, 5 weeks is perfectly fine for a team tour given how many there are these days and 7 week ones can tend to drag on, let alone 8. I don’t really like the idea of repeated matchups within the regular season, considering there’s also playoffs to come you’re potentially playing the exact same opponent 3 times (or more with tb) within 2 months which feels boring to me.

I also like that this is the only playoff format really where there’s actually some sort of benefit to finishing with the #1 seed. I don’t think having a single week off is remotely an issue given it’s not like an official where the chat tends to be super active so you’re not really killing that much momentum, the only problem I see is that multiple weeks off as a result of tbs can be a bit much, perhaps the 2v3 semi final can use odd slots or the #2 seed nominates a slot to be worth 2 points to avoid ties.

 

[Vertigo]

I don't think there is any problem with 6 team PLs to be honest, 5 weeks is perfectly fine for a team tour given how many there are these days and 7 week ones can tend to drag on, let alone 8. I don’t really like the idea of repeated matchups within the regular season, considering there’s also playoffs to come you’re potentially playing the exact same opponent 3 times (or more with tb) within 2 months which feels boring to me.

I also like that this is the only playoff format really where there’s actually some sort of benefit to finishing with the #1 seed. I don’t think having a single week off is remotely an issue given it’s not like an official where the chat tends to be super active so you’re not really killing that much momentum, the only problem I see is that multiple weeks off as a result of tbs can be a bit much, perhaps the 2v3 semi final can use odd slots or the #2 seed nominates a slot to be worth 2 points to avoid ties.

This is wrong for multiple reasons, but I'll address the "not an official so people don't gaf" point you bring up.
People play subforums PLs to win, and even if there's no trophy at the end, I can argue as I've seen it firsthand that chat can become really active even for a mere subforum PL as people play for the gen or the tier they like and that is not represented in official team tournaments. After 5 weeks, if your team is #1 seed then there is at least some cohesion and I've seen firsthand the week off meaning chat literally dies because no incentive to talk/build/play testgames other than looking at how the 2 semifinalists perform, and once it's finals time then the dynamic is broken. If we can avoid this at all then we should try.

 

[peng]

covering old ground here again re: wins are wins lets just count them

My suggestion is that these team tours remain 5 weeks but your score in regular season is simply just how many games you won. This has been suggested for SPL before and shot down, which I get, but I think a 5 week tournament with only win/loss scoring is barely a competitive format for the reasons listed above - you simply don't have enough weeks to make up for variance of an unlucky couple games leading to a 0 score in a close week.

If you start off with two 3-5 weeks in a 5-week tour, you are all but out despite the same win count as a team that went 5-3 then 1-7 in their opening weeks. In a game like Pokemon, I don't think we should be putting as much emphasis on where games were won across 5 week period, as opposed to whether they were simply won or not. As much as we pretend otherwise, there's no meaningful depth to the idea of two franchises playing eachother, especially in side tours. Its just for flavour, but basing a scoring concept around "you need to get a critical mass of games won vs an opposing group of players who may not even be talking to eachother, lets be honest" is a bit whack.

This isn't some low variance, drawn out, high performance sport like tennis, where you have serve advantage etc etc so you need to group points into games and sets in order to have a decent scoring system to avoid favouring big servers. Its not like football/soccer, where points are awarded for wins rather than goals in order to promote different styles of play. This is a video game where there is already a baked in win or loss into the battle itself, and trying to make these 5 "best of" weeks in order to make it feel like some franchise sport, I don't think makes any sense for the competitiveness of side tournaments. The idea that a 3-5 week is worth 0 while a 5-3 week is worth 2, over 5 weeks, does not breed good competition, it is purely for "hype".

Whilst I'm not sure how I feel on the "bye week for 1st seed is bad" concept, I do feel like 50% of teams guaranteed making playoffs is a little bit silly. Taking the example from the table in the post, the win count for each team is 22, 18, 15, 12, 12, 9 - the idea that a 3rd placed team with 15 wins should be entitled to playoffs when they are closer to last than to first doesn't sit right with me (another issue with points rewarded for w:l masking true performance in a short-term tournament!). Advancing to a top 2 play-off, determined based on number of game wins, and reserving a 2nd-3rd place playoff only in the case of tiebreak, feels like a strong solution from a competitiveness point of view.

edit: also potentially a hot take but i think the appeal of these tournaments for a lot of people is short duration + low commitment, trying to make them bigger than they are may not have the desired effect

 

[Larry]

First of all: After having gathered experience managing almost every team tournament on this website for the past few months, I absolutely agree that the 3-team playoff format needs to be abolished as it currently puts the first seed teams at an immense disadvantage. Pokemon isn't a pro sport where you need rest days between your games. On the contrary, you want to stay on top of your game at all times by constantly competing.

I strongly support proposal C as it solved all problems addressed. Sure, it may be a bit confusing at the start but that's gonna be a non-issue in the long run if this gets adopted in more tours and people get used to the system. I personally don't think the format is that hard to understand, either. Perhaps you could include a pre-written paragraph about how the new tournament format works in the OP's of week threads of tournaments that adopt this system?

I don’t think having a single week off is remotely an issue given it’s not like an official where the chat tends to be super active so you’re not really killing that much momentum

The momentum is very much being killed. Sure, a single week is salvagable in some scenarios, but what if theres a tiebreaker? Or a regular season tiebreaker? Or both? That stuff could add up to a three week break between the last week of regular season and finals for the #1 finishing team. This happened to us in ADVPL and it is absolutely impossible to get the train back going after a break that long. Amaranth's proposal makes this an impossible occurrence and also solves a couple other problems in the process.

mucho texto

There's a valid point here with tournaments potentially being too long, However, I personally think that the better performing teams won't mind as much as the worse performing teams, who will be out by week 5 anyway. If this ends up proving to be an issue, a potential fix for this could be to turn the first or second phase of regular season into a pools format that saves a week or two, to steal a page from the SSD2 textbook.

In short: Adopt proposal C. Turn a phase of regular season into pools if the format proves to be too long.

 

[kumiko]

I don't think there is any problem with 6 team PLs to be honest, 5 weeks is perfectly fine for a team tour given how many there are these days and 7 week ones can tend to drag on, let alone 8. I don’t really like the idea of repeated matchups within the regular season, considering there’s also playoffs to come you’re potentially playing the exact same opponent 3 times (or more with tb) within 2 months which feels boring to me.

just wanted to reiterate this because i feel like this is getting brushed over in this thread. i absolutely do not like the idea of just facing the same people over and over again for a tournament where there are specialized tiers; for a format where everyone is playing the same tier i think it's perfectly fine, but stuff like lower tier PLs and old gen PLs where there's 2-3~ 'main' slots and then 1 of each other slot it's really not an enticing idea to face the same people repeatedly. yeah, people CAN face someone three times even in SPL format, but with this it would always happen and i think that's quite lame to deal with as a player.

i also don't think we need to always try to extend the season; sure, more games can be fun, but for some people these tournaments are low commitment and they don't want it to go on for as long as stuff like spl/scl/wcop etc. burnout happens and i don't think a longer tour is a blanket Good Thing.

i do agree that having a bye week can be lame, but i think it's being very overstated. the only tour with this format (i think?) i've consistently played/managed in is bwpl, and 2 of the 3 bwpl winners were first seed. my team won the first as first seed and we had one of the more fun and active team chats of any side PL i've been a part of. we enjoyed watching games and having talks about random things in the server while we waited. people even prepped ahead of time for finals. if we want to bring up ~skill issue~, maybe blame the managers for having their players lose motivation during a bye week instead?

 

[Dave]

just wanted to reiterate this because i feel like this is getting brushed over in this thread. i absolutely do not like the idea of just facing the same people over and over again for a tournament where there are specialized tiers; for a format where everyone is playing the same tier i think it's perfectly fine, but stuff like lower tier PLs and old gen PLs where there's 2-3~ 'main' slots and then 1 of each other slot it's really not an enticing idea to face the same people repeatedly. yeah, people CAN face someone three times even in SPL format, but with this it would always happen and i think that's quite lame to deal with as a player.

i also don't think we need to always try to extend the season; sure, more games can be fun, but for some people these tournaments are low commitment and they don't want it to go on for as long as stuff like spl/scl/wcop etc. burnout happens and i don't think a longer tour is a blanket Good Thing.

i do agree that having a bye week can be lame, but i think it's being very overstated. the only tour with this format (i think?) i've consistently played/managed in is bwpl, and 2 of the 3 bwpl winners were first seed. my team won the first as first seed and we had one of the more fun and active team chats of any side PL i've been a part of. we enjoyed watching games and having talks about random things in the server while we waited. people even prepped ahead of time for finals. if we want to bring up ~skill issue~, maybe blame the managers for having their players lose motivation during a bye week instead?

In ADVPL, there was an entire month of downtime between when the regular season ended and when the Dugtrios (my team) got to finally play finals. With tiebreakers (and a 12 hour showdown outage that delayed an entire week), a month is a momentum killer.

I brushed this off as a one-off freak accident - until my SMPL team the Darmanitans had to wait another 20 days before they could play from when regular season ended.

edit: TDK was right. There was an extended delay between finals and semis but it was primarily just a standard 1 week delay.

I think you can personally attest given the fact you know me that this is beyond a manager issue at this point.

Again - if it was one week, that's one thing. But this hasn't been the case for me in the 6-team PLs that I made finals in.

Is it possible that both instances are out of the norm? Sure. But currently, this has been a major issue that's negatively effected my teammates.

*estimated numbers of downtime maybe be exaggerated for dramatic effect

 

[kumiko]

In ADVPL, there was an entire month of downtime between when the regular season ended and when the Dugtrios (my team) got to finally play finals. With tiebreakers (and a 12 hour showdown outage that delayed an entire week), a month is a momentum killer.

I brushed this off as a one-off freak accident - until my SMPL team the Darmanitans had to wait another 20 days before they could play from when regular season ended.

I think you can personally attest given the fact you know me that this is beyond a manager issue at this point.

Again - if it was one week, that's one thing. But this hasn't been the case for me in the 6-team PLs that I made finals in.

Is it possible that both instances are out of the norm? Sure. But currently, this has been a major issue that's negatively effected my teammates.

*estimated numbers of downtime maybe be exaggerated for dramatic effect

i am not advocating for the bye week; i don't like it and i'd rather alternatives (just a top 2/4 playoff or an 8 team tournament instead). i mostly posted because i was very against the solution to this being to extend the tournament with multiple repeating matchups. i think that is an incredibly tedious and unappealing format as a player.

if we're going to look at examples, why on earth were semifinals of SMPL posted on a wednesday? is posting the next week multiple days after the deadline of the previous the fault of the standard 6 team tournament format now? regardless of the reason for the delay, i've dealt with a longer delay between the end of the regular season and start of finals, yet my team was still able to win bwpl 1. so, yeah, it is still a manager's problem to deal with that.

bye weeks happen; spl tiebreaks happen, world cup tie breaks happen, scl tiebreaks happen. teams can tiebreak for the last playoff slot, teams can tiebreak during playoffs, etc. it happens. obviously, up to three weeks can happen in this format, unlike official team tours, but that doesn't really mean we should use a worse format, when the managers could simply find ways to keep their players interested in the tournament during the delay. if the bye week is such a big deal to people, don't use a 6 team tournament... or just don't join them.

 

[cherryb0ng]

Thanks for reminding me that I managed a team that had the worst record in GSC PL history RIP

Anyways there are lots of good points here and I think that at least to some degree Proposal C addresses most of the issues and could definitely turn a 6 team PL into one with much greater investment.
After having played in GSC PL I, hosted GSC PL II, and managed in the third, I can say with confidence that I find that the length of GSC PL is too dam short. I will try to outline some of the gripes I have with 6 teamtours and also touch on some aspects of the alternative and more popular 8 team tours:

6 team tours issues (some of which are specific to GSC PL):
1) The budget is too high. I am surprised this did not get addressed but as far as GSC PL III was concerned, we had 80k credits and the auction was a smooth cruise. While initially I was quite happy with the players I had drafted for an easy price (you can quote me when I said "I won the auction"), I also ended up with more than half of the budget spent on extra players that I had no idea what to do with.
Problem 1 with the budget being too high: Managers that invest more time and credits into scouting for and drafting the talented players end up losing out. This makes the whole auction process less competitive, which is a damm shame because it's part of the fun of the team tour in my opinion.

2) Too few slots. This one relates to the first issue I mentioned. With fewer slots it's way easier to allocate your credits into a playerslot with almost no risk of getting out-priced by another team, because you'll simply find the next best thing. With less opportunity cost, the managers who decide to invest in retains barely get punished because they will still have more than enough credits for the auction, but the teams that have fewer or no good retains get penalized a lot. This is shown with an incident in GSC PL II that went unnoticed, where the Pichus had lost all their retains because half of them decided to become managers (the Pichus came last that year).

3) The event is also too fast. I am just reiterating what Amaranth said at this point, but 5 weeks events makes everything sway too quickly in my opinion. I might be biased but I think that 5 week team tours absolutely suck.
GSC PL I and I believe III had 2 double weeks making the entire season last only 3 weeks just because SPL was approaching. No reason needed to explain how that ruins a lot of the competition.

4) 3 slot finals with a bye for the 1st seed is somewhat uncompetitive (or too competitive???). Everybody says that having a week's break can cause rust. While I am in no position to deny that, I also believe that we lack sufficient evidence to disprove the contrary.
What I believe an issue with the 3 slot finals is simply the fact that it feels unfair for potential 4th seeds not getting a chance. That's mainly why I like Proposal C by Amaranth because it doesn't just give a fourth team an advantage without trying as hard.


Here are some problems with 8 team-tours:

1) Burnout. Burnout brings the worst in everybody and it turns what otherwise might be an overall good experience into a stressful one (not to mention having to build teams for opponents each week). Furthermore, tours with a total of more than 8 weeks last quite a while. And I don't even want to talk about those tours where the TO decides to give extensions during the playoffs. That's an asbolutely vile and horrible thing that draws on the tournament because one person couldn't be bothered to schedule properly.

2) Disinterest. Once approaching the final weeks of a season, certain teams already know that they will be eliminated from POs which sometimes causes the in team experience to be lacking and a bit stale. If you end up on a losing team, it's quite rare that people continue to feel invested. Furthermore, those same teams may end up generating a lot of dead games or games that are underperformed which skews the competition greatly in favor of a potential playoff team.
For example, let's say the last seed (Wolverines) have to face the 3rd seed (Tyranitars) in week 5 and the 4th seed (Raikous), who are also in contention for POs have to face a much stronger team in the 1st or second seed. That means that the Tyranitars have a huge advantage because they already faced a team that was strong in the early season and now only go against the losing team that is not as likely to try their best.

The problem here could likely be solved with Proposal C. The disinterested teams get eliminated by week 5 or something and there are 2 additional weeks where the top 4 try their hardest, perhaps with only 2 teams making it to a finals.

 

[Colteor]

bump. Since this thread was posted both RBYPL and GSCPL changed their formats away from the current standard of 6 teams 5 weeks with mostly unanimous desire for at least some change. I was going to make a similar thread for ADVPL since there's some dissatisfaction with that tour's format as well, but seeing as this thread is still open I figured I'd post here instead*. IMO the best one size fits all option is proposal C from the OP. It's better for the bottom ranked teams that won't care come the middle of the tour anyway, while solving the issue of how swingy 5 weeks can be where one game decides your playoff chances. Fighting the same player 3 times is annoying and a valid complaint, but it will only be an issue for 2 teams and only if those teams never change their lineup at all (pretty rare in my experience).

Also to people who want to keep the 5 week shorter seasons, I'd strongly recommend peng's proposal of just counting wins. It still improves competitiveness while keeping a short regular season with no repeats. It doesn't solve the finals bye week being a debuff (it is a debuff, the #1 thing for winning side tours is activity and the bye week kills activity) so I'd recommend either 2 or 4 teams making playoffs in this format, preferably 2. Personally I prefer a longer season hence option C, but peng's post shouldn't be discounted just because it's different from the standard team tour format.

* I know ADVPL can do whatever they want regardless of this thread, but I'd still like a general solution to be found.