WAR SEASON II: Discussion

[Felly]

I'm not sure if this is already being discussed by the WAR Leaders since all I'm seeing through a bit of reading in this thread, the Phoenix Battalion thread, and the Awesome thread is that the merge between Awesome and Phoenix Battalion has been called off because some of us, myself included, were against that because of how heavily skewed it would be towards the larger teams and therefore leave Magma, JMC, and Yoga Bears (assuming we can even get 5 at this point) struggling to keep up. I apologize if this is already being discussed and I'm just wasting my breath here, but I'm not seeing anything that's telling me otherwise, so I'm just going to express my concerns in case it's not being discussed.

I understand Awesome and Phoenix Battalion aren't merging anymore, but I still feel as if there's an imbalance in this. At the time of posting, the current team numbers are as follows:

Team Trainer: 20
Prism Legacy: 16
Phoenix Battalion: 9
Awesome: 8
Magma: 6
JMC: 5

There's also Yoga Bears, but at the moment, we're currently sitting at a total of 3 members and still need 2 more to become an official team, so for the purposes of this post, I'll leave them out.

Even excluding Yoga Bears, however, there's still a heavy imbalance towards the larger teams. Assuming JMC gets no more members, they have to do four times as much work to even stand a chance against Team Trainer, who has 20 people. You can say that all 20 of those people on Trainer may not participate, but how do you know that? How do you know that all 20 of those people won't participate in WAR at some point during the course of the event? You really don't.

This event is heavily skewed towards teams with greater amounts of people. The more people you have, the more of a chance you have of winning because there's more people on that team that can participate in events. I noticed last year that it seemed like the more people you could have entering a specific event, the greater your odds were in winning points for that week. That put more strain on smaller teams to do more work because they had to basically do the work of several people by themselves for one section in order to have any chance of scoring points. In a way, I feel like I'm being punished if I join a smaller team; I'm not getting an infraction or anything of that sort, but I feel as if I'm being punished because now that I've joined a smaller team, I have to do four times the work as a larger team in order to feel like I'm not useless to my team. It's a figurative punishment, if you will. Why should I have to do four times the work as another, larger team because I'm on a smaller team? Why should I feel like I have to pull out a brilliant, beautiful, amazing piece of work to be put up against work from five people from the same team? Don't get me wrong, I understand I'm going to have to put some effort into things to stand a chance, but I shouldn't have to put in more effort than other teams to stand a chance at getting a positive result.

Before anyone tries to say that I'm only saying this because I'm a part of Yoga Bears - a team that still lacks 2 members to become an official team and a team that if it gets those two members, it'll have to do four times the work as larger teams - I'm not. I'm saying this because I can see that there's an imbalance in the teams, and if Yoga Bears does get through, I'm going to feel discouraged to participate in non-URPG events because of how much more work I'm going to have to do in order to even stand a chance against everyone else. Even with my team not a real team yet by WAR standards, I feel very discouraged to participate in non-URPG events as a result of this imbalance. I can't say if I'll join another team or not if Yoga Bears doesn't make it to 5, that's something I'll have to decide later, but at the moment, I still feel discouraged, and I shouldn't have to feel this way before the event even starts for real.

I don't want to make this long post with no suggestions, but unfortunately, I don't have much in terms of that because it's hard to suggest something that doesn't go against the spirit of WAR either. My only suggestion is that the WAR Leaders ask the larger teams, in this case Trainer and Prism, if they would have any members that would be willing to switch to a smaller team to create at least some sort of balance; members would not be forced to switch teams, they'd do it of their own free will. This probably isn't going to be a very popular suggestion at all, but it's all I've got. I understand people want to be able to play with their friends, and that's totally fine. However, there should also be some sort of balance as well, and I'm not really seeing that.