First, I'm going to start off by apologizing for any trouble I may have caused. By no means was I, nor any of my friends from URPG who posted here, looking for some sort of freebie or a larger team. We wanted balance between the larger teams and the smaller teams; we felt outdone by them, and we wanted something done about it. Now that we've gotten the anger out of us, hopefully we can work towards a conclusion to create some balance for next year's WAR and maybe even this year's too!

Of the ideas presented, I think either the idea Harry posted about point bonuses and/or the idea Winter posted about limiting scoring to one person per team would be the best for this year. We can't really do anything about the imbalance of team numbers without ripping teams to shreds, and I don't want to see anyone forced off a team to give us the balance we want; if someone leaves a team and goes to another, it should be of their own free will. I think for the limiting scoring to one person per team thing, it shouldn't be about picking and choosing who's most likely to win but instead allowing all of the members of a team to submit in a category, and then the judge picks the best ones of the ones presented to him/her. Five people could still submit art from Team Trainer as they normally would, but only one of them would get the points, even if all five of them had the top scores. For example, if in art, the judge gives the top five people from Team Trainer a 30/30, a 26/30, a 24/30, a 23/30, and a 21/30, and then someone from Team Magma scores a 19/30 and a person from Phoenix Battalion scores 18/30, the top three places would go to the 30/30, the 19/30, and the 18/30 since only one person from Trainer can claim one of the top three spots, if that makes sense. This way all members of a team can participate and feel like they're contributing, but only one of them is going to be able to get the top three spots in a section. This would obviously be section dependent, so it would work for something like art or writing, but not so much for URPG since the URPG's system is done on the number of wins one receives individually and as a team.

I think Winter's idea with the limited scoring also works because when you look at last year's results in judging, you can see that in some cases like in RP, sprite art, and GCEA, two people from the same team could take one of the top three places. In the current system, if, for example, Phoenix Battalion has 5 people that put in stuff for drawn art and every other team only has one, Phoenix Battalion has 5 chances of getting all three of the top three spaces for that week. Basically, the more people that can enter a given category on a given week from the same team, the odds of that team having more than one member place in the top three increase. Phoenix Battalion gets five chances to place in top three in that example whereas every other team gets only one because Phoenix Battalion had 5 people enter that category and the other teams only had one. If we limit it to where only one person can earn the points for their team, it wouldn't matter if all 21 people from Team Trainer entered drawn art or not because even three of their members placed in the top 3, not all three of those members would earn the points for top three, two others from two different teams would. Hopefully that makes sense, but basically instead of making it a system where the more people you have enter a competition from the same team, the higher the odds of multiple people from the same team placing in the top three, make it a system where the more people you have enter a competition from the same team, the higher the odds of one of them placing into the top three.

In terms of future WAR events, I especially like the pre-team draft selection that Elysia presented and that Harry posted. I think a thought I had earlier was similar to it, but our ideas both stemmed from similar ideas: housing at our schools. Her school does it differently I think, but the way my school does it is you get to pick your top three housing choices and they try to accommodate that as best as they can. The way I was thinking it was different than what Harry said, but team leaders create their teams, and then after a certain date, members sign up to be drafted onto a team based on the top 3 teams they chose when they signed up. This way people are still getting the teams they want, they still get to be with their friends (though not as many as they may have preferred), people get to make new friends, and there's balance in the system in that everyone has an even team. If anyone joined after the initial draft, we could just add them in as we go or figure something out for them.

While I'm for the draft because it still lets people choose while enforcing balance, I think the cap does that too, so long as it's a soft cap. However, with that said, I feel like we may have people who may just wait around for the team they want to join to open up, and then we have unhappy people because if their team doesn't open up, they may feel obligated to join another team and therefore be unhappy about that.

Ultimately, I'm going to be okay with whatever we choose. Whatever creates balance and makes people happy would be the best option in my eyes. I have my preferences on what I'd like to see for that, as stated above, but at the same time, I'm not going to throw a fit if those things aren't chosen. I just don't want to see another incident like this where there's 21 people on one team and then 5 or 6 people on another, and then there's people on those teams of 5 or 6 feeling outclassed and discouraged because they don't feel like they can really do much or have any chance at winning. No one should have to feel bad about joining a certain team, but no one should feel like they stand no chance at winning either. It's not about winning, yes, and we've established that, but at the same time, everyone should be on some sort of equal ground in terms of being able to win the overall event and the individual events because winning does give people a sense of accomplishment (at least most people, maybe not all, I dunno). At the moment, there's not that level ground, but I have faith that we can reach that level ground, if not this year, then next year for sure.