Team System Discussion and Ideas

[Lord Celebi]

I like the idea of a randomizer choosing people, but what if we mixed that idea with another one some people had: picking a few teams from the beginning and being chosen onto one. People pick a few teams they'd want to be on, then the randomizer puts those people randomly on those teams with an even distribution.

We've done this before and they have been some decidedly low energy WARs (WAR VI comes to mind). I recall a lot people being very unhappy with drafting decisions and basically all-but-quitting if they didn't get onto the team they wanted.

I also like the idea of soft caps that can be tightened to an extent; if you truly wanted to participate in WAR then there's probably a couple teams you wouldn't mind joining, if someone turns away from WAR simply because they didn't get on a team they really wanted to, would they have participated at all? I don't know, maybe, maybe not. But then again my idea of a soft cap was more of saying "around this number" (say 15) with -2/+1 wiggle room, but then when added another cap add to the original 15?

This is definitely the most workable of the solutions. However, my concern with this is two-fold: 1) If a team is temporarily "full," people will just wait for the cap to be raised. 2) The raising of the cap would rely on other teams being popular enough to get members. "Joke" teams wouldn't work in this environment. We would either have to ban joke teams or we'd have to wait for them to fill up.