Greetings Woodland Warriors!
As we are preparing our normal end of season awards, I can now share details of what we plan to change for our next season, LH02, starting on April 1st.
First off, what’s not changing. In our recent survey, the community was split on their enjoyment of hirelings (3.4 / 5.0) but in agreement on how they wish for hirelings to be used in the league. 98.1% of players wish for them to remain as an optional game mode, and 75.5% of players do not want there to be any sort of bans of specific hirelings. So for the next season, rules around hirelings will not change.
Next up, what is changing. The league showed a higher enjoyment of landmarks (3.9 / 5.0), but were split on how they should be implemented. 52.8% of players do not want the host to control which landmarks are in the draft pool, but 64.2% of players want there to be exceptions regarding Raft + Lake, Tower + Mountain, and Lost City + Mountain. The other admins and I took that idea to the drawing board to discuss both how we would document this rule on our website, as well as how players may need to detail game options in LFG posts. We came to the conclusion that to enforce random pick on certain maps but not on others will result in this situation being too convoluted, especially for newer players. For this reason, we are going to go against the slim 52.8% majority here, and try out a new ruleset for LH02. Starting on April 1st, hosts may select both map and landmark choices when posting an LFG post. You may still declare you want the map to be random, similar to how some folks still play with a random deck choice, but we will no longer require it. We’ll check in at the end of LH02 to confirm how this decision has been received, and change it again if needed.
Finally, something not on the survey, but something we are going to add in as a new rule. We have received several reports in this last season regarding players not logging their wins until several weeks later. While it has historically been the winner’s right to post their winning data, this delayed posting harms both the other players in that game that want to look at their stats, as well as harms our growing audience of data scientists that have built tools using our dataset. So starting on April 1st, the winner of the game will be given 72 hours to post their game to our website. After 72 hours, any of the other players in the lobby should register the game instead, and post the completed game link in the game thread. As an alternative, we want to remind folks that hosts can also pre-register games once the draft is completed. This can help make the process easier to update information when the game is completed. We believe our recommendations above will help improve the situation for now. If it does not, we will begin looking into alternate solutions.
As always, we appreciate players continuing to participate in the league! Looking forward to another season of games with everyone!
Mouseman, on behalf of the League Admin Team