Hey Dialers!
It’s been a while since we’ve written up some words here on the blog, so let’s use this time to tackle a few things and hopefully answer some questions that some of you have about the future of Off the Dial.
FABL
FABL was a great event! We will likely rerun it at some point, but we currently have no dates set. If we do, it won’t be in 2023; there is too much prep work for us to have another day in time for this year. While the event did not get as many participants as we hoped, the reception was excellent! The main takeaway from the event is finding a way to make the beta bracket more engaging in a cross-tournament format.
The main struggles for us from behind the scenes were simply the sheer number of events that had to be run and the prep for each event, so in the future, we’ll likely reduce the number of qualifiers to four and have them occur once every two weeks. This should hopefully increase the event’s turnout since it’s not weekly.
IDTGA
Now, back to our standard event. We recently launched our chibi commentators to a positive reception, which is excellent! I want to use this to make the stream more interactive and engaging.
At the moment, we’re looking at enhancing the courage bracket, as currently, our Anarchy rank conversion is still a little inaccurate, so we’re still calibrating that. We’re also paying a close eye to a few other aspects, but you may hear about that later!
While here, I also want to tackle a few issues mentioned in the IDTGA 38 feedback.
It would be nice if future applications and team assignments looked at age as a factor.
There are always a lot of factors that go into making teams balanced when we form them. Currently, we can’t add another feature to the balancing. We’re already balancing solo ranks, competitive experience, play styles and timezones. Also, if we were splitting up teams due to age, there would always be some crossover because it would be scarce to have an even split between age groups/
I’m a backline player, and one of our members said they played “all” weapons only to play heavy deco for most of the tournament...*
Unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do to fix that. We don’t know each registration individually; we only go off the information provided. Additionally, we never say that all teams will be perfectly balanced. That is flat-up impossible. We try to make the splits as close as possible with the information we receive.
Dropping out shouldn’t lead to being banned from a season.
Why not? What a dropout does is essentially crippling a team. And if people who sign up just drop out or do not show up when it comes to a tournament, we need to provide some way to show that this is not something we condone. Honestly, I think the one-season suspension is quite light, and I know if other TOs were in my position, they would give a lot harder (and permanent) resolutions. And most dropouts aren’t due to ‘emergencies’. Out of the hundreds of dropouts we’ve had over the five years we’ve been running IDTGA, less than 5% of dropouts are because of emergencies.
The future
Well, for starters, IDTGA isn’t going anywhere. We are the largest and most frequent FA / draft tournament running, so we have no reason to quit!
Additionally, we’re looking at enhancing our social media of Off the Dial, as we’re starting to bring on a separate team to enhance the number of impressions we can get online outside of the competitive scene.
There are also a few other standalone events coming out this year that we plan to put on beyond IDTGA, so stay tuned for those!
Stay Tuned!