As the week has gone on, I think it is safe to say that there is no clear "best solution", there is negative connotations with every decision, whether that be the isolation of players of a specific tier on a team, the lack of a clear solution of a tier to double up on for the whole season or some people's general distaste for 4SV. Initially I thought that 4 SV would be fine, nothing special but is the least horrible solution. However, what was mentioned previously by Olivia is true, it does lead to a lot of players that don't play SV to end up either undrafted or hardly playing because they are top 8 of their tier. Therefore, you're kind of stuck with players of an older generation that do not really have a natural place if they are not among the top 8 signups of a generation.
This was what brought me back to the question of could the flex spot be refined, whilst still maintaining VGC in the event. This seems like a slippery slope, as the preferred route of flex seems to be the DPL approach of each team picking one tier. The format of flex in one slot last year had its doubters due to the preconceived doubled tier every week across the board, introducing an element of RNG that could not be controlled in any circumstance. It did lead to teams needing to draft multiple players of a tier though, which reduces the isolation problem previously mentioned.
I do believe that I have found the solution to refine flex in a way that takes inspiration from the DPL style whilst also keeping the VGC slot intact that it well and truly deserves. How did I do it? Well I actually didn't, shoutouts to
The Diabolic Gift ,
Bowas and
Princess Autumn for dealing with my antics on this and actually being capable of statistical modelling (or at least trying to make it work in Autumn's case). Below are two examples of how the system might work
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Let me explain what madness is going on here. In essence, the idea is to allow for the flex slot be picked by one team every week, essentially leading to teams having "home" (where they get to pick the 8th tier) and "away" (where the opposing team would pick the 8th slot) fixtures in the regular season. This system allows for each team to pick the 8th tier 3 times in a season, with one week needing to be a neutral week to allow for this to be possible. This neutral week would consist of 4 SV as it is the safest "middleground" as previously mentioned. For these examples, I asked for week 7 to be the neutral week but this does not have to be the case. Week 7 was the fairest neutral week to ensure that no team would be able to pick the 8th tier for both their week 6 and 7 series (Trust us on the math here, we tried) as the ability to pick the tier twice this late into the season may be slightly too unfair for the other teams. If people are not as upset about this possible statistical advantage, this neutral week can be moved to week 1 (or week 4 if people would prefer it to be right after mids).
Essentially, this system would allow for the flex slot to be kept, incorporate the tier selection system that is liked in other events for the tactical elements it brings, and also be as fair as possible whilst maintaining 8 slots. If this system was to succeed, it would also ideally prevent the need to have this exact same discussion in the forum again next year if in the hypothetical circumstance that whatever is chosen ends up not working as planned in the event and we're circling back to this exact same debate next year.
If people have any questions on this system, please reach out to me either on here or on Discord, but I am open to feedback on this system which I feel might be the "best of all circumstances", or at the very least is the best that I can think of.
Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk!!!!
