I'm posting my personal take on this, not speaking for the rest of the TD team.
The current system is alright, it's old but it gets the job done and the large majority of the "controversies" are extremely inconsequential. I don't think I have ever fully agreed with the managers pick, before or after being a TD, but they have always been decent enough. However, I fully believe the system can be made better.
The TD team generally focuses on a few factors when discussing potential pickups:
- Experience (in) Managing: Picking someone who has gotten decent results in the past, hasn't created any problems and whose players have had a decent experience with is easy and risk free. All new managers are a potential risk and that will always work against them.
- Tournament Results: Having good results as a player and manager is a good trait, but there's no way we can pick solely based on this. There are more than a handful examples of absolute top tour players completely failing as managers, there are people with completely unremarkable results as individuals winning tours as managers, there are managers who win one tour and end last in the next one and viceversa. Skill and results alone aren't enough, but we do give them a lot of weight.
- Behavior: We don't want fake "kindness" or people who never rise their voice. We want managers who won't get (tour)banned midtour and/or won't relentlessly attack their own players if results don't go their way.
- Team Affiliation: Having managers who have history with the team they are managing helps create a stronger team identity. Some people really care about this, some don't (myself included).
It's rather straightforward, has lots of subjective elements and is safe. I'm pretty sure everyone has their own personal criteria and preferences, but I don't see the core of this changing. Nonetheless, there's room to improve the system.
As things are right now, the odds are heavily stacked against new pairs because they have to compete with former managers and people with better team affiliations than themselves. A proposal I had to lessen this issue was implementing a "relegation" system. The relegation would "ban" the bottom two manager pairs from managing in the next installment of the tour and the team affiliation aspect wouldn't be used to pick their replacement, this would prevent relegated managers from simply picking their friends to take over the team. This would open up more opportunities for new managers, keep managers picks fresh, and increase the competitiveness of the last couple of weeks in team tours.
It was recently suggested we made a player feedback survey which would be sent to all players after a team tournament. This could give us a better feel of each team's environment and quality of contributions of the managers, which is important because we tend to use a lot of hearsay when it comes to discussing these things and they are one of the biggest factors used to repick a manager.
Those are the two main ideas I'd like to discuss and try to implement. Is there any other idea we should talk about?
The current system is alright, it's old but it gets the job done and the large majority of the "controversies" are extremely inconsequential. I don't think I have ever fully agreed with the managers pick, before or after being a TD, but they have always been decent enough. However, I fully believe the system can be made better.
The TD team generally focuses on a few factors when discussing potential pickups:
- Experience (in) Managing: Picking someone who has gotten decent results in the past, hasn't created any problems and whose players have had a decent experience with is easy and risk free. All new managers are a potential risk and that will always work against them.
- Tournament Results: Having good results as a player and manager is a good trait, but there's no way we can pick solely based on this. There are more than a handful examples of absolute top tour players completely failing as managers, there are people with completely unremarkable results as individuals winning tours as managers, there are managers who win one tour and end last in the next one and viceversa. Skill and results alone aren't enough, but we do give them a lot of weight.
- Behavior: We don't want fake "kindness" or people who never rise their voice. We want managers who won't get (tour)banned midtour and/or won't relentlessly attack their own players if results don't go their way.
- Team Affiliation: Having managers who have history with the team they are managing helps create a stronger team identity. Some people really care about this, some don't (myself included).
It's rather straightforward, has lots of subjective elements and is safe. I'm pretty sure everyone has their own personal criteria and preferences, but I don't see the core of this changing. Nonetheless, there's room to improve the system.
As things are right now, the odds are heavily stacked against new pairs because they have to compete with former managers and people with better team affiliations than themselves. A proposal I had to lessen this issue was implementing a "relegation" system. The relegation would "ban" the bottom two manager pairs from managing in the next installment of the tour and the team affiliation aspect wouldn't be used to pick their replacement, this would prevent relegated managers from simply picking their friends to take over the team. This would open up more opportunities for new managers, keep managers picks fresh, and increase the competitiveness of the last couple of weeks in team tours.
It was recently suggested we made a player feedback survey which would be sent to all players after a team tournament. This could give us a better feel of each team's environment and quality of contributions of the managers, which is important because we tend to use a lot of hearsay when it comes to discussing these things and they are one of the biggest factors used to repick a manager.
Those are the two main ideas I'd like to discuss and try to implement. Is there any other idea we should talk about?