Things is, 'minor mistakes' aren't always the players' faults- sometimes there's a weird lag spike, or someone's computer crashes, and we don't get fair game.
But on the flip side, it is only odds that say that a game won't be turned by computer faults for every game of the match. Is it likely? Of course not. But the only way to eliminate that from effect would be to play an infinite number of games, to determine who is statistically better.
Yes, I'm being disagreeable, but I like the way best of 1 works. A team can practice all week and master a single ambush that will only work once. And they only have to do it once. Taking risks may be scarier, but then again taking risks may give you an edge for one game that you wouldn't be able to hold for 3 games. And that is where best of 1 shines: when the underdog/lesser team wins through a single well played tactic. If we were trying to just determine who the best team was, we could skip a lot of games.
Yes there are unfair situations. You may point to the match I played in on Saturday. ~Please note, this is my personal opinion, and I do not want this to turn into an argument. I will happily discuss the specific situation in private, but I elaborate here as an example, not fodder for arguments~
~I will also remove the specifics here if anyone feels it does not add to the current discussion~
During the Gents-OVW match with Sky League, OVW took Alistair and his goldfish. We have had him fly several times in the past competitively and he is an excellent pilot. I was looking forward to playing with him.
He also has crappy internet, and sometimes it just won't let him play. We played a few games earlier that day and we thought his internet would be able to handle it.
As soon as the countdown ended and the game started loading, he said on TS that his client had just crashed trying to load. We knew
before the game had even started that he would not be able to fly effectively.
Rewatching the video, the casters did not realize that within the first 20 seconds of the match starting, both teams had stopped to wait and see if we could get Alistair back in.
I want to put out that I think that Urz handled the situation appropriately.
Given that there were no rules regarding the situation, the choice was to either let the opposing team make the decision on what to do (boiling down to either be an exceedingly good sport, or be seen as exceptionally poor sports), or make up a rule that hurts one of the teams without having been established before hand.
The ruling he made was that we could swap players out to maintain a full crew that wouldn't disconnect, or go as is. We tried swapping out players, but after that failed the first time, we didn't want to drag it out too long and resumed play with Alistair still piloting.
Urz made the correct decision in the match, and it is difficult to predict something like that happening, so I can't fault him for not being prepared.
Which all boils down to 2 notes I want to make having been shown another possible way for things to go wrong.
1. In the first 30 seconds of the match, if no permanent damage has been dealt, a team may request to restart the match to adjust players/loadouts. Doing so will sacrifice the entirety of that teams emergency pause time.
2. During emergency pause time, a team may shuffle players as needed between ships/positions, as long as there are no equipment changes at each respective position (if you replace an engineer with chem, extinguisher, buff, loch, and moonshine, you must take that same loadout).Using our situation as an example, the match had not yet really started. OVW would have sacrificed the possiblity of any more pauses that match, in exchange for being able to bring a steady set of players to the game. The Gents would be given an appropriate amount of time to adjust ships/crews with no penalty in the match lobby.
I feel like that is a pretty fair balance between maintaining a timed schedule, allowing a team to handle problems, and protecting the other team from excessive radical changes.
Outside of those first 30 seconds, we would have switched to the rule Urz was employing, just slightly more defined. Players can re-arrange to accommodate drop-outs, but the match continues.
This specific ruling gives a time limit to the swapping, which would have given OVW a better indicator of how much time they had to complete their rearrangements, along with protecting the gents from the possibility of OVW changing their loadouts without the gents getting a chance to respond.
~Thank you for humoring me~
Regarding previous questions...
1. Players loading in slowly:
Players may make repairs, buff, load ammo, etc as soon as they load in. However, no pilot may move their ship until the ref begins the match, no guns may be fired, and no spots may be laid down. The ref will begin the match when all 4 captains have announced in match chat "Ready". Pilots are given 30 seconds to announce their readiness after the ref loads into the match. Beyond this a team's emergency pause time will be used for any further delays.
This gives all players a chance to load in. It takes the responsibility off of the ref to monitor all players to make sure no player moves before the game starts. It ~can~ be abused to give a team more time to prepare after loaded in, but the other team gets the same amount of time, and noone can make any game-changing moves until all captains are ready.
2. Player drops mid-engagement
Emergency pause time for a team may only be initiated if there is not currently an engagement. An engagement is currently defined at the discretion of the ref, though I would like to make it a clearer rule.
This means if your pilot drops mid engagement and your ship flies away, too bad. There is no quantifiable way to determine how things would have gone, and as such there is no way to determine how the match should be altered retroactively.
The only solution for this would be an actual pause button available that would freeze ships, players, and projectiles. Since we don't have one and are unlikely to get one, any mid-engagement problem will have to wait until the engagement has ended. To give an example (again from Saturday), on Canyon Ambush with OVW and the Gents shooting at each other through the beam for about 8 minutes, I would not have defined most of that as an engagement. Shots were being continuously fired, but no real damage was being dealt to any ship, and the situation was not going to change unless someone moved as the Gents did towards the end. If a player had disconnected at that point, I personally would have approved a pause, with both teams awkwardly staring at each other through the beam.
The exception here is with slow-mo. If slow-mo is engaged in the middle of an engagment, the engagement will continue as normal until it ends. However, the match timer will be paused, and the Server time will be started. If Server time runs out, the match will be called according to server time rules. This means that the fight will continue as normal until the teams disengage or slow-mo lasts too long.
