redria, this is my reason for believing this was a part of the Muse competitive system.
excerpt from OP of this thread, posted by Muse employee:
As per the wishes of Squash and the ducks, we're bringing the titles into the full ruleset for competitive, and making a new thread so that all questions about them will go here, and he won't have to deal with them. Down to business!
Although it's true that with their system essentially defunct and no Muse involvement in maintenance of titles, those rules are no longer particularly relevant or binding. I just assumed they'd remain in force with no clearcut policy in place to replace them. That said, it's clear that the consensus on what the rules
are is against that assumption - that acknowledged I am now simply arguing for what I think they
should be.
1. Strict rules on what counts as scrim and suddenly no one will play (what we were doing at the beginning of titles)
I don't at all see that an opt-in system is a strict ruleset or that it would stop teams from allowing transfer of titles. For example I have every intention of agreeing with BFS that
some of our scrim matches can have titles at stake. Ultimately it won't bother me too much if my clan loses titles while experimenting during practices but I think it would be nicer to be able to draw a distinction between when a scrim is a practice or a competition.
I suppose it
is true that titles will be more mobile if all scrims count and that does stop teams from hoarding titles - although to do that they'd have to avoid competing in tournaments, too. However I don't think titles changing hands regularly is inherently a good thing - while total stagnation is bad, I'd rather see fewer, more hotly contested title transfers than regular and rather meaningless ones.
The primary benefit of the titles is, as I see it, to add some excitement and put something extra at stake in otherwise uninteresting matches, as well as giving clans a badge of honour as they have a (questionable) claim at being the best players on that map. That works perfectly in scrims where the teams have agreed it will be a title fight - you get an intense match because the teams are a little more invested as their pride is on the line, with a somewhat tangible result in that the title could publicly change hands. But if there's no specific agreement, you get a situation where every scrim is a title fight, and is therefore taken seriously to the detriment of casual play, experimentation & practices, or every scrim is a title fight so titles change hands too often, too easily and therefore don't really matter to anyone (current situation).
I think your claim that there would be few title fights is most likely correct. But that's more because of a broader stagnation of the competitive scene - in particular scrims, which are much less respected than tournaments as competitive events - than anything else. And the solution to that is not, in my eyes, to force competitive and practice scrims to be the same thing.
However I can see the appeal of keeping the titles casual rather than particularly competitive. I guess we have tournaments for serious matches, if people prefer to keep it that way there's no harm if titles are a bit of unimportant fun on the side.
