I also think you should switch around the incentive for seeding matches. Instead of penalizing teams who refuse seeding matches (as there are a lot of legitimate reasons to do so with scheduling, the number of tournies that are going on, etc), you should incentivize the teams by giving them a point in the next season for every seeding matchup they play against a new team. You can cap it at something like 3 or 5 so existing teams can't run up the score before the season even starts. Also, I'd also make it so in the event of a tie at the end of the season, the team with the higher number of season match points (i.e. excluding the preseason points) would be the winner.

Sorry, but no one are getting extra points for playing seeding matches. That will be unfair. There have been an entire month to play these matches, I simply don't believe that it's not possible to arrange up to 2 matches in that timeframe. It's half of what is required once the season begins.

I'm just saying that if you want better compliance with the between season rules (up/down, seeding matches) carrots are better than sticks.

Also, the informal nature of these matchups makes them much harder to organize. I only recognize about half of the unseeded North American teams (mostly because they've participated in the custom and invitational qualifiers tournies). Personally, I'd love to see either a tournament or have a week between the closing of signups and the beginning of the season in which prearranged seeding matchups are played.

The "carrot instead of stick" thing does simply not work in this case. We know that it's very late that we come out with this, and we are taking each specific case up and evaluating it closely. We will not give minus points to teams if they really can't attend to play a match this weekend. There are plenty of teams with seedings to play against.

I don't think prearranged seeding matches would work at all. It is much easier for a team to estimate their own skill level, compared to us trying to guess it. It also gives some freedom for the teams to strategically pick which teams they are going to play seeding matches against. And the nature of defending your seed against an open challenge like that should give some interesting matches for the teams playing them. Especially since the new team picked the team themselves, and thereby estimate that they can at least tie with the team they are going up against.

Maybe for next season there could be a double-elimination bo5 qualifier for new teams and the top 4 (or 8 or 16 if there are a lot of teams) could then play in a second tournament against the lowest ranked teams from season 2, with a total of 16 or 32 teams say. Then the results of that tournament could be used to seed teams for the next season.

The new teams that didn't make the cut would all go into the lowest division for their first season.

I like the stick thing and dont think carrots are any incentive for anything EVER .. i mean carrots are distgusting !

But i think on the internet punishment always works better than cookies ever will. .. SO surprisingly enough i agree with swalks approach .. DAMN IT XD !

I think you should give teams a little more time to vote on descent. This weekend is very important for 16 teams. There won't be many pcws played on the map this weekend by these teams. Therefore i'd have to blindly vote no on this, from a first glance over the map.
Let the vote run until the end of the week.

Statistics will determine if the map is viable or not. I would never vote on something like this.

Also i found this section now:
"If a team that played previous seasons decline to play seeding matches and are signed up for the upcoming season. They will get a point punishment in the group play, unless they have played at least 2 seeding matches."
I think you need to at least let the defending team decide on match time, and let the team have at least one week to plan the match. As I understand this paragraph, the defending team has to play the seeding match at the request of the other team, unless they already played two seeding matches at the request of other teams...
Please make some rules for challenging and accepting seeding matches.

Something like this:
To be seeded team proposes a match time. Proposal has to be made 3 days in advance.
Challenged team has to respond to request within 2 days.
Challenged team may reschedule, if they propose 2 other match times within the same week.
This, or predefined seeding match times/days...

The vote have been extended until tuesday. We need the divisions and matches up at tuesday/wednesday at the very latest. Last season we had that up on a friday, with matches on sunday. And we got complaints about not having enough time to contact eachother.
Good proposal about the seeding matches arrangements dreidel, might do something similar to that. The rule about the point punishment is more forwarded to after season 2, since we DO know that teams only have this weekend for it. We won't punish them if they really can not play. Predetermined seeding match times/matchups are not a good idea in any case. It is far better to have the teams plan those matches themselves.
EZM, if you don't vote or don't write your opinion about the map in the thread. Then your voice is not heard and that is your own fault. Win/loss stats are NOT enough to determine if a map is good or not.

I accidently voted yes in the vote when I was suppose to vote no! Based on the fact it seems you are adding 3 new maps to the rotation already? 6 for a season seems plenty of rotation to me?

I think you could make predetermined seeding matchups work. Just have each new team play one match vs a high seed and low seed, where you distribute the burden between all of the existing teams. As long as you give the new teams the option to play additional seeding matches outside of the predetermined ones (in case they want to try for a higher or lower seed), I think it would work out well.

@Bonkers there are getting added two new maps. jambi and icarus, which means a map pool of 5 maps total.

Lookint from outside, I think in the future it would be nice if you would space out the tournaments a bit. In NS1, we almost never had two tournaments at the same time, not even signups. Just my 5c.

@jiriki Yeah, the only reason we had it this close was because UWE booked the ESL Studio at the "new" date and we had to make a new contest to decide for it and it could not wait. We had only planned the custom map cup and season 2 before that.

I am seriously completely new to this and I have been trying to get people together for the past two weeks to get a seeding match in, and to figure out what one even was. Im guessing its basically like a qualifying match, but Im still lost on how to set one up, and how the reporting goes. Do you manually report it?

Yes, just send me a PM with the results M1sterS1r