A long time ago, a date was picked for the TRONIC Cup. That date was December 23rd, 2012. It’s a good date for a tournament. Winter, vacation, two days before Christmas. We won’t be having the Cup then. There won’t be a hundred thousand teams or a million people playing fortress either.
The last time we actively tried to grow fortress, we needed to get a new bracket. We jumped from about eight teams in Ladle 16 to about 16 in Ladle 17. The approach was simple. Contact already existing clans and teams in other game modes, and invite them to play. A previous approach had targeted individual players and fitted them into new teams. That approach failed because the players didn’t know their teammates and didn’t enjoy playing with them. Approaching already existing teams did work. Fortress is a team game and the teammates can make the game fun or unbearable.
There won’t be a hundred thousand teams in 2012. There won’t be a thousand or even a hundred. But let’s set that same goal as in the Spring of 2009. Let’s double the number. Let’s fill up our 32 team bracket.
This shouldn’t be our only goal, though. Recently it seems many in the community have transformed from fortress players to Ladle players. The only fortress game going with any consistency is in CTWF. That’s a good server, and it has an important place in the fortress landscape, but there needs to be more.
Casual fortress used to be the core of the community, and Ladles were an added bonus. A more serious competition played once a month. Today, a good casual game is the bonus.
I think one of the strongest trends in the history of fortress is the stiffening of personnel. More Players stay on the same team longer than they used to. The idea behind this is, I think, that people stay with the same teammates for a long period of time to build intuitive understanding of each other. The idea that this works is ludicrous, because it never has. A successful team needs good chemistry and a coherent approach to winning, but fortress isn’t the type of game where intuitive knowledge of one’s teammates is all that important. At least not yet. One isn’t passing them a ball. They don’t need to get open. For the most part, techniques and tactics do not yet exist where non-obvious teamwork is important. Players have different levels of awareness of their teammates, and that is important. A player has high awareness or low awareness or something in between, but it doesn’t matter who are his teammates.
Something that I would welcome would be more shorter term teams, mixing players and ideas around a bit. Stirring the pot. It’s happened before. In Ladle 33, a team was formed of half Speeders and half Plus, just a couple months after the teams had met in the finals. Before this year, there was always good circulation of players, new combinations and formations. We need this more than ever, especially if there isn’t going to be any casual fort being played. Otherwise, we’re each only playing with the same small group of people.
The Ladle itself is becoming less significant. This will be the 53rd Ladle. It’s getting a bit absurd. They remain tough to win but how much does winning one really mean. I still think we compete in tournaments not necessarily to win but to gain the recognition of our peers. It’s the communal experience that makes it worth the time. When that community is just the size of a clan or a small team, it really isn’t worth it. The teams might be strong, and the competition might be stiff, but the fortress community is as weak as it was when there were four teams and the first round of the Ladle was the semi-finals.
I think we need raise our game. The Ladle does not provide the best forum for the best matches, because by the final, you’ve been sitting at the computer for three hours. League formats have failed in their last two attempts. The AFL had some success, but even then you got a lot of 5v5 matches that end up being 4v3 or 5v4 or something small-sided.
Let us leave the Ladle for the clans. Because of the inflexibility of time, clans generally need more than six players to consistently field a team. With varying degrees of activity, they sometimes field two, sometimes leave a lot out, sometimes do not field any. A perennial challenge to leagues is that they occur over a long time period and players’ activity fluctuates and flickers. Scheduling games also remains a constant challenge. The Fortress Premier League gave teams the control over when to play their matches, and most matches ended up not getting played. The league office scheduling a time often results in just as many no-shows. The tournament format works because it is infrequent. When you do get everyone together, playing many matches is easy. Of course 3/4 of the teams play just two rounds, despite being around and available for the rest of the afternoon or evening.
Ladles are themselves dragging down creativity in strategy. Teams have a month prepare for a Ladle, but potentially only a couple minutes to change things between rounds. This means that teams generally don’t experiment with tactics or strategies in any competitive environment, since there are barely any wars any more either. Hell, it’s pretty hard to find a half-decent 6v6 casual match to test any individual or paired tactic on. Maybe the reason things have stagnated is simply because there is no opportunity to try anything anymore.
I think it’s time to rethink how the fortress competitive scene works. I think we need to strengthen the fortress community, and if it is at the expense of the Ladle then okay. I think fortress competition can move beyond the Ladle. I think there should be more matches directly between teams (i.e. wars). I think more fortress needs to be played. I don’t know the answers, but I know the question. What now?
