Staff Update & Season 7 Information
In the previous Clarity update blog, we talked about our plans to take an extended break in the off-season — primarily with the objective of updating the league’s staff structure and roster. We’d now like to follow up on that by welcoming the new staff team — but also providing some background on why this was done and what will change. Finally, we’ll go over some details on Season 7, including an early projection of the schedule and an overview of the formats we’re considering.
The How & Why
It is now well over two years since work started on developing Clarity League, and in that time we’ve managed to carve out a place in the amateur Dota landscape. In doing so, we’ve built a lovely and growing community, and with season 5, managed to run the biggest amateur event in EU in a good couple years.
That kind of expansion inevitably comes with some growing pains. The team behind Clarity League was assembled for the express purpose of creating and preparing CL — not necessarily for maintaining the project long term. The same group nonetheless mostly stuck around with only a couple changes, but it is nigh inevitable (and perfectly natural) that things might change over the course of two years — and that includes the time people are able to commit to working on a passion project like Clarity.
It thus became apparent that we needed a bit of a refresh. Not only to ensure that things continue to go smoothly, but also to prevent burnout — which is something we always tried to be mindful of, but weren’t particularly great at proactively pursuing.
The goal then became to emphasize a more defined staff structure — one that would allow us to divvy up the workload and break down the process of running and maintaining Clarity in a way that doesn’t leave someone dreading having to spend time on it.
To that end, we invited members of the community who we think will prove to be a great fit to join a renewed staff team & will provide us with the fresh perspectives and the boost of energy we might’ve been lacking for a while. We’re also dropping the Council Member and Moderator roles, which will be replaced by a singular Staff role — partly to emphasize that the new roster will all contribute additionally to the organizational side of the league, alongside the advisory role that defined the role of councilor.
Finally, before we move onto the new staff team, I’d like to again thank the people who helped get Clarity where it is — and, maybe more importantly, how it is. Their contributions were invaluable — both to the creation of the league, but also to me personally. As a minor reflection of their impact, they’ll be given the role of Founder on the Discord. Thanks, y’all.
The New Staff
With all that being said, the new staff of Clarity League consists of Snufkin, Crispy Bacon, haraway, Buzda, waterfalls, eisi, Nappa, Bianco and Difikoll — as well as your admin team: Marceline, skully and Madsen.
Note that this announcement doesn’t necessarily mean that we aren’t looking to make further additions to the team. We’re still taking things slowly, but felt it necessary to get the ball rolling and keep the community up to date.
Season 7 Schedule
Our current projections for a potential schedule are as follows. Note that these dates are not final and may change — we will announce finalized dates on Discord.
Registration Open: January 24th
Registration End: February 7th
Activity Check Period: February 4th — February 8th
Player Drafts: February 11th (Div 1), February 13th (Div 2), February 16th (Div 3), February 18th (Div 4)
Group Stage: February 21st, February 28th, March 7th
Tiebreakers: March 14th
Playoffs (Single Elimination): March 21st, March 28th, April 4th
Playoffs (Double Elimination): March 21st, March 28th, April 4th, April 11th
Season 7 Format
With the firm decision to make Season 7 a single-playday event, we are looking at two options for the season format.
Single Elimination
This traditional format would feature two groups of 4 teams playing a total of 3 weeks of round robin BO3s, followed by 1 week of tiebreakers if necessary. All 8 teams then proceed into a single-elimination playoff bracket lasting 3 weeks, for a grand total of 7 weeks maximum.
Double Elimination
This format again features two groups of 4 playing 3 weeks of round robin BO3s into 1 week of tiebreakers. However, the playoff bracket looks very different here.
All 8 teams proceed into the playoff, with the top 4 (ie, the top 2 teams in both groups) being seeded into the upper bracket, and the bottom 4 into the lower bracket.
The first week is standard: all 8 teams play a BO3 series. The losers of the lower bracket series’ are eliminated. The losers of the upper bracket series drop to the lower bracket.
The second week sees the winners of the week 1 upper bracket series play each other. However, in the lower bracket, the other 4 teams then play a BO1 — the losers of which are eliminated, but the winners of which then play another BO1 against each other to determine who proceeds and who is eliminated.
In the third week, the overall winner of this pair of BO1s plays the team who lost in the upper bracket. The remaining UB team has a bye week. This is the major drawback to this format. Week 4 then naturally features the Grand Finals.
The one potential consideration for this format, if we were to opt for it, is whether a finals rematch is warranted. Specifically, if a team remains in the upper bracket until the finals, and then loses, they are the only upper bracket team who is eliminated without being beaten twice. In many competitions with this kind of a double elimination format, a finals rematch is played when the upper bracket competitor loses in the finals.
In our case, this also serves as “compensation” to the UB team for forcing them into a break during Week 3, and the damage these breaks do has been a contentious issue in the league.
The staff will discuss these options and announce the final decision, but we welcome community members voicing their opinions on the matter (preferably in the #league-discussion channel!).
Thanks for reading. If you have any comments or questions, we’re more than happy to discuss on the Discord.
Cheers all!