The world, live

Hey, time to check up on some AI-assisted overviews of the upcoming changes. This time we dig into the assorted new features that are coming.

2v2 : the teamplay phase

THE THIRD LEAGUE PHASE BECOMES THE TEAMPLAY PHASE
Every league season is three round-robin phases. The first stays a plain series, the second is the Winner's League, and the third is now the teamplay phase: rounds 23 to 33 at full size, eleven matches a club. Each of those matches is a normal best-of-five whose middle set is a 2v2, fought by a pair from each club. The set is worth a full point in the series.

Pair sets have their own catalogue of twenty teamplay maps— The Hunters, Hwangsanbul and their kin. Every season's map pool draws three of them alongside its regular seven 1v1 grounds, and the ground for each match's pair set is announced on the fixture page like every other map.

PICKING A PAIR
The lineup rules extend naturally: five different players through regulation — the pair counts as two — and only the ace may repeat someone. The fixture page's third card takes both picks. Set nothing and your coach fields a pair for you, as he does for any other empty slot.

CHEMISTRY
Every player carries hidden chemistry: one partner race he thrives beside, one he struggles beside, and one he is simply comfortable with. It is rolled at birth like his potentials — every player already in the world receives his at the season flip— and it is worth about half a skill point across the board, either way. Nobody can see it up front. Your coach learns it only by watching: after three official 2v2 games beside a given race, the verdict appears on the coach's report. Until then you are guessing, or reading how the sets went.

And not every pairing of races is equal. The real 2v2 scene had its feared combinations and its victims, and so does this one. Working out which is which is part of the fun- but I have made sure that the differences between pairings aren't quite as bad as they were in real life. And with the added complications of chemistry and varied rosters, most pairings should see play.

WHAT DOES 2v2 AFFECT?

• A separate 2v2 rating. Every player has his own 2v2 Elo, starting level with everyone else's. A side is rated as the average of its two men, so carrying a weaker partner to an expected win earns little, and an upset earns both of you plenty. It has its own board under Rankings — by player, not by pair — and player pages gain a 2v2 card: rating and rank, best pairing, most common partner, best matchup.
• No 1v1 number at all. Pair sets never touch a player's 1v1 Elo or his matchup ratings.
• Experience and condition, at the full rate.
• The MVP race: a pair win counts as a regular win for both men.

TRY IT BEFORE IT COUNTS
The teamplay phase closes the season, so there is time to practise. Two things open with the update, both of them exhibitions — they move no rating, and they reveal no chemistry, because only official pair sets teach your coach anything. But chemistry does affect unofficial games, so you get to speculate!

• Dual tournaments in the Challenges hub: the individual tournament lobby gains a pairs mode, played on teamplay ground.
• 2v2 sparring: from any of your players' pages, send two of your own pairs against each other.
  -Additional unofficial 2v2 modes might be implemented later. But for now, we start with these. Amateurs dont get to learn 2v2 just yet.

KOF becomes the Winner's League — and the order gets interesting

Some changes come to the winner-stays format in season 2, and the first is its name.

RENAMED TO WINNER'S LEAGUE
KOF is now the Winner's League — WL where space is short — everywhere on the site.

STREAKS TIRE
All-Kills should be somewhat rare, and with some of the condition changes for Season 2, I wanted to make sure that they don't accidentally become too common. From season 2 the man who stays on plays each further game of the night a little more tired than his condition number says — two points for every game he has already played, that only affect him during the streak and doesnt affect his permanent condition — and each game of a streak wears him 10% more than the one before (this one does add up to official condition). Between evenly matched clubs that takes roughly a third off the all-kill rate. An ace who genuinely outclasses the other bench will still run the table often enough to be feared.

ONE SEALED COUNTER-PICK
Beside a league Winner's League order you may now file one optional counter-pick: a fifth man, attached to your second, third or fourth pick, with a condition — the opponent standing on stage is a given race or a named player, and/or the game is on a given map. It is decided once, at the moment that pick is called. If the condition is true your fifth man plays instead, and the player he replaced sits the whole match out, fresh. If not, your order plays as written.

The small print:

• Never your opener. The first game stays a blind guess for both sides.
• It is sealed. Nobody sees your rule unless it fires; when it does, that game wears a COUNTER-PICK chip in the report, on the live board and in the replay. A rule that never fired is shown afterwards to you alone.
• A Random opponent has no race until his game begins, so only his name can call your man out.
• League Winner's League matches only — not challenges, not cups.

Be warned: it is a gamble, not a free upgrade. It might not always be the best play, but thats your coaching decision.

THE RANDOM RACE

About three newcomers in a hundred now arrive as Random players. A Random player has no race of his own: it is rolled fresh at the start of every game he plays, and the game is recorded as the race he played — in the battle report, in his matchup records, and in both players' per-matchup ratings. He appears on a race's ranking board once he has actually played games as that race. He wears silver.

He turns up wherever new players do — the scouting pool, free agency, the off-season intake — though never among a founding squad's guaranteed race slots. The obvious worry is that he cannot specialise his training for one race's matchups, but they also weren't entirely terrible in test situations.

THE SCOUTING POOL

Four changes to the academy's weekly ritual:

• A scout's call no longer shows a kid's skills. It tells you one thing: his rank on the online ladder, from F to S. The letter is mostly how well he plays today — but the ladder flatters a kid with a great deal still in him and underrates one who has nearly peaked, by about a letter, never much more, and the card does not say which you are looking at. Whether the B-ranked fourteen-year-old is a gem is your judgement again.
• The pool is younger: finds are 13 to 16 years old, where it used to run to 18. Prospects over sixteen leave the pool at the changeover.
• A kid refused three times — by anyone — gives up on the phone and leaves the pool.
• The pool's talent is spread more evenly. This is a backend fix to a weird gap in the original talent spread, and is meant to make the amateurs in the pool a bit more varied long term.

Everything else is unchanged: one held find at a time, one signing a week, an academy of at most seven. I am planning on possibly implementing a one-round off-season draft feature that would feature highly sought after juniors- but I have not started developing it yet. More news about that will come if and when I make it happen.

TEAM CONFIDENCE IS RETIRED

We took a hard look at team confidence before this update and did not like what we found. It was never the momentum the manual once described. It could only ever cost you — a squad riding very high or sunk very low played some of its games a few percent below itself — it never faded, it never reset between seasons, and nothing but results could move it. That made it a trapdoor under a struggling club and an invisible tax on a winning one, and gave a manager nothing to do about either. From season 2 it no longer touches a match, and the number has left your club header: every club stands level. A redesigned version — one a manager can actually steer — may return in a later season.

TEN NEW MAPS

Ten real Brood War maps join the duelling pool at the changeover, taking it from twenty-six to thirty-six: Outsider SE, Triathlon, Neo Beltway, Dante's Peak, Empire of the Sun, Alternative, Ride of Valkyries, Monte Cristo, Gladiator and Sin Chupung-Ryeong. Every one of them was in the original Shakuras's own map table, and the values it gave them in 2013 are the guide for ours. But some are deviated to fill our needs.

They were picked to fill a gap. The old pool had almost no map that was both rich and quick to cross — its rich maps were slow and its quick maps poor — so the macro third of every season's draw leaned the same way. Most of the ten are rich grounds with a real rush distance; the rest add a four-player map, a poor and winding one, the most open ground in the pool after Jade, and a rushy maze. The draw comes out more even, and the seasons that land on the pool's most lopsided maps come up less often.

AND THE REST

• Every lineup screen — league fixtures, playoff ties, the Winner's League — now carries your squad by matchup, and the opponent's roster with overall, experience, Elo and ratings against each race. This feature is actually already live, but it has some extra info during Winner's League.
• New free agents and founding squads are generated with a slightly wider range of potential, skill by skill: taller peaks and deeper holes inside one player, the same player on average. Nobody already in the world is changed. A very minor tweak for future teams.

I'll put up a page with the patch notes in one place later. Sorry if the AI-generated text is confusing, I tried to fix the worst sentences. But this is a lot of information to go through.

/VD