Today I spent a little lime looking through the early division set-ups for the 2009 Summer League on Grifball.com. I decided to randomly click on team names that were new to me and I was happy to see a lot of unfamiliar gamertags and also some that were familiar to me from double XP matchmaking. While the league won’t be quite the size it’s been in the past, it’s comforting to know that new people are still finding out about it and signing up.

I could go on about how we need better advertising for the league in order for the league to properly experience more consistent growth as opposed to the recent decline, but that’s a subject for another day. What I would like to talk about is dedication and awareness from newer teams.

New Teams Means New Forfeit Factories
Every season we unfortunately see a lot of teams turn into what have affectionately become known as forfeit factories. These are generally amateur level teams who either play a couple games or even worse, none at all and eventually end up forfeiting the remainder of their season. While their forfeits basically mean free wins for the rest of the teams in their division, it’s certainly not the way anyone would like to register wins. I think it’s safe to say that the large majority of teams who are in this league and enjoy playing the game as much as they do would much rather play against those forfeit teams, regardless of the outcome.

So how do we minimize the number of forfeits? That’s a good question. Perhaps a good start would be in educating new players entering the league by letting them know that while the game they are about to play competitively is very similar to what they enjoyed in double XP matchmaking, it is not quite the same. For starters games are played to a total of 9 goals, meaning the first team to 5 wins. The nine rounds have no time limit which means there is no sudden death. You play a round until someone scores.

Another thing to consider is that while many new players may have gotten used to steamrolling lesser skilled players in matchmaking, there’s a good chance that they instead could potentially become the ones getting rolled over. If you’re used to winning easily in double XP games, the losing can become frustrating. It’s that losing which many new teams to the league experience that can certainly cause many of them to become forfeit factories. They realize it’s not quite so easy and decide to call it quits.

I think teams need to be better encouraged to stick with it and continue playing even if their season isn’t going quite how they’d hoped. While it’s certainly possible to learn and improve on your game in victories, I’d like to think you can improve your game even more in defeats, if you’re willing to dedicate the time to do so. If you find yourself being completely throttled and outmatched by an opponent, consider saving those game films and viewing them later. Look for mistakes you or your teammates made. Look at what your opponent did that was successful and learn from them.

Studying game films and diagnosing what you did wrong then practicing new techniques to correct your flaws is quite honestly the best way to turn your failure into success. Eventually your team is going to improve. It may not happen overnight, but if you’re willing to stick with it, I promise you will improve with time. I’ve been playing this game for 16 months now and I’d like to think I still have plenty of room for improvement in my game. I’m willing to make that improvement because I love the game. Sure I get frustrated when I lose to a stronger opponent, but I look for ways to fix what didn’t work and play a better game against them the next time we meet.

A Simple Implementation Could Also Help
While the presence of forfeit factories each season has a lot to do with incoming players and how they react to adversity, I think some of the blame can be placed on the league as well. Considering many players each season come into this league not being regulars of the grifball community, the chances are quite good that they’re going to be unfamiliar with league rules and simple game set-up and protocol. For example, I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve heard of teams receiving a forfeit win simply because their opponent was unaware that they needed to play two games each week. That boils down to new teams not understanding how things work.

I believe in order help resolve things like that, it wouldn’t hurt if team captains were added to a “Captain’s E-mail list”. The very first thing that should be sent to every single team captain is a link to the rules page on Grifball.com. Following that, once the season begins I believe it wouldn’t hurt for a weekly e-mail to be sent to team captains reminding them to play their games on their scheduled nights and at the times they chose. It should be in that e-mail that they’re also reminded of the need to play two games each week on their scheduled night. I think each captain should also be e-mailed a copy of their team’s schedule.

Let’s face it, not all teams that sign-up and register themselves for league play are regulars to the community and likely spend very little time on either Grifball.com or Rooster Teeth. We need to remedy that by extending the community more and the simplest way to start is by keeping teams that are not so regular to the community informed of league happenings via e-mail contact. If the resources are not available via Grifball.com for this to happen, I’d like to personally volunteer the Hub’s services.