Hey everyone,
First off, I want to apologize to everyone. It is ultimately my responsibility to keep the tournament clean, to facilitate as much fun and healthy competition as possible, and I have utterly failed to do that. When I made the decision that any of the current teams could schedule a match with one another, it perhaps was out of a lot of frustration, but mostly it was out of a strong ambition to let everyone have a go at the participation shields. The tournament would not have been possible had there have not been an opportunity for a participation shield for everyone to earn.
It was important to me that everyone play at least one match to earn their participation shield. Taking that away from players who have put in a tremendous amount of time was incredibly disheartening to me. But I knew that granting shields to participants even for being disqualified would result in even more controversy – I really had no desire to perpetuate more arguments, more toxicity; however, that has already surfaced on the forums, on both sides of the argument (including myself). Hence, my premature decision to let the current teams schedule matches with anyone was one of frustration, and the constant pressure to speed the tournament up (in the sense that, I wasn't going to wait another week just to hear everyone's input). There were many external forces and circumstances, and above anything else, I really was just trying my best to balance it all.
But as I said, I failed with that.
Here is what I'm going to propose:
Matches are going to continue through the original bracket. That is, Family will play Reborn, and Betrayed will play Restoration II. All teams, however, will receive a participation shield even if they are disqualified. I believe this will restore some peace and harmony to the controversy that has surfaced. Additionally, to keep the spirit of competition maintained, a first place prize shield will be given to the winning team, in addition to the participation shield.
To the teams that have tricky timezones (and I will be sending you individual PMs to express this in more detail), I am really sorry for all of this. You guys are all important to me, and I realize there will be some angry players, and I fully deserve any resentment that's thrown at me. It's really important to me that, after all the time you have invested into this, that you are awarded with participation shields, irrespective of being disqualified. Believe me, I care about everyone here – that's what keeps PL thriving for me. But I'm going to really motivate and push you guys to get those matches in. There is still time!
To reiterate once more, I'm sorry to everyone for all the controversy. I don't think I am really fit to host tournaments after the way I handled this one. A lot of pent up frustration mixed with an overwhelming amount of coarse, uncivilized commentary did get the best of me. At the end of the day, the most important thing to me is the way we treat is each other.
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