(GotFrag Community) - With TWL Season 4 Qualifiers just starting up, I sat down with one of the men who made it happen: TrainriderJ.


Good evening trainRiderJ, mind telling us a little about yourself?

I've been a pretty active TF2 player since the beta, playing semi-competitively since early 2008. Before TF2 I was more of an RTS guy with starcraft and warcraft; TF2 is the first online FPS I've played seriously since the Unreal 99 mod Tac Ops.

When, and why for that matter, did you become a TWL admin?

I became a TWL admin actually for a short time in Fall 2008, but I wasn't able to do much and had to resign due to my personal life taking things over. I came back to TWL during the middle of Season 3 because I saw that TWL had a lot of potential, with the league having grown every season, and I wanted to help.

Now I've heard from a little bird, that you are one of the masterminds behind the new Division system for TWL. Who else did you work with and why did you choose that system?

Revalk, Attean, and I argued and yelled at each other until we finally came up with a system that we all liked :) We wanted to create a system where more teams had a realistic goal each season, and where there would be a systematic method of creating matches amongst equally skilled teams. We also wanted to create a league with a fast turn-around time between seasons, and I believe we've been able to accomplish all of these goals.

I'm certainly psyched for this season! Could you give our readers a brief outline of how the Division system is going to work?

Season 4 is going to start with a brief qualifying season, to give the basis for division placement. At the end of the season, the top 12 teams go to Division 1, with the next 20-24 teams equally split into two Division 2 subdivisions. If we need to, there will be a Division 3 for the remaining teams. The real driving force behind all of this is a revamped league points and tiebreaking system. We looked at a wide variety of options and settled on a system similar to that used in chess tournaments. Teams get 1 point for a win, no points for a loss, and tiebreaking is done almost exclusively through strength of schedule.

After the qualifying season, that's when the "real" Season 4 starts and the fun begins :) Every team will be trying to win their subdivision, with the top teams in Division 2 being given the opportunity at the end of the season to play their way into Division 1 (by playing the weakest Div 1 teams).

Of course, Division 1 will get its own playoff system to determine the overall winner.

How close is this to the ETF2L system that our compatriots over the Pond use?

There are some pretty big similarities, obviously. We have a bit more exact method of determining who goes up and down divisions at the end of the season, and of course our actual match play is similar to that of CEVO or ESEA.

Have there been any other major changes to that we should look out for?

This season, TWL is more committed to listening to the community's input and acting faster when changes need to be made. We've updated our ruleset with several items that, frankly, we should have added long ago. Most of the config items are now similar or the same as CEVO/ESEA. There will be no more ctf maps in TWL, and gravelpit will be the only stopwatch map for the time being (cp_furnance, I've got my eye on you!).

You'll find that the TWL admins are more active than ever before, both as admins and as players within the league.

That's always good to hear! How many teams are you expecting TWL to have this season? Season 3 started off with about 55 and ended with 35, a lot more than previous seasons. Do you see this growth continuing?

As of this interview, I think we have 22 teams signed up with valid rosters, and another 20 or so who are waiting on their players to join up. That's a better number at this point in the registration process than we saw in season 3, so I'm hopeful that we can have another season of growth at TWL. We're trying to get the word out to as many community sites as possible as well as talking to clan leaders individually, in order that we can make the best league possible.

Registration will be open throughout preseason, and possibly during part of the qualifying season as well, so I hope to see a lot more teams signed up before everything is said and done!

I expect nothing less than a 3 digit turnout :-). Well thank you Train for your time, is there anything you'd like to add before we wrap this up?

Just that if anyone has questions about TWL, feel free to stop by our irc channel, #twl_tf2, or add me as a friend on steam: http://steamcommunity.com/id/trainRiderJ

Thanks again and good luck with Season 4!




I hope you enjoyed the interview even if it was some time ago! We now have 56 teams signed up with 25 pending. The first week went smoothly, with a great MOTW and cast by E-REV.

Thank you all for reading and keep your eyes peeled for the next installment!


-Joose