Seeding Rules

Heroes Lounge has been around for a long time and we've gone through many changes as to how our league is run and also how we seed our teams. This is meant as a guideline on how we seed our teams in the start of every season. 

Legacy system

A team's skill is very hard to measure in numbers, especially with the current MMR systems that do exist. That's why we have our legacy system which in short means that how your team has performed in the previous season will impact your seeding in the next one, given you don't make any larger changes to the team's roster. This means that if you end up in the middle of your division when the season ends (not winning the playoffs, top 3 or bottom 3) you will stay in your division in the next season regardless of MMR. If you do however add two or more players to your roster, your team will be seeded freshly as a new team based on your MMR. Removing players does not break legacy and will not move your team up or down in divisions.

Promotion and Demotion

If your team ends up in top 3 in the regular season or wins the playoffs, your team is automatically promoted to the next division or higher. Your team can move more than one division if your MMR is higher than the division bounds you would get promoted to. However, like any team you can protest the seeding and we will evaluate your case individually.

If your team has a rough season and instead end up in the bottom 3 in the regular season your team will have the option to demote to the division below. Demotion is entirely optional and a moderator will contact you at the end of the season.

NOTE: Adding two or more players to your rosters breaks legacy and makes your team get seeded as new.

Calculating Team MMR

How a players MMR is calculated is explained in detail in the ruleset.

We seed our teams based on the teams TOP 3 MMR. This is done to prevent using "anchors" in MMR to avoid higher MMR players and teams in lower divisions.

NOTE: This does not mean that higher MMR players cannot play in lower divisions, it's still an average MMR that places a team.

Free Agents

We allow everyone to sign up in our league, regardless if you're in bronze or a grandmaster. An important part of this is that we allow individuals to sign up for our seasons without a team. During seeding for the season we will create Free Agent Teams (FATs) with players of similar MMR as well as trying to fit the chosen roles on our website. All FATs will get a new mentor that will help them get started in our league. 

NOTE: We place 6 Free Agents in each FAT

Partials

We also allow teams that doesn't have a full roster to sign up for our seasons. Similar to FATs we will fill Partial teams with free agents until they are full.

Division Boundaries

The division boundaries are the limits of MMR of the teams that play within each division (with the except of legacy teams). These serves as a ruleset of who you can add to your roster mid season. The division boundaries are decided fully by the MMR of the teams that sign ups for a division and can't be known before seeding is done. Basically what we do is that we set up a list with all the teams and FATs that has signed up that are not a legacy roster and rank them by MMR. Then we split the list somewhat evenly based on how the MMR of the teams are spread to get reasonably sized divisions for the season (20-30 teams).

Protesting seeding

As we all know and stated before, it's incredibly hard to place a team based on MMR correctly and we want everyone to enjoy themselves in our league and still keep the competition as fair as possible. Because of this we allow all teams to protest their own or any other teams seeding if they think that the team in question is seeded too high or too low. We look at every case individually and move them up or down in division if we think it's best for the competition. 

NOTE: When you protest a seeding it's important that you explain why you think you got seeded wrong, this can be done by referring to previous seasons or using in game ranks (screenshots are appreciated). Protests to seeding have to be done one day before the first round of the season starts.

With this we hope that our seeding system is a bit more clear. If you do have any further questions you are more than welcome to contact anyone from the competition teams mods or managers.