Sign Ups In
Thank you to all those who signed up for the featured matches after the last call (thanks goes out to those who signed up before it as well). Although it didn’t allow for the variety of matches that I had hoped, the additional sign ups did help me fill in some gaps.
Prizes
As announced in past posts, the main prize for winning the featured matches will be island exploration. If a faction goes 2-1 they can explore an island from the current quadrant, while the 1-2 losing faction gets a smaller mainland exploration event. If a faction goes 3-0, they can explore any of the islands around Nyroth and get a secondary prize. The 0-3 faction gains nothing.
The secondary prize for this week will be a bonus strength 5 military unit that they will have available in Nyroth.
FACTIONS 
hm wasnt SI vs Bilge 2 weeks ago too?
I think it may be a bit too late to post this, but I signed up as a Silver for the featured matches for Freljord. I recently won my promotion match to Gold V this week. If you could rework the skill tiers in the featured match schedule to include me as a Gold, that would solve the problem of Ionia’s Gold players being excluded from the featured matches.
Updated the schedule accordingly. Moved a couple silvers to subs to accommodate the gold slot, but I made sure that they were already playing in another game; to not deny them their already promised chance to play cause of a schedule change.
I understand and agree that it’s not very fair to eliminate a skill tier like this. I have always tried to make it work out for each day of featured matches to have every skill tier play at least once. However, this week was incredibly lacking in players signing up, and something had to give in order to make a schedule.
In the past we had a few other weeks like this (few sign ups) and it lead to forfeits, which the community very much disliked. Since then we made up a new rule to regulate how the match’s skill tiers are determined, in order to try and make it as likely as possible for matches to be played out without any forfeits. A side effect of those rules are that if no golds from one faction sign up, the opposing faction won’t be able to use their golds that signed up.
While I would like to find a way to fit in the golds from Ionia that signed up, there is none at the moment. The only real solution to this is to get players to sign up for featured matches, from every faction; and if I knew of a surefire way to generate sign ups, I would have started using it long ago.
So if a faction doesn’t have Gold players sign up, the opposing faction can’t use its gold players, either?
I know it was just due to lack of signups, but it just feels like me and a lot of fellow golds (which I know Ionia has a decent amount of) are getting screwed for another faction not getting enough signups.
Plus, the balance of the matches is kind of questionable after cutting out Golds completely.
I mean, technically that’s balanced, but I’m sure HHSSS v. HHSSS can have really skewed games if one team has their HH on a Support and Top or something, while the other team has their HH pair in Mid and Jungle.
I know this is just one week, but honestly, the rosters for featured matches barely change week to week, so this can easily turn into an extended problem. Plus, from the way the Freljord signups are looking, their side isn’t going to change up much at all.