Hello everyone and welcome to the first installment of the CRCorner, a series dedicated to transparency towards decisions that the CRC makes on a weekly basis. This first-ever article will focus on some problems that the CRC had to face in terms of the Auction Draft, specifically in terms of Dyson Majors, Ghostboosters, and some other teams that I won't name (heh).

Many of you are aware of Dyson Majors drafting Lej as the first overall pick of the S9 draft for 0c. What you didn't know is that Grief requested afterwards to remove Lej so that he could draft an actual minors starter as his 5th pick. His main argument was that of ignorance; mainly that he thought he could draft as many players as he wanted. Now, the rules explicitly prevent you from doing this (it was one of the reasons we created the rules as worded). The CRC came to a split decision as to whether we should award him another pick; one of my arguments were that we want the league to be as competitive as possible, and we should make the exception to preserve that high level. Another argument was out of pity for his ignorance, as we did move from 6 to 5 players in the auction draft and that would make a large difference in draft strategy. Ultimately, we handed it over to the captains to make the final decision, and their judgment was swift; Grief would not get a replacement for Lej.

Moving on to the Ghostboosters and their captain, Fronj. Fronj was specifically frustrated about his recent inability to play to Pi and being placed in the Atlantic Division, something recently publicized by Gem in an /r/MLTP self post. There was heavy talk about the "random" placing of captains into their respective divisions. I'm here to say that it was not random, and in fact I spent a great deal of time personally creating the divisions this season. Captains were given Servers based on a very specific pool (3 Centra / 1 Sphere / 4 Origin / 2 Pi / 6 Radius) and those Servers were factored into Divisions. In this example, captains who listed Pi as a second option were placed into the Atlantic Division, and Fronj/Grief were two examples of that. Once the divisions are set the only way it would be wise to change them is through mutual agreement due to extreme issues. As for his recent unplayability, we have pointed Fronj towards a VPN that should handle all of his needs.

My final topic of the night is of the tean name controversies, mainly concerning okthen and BAllstar. okthen was of course a recently appointed captain after a late resignation, but he still took up until the day before the draft to select the Origin Ducks as his team name. BAllstar was even worse, waiting until the draft had started to declare BMX2: Electric Ballaloo as his team name. A lot of people (captains, specifically) were upset that the CRC didn't penalize these two teams for not having a name, or selecting a name by a certain date. This is a tough thing to do, as it's just a name; I personally didn't think it would matter as long as they actually had a name. The logos and minors names should be all in by the start of the season.

That's it for me. One last thing; if you want me to answer any questions on here, just shoot me a message on Reddit and if I like it I'll talk about it here. See you next week.

-Ash