house cup feedback

[down-in-flames]

Hey guys!

We've gotten a lot of feedback over the years that while people often really like our events individually, they don't necessarily enjoy the overall House Cup as much - the most common concerns have tended to focus on how intense/competitive the events can sometimes get, disappointment about not being available during the big events, frustration with house size, and feelings of being discouraged if you have to go into the finale feeling you have no chance to win.

We understand where those concerns are coming from, and it's absolutely not how we want you guys to feel - we've tossed a lot of ideas over the years about how to remedy that, including teaming houses up, building in breaks between rounds, and experimenting with scoring metrics. The feedback we've gotten on all of those has been mixed, and none of them has really solved the underlying tension members are often concerned about.

One idea that's come up is to convert the year-long House Cup into individual competitions. Instead of every event feeding into a final points tally at the end of the year, winners would be recognised on an event-by-event basis. Some would still be house-based, but since each event would be its own individual thing, this would also allow us to run events on non-house lines as well (for example, interhouse teams where members from any house can sign up for any team), so that members wanting to work on interhouse lines could do so without worrying about the impact that these interhouse alliances might have on their overall House Cup totals. How would y'all feel about that?

(There's a poll above, but also feel free to submit long-form thoughts/questions/concerns below.)

[Guest pookha]

It could also be opt-in for the 'points'. That way, anyone could compete if they wanted for an event, but they would only get points for the 'leaderboard' if they opted in.  I mean, that you would opt in for the year-long event, and your points would be scored, but people who don't opt in can still participate, they just do not score points for the year long event (although maybe they could opt in for just one event, idk, maybe too much to track?).

 

If you want to still go with teams (I'm guessing HP named houses might go away at some point), then teams should be assigned randomly based on those 'opting in'. As people leave/go inactive, then the new people joining in the middle of the year-long event get added to whatever team has the lowest number of peeps. If all the teams are equal, the new peep would go to the first team on the list, then move down it for each new peep.

 

(This is not a suggestion to do away the houses, btw. I love that we can self-identify as a house, merely an observation that with all the stuff going on with JKR that this may be something that happens).

[magemadi]

2 hours ago, pookha said:

It could also be opt-in for the 'points'. That way, anyone could compete if they wanted for an event, but they would only get points for the 'leaderboard' if they opted in.  I mean, that you would opt in for the year-long event, and your points would be scored, but people who don't opt in can still participate, they just do not score points for the year long event (although maybe they could opt in for just one event, idk, maybe too much to track?).

I actually quite like this idea! Especially if people still kind of want some sort of annual goal to aim for but with less pressure to do so as a House. It may be difficult to track individual members for the first couple of events, but perhaps once the initial front-end work is done, maybe it wouldn't be so bad?

If there are interhouse events where teams are "mixed" houses, I think having that sort of an individual leaderboard would be better, maybe, because of that.