Welcome to Season 78 as League returns after an extended break for the Dominion Online Championship. That tournament is still wrapping up so watch for match announcements as we get into the later stages.

New Moderators

Last season we asked for new moderators and received a number of applications. From those, we are adding four new moderators this season: Elegant_chaos, hdarj, MuensterCheese, and Petethebossch, who together bring 61 seasons of playing experience to the moderator team. Many of our newer players may have already heard from them as they onboarded to this season, and hopefully the rest of you will hear from them soon as division moderators or in other functions.

Timer Update

We are continuing to experiment with different timer parameters as we approach one that we feel comfortable enforcing. At this point we feel that we are getting close, but need to shift around where during games players get more time - this season’s timer is intended to give less time towards the start of games and more time towards the end of them. Read the full specification here.

Season Schedule Change

While the length of League seasons is not changing, the breaks between them are being adjusted to accommodate a planned major tournament in March: the Reckless Dominion Online Championship. You can now expect that most seasons will start 2 weeks after the end of the previous season, with the exception of the seasons ending in September and March, which will have their next season starting 4 weeks after instead (and so usually in October and April).

As a reminder, you can check the planned schedules of the next three seasons at the bottom of our Past Standings Page, and this described change is reflected in the gap between Seasons 79 and 80 now being 2 weeks (down from 3) and the gap between seasons 80 and 81 now being 4 weeks (up from 2).

End of Summer Time

Partway through this season, Summer time (Daylight Savings Time in some locations) will be ending in the northern hemisphere. Please be aware of this change if scheduling across timezones, particularly if using UTC as many people’s offsets will change. Be extra careful if scheduling across continents: in Europe, the clocks will change on October 25th while in North America the change will happen November 1st.

It is likely that this newsletter is the last one I write before the job is passed on to a different team member. So, for what I expect will be the last time, best of luck this upcoming season!