With roughly a month remaining on this trophy season, I wanted to do a little bit of a review of the IRONDWARF Trophy (IDT) system. With the way it automatically enrolls teams, it's hard for me to know if it's something people actually enjoy or if it's more or less ignored by everyone.

In addition to wanting some feedback on what you all think of it, I also wanted to go through a bug that has been there since inception, but I'm not sure if I should fix. Let me explain.

When I came up with the system in the first place, I intended it to require completely new teams, meaning the first match of the team should be played during the season (given that it was also a Blackbox or tournament game).

Now, I managed to introduce a bug in how this functions, and instead of what was intended the system will enter a team into the IDT when they play their first eligible match during the season. This means that old teams who played prior to the start of the season get enrolled, but also that a team which played open gamefinder games before (or at the start of) the season would be enrolled in the system whenever they played their first blackbox/tournament game.

Edit for clarification: Once a team is enrolled into the IDT season the first time, they can not reset their run and restart by playing an ineligible match. Doing so will "freeze" their team for the remainder of the season.

While the way it functions now isn't exactly what I intended from the beginning, there are two ways to fix this and I'm not entirely sure which path to take, so this post is partially intended to ask for what you all think. The two ways are:

1. Change the code to switch to the intended behaviour. Only new teams should be able to enter the IDT season.

2. Change the rules and make the way it works now the intended way. This makes it more of a "sprint" system, where coaches can prepare their teams for an IDT run and then make an attempt with their built-up team.

The second option could then be further extended by keeping track of "current" and "best" runs for each team to allow a single team do multiple runs in a single season should they want to. The natural question that would come up is for people to want to manually reset their runs (after an early loss for example), or in the extension have the system simply automatically track the best sequence of matches. I'm not entirely sure I want to push towards this extension since it (to me) feels like removing the stakes to an extent and diminishes the competition aspect of it.

While I'm on the topic of the trophies, but separate from the format discussion, I am very likely going to change the way both trophies (BBT and IDT) interacts with the "Tournament Wins" section of coach pages. The current mapping of trophy wins into minors and majors doesn't feel like the right way of doing things. There are currently 4 categories which are shown: Majors, Major Qualifiers, Minors, and Leagues. My intent is to add two trophy specific categories, effectively major and minor trophies. Not 100% sure of the terminology as I don't want to confuse things unnecessarily. Perhaps "Trophies" and "Medals" as the major and minor equivalents.. Let me know if you have any good ideas regarding this :)