Quote Originally Posted by Bonoki View Post
Their perspective was that by hosting multiple custom tournaments, these communities pulled players away who would have otherwise been queuing for ranked matches.
It's half true. Especially when people got to Crystal, there may have been 7 people queued up for ranked on each given data center, meaning we couldn't get a game to pop. And lordy did we try, we had a sign-up bot to tell us if and when enough people were interested in doing ranked. But when no group of 10 existed on a single DC, we decided to do custom games instead.

Not only that but the coordination and skill expression you can have in custom games is way more fun than ranked, at least in my opinion. And if we decide it's a more fun time than doing ranked, that's what we're going to do and it's why I want to let folks know when/where they can join us.