Start your hammers!

Signups are now open for the Spring 2014 season of GrifballHub’s Good Games League! This league, called the Good Games League (GGL), is a Grifball league that welcomes all teams, regardless of your level of experience. So if you are a squad of grizzled pros, or if you are new to the game, you are all welcome to join!

If your team has played in a previous GGL Halo 4 season, register here.

If your team HAS NOT played in a previous GGL Halo 4 season, register here.

If you are a returning captain who would like to leave your team or name a new captain, you can do so here or by contacting the league administration.

Signups will remain open until April 4. Games begin the week of April 7.

(If your team wants to sign up for the veteran divisions, check below.)

How the league works

The regular season will last for five weeks. Teams will be placed into divisions with other teams with their availability and at their level of experience. If you’re new, you won’t be going up against the Grifball pros, but rather you will be playing with other new teams.

Every team will play two games per week for five weeks at a set time, for a total of ten games. This is a great way to make friends in your division and in the Grifball community. You will get to fill your friends’ list with other Grifballers and have great people with which to play more Grifball games! After the regular season, the top teams will advance to the playoffs.

When you sign up, you will be given a choice of gamenights. Your team can choose from:

Mondays at 8:00PM EST

Thursdays at 10:00PM EST

Fridays at 11:00PM EST

Saturdays at 2:00PM EST (7:00PM GMT)

Saturdays at 9:00PM EST

Sundays at 7:00PM EST

When we place your team in a division, you are to play every game of the regular season at that assigned time.

Let’s walk through an example:

Your team normally gets online to play Halo every Monday evening. So when you sign up for the Grifball league, you pick the Mondays at 8:00PM EDT time slot. Once registration closes on April 4, you will be placed into a division with five other teams that can also play on Mondays at 8:00PM EDT.

We will give you a schedule that tells you who to play each week. You will get online with your team every Monday night (April 7, April 14, April 21, April 28, and May 5) and play two games of Grifball through the Custom Games lobby: One against your first opponent for the week, and one against your second opponent of the week. This means you will play two games per week for five weeks, for a total of ten games over the course of the regular season. You will only be required to play on your chosen night.

If you are unable to play your games one week due to a conflict (such as a family commitment), fear not! You can make up your missed games at any time that works for both teams involved. You can also play any missed games during our special “make-up week”, which is a week-long buffer between the end of the regular season and the start of playoffs.

If having regularly scheduled Grifball matches every week sounds good to you, then you can sign up your team here!

Note: When you sign up you will receive a confirmation e-mail. To confirm that you will play in the league, please follow the e-mail’s instructions.

Need a team?

The league is for teams only. That means that you must have four or more players on your roster to participate. But what if you don’t have a team?

Although we can’t personally place you on to a team, we can help you meet new people, including captains that are looking for new players.

Your first stop should be to post in our brand new Recruitment Forum.

Be sure to read the Forum Rules before posting to give yourself the best opportunity to match with a compatible team. For even better odds, take a look at the Players Needed sub-forum to see which teams are looking to pick up free agents. If you think you’d be a good fit for that team, let them know by posting in their thread!

If you are the enterprising sort, you can even start your own team! Go to the Recruitment Forum and post in the Players Needed sub-forum. Please be sure to follow the posting format outlined in the Forum Rules. While posting here is the first step, it is definitely advantageous for teams to be proactive! Teams in need of players should frequent the Free Agents thread in the Recruitment Forum to see what agents are available and start up a dialogue with them. Who knows, your future life-long Grif partner could be there waiting for you!

Finally, become active in the community, get noticed by other Grifballers, and you may soon find yourself on a squad!

Achieveables

Everyone loves Achievements on Xbox Live. Heck, there is even one for using the Gravity Hammer in the Halo 4 campaign! But what if there were Achievements for playing Grifball…?

You’re in luck! Not only does the GGL offer you a kick-ass Grifball games every week, but we also supply teams with a list of (optional) Grifball Achievements to pursue during your league games! We call them “Achieveables.”

Achieveables are 100% optional for all teams. If you’d like, your team can safely ignore them, still make the playoffs, and rise to the upper echelons of Grifball glory. But if you want a little more spice in your games, we are here to provide!

Each Achieveable is worth a certain number of GrifPoints. The total number of GrifPoints your team has won is called your GrifScore. Achieveables are all team-based, so your team earns them together. There is no such thing as an individual Achieveable. While some Achieveables require only one person on the team to complete a feat, they all count towards your team’s GrifScore.

No Achieveables will require you to stat-pad. They will never be tied to earning killing sprees or Killionaires. Achieveables are a challenge, meaning that they will actually make it more difficult for your team to win. We may ask you to win the game with an overall negative Kill/Death spread, for example, or to play a match without using the sword!

So what good are Achieveables? At the end of the regular season, the teams with the highest GrifScores will make the playoffs, regardless of their record! So you can go 0-10 and still make the playoffs! Note, though, that this is in addition to the teams that make the post-season by winning their divisions or earning themselves a wildcard spot.

We will release a full list of all the season’s Achieveables at the start of the first week.

Veteran Divisions

Back by popular demand, the GGL is also offering purely voluntary “Veteran Divisions” for more experienced teams that are looking for even more Grifball action!

Veteran divisions will be open to teams with a proven track record of playing their games. Generally speaking, this means teams with six or more seasons of league experience. If a team has fewer than six seasons, but believes they have a strong history of playing Grifball, they can register.

Veteran divisions will have up to six teams each, and teams will play more than two games per week. During signups, teams will tell us when they can and cannot play games each week. Teams are encouraged to be as available as possible…and to have a roster big enough to cover all those times!

You see, regular season games in the veteran divisions will never be postponed. There will be no make-up week, no free scheduling. Teams are expected to get on at gametime and play. If a team does not show, that team will receive a loss. These games will also be scheduled for six weeks, meaning that games will be scheduled for the make-up week as well.

Relatedly, games in the veteran divisions will all be eligible to be streamed. Since all the scheduling is set-in-stone, we will be able to more easily set up a streamer for the match and show the game to a wider audience! Teams in these special divisions should enter with the understanding that any of their games may be streamed.

Not everything will be different for the veteran divisions, though — Teams can use subs for their squad if both captains agree on the player, as long as they have not previously used two subs in the season. Everyone can still go for Achieveables. And both the veteran divisions and the classic divisions will feed into the same playoff bracket for the post-season.

To sign up for the Veteran Divisions, simply select that option on the sign-up form. The GGL administration will contact you in the coming week to set up the league schedule.

Other minor changes

Playoff matches will, as always, be a best-of-three series. In the past, neutral hosts have not been required. Starting this season, if a playoff series goes to the third game, a neutral host will be required for the third game . The neutral host will be chosen by the team captain whose team has: Scored the most points in the first two games. If both teams have scored the same number of points, it shall be the captain of the team that is the higher playoff seed. If both teams are the same seed, it shall be the captain of the team that has the best regular season head-to-head record against the opponent in the regular season. If both teams have the same record against one another, it shall be the captain of the team that has the best goal efficiency in regular season head-to-head matches. If both teams have the same goal efficiency against one another, it shall be determined by a coin flip or other random drawing.

. The neutral host will be chosen by the team captain whose team has: Teams are expected to make reasonable accommodations to ensure the chosen neutral host can perform his or her duties. This includes running host checks and having host-pullers on the team join the match after it has already begun, if needed.

If the team who is to choose the neutral host cannot find one, the other team captain may choose the neutral host.

If both team captains agree, the match may be played without a neutral host.

In short…

Teams choose one set night per week to play their games.

Veteran teams have the option of signing up for the Veteran Divisions, where they will play at least twice as many games.

Signups close on April 4, and games begin the week of April 7.

You all rock!

As a result of feedback we have heard from the community, we have one change for the GGL post-season setup:

Let us know if you have any questions. See you on the court!