Guys, please stop considering manual placement as an option for intermediate. It wouldn't be even remotely the same scheme, every single worm would be hidden away and it would be extremely hard to get kills; people would just shotgun almost every turn. Most of the creativity in the scheme comes from dealing with worms in places you'd never intentionally put them. Most importantly, that would suck most of the fun right out of it.
Intermediate should use the NNNL scheme, which is what the most competitive players use. The competition continues to increase year by year with that scheme, so there's really no need to change it; it's already well-tested. I think it could work in the classic league like other schemes, as bo1 with optional bo3. This does change the scheme, because there are certain psychological elements of playing bo3 that you don't need in bo1, but the scheme would be equally fun, and still vastly more skillful/interesting than certain schemes (cough shoppa).
The reason it would have to be bo1 is just to make it playable, bo3 can last over an hour, which is going to be annoying for players who aren't all that interested in the scheme. To get more players to start liking inter, they have to actually play it; people who don't know or care about it might just not want to play if it's a huge time investment. But the level of interest is there, especially among a lot of newer Russian players who host inters constantly. If we could get some Russian-speaking wormers to get those new Russians to check out TUS, I think some might be interested and stick around, if they could play inter.
For people concerned about luck when it's bo1, here are some stats from some of the better players in NNNL (I think this covers the past year, not sure on the time frame):
Player | % cave rounds won | % island rounds won |
Mablak | 70 | 74 |
Dario | 67 | 68 |
Kayz | 59 | 65 |
Koras | 65 | 69 |
FaD | 55 | 59 |
As you can see, the best players in NNNL typically having winning ratios around 60% or higher in bo1, which in TUS would definitely translate to something like 80-90%, at least until the community gains skill. That seems pretty comparable to elite, where the top players in TUS classic tend to have winning ratios between 70% and 90%. It has the right level of skill, I don't think luck is nearly as big of an issue as some think.
On the idea of forcing caves in bo1, I don't think it's necessary, people will probably agree to them about half the time. Also, caves might be luck-reducing, but they might also be skill-reducing. Good players tend to have more wins on islands. Either way, it wouldn't be good to force one kind of map, since intermediate is about map diversity, and being good on both caves and islands.
TNL would be a decent idea, but only because it would allow inter clanners, the singles league wouldn't be necessary due to NNNL. Some 2v2 action might genuinely get some of the NNN folks over here. Still, it would be nice to see a more default-oriented main league, and inter would definitely raise the skill level, even with bo1.