What do you want in a Ladder?

[TinCow]

ideally this is what i was thinking:

Have different leagues that players can go in and out off and you can only play players from your league or the bottom portion of players from the league above you. (perhaps also top portion from the league below you)

that way players will get a chance to rise through leagues, improving their skills and will get points based on opponents. Basically, the way its done in SC2. We can also have leagues for different countries (or else one clan will just dominate the leagues >_> ) and then pit the top players from each league in a team contest to see which country or region has the best players that time around ^_^

As I understand it, leagues and ladders have a major difference in our current system. For ladders, players 'challenge' another person in the ladder. If the other person accepts, a match is setup and they play it and report a result. All matches are done by this method, so players get to pick who they fight. For leagues, all matches are created by the system itself, which tells everyone who to play, though scheduling and result reporting are up to the players themselves. The idea of a league (as I understand it) is to ensure that everyone in the group plays everyone else in the group, so you get an even distribution of competition.

So, what you want sounds like it would actually be best accomplished with ladders and some manual organization. Essentially, have multiple ladders with rules about who can sign up for the ladders. Ladder competition then continues for a finite period of time, with players competing as per a normal ladder system. When the time limit expires, the top players from the bottom ladder move to the top ladder, and the bottom players from the top ladder move to the bottom ladder. This would have to be determined manually, but would not be complex. New players would enter at the bottom ladder and would have to win to move up to the top. Add in more ladders (2/3/4/etc) depending on how many tiers you want.

If we can get a small group of people, say 4 to 8, it might be a good idea to simply run quick tests of both systems. Create a test ladder and a test league, put all the volunteers in them, and have them use both system as they're designed to work. Afterwards, review what worked and what didn't, pick one system, and make any necessary tweaks, then create a full system for large-scale use.

That's not 100% what I said though. You should only be able to gain skill rating beating lower ranks through your win streaks and also you lose skill rating when losing against people of equal skill rating and lower skill rating. There is abit more to it then that, but that's just the basic idea.

Since we're not gonna have thousands of players it can be something different anyway. Maybe what king is suggesting.

Automation is the key, as it simply won't work if we've got to have someone doing the math on every match. So, we're kind of constrained by the systems available to us in the current utility. I could certainly ask the developer of the utility to add in another system, but I'd need to be really, really specific about the kind of methodology needed before making the request.