What do you want in a Ladder?

[00owl]

It sounds like the leagues are designed for seeding people for tournaments. It is all a giant round robin. Does everyone play everyone else in their league exactly once? Or can that number be changed?

[TinCow]

It sounds like the leagues are designed for seeding people for tournaments. It is all a giant round robin. Does everyone play everyone else in their league exactly once? Or can that number be changed?

Currently, exactly once. There's a function in there for setting a time limit on 'Round 1', and from what I can tell starting a new round should open up a second wave of games. However, there doesn't appear to be a way to actually start Round 2. While researching this, I actually just came across a bigger problem. There's no way for me to choose which players get added into which tiers inside the League; all players are assigned randomly. That right there means we cannot use this system, as it would allow some of the later players to join in on tiers higher than the starting tier. The League feature of this utility is pretty new and is still being developed, so I'll request this as an additional feature. However, I wouldn't count on it being ready in the time frame we need.

I still think the League system is the way to go, but I think we'll have to use the Ladder part of the tool along with some custom organization. That's fine, and pretty easy to do actually. I'll just create one ladder for each tier of the League and will manually do the promotion/relegation at the end of every season. Not difficult at all. That also frees us from the constraint of forced match-making, and eliminates the problem of a non-responsive player holding up a lot of matches. If someone isn't playing, they simply won't gain points. Seems like a better way of implementing what we want, really. It'll still be a league, but with the greater flexibility provided by the ladder part of the utility.

[AMP]

I was trying to think of way to combine the two but do as you like, I was just throwing out ideas.

Playing each player only once and not best out of 3 isn't the best I think and let alone having to play everyone in their tier especially if you have alot of people in the tier. That's why I said a cap amount of players in each tier before that player can be regulated at the end of a season. Having an ELO rating and win/losses is best because it gives an idea if that player has more or less losses/wins against higher or lower ELO opponents and allows people to be ranked by ELO rating in their tier.

Your way works for course, but maybe not the most satisfying way. I'll still play in it reguardless.

[TinCow]

I was trying to think of way to combine the two but do as you like, I was just throwing out ideas.

Playing each player only once and not best out of 3 isn't the best I think and let alone having to play everyone in their tier especially if you have alot of people in the tier. That's why I said a cap amount of players in each tier before that player can be regulated at the end of a season. Having an ELO rating and win/losses is best because it gives an idea if that player has more or less losses/wins against higher or lower ELO opponents and allows people to be ranked by ELO rating in their tier.

Your way works for course, but maybe not the most satisfying way. I'll still play in it reguardless.

The hybrid system I'm thinking of now actually gives us a ton of freedom and opens up a lot of the options you were asking about. Since I'll handle promotion/relegation manually, we can easily add in that minimum number of games played rule.

You're actually getting confused by the 'best out of 3' and 'playing only once' aspects of the system. Each match between two players would be best out of 3. First to two wins claims victory in the match, which counts as a single win on the tier. We can then use the specific result of the three games (either 2-0 or 2-1) as the 'score', which will give additional information about how the match went. A 2-0 win really does mean something different from a 2-1 win, and it'll be nice to have that officially recorded.

Regarding ELO and win/loss, we can have both stats recorded, but we'll have to pick one of the two methods as the official ranking method. Is ELO the proper method for that, or is it win/loss?

[AMP]

The hybrid system I'm thinking of now actually gives us a ton of freedom and opens up a lot of the options you were asking about. Since I'll handle promotion/relegation manually, we can easily add in that minimum number of games played rule.

You're actually getting confused by the 'best out of 3' and 'playing only once' aspects of the system. Each match between two players would be best out of 3. First to two wins claims victory in the match, which counts as a single win on the tier. We can then use the specific result of the three games (either 2-0 or 2-1) as the 'score', which will give additional information about how the match went. A 2-0 win really does mean something different from a 2-1 win, and it'll be nice to have that officially recorded.

Regarding ELO and win/loss, we can have both stats recorded, but we'll have to pick one of the two methods as the official ranking method. Is ELO the proper method for that, or is it win/loss?

Ah ok I thought you just meant everyone plays each player only 1 match, my bad, so yeah best out of 3 is very much needed and the best way to do it. Yes a 2-0 win really means something different from a 2-1 win, you don't need to tell me that. :)

Well for ranking... if two players or more have the same wins/losses and one of them has defeated opponents or an opponent with worse win/loss stats then ELO will be needed to help decided who is on top. Unless you have each player play everyone in their tier before any regulation is done, but that probably wouldn't be the best way to keep things rolling at a steady pace. Might be best to put a cap on amount of matches needed to be played by everyone depending on the amount of players that join of course.