What do you want in a Ladder?

[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.