What's the point of having a team league if at the end of each season, you have a single player at the top of the standings, not a team? I feel all that would do is call for speculation and investigation as to why that particular player ended up #1 and not someone else ("He got randomly paired with Mablak and Random00 in 50% of his games, that vile cheater!") rather than stand to bring any sort of prestige, and hence motivation for the future, to the winner.
Well, I don't see this would be any bigger problem than with TUS singles. In singles league you can avoid certain players and look for a good match up to get a better ranking. We might see a player ranked #1 with no matches against players ranked #2 or #3. Can you call such player the best then?
You can't and that's exactly my point. This is why in practice, prestige in WA comes primarily from winning playoffs, not finishing at the top of the standings at the end of each season. In a 2v2 league with individual standings, what can you really do to address the problem as well as holding a playoff at the end of each season addresses it in 1v1 and clan leagues?
We see players ranked individually in many other team games (Counter-Strike GO, Heroes of Newerth to name a few). Clan league is kind of old thing. Even in tennis players have individual doubles ranking. It works in other games so why not in worms?
Those big competitive team games only (mis)use Elo-like rating systems to aid their matchmaking, as a way to guarantee "even" matches where each team has as close to a 50% chance of winning as possible (in theory). They do it to keep the game fun (in both ranked and casual, unranked play) and get away with it because of the sheer mass of games that get played between their millions of users, but in the case of Dota 2 for example, they don't even show you your personal rating because it's not meant to be an accurate representation of your skill anyway. Again, the real prestige in all these games comes from stable teams of five players winning tournaments together and taking home the prize money, that's the relevant measure of skill at the top level, nobody gives a damn about individual players' matchmaking ratings.
Likewise in tennis, doubles rankings are pretty meaningless, it's the tournament titles, especially Grand Slam ones, that really matter to anyone who knows anything at all about the sport. But yes, tennis also makes use of player ratings to determine the seeding in tournaments (and in singles there definitely is some amount of prestige associated with holding the #1 spot or being in the top 10), so that's their excuse for publishing the rankings publicly. What's yours here?
As a player, you'd have little to no control over who you partners are and would end up having to try and game the system (queue for matches together at just the right times) to get to the top with your preferred team mate, again ridding the standings at the end of the season of any real meaning and prestige.
You can't really game the system. Even if you look for a match always the same time with your friend(s), you might still end up in different matches or playing against each other. We could also have limits for playing only X number of games with same partner and/or against same opponents just like in TUS singles.
I just honestly feel that trying to come up with a perfectly bulletproof system here, even though the one presented up there certainly isn't bulletproof yet, might not be worth it because you're just not measuring skill in a meaningful way. What skill are we measuring? The skill of being an active/adaptable/calm/solid 2v2 partner, regardless of who you get randomly paired with? Is this really a quality enough people in this community care about to warrant measuring? I dunno...
If the whole point is to simply find games for people who like to play 2v2 but have trouble organising clanners/funners, I imagine a much simpler implementation (more than likely via Tomi's snooper or a simple IRC bot) would do the trick just fine. The way I see it, there's really no real need for an entire league, here on TUS or elsewhere, unless the primary concern is to find the best player/team at X, where X is something that isn't covered by a different league or competition...
We need a league table because otherwise the matches would be just funners. We are finding the best player (not absolute) at 2v2. Now we have league tables to find the best player in 1v1 and the best clan. I would be ok with having shared league table for 1v1 and 2v2 matches. We would just then have different rules for 1v1 and 2v2 so the matches wouldn't be really comparable (in 1v1 you could select your opponent but not in 2v2). I don't see how this could work with Tomi's snooper or a simple IRC bot. We need a system to arrange random matches and penalty points for not agreeing to play. Otherwise we would have no matches because players would look just for a perfect match up.
If this is meant to be a slightly lighter, less fiercely competitive alternative to clan leagues (for when there aren't enough players online to play clanners), what's so wrong about having the games just be funners?
If it was me, I think what I'd do is simply slap an IRC bot into #AG or #RH, have players interested in finding a 2v2 match sign up via a PM, PM them back when 4+ players are found to check if they're all still online and ready to go (this is the point at which they would confirm their participation, before they learn who they'll be playing with, and lose the ability to back out), let them know who they're playing with once everyone has confirmed, then wait for the result of the match to be reported. All you need then is to have your usual complaints forum set up here on TUS for when people back out regardless or when anything out of the ordinary happens and possibly also teach your bot to spit out the most successful pairs of all time when anyone PMs it with a !stats command or whatever.
Then once you see how popular the concept gets at that accessible, relatively casual level, maybe set up an optional login system via the bot through which the more serious 2v2 players (with a certain amount of 2v2 games played under their belts already) can access a first division where teams are locked for the duration of a season and the standings have actual meaning behind them. But I'm not really sure how much sense this last part makes considering we already have a clan league
and now Avi's team competition going.
Frankly, if this really was me working on the project, I'd probably just do the one-off captain draft tournament that I mentioned in Avi's thread. That really did sound like it might have been fun and measured skill at something that isn't covered by other, already existing competitions on WA. Damn him for not taking that idea and doing it instead of what he's doing now!
Forums
Poll
