The Rotated League

[Ray]

I had this idea for quite a long time now, few people might know about it, I'd now like to present it to the public. What you need to know and understand:

• This is only an idea yet. This is a concept that is not on the workbench yet, it might never make it there. I am gladly accepting ideas or any help of any kind you can offer, if you think this idea is good and you want to take part in the procedure of bringing it to life.
• This league is not meant to be rivalry for The Ultimate Site, my plans are to make my idea come alive and see if it works out.

Why?

"Ray, why do you want to launch a new league when we have The Ultimate Site?"

As I mentioined above: please don't accuse me of trying to "race" with The Ultimate Site, first of all, I don't have the time and resources to do that, second of all, the two concepts are absolutely different, and that is also the answer to the question. It is going to be different.

"Why don't you want MonkeyIsland to implement your idea into The Ultimate Site?"

Because it is different. The Ultimate Site has an enormous amount of features, databases and who knows what else is cooking in MonkeyIsland's kitchen. This idea is not simply an idea for a new type of competition, it is also an idea for a website. Here, the community has a big impact on what is going to happen, while I insist to my own plans and want absolute freedom over what I do, even if this sounds like a tyrannical way of leading a website, but remember that The Ultimate Site was new with this type of attitude towards the community.

The concept (so far)

The website

This is one of the reasons I want it separate from The Ultimate Site. I haven't managed a project of this size before and I need the experience to become better in my job. I have ideas I want to implement and try in a working and used environment.

I want the website to be as clean and clear as possible. I am not going to install and create thousands of features on community requests, the site is going to feature the absolute necessary things one might need.

• There is not going to be a Shoutbox.
• There are not going to be Forums.
• When someone acts as an asshole, the person gets banned. Forever. I don't want to regulate and decide with jurys and discuss something for weeks and base a decision upon that. There are going to be crystal clear rules with crystal clear consequences to when a person breaks these rules.

Once again: this might sounds tyrannical, it might sound like I'm trying to create rivalry against The Ultimate Site, but this is not true. Please, if all you ahve to comment is something like that, just don't bother.

The League

Here's how I imagined it would work: instead of the concept of you play whoever you want whenever you want, I'd make the competition more like any given country's football league. You have the first division, the second, the third... and in a given season, each team - or in this case player - faces everyone else in their division and at the end of the season, the best advances to the next division and the worst goes down a division.

Each season would consist of one month. January, February... are all seasons. Each division would stand of 6 players which means you'd have to play 5 games in a month.

Very clear and strict rules to prevent people not playing their games (without further notice). As I mentioned before, the concept is by far not ready yet, it lacks a very particularly created plan as to what happens in different situations - such as a draw, not playing your games, etc.

But first, I need to know what you think. If 30/30 people say it's shit, I won't bother. Feel free to express your hatred or to ask, think about ideas, I'll accept them all.

[Peja]

wow ray, would be awesome to get this done, but activity might be a problem for this league concept. anyway i have been waiting for a concept like this, love the idea with seperate leagues. good motivation reach higher divisions. but how you want to classify the palyers? based on tus rank?

[Abnaxus]

Copycat detected.

[Ray]

but how you want to classify the palyers? based on tus rank?

This is one of the biggest problems I was dealing with, I am open to any ideas. We are talking about how to put players into divisions in their first season. I had the thought of comparing it to the Classic League overall ranks, but... well, why should one's performance depend on the earlier performance in a different league?

Someone had an idea of just making the first season the same as it is on this site for instance, free for all, but then again, that is the absolute opposite direction what this whole plan is built around.

Maybe the best idea would be to randomly put players into equivalent groups of 6, and after the first season, every single player is sorted based on the number of wins in their season and that's how they get sorted into the divisions for the next season. That is true for only the first season of course.

Oh yea, and I left out that each season is a different scheme, based on the votes of the players. Elite, Team17, BnG, Roper, Rope Race, Shopper.

[Random00]

Imo you will have to many games not being played. So I think this concept just doesnt work with worms. Sorry

[Anubis]

To classify each person that signs up you can simply hold a tournament that "simulates" a season. You let the interested players play vs. each other a best of 3 match in the schemes you plan to implement. Each win grants "points" and then you have a source to classify the players.

[Ray]

Imo you will have to many games not being played. So I think this concept just doesnt work with worms. Sorry

As I said before, the rules are going to be very strict and particular about everything related to activity, since the whole concept is very sensitive to that manner. If someone doesn't play their games, gets kicked out of the competition instantly - or however we will build up the rules, I don't know yet.

To classify each person that signs up you can simply hold a tournament that "simulates" a season. You let the interested players play vs. each other a best of 3 match in the schemes you plan to implement. Each win grants "points" and then you have a source to classify the players.

The simulated season is kind of what I said, but I'll put that on the moodboard.

[Desetroyah]

Sounds unlikely it'll work imo because:

1) imagine a player goes away/has their pc busted/etc/etc, for a season, does he get relegated? Does he relegated only for that scheme? If someone is relegated f.e. to the 3rd division in wxw, and he's great in elite (next season) will he be in 3rd to start with and then go up to 2nd, only to be relegated again perhaps in another scheme next season?

2) dreaded "activity" issue. As Random said (among other things), there are players on TUS who play only in one league cause they cant afford the time to play a 2nd (trl, cups, tourneys etc), now guess what will happen if a totally new site is introduced on-top of the well-established TUS where 95-or-so% of all WA players are registered on...

These are my first thoughts, I'm only saying negative things cause those will be the issues imo. I like the "Primera Division", "Secunda Division", etc idea XD after all, we only have our worms ranks to brag about in rl dont we?

So to re-cap:  
1) classification issue
2) activity

Lets see how the pole goes

PS: Mind you, the classification issue stands imo for TUS TRL as well, so dont worry too much I guess, still, there has to be a way to make it work

[KoreanRedDragon]

What's the reasoning behind implementing the divisions and rotated ideas all at the same time, Ray? It seems to me that a league concept involving not just two but many divisions would work best if you made it either a single scheme league or an all-around league where every matchup was similar to how playoffs are played in regular leagues. With only five opponents in a month, that seems doable, especially if you're able to write and enforce a good set of strict rules. Because really, once two players from the same division do set up a time and both manage to show up, there's not all that much difference between playing one game or three. Or even five.

[Desetroyah]

What's the reasoning behind implementing the divisions and rotated ideas all at the same time, Ray? It seems to me that a league concept involving not just two but many divisions would work best if you made it either a single scheme league or an all-around league where every matchup was similar to how playoffs are played in regular leagues. With only five opponents in a month, that seems doable, especially if you're able to write and enforce a good set of strict rules. Because really, once two players from the same division do set up a time and both manage to show up, there's not all that much difference between playing one game or three. Or even five.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^what he said

[Ray]

The whole point of the League is to make it an interesting all-round competition, yes, that is the point you mentioned, you may go down a division if it's a scheme you are not so good at, but you might get promoted back in the next season.

Activity... if you know, that you are not going to be able to play your games for whatever reason, you can tell us any time (or maybe there is a button on the site, a calendar where you can mark the lenth of your activity, whatever) and that makes an exception. The penalty goes when you are gone or you don't play your games without any further notice.

If a person can't play in February, he logs in once and is able to notify the system, so maybe if you are all out for the whole season, other players are notified in the division, maybe your name becomes grey in the standing table, don't know yet, but it's not a problem if you notify before, got my point?

Yes, I know, I'm building a plan on personal responsibility through the internet, big risk. But I am 100% certain that with good management and a well-thought system that covers all these holes, this can work out.

What's the reasoning behind implementing the divisions and rotated ideas all at the same time, Ray? It seems to me that a league concept involving not just two but many divisions would work best if you made it either a single scheme league or an all-around league where every matchup was similar to how playoffs are played in regular leagues. With only five opponents in a month, that seems doable, especially if you're able to write and enforce a good set of strict rules. Because really, once two players from the same division do set up a time and both manage to show up, there's not all that much difference between playing one game or three. Or even five.

I have to think about that... for a one-scheme league, there is TEL right here, I don't know... not that there's no way to launch a league based on one scheme because of the existence of TEL, not like the only scheme could be Elite, it just doesn't seem to be that good of an idea, since it would mean that a lot less participants would play. It would certainly narrow down the scope of possible problems though. I noted this as well.

I understand your concerns - yes, you too reader, who doesn't post - and I understand your doubts, even more so because I never actually managed a league by myself. I am asking you to be supportive if you like the idea and give me all the sides I have to look at it from, give me your comments, may it be negative or positive.

And thank you for the posts so far, I'm glad you are interested.

[avirex]

i would like to participate in this league, but the rotated thing sounds boring.... for instance, i would get banned forever from your league when the bng month rolls around.... either that, or i will mark on the calender that ill be away

because lets face it, who really wants to bng?

[Ray]

i would like to participate in this league, but the rotated thing sounds boring.... for instance, i would get banned forever from your league when the bng month rolls around.... either that, or i will mark on the calender that ill be away

because lets face it, who really wants to bng?

That is kind of something we would want to avoid. KRD might be right about the fact that mixing scheme rotation with the division system is not such a good idea.

But if the plan sticks with the the system of divisions, but with only one scheme... what scheme would it be? Wouldn't it get boring after a while?

Because I thought, that maybe after a year - if it would live that long of course - by the time the ranking would show something that is very close to being "right", so like the overall Classic League statistics, the league could offer prizes for the winners of the first three divisions, and the scheme rotation would help make it sure that it's not always the exact same players winning the prizes.

[Almog]

-I am not worry about the activity
-I don't like the rotated/division combination
-I do like however the divisions idea, and I think the best way it would work is if it will be allround league best-of-five
-The biggest issue, I think, is how you decide which players to accept into the league? I'll elaborte.. If each division consists of 6 players, then 3 divisions will make room for only 18 players. I don't think there's a point in 4th division, I mean, I don't think anyone would actually play there.. Who can bother playing there? The whole point is to be the champ, and if you're a player in 4th devision, you need a minimum of 3 months playing just so you can climb to first division, and then another month to be the champ. Maybe that's not true for everyone, but I just think people really care about winning or at least playing in first division - with the good guys - and won't bother, or care enough, to play in the low levels. That leads me to the real issue: How do you select the top 18 players of W:A ? I only assume at least 100 players will be willing to sign up in the first months.

[HHC]

Yo Ray, this is (almost) exactly the system I used in the (early) days of WEL.

Dunno if it will work again though. TUS is so all-round and complete, it's hard to compete with that.

I think WEL had 3 divisions at one point, of about 20/24 people each. If I recall correctly the max number of games people could play was 30 (2 times against everyone). I made the divisions bigger than 15 players so that any inactive players or people who had given up would not have an impact on player's ability to max out. So people only needed to play 2/3 of the players in their league to reach the max limit of games. Made it a lot easier.. and well, every player in the division was good, so there was no incentive to avoid players.

As the seasons progressed though I had to limit the # of divisions from 3 to 2 (cl2k style), to eventually 1, as less and less players kept being active.
As WEL implies, it was only Elite scheme. I think for a system like this that works best. But a split in roper and default leagues could also be an options (bo3 Elite,T17,Hyst in default; bo3 Rope,RR,wxw/shop in the roper one).