Hello everybody, next sunday 15th at 15:00 GMT I will be hosting a tournament of a scheme is somehow remotely similar to BnG.
One of the goals is (through testing) get to a scheme with a BnG feeling but without rules that can be bended by lame players. Maybe after perfectioning it could be a good stepping stone to get more people to like BnG.

This is the post announcing it: http://nnnclan.freeforums.org/1st-not-bng-tournament-2009-02-15-15-00-gmt-pt-t296.html

And, if you don't mind reading a bit more, I'd like to add a few things I've noticed while playing it in the last few days:

-You can prevent your opponent from repeating shots without re-aiming by moving your worm before shooting (yep, you can move to a different hide before you shoot).
-If the 4s max power shots annoy you, feel free to use a girder above your head so that he will have to break the girder before he can go on with the 4s shots, or try a different kind of shot. Or you can use a nice petrol bomb on your opponent, so that he can't go back to the same spot he was standing before.
-If your opponent likes sitters, then simply don't hide in the bottom of a hole .
-You can go out in the open to have a clear shot, but be careful because you will be giving your opponent a clear shot too (no retreat time).

Of course, I am not good at BnG and probably never will, so skilled BnGers are needed to test this.
Lame players who are really good at bending the rules are welcomed too, there aren't any rules to bend here, but people like this can help testing if the scheme can take it.

Cheers, and have fun.

I think I can do it, no problems I could think of.

The problems:
-People don't want their points to get reset every season. With the current points system resetting the points also means noobashers can keep on bashing the same noobs the bashed in the previous season.

-Ranks (elite, average, newbie, etc) seem not to work well enough, because a new player in the league get's too much advantage from that. I think it is good enough and only needs time, but obviously the rest of the players don't think the same and don't want to wait until this synergistic system starts working smoothly.

-If you don't reset the points, then after some months those who have played many games will have such an amount of points that it will be impossible for a new player, no matter how good he could be, to reach them.

-----------------------

Alternative solution:

-Forget about ranks when calculating points (elite, average, newbie, etc.).
The points obtained and lost should no longer depend on that.

-Never reset the points
If in one season you had 5000 points, in the next season you won't necessarily go back to 1000.

-The points a player gets as base points for the next season could be proportional to the points he had at the end of the previous season (obviously less) so that a top-top-top player would still be inside the reach of new league players.

-All the scores get adjusted in the exact same way
Obviously you can't divide by 100 the points of the top player while you are dividing by 5 the points of other players.

-A new player should get an average amount of starting points
Someone who is new to the league shouldn't start with too many points compared to the other players because you could be turning a total newbp into a juicy target for noobashers who would pop each other eyes out fighting to be the first in sucking up the newb juice.
Also someone who is new to the league shouldn't start with too few points, otherwise if he turns out to be a good player he will have a really hard time at finding other good players to play with because they'd all be scared of losing too many points.
----------------------

Expected effects of this:

-If you had a good performance during the previous season you will have a small (depending on the adjustment used the advantage could be smaller or bigger) advantage during the next season. If you proved to be really good and active during one season you can relax, just a bit, the next one.

-At the beginning of a new season, newbs that played in previous seasons won't have too many points compared that good wormers that played in previous seasons. Therefore good wormers won't get much from noobbashing, because newbs will be just too low for them to get any significant profit.

-A new player, should be able to reach and even outrank top players of previous seasons if he is good enough. Because top players, even if they start with a certain advantage in points, won't have too many.

------------

Things to consider:
Finding out the best points adjustment from one season to the next one won't be an easy nor fast task, it will take some seasons to know which adjustment generates scores low enough so that new players can reach them and high enough to prevent a noob-bashing outbreak.
The first thing that comes to my mind is dividing by something the points of the top player so that the score gets reduced to a defined number (could be 1000?, 1500?, no idea.) and divide all the other scores by the exact same something .

Well, I don't really care about it since I obviously can't win it. But I do care about the well functioning of this league because so far MI has proved to be the most open minded and less arrogant league-owner I've ever seen in the worms community.
Before going into cash-prices I would really try a lot harder to fix some, or most, of the following bugs (by bugs I am talking about little things in the rating system that I personally don't find quite fair).

-Players can, somehow, help their overall stats by not playing the schemes they suck at. Me for example, if I wanted to rank I wouldn't play RR and then keep those 1000 starting points instead of losing the tiniest bit. I honestly have no idea how to fix that given the current rating system.

-Players can rank even if they have played games of 1 scheme as much as the addition of all the other schemes. (39 Intermediates ; 39 rr+roper+elite+hyst+...) Ya, ok, I am not a good example of a 1-scheme ranker, but someone a bit faster than me at roping could if he decided to avoid playing ropers against skilled players. If the item above this one could be solved, then the classic season ranking could be equal to the average of the other rankings. In that way it would be really easy for a better all-arounder to outrank a noob-bashing 1-2-scheme/s player.

-Map choice and noob bashing are other issues. You had  a nice idea for the first one and the latter might simply dissappear with the adjectives ranking after a few more seasons.

*Ty for the bo3 system, I don't know still if 2-1 = 2-0 = 1-0 (regarding the points), it'd be good if it wasn't of course, but anyway I will start asking my opponents to bo3 their pick as well, to be fair.

I think it's just too hard to force people to make hard moves in league games if the scheme, the map or the situation are not doing it.
I am an extremist during fun matches and I hate it when people do moves that are easy for them, because (as Ramone said) they never get really skilled in that way and they ruin the fun of funners.
Yet I agree with NAiL when it is a league/tournament game, mostly because it is impossible to enforce "showoff" rules without tons of complaints arising under grey situations. Also you'd be discouraging less skilled wormers to play the scheme.

I like it, it's different from the other schemes, it requires different skills and different tactics.
Imho, a league that is meant to encourage all-arounding should never dismiss a scheme simply because it is different from what people are used to play. Worms is a lot more than rope+elite+bng, so you can like/dislike be good/bad at certain ways of playing worms, but you can't be called a good all-arounder if there is at least one little dark corner in worms that you haven't explored and became good at.

Working perfectly now, thanks "MI".

Still the same. Just played with m0j0 and can't report even though it was only one round. Not with firefox nor with IE.