Anyone think a 4on4 ladder is worth the time?

It sucks with all the hazzle with divisions and misplaced clans, clans who wont play in a certain division and players, you know who i mean, who leave div1 clans to play in lower... in a ladder anyone can play in any team and your team can play vs who you want and not being forced to uneven games if you dont want to. However, you will get more points the more you play even if you lose so that might make it worth to challenge some better clan now and then.

General suggestions:

play as many games you can inside a set time frame
runt for X (like 5-8?) weeks and then top 8 to playoffs (perhaps 9-16 can play b-playoffs?)
maps: suggested by players, but perhaps tb3+extras (known 4on4 maps, episode and customs, and some new to try out)
games: bo3 with one of the tb3 as decider, this way you can have your favourite home-map but still have to master tb3 to win.
points: 1 activity point for playing, 3p for 2-0, 3p for 2-1 and 1p for 1-2. This would mean 4p per win, 2p if you lose 1-2 and 1p for 0-2.

Main purpose would be for fun and prac just like admortem ladder and the nqr ladders. There are a lot of pracs going, why not play them in a ladder?

Thoughts and suggestions?

All i need help with is a simple page with possibility to sign up teams, report games and news and then i can admin it. wont be much work other than that

Sounds interesting?

But who will play with us if they don't have to?

A ladder system would be nice. But rather than a tournament going on, how about a continuous system with rating (something like chess ELO could work I guess) so it gain you no benefit to play the same team and beat them over and over again. To climb the ladder you would eventually need to face the teams equal or stronger than you. Shouldn't be that much of a job either. Think Phil already got something for duels, but that seems to have been somewhat inactive the last year or two.

I have seen tvs prac and this would be a for fun and prac ladder in all ways so i guess it should be sorted out. The main idea is to raise activity some more.

Chosen would play vs tvs at least 1-2 games if given the opportunity but perhaps not 10 times.

http://koti.mbnet.fi/tspartan/chosen/index.php?id=list.php&rounddir=2008-05-06_Kalma_csn_vs_tvs_e1m2_000&_s=2365

The thing with continous systems is just that they tend to idle away after a while. I think at one point there must be an end and a restart.
But if it looks like most ppl want what Rikoll suggested im fine with that, no use in starting something ppl wouldnt play.

Also i doubt there would be many teams losing over and over to the same team (after a while they will try to play a more equal opponent) but rather some equal teams playing a lot and winning some games each. Atleast thats what was going on during the nqr ladders. Clans doing that was CSN, DC and PHC but thats just good for the activity imo. Thats what im after with the project as well, help to raise the activity. The pressure on the individual clan is also low, you can play 1 game in the time frame or several games each night as long as you find opponents.

Might take a while to load but here is one of the nqr ladders:
http://web.archive.org/web/20080623042830/ladder.nqr.nu/4on4_2/

What about a ladder/prac-DB that goes on forever, but the rating is calculated based on games played during the last 6months/12months.

Could be an idea but couldnt the qw stats by pleuraxerphim easily include such a feature if the ranking is what your are after?

I would still like some ending to each "season", i know there are off seasons as well but for the rest of the year this should be able to be run a good 4-5 times?
Just avoid having any playoffs during low activity times since those games are the only ones that must be played on a certain time.
Playoffs can be discussed as well but this is a first draft anyway.

But as stated above, lets see what kind of ladder that most ppl seem interested in!

You are right, stats.qw covers my idea already.

ELO doesn't promote activity. Kasparov is still highest rated chess player despite not playing for five years.

You can add purpose to playing tVS if for example every made frag adds to ladder score. Maybe you could even gain more per frag against higher ranked teams.

Playing vs same clan repeatedly should give less and less score.

Less skilled but most active clans ending up with highest score is not a problem if there is a reasonably sized playoff in the end.

Even if the result is that slackers will play versus dark abbots in the eight final its not a problem imo. The idea is that we wont have divisions so noone can complain about placement and if div0 is playing with his div5 friends. You are free to choose opponent up until playoffs so if there is 1 rape game for your clan there then so be it.

I know that aKKe felt that the admortem ladder failed since clans asked for "ladder game div4 now" and i can agree with that. But on the other hand, isnt it more likely that a clan would play some of the top teams if they gain something from it rather than just getting soundly beaten in a random prac? I know i would play vs any clan if we just lacked a few points before the playoffs began for example. Unless that same clan was competing for the last spot too and was much better than us ofc.

Kalma ELO does rank people according to how good they are, exactly at that time.
And a system that can be copied from chess again is to remove clans/players that have not played for 1 year.

I think each ladder season should be shorter than 1 year tho. 8weeks something and then playoffs, or just topclan is the winner and then restart.

Every rating system tries to do this. And every system is imperfect. There are many variations of Elo too.

When the ladder has no fixed match schedule Elo does not work at all. You can pick and choose your opponents and just idle once you reach a good rating.


What do they do when this player becomes active again?

im leaning towards static points: lets say 3-3-2-1 to reward activity.

2-0 map score equals 3-1p
2-1 equals 3-2

NQR2 certainly wasn't a failure IMO. Looking here http://web.archive.org/web/20030428060713/www.nqr.nu/nqr2/news.php there were 431 played games. I enjoyed playing in that league with Trash and earned Hagge a place in my fan club \o/

One of the nice things about a ladder is it gives more exposure to 'lesser' players/clans, through leagues like that we got to know about players like TCO, Janozh etc, and clans like HGC were able to start building a reputation for themselves.

Due to the delayed start of current EQL season I quite fancied having a ladder earlier this year, but I don't have the skills to implement such a thing.

Only thing I found a bit strange was the use of playoffs, which kinda defeats the whole point of a ladder. Zetor won the title dispite only plaiyng 9 regular season matches and sneaking into the playoffs in 16th place!

Give a virtual trophy to both winner of the "ladder rank" and "ladder cup". It's good to have playoffs for the excitement and for the specs.

I get the point hangtime but at the same time i find kalmas idea compelling.

Looks like we have access to the old nqr ladder code, lets see what we can do about it