Pedros wrote:We seem agreed that Ceebs is right about teams, and teams of three sounds sensible.
As much as i am amused by the prospect of getting credit for good ideas that aren't mine, i feel obliged to point out that those ideas were in fact suggested by cs, not me.
As for my thoughts on the league as a whole, i think it's intriguing but very very ambitious. Considering the difficulty we already face in running good quality individual games, a separate long-term series may have a hard time getting off the ground right now (in terms of recruitment) and organization/maintenance would be a big difficulty.
Instead of establishing a separate series of games, my recommendation would be for the establishment of a friendly ranking system for the existing and future forum games. Essentially it means designating some games as 'ranked' and using them to establish a leaderboard of sorts. The reason why not all forum games would be fit for inclusion is the same suggested by Pedros--that many unsuitable games are rightfully considered to be playtests/works-in-progress or may have been heavily unbalanced or cancelled due to DMRs.
I realize that this suggestion is really more like a ranking ladder and not a tournament. For one thing, it would mean that participating players would not be all playing in the same number of games or in all the same variants. In my view, this is not a drawback, but actually a positive feature, since recruiting reliable players for a large series of the games would be really difficult (consider the number of dropouts that occur over just one game, and magnify that if players are expected to play in many consecutive games).
Alternatives to regular tournament scoring structures are available. For one example, i came across an interesting system that is used at another diplomacy community,
dipplomaticcorp. I didn't study it in minute detail, but i can see that it has the notable advantage of being able to standardize games of any size/variant. So, participating players do not all have to play in the same games, or even the same number of games.
Speaking of variants, i'd have to disagree with Pedros' suggestion of incorporating not only map variants but also various modalities of rule variants. The level of complication arising from rule variants makes them not suited for a long-term league system because the results cannot be standardized (though in an isolated tournament, sure they could work). Classic diplomacy rules played on new map variants would be best for the idea that I'm suggesting (also i think build-rule changes are benign enough to be acceptable as well).
In terms of execution, i believe this idea could be a lot more plausible too. Firstly, players could opt in or out on an ongoing basis, and therefore it is up to each individual to choose whether they want the results of their forum games to be compiled into the rankings. This means that 'ranked' games do not necessarily have to include only participating 'league players', thereby making it easier to get full rosters for games.
Secondly, in order to have the league hit the ground running, some ongoing or previously completed games that are judged to have been of a suitable quality could be retroactively designated as 'ranked'. This means that from day one of the league there is a leaderboard and no need to wait a number of months before there are any official results to be noted.
So in sum, no it isn't a tournament per se, but i think it's a more realistic approach to tying together multiple forum games. I apologize if i've derailed the original proposition--i just want to put this similar idea up for discussion and comparison.
