Ladder

posted on August 29th, 2010, 7:01 am

I have a suggestion to implement a ladder for FO online.  Maybe this has already been suggested and poo-poo'd before but anyway here goes.

Reason: When playing online, especially against people you have never played against before, you have no idea how good they are and who they are good with.  A ladder would help this.  It would also help balance teams in team play as you could average people's ranks to find the most optimal team setup.  People could use the ladder competitively ("ha ha, i'm number 1!  Take that Mal!") but its not the main aim.

How it could work:  Naturally an online ladder with full integration into Tunngle would be perfect but thats not likely to happen this side of the next ice age, so I propose a simpler solution.  We use the forums to post the ladder in a stickied post in this forum.  When people play they agree before starting it is a ladder game (ie: not just for experiments or laughs) and regardless of what happens the result is logged, barring an official failure of Tunngle.  I say this to stop people quitting/dropping just because they don't like the way the game is going.  Only in event of a full game drop is the result voided.

Results are then posted to the thread and we have a couple of people responsible for adding the results to the ladder.

I'm willing to put some time into creating a ladder in Excel.  I'm pretty good with Excel and believe I can create this and all the required algorithms.  The ladder itself will be posted as both a downloadable XLS and pasted into the first topic of the thread.  Suggest the ladder is updated weekly with the previous week's results.  I'm willing to be one of the maintainers of the ladder, at least in the first instance while the ladder is still under development and being fine tuned and bug tested.

I have some ideas about the mechanics of how the ladder should work to provide a fair reflection of rankings and some ideas of additional features such as displaying people's biases/preferences for playing different factions.  Also the ability for the player themselves, their opponents, and any observers of the games played to add "tags" to a player's ladder "profile" such as:
Elim: Dom B8 spammer ;-)
Tags can always be removed upon request from the actual player.

If people like this idea and the site admins are happy with such a thread being here I will start work on the ladder.

If anyone has a better suggestion for a ladder, or can think of a better way to implement it (other than Excel) then let me know.  I would prefer a specialized FO ladder rather than something generic.

posted on August 29th, 2010, 11:28 am

i dont like ladders.

posted on August 29th, 2010, 12:09 pm

Im not keen on the idea either, i always saw ladders as a elitist thing. Nowadays people in games just ask how experienced people are and form the teams fairly around that.

posted on August 29th, 2010, 12:23 pm

I generally like the idea. (im a competitive person) So having a ladder would be nice in my opinion, but I think the post-excel thing will never work   It's too complicated, needs too much time, and basically ruins the fun. In my opinon anybody who would like to see a ladder, must wait "til the next ice age" .

posted on August 29th, 2010, 12:36 pm

Interesting first reactions.  I suppose Bigmachk's comment about elitism is correct which is why I would want to make it more than just a ladder but also some sort of lookup to get some details about the people you are playing against.

Elim perhaps commented on the most significant point which is how well it would actually work and how much maintainence would be required... not to mention people reporting their results, not a big effort, but still takes a little time.

Perhaps if it could be made into an online form where people can post their results and could work through the issues of multiple people posting the same game info then it could be easier for people and more accepted.

Will wait for more feedback methinks.

posted on August 29th, 2010, 2:15 pm

Ethics aside, there is of course the problem of how do you determine where people sit in a ladder over time - other games have a point system, not just a general "he's better than me, I'm better than that guy, and that girl over there is best of all".

There's no real way to organize a non-automated ladder system without running up against some significant problems - such as people not ever going onto the forums... not to mention the amount of games, and the relative amount of time people spend playing games.

Some of us have been here for a long time and probably played more games than anybody else here - others are new and may be winning a lot with the current online crowd, but because a non-automated ladder could really only keep track of a limited number of wins/losses out of the whole as well as only the relative position of players, a ladder wouldn't give any real meaning to who is best. It would be for fun, just like tournaments.

posted on August 30th, 2010, 1:57 am

I'm afraid Im going to have to agree with Dominus and the others on this one. Things like this often lead to superiority complexes and other conflicts. It's also not required as we get by just fine when balancing teams. We know each others approximate skill level so a ladder system is not required.