As a player that wishes to, probably due to the fact he is only able/willing to, play for a mid division team - I would like to make the following rant/defense to why a ladder would work in the NS2 community.

Firstly

Teams that wish to make a new team are parachuted into the top divisions due to the players they have in their team. This to me makes no deterrent into players just leaving there current team because of the failings/want to be a successful team together.

I'm not knocking the teams that have done this, but by putting brand new teams into division 1/premier league (whatever you wish to call it) you are giving players an easy way just to recruit a bunch of players to leave there current team and play in division 1 without any recourse into what leaving there team may actually do.

Example:

I could play for a well established team such as HBZ and consider myself a top flight player - turns out next season I may not be in the top division - so I contact players from Cocorico, we get the best 6 players - and hey presto we have ourselves a top division team with no recourse or questions ask of our actions.

You can split hairs on the details/players if you wish, but I think most people understand the thought process behind this.


By having a ongoing ladder (and not 2-3 seeding games where we all see that it turns out that Snails are an amazing team) we can see the leagues to where the are on ability rather than reputation. There needs to be some kind of deterrent to people just leaving and making a brand new team as they wish to ensure they remain top flight players*

Secondly, whilst I appreciate the current cup that is in place - its a waste of time for most of the teams involved because everyone know that of the groups currently formed:

miau
Radical
Snails
Duplex
Saunamen
Quaxy
Godar
Vetus

End up in the top flight of the cup - and the rest go into the Horizon Bracket.

I don't think many of the teams below this would even question it - let alone be bothered in trying to compete with these teams.

So why don't we make future cups more appealing to those that fit each bracket.

We could have cut through all week 1's nonsense and just seeded the teams as such, and played a more interesting cup for all involved rather than a 1 game knockout when it gets down to the interesting games. Tonight my team played Snails - and I can't imagine for one moment anyone was remotely interested in watching it because it was a complete non-contest.

Again - I feel a ladder would justify this sort of decision.

To back this up - most teams (and I say this as a player that is unlikely to be involved in top end prizes) play most PCW's as serious games. Because there is really a lack of anything else. By definition a PCW is a practice game - but when there is such little competition they become meaningful. By having ladder games where you can actually compete for something at any time means that PCW's can actually become practice games - and ladder games remains a focus during the off season.

Should teams not wish to play ladder games then there rating within the ladder will rightly be affected - but just because the sun is out doesn't mean everyone wants to down tools.

A ladder doesn't have to be the be all and end all to every team, but its a decent solution to those that feels they can achieve a target outside of winning a league that isn't going on or, a cup that well out of their bracket.

Basically the administrative interest in the league etc (IMO) is way too top heavy without interest in the other teams taking part.

*This is in no means suppose to be a dig at the players of Snails. You are rightly a top team, but I hope you appreciate the sentiment.

It's a nice idea. It can be completely automatic with little league admin input.

Referees would have to be contacted when a match is made. The divisional leagues can run with the ladder in the background.

It also doesn't have a deadline unless they are run annually?

You can also effectively seed teams for cups and such using the ladder.

My loyal subject here has a point. As teamfrance and snails, we have played a lot of matches that ended up really one sided (or full cheese'd). This isn't really interesting for anyone, especially if it has to happen every cup.

But that's how cups work, you can't really change it.

The idea of a ladder is a good idea though. As he said, it will make interesting competition for everyone, and reachable GOALS for everyone.

This past week, I've actually been putting serious consideration into a ladder and was thinking about doing a test run with NA teams if I felt we had enough teams that would be willing to participate. I'm not too familiar with gaming ladders and was still trying to figure out the best way to do it. Rules and matches and website stuff. I'd really love to see this idea fleshed out.

From my viewpoint ladder is completely viable in our community. The thing is, you cannot think about it as separate competition, but rather global ranking for your team. Regular season matches would count as well as any cups that would follow some kind of match rules suite. I would also include PCWs, if you want it to be a ranked match then be it a ranked match (aka PCW would turn CW) if you don't it doesn't have to be. There would be almost no change for any team that is active now. You would just have to decide if you wanna PCW or CW.

(to make the ladder kind of updated, teams without matches would loose points/ranks over time, I dont think there is really need for short seasons like in Starcraft, but lets say seasons by years or eveery half a year would be nice.)

I would advice to carefully put together a webbased ladder system that works (or atleast system) and not do a half finished prototype on some different website, rather than ensl. Hence talking to someone that's created one before or knows the important details.

In theory it can sound good, but I also know there's people against it for various reasons.
If players wants it and uses it though, I dont see why not?

(btw if someone knows coding/ladders please lend a hand to help.
It's easy to post ideas and suggestions, but the ENSL guys aren't payed workers^^)

PCWs == ladder

Actually the best suggestion I've heard in a long time. The difficulty is in making people assign every game to the ladder, rather than just calling it a PCW because they don't want to lose. What you really need is some way of forcing every organised competitive 6 v 6 into the ladder system. Good luck with that without dev support. Needs matchmaking (where did that go??)

In terms of teams, NS has always been like this. The community doesn't have enough good players to make a large scale competitive scene and all of the good players know each other. You basically need to have a flatline style full retard 24/7 team to crack the top.

And IIRC we actually had a ladder in NS1 that failed abysmally because nobody wanted to get raped by fins.

If a system was to be built for the ladder system here on the ensl web page it could be tied to a pcw finder with the possibility of adding games manually. Sounds like a ton of work though.

I guess thats the second best thing since I doubt it will get dev support.

If we are discussing about a ladder system, why not just make an ELO based system. Where when teams play the ELO of those teams change depending on a win/loss. I guess this also easier to develop since you just have to calculate a new ELO score for each team when they have played depending on the outcome.

ELO:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system

Great idea - each game would need to be ref'd though I imagine

I created the ladder system, and the whole website before. It *should* work but probably something has broken over the years. It uses ELO.

just have weekly matches like before. the only difference will be that you don't have to 'force' people into groups just to fill numbers (massive problem in NA) and teams can join/die and it won't affect things. less downtime in general as well.

Guys X.X

Use a ladder like enemydown.co.uk for CS

You can still have PCWs without affecting your ladder rating.

You just officially challenge on the website, agree a time/date, what map or maybe multiple maps, try and get a ref (caster if you want I guess) and play the game. The score is updated and your ranking adjusts accordingly (ELO sounds good).

A problem I see is how rounds come into affect. I think each team will have to play a substantial amount of games until the ELO ranking can work effectively because each game will probably only be 1 map at a time because teams won't want to risk so many rounds in one go. CSS goes through 30 rounds in 1 game.