Century League

This is the full press tournament you’ve all been waiting for!
A complete reimagining for the old web diplomacy leagues with the intention of creating a faster experience with a lower level of commitment all at once.

This league will run in two seasons per year. January to April and August to November.
I’ll be accepting sign ups for the January to April component below. But first details!

During each season you will play three games, one game will start at the beginning of each month.
These games will be unranked full press games, with non-anonymous players and public draw votes and 25 hour phases. At the end of 1910 all games that have not been soloed will be force drawn by the tournament director and scored using C-Diplo 100 scoring

Once all three games have been complete the top 7 players from each tier will compete in a final. Ties for admission into the final will be broken based on GR.

A quick word about commitment: to keep the pace of the tournament up there is anticipated to be about a two week window of overlap between games. Which means you should never end up playing in more than two tournament games concurrently. Additionally all players will be give 3 days of pause time per game, meaning each game can be paused for a maximum of three weeks if all players use their pauses concurrently. In the unfortunate event that a player has to drop out of the tournament we will be soliciting a substitute player to fill in for them, the substitute player will keep all the points scored by his or her predecessor.

Lets talk scoring: games will follow C-Diplomacy scoring: http://www.diplomaticcorps.org/Scoring/cdiplo.html
Each game will be scored out of 100 points.
If you solo you will get all 100 points
In the event of a draw
All players will receive 1 point for playing
All players will receive 1 additional point for each supply centre they hold at the end of the game
The player with the most supply centres will receive 38 bonus points
The player with the second most supply centre will receive 14 bonus points 
The player with the third most supply centre will receive 7 bonus points.

In the event of a tie for number of supply centres the players will split the bonus points.
For example, if France had 8 supply centres, England had 8 supply centres and Turkey had 7 supply centres. France and England would split the bonus points for 1st and 2nd place (38+14)/2 = 26 points each, while Turkey would receive 7 bonus points. 

If France, England and Turkey all had 8 supply centres they would split the prizes for 1st, 2nd and 3rd (38+14+7)/3=19.6 points each

Excited?
Lets talk about signups

When players sign up for the century league they will be placed in one of three tiers.
Tier 1. The highest ranked 14-28 players (depending on number of sign ups) to sign up for the tournament based on their most recent full press GR. 
Tier 2. The next highest 14-28 players (depending on number of sign ups) to sign up for the tournament based on their most recent full press GR
Tier 3. The remaining 14-28 players ranked based on full press GR, unranked players will also be slotted into this tier.

During a season of the Century League each each player will play 3 games with other members of their tier. Each game will consist of a 6 other players randomly drawn from the same tier. If a board is randomly generated were 6 or more players on the board have already played each other the board will be re-rolled. After the three games are completed the top seven players from each pool will move on to their tiers final to play for the Century League Title. Each tier will have its own top board.

Thanks to the courtesy of our wonderful moderator team we’re going to have some prizes at the end of the season based on the results of the final for each tier.
Tier 1: 500 for 1st,  300 for 2nd, 200 for 3rd   Solo: 1000
Tier 2: 300 for 1st, 200 for 2nd, 100 for 3rd   Solo: 500
Tier 3: 200 for 1st 100 for 2nd, 50 for 3rd      Solo: 300

So what makes it a league exactly:
Great question. What makes this different from a typical tournament is we’re going to do persistent rankings, which means your performance during a particular season will determine what tier you’re in the following season.

At the end of a season the top 1/7th+1 players from each tier will move up to the next tier
and the bottom 1/7th+1 players from a given tier will move down to the next lowest tier.

If you’ve had enough by the end of the season we encourage any players who wish to withdraw from the century league to do so at the end of a season. Any open spots will be filled by new applicants based on GR. If you are in Tier three and are one of the players scheduled for demotion you slot will be marked as open and you will be invited to reapply for the open slot.

In the event that we have to expand our tiers between seasons the number of promotions will be increased to the top 2/7th+1 players and new players will be slotted in to any open slots based on GR

In the sad event that we have to shrink our tiers down we will do so by initially decreasing the size of tier 3 as larger pools of players will tend to be more competitive. If you are in a pool that shrinks there may be initial demotions from the players with the lowest score in the previous season to bring each tier back to a multiple of 7 players

Finally a note on rules:
We expect you to play based on the scoring system and attempting to maximized your total score and your position in the league, sometimes this may result in you choosing alliances to maximize your score. However Cross-gaming is strictly prohibited and if will result in your removal from the league and may result in moderator action for metagaming.

With all that out of the way I encourage you all to sign up, I’m looking forward to seeing everyone’s performance in the first century league.