#playingMoreThanOneGameAtATime
#highGhostRatingProblems
#cellarDoor

@Villiage

Yes, perhaps pure GR would have been better, but that wouldn't have really be fair to previous participants. I would like to point out, though, that the Leagues ran very successfully for 5 years, which is better than any other tournament we've had. There were a few bumps the last few years, but I think there could be a real revival. It's not like this is the first time we've ever run the Leagues. It has a good track record.

I was curious about GRs without biasing myself by looking up who has previously been in Leagues...so:

A*:
11, 14, 17, 27, 94, 108, Unrated (but in Aug14 was 463)

A:
15, 35, 50, 57, 67, 73, 121
20, 33, 41, 65, 99, 137, Unrated (but in Aug14 was 48)

Unless noted used Mar2015. Which is not what was used for the initial seeding (almost sure that was Feb2015), but these should be slightly more accurate supposedly. Anyone who wasn't rated in Mar2015 wasn't rate in Feb2015 anyways.

Village -

Thank you for your thoughts. But please, in the future don't go out of your way to point out that bo_sox is thoroughly outclassed in the Premier League. Its not really polite.

To address some of your concerns, the Leagues is generally a format that is supposed to play iterations fairly close together (twice a year). To avoid tournament burnout by players, the games need to be in fairly quick succession in order for each iteration to be wrapped up in 3-4 months. To wrap it up quick, its necessary that some games overlap. But, three weeks into 24 hour phases should put you close to the mid/end game by the time the next game starts. Most games right now are in 1907. Also, as you can see from Valis' research, after one iteration the Leagues will be fairly well ordered according to GR. As abge said, it wouldn't be fair for those who have already put time into the Leagues to not be rewarded for sticking around. As to your last point, I wouldn't want to bump people up and down after each game. That would allow country draw to factor into whether or not you advance, which is unfair. Four games pretty much negates this. There is a discussion point for bringing it down from four games to three, but four works better with creating close numerical scores.

Pretty much everyone who has voiced negative opinions on this thread has not been around while previous Leagues were ongoing, so you all haven't really experienced how tournament oriented this site once was. I remember being in the Leagues, Master and World Cup all at once (Ended up getting a solo in the Masters, placed 2nd in my League and....well, World Cup....so it is possible to multitask that much). I would like to bring this site back up to that level of tournament play. So if you do not enjoy this experience, please try it out with another tournament. I'll probably start up the Masters this June (Yes everyone, you heard it here first).

Also, I should note, if anyone thinks that they were stabbed in retaliation for actions in another game, contact me. I'll sort to the bottom of it, because I *can* find out whether they did it for strategy or for revenge.

I am not a league. Can I still give my opinion?

semck is a league of his own.

Abge/Gold -

All very fair points, just offering personal feedback on what i was hoping to get out of it and why it doesn't seem best suited for me. The last accepted set of games were two years ago and even those didn't really finish to completion since people dropped out in the 4th round. Not rebooting this has kinda gotten it off on the wrong foot and is demoralizing a few people to the point i doubt you'd retain half the participants from going into the next set (from my game anyways).

Biggest reason i won't return though is just the boredom factor of playing the same seven guys four times. Personal short attention span i guess.

Hello all,

Are the leagues the only tournament scheduled for 2015 so far? If that's the case, I don't think they are sufficient, because of all the objections made in this thread.

Some comments from my memory about the leagues from way-back-when:

1) They were always plagued with high dropout rates, because you do play a lot. If you don't, people leave between seasons even more. A partial solution was to allow people to skip a season, and re-enter without starting at the bottom again (e.g. placing them as though they had played and lost all their games)

2) The promotion/relegation dynamic becomes a bit silly in the lower leagues. When we had 10-12 leagues, it was usually the case that almost everyone in the bottom level got promoted, due to dropouts. The top two leagues in the pyramid were the only levels with many relegations, the B-level (3rd tier) would typically get 1 or 2 at most.

3) It took too long to get from the bottom to the top of the pyramid. We had Premier, A, B, C and D tiers. Since we normally took about 7 months per season (including the offseason), that means it would take 3 years to win the tournament from your first season. (the dropout replacement mechanism of picking a leader in the lower league means you could do slightly better in practice)

4) It is the absolute hardest tournament to run. Partly due to its size, but also the fact that the games were started in quick succession means that you need to be really on the ball to keep it moving. Automation of game starts would help a lot in this, if someone codes that, but you still need to hunt for replacements fast to stop delays, because you can't start the new season until the old one is finished, and people have had the rest period (which is essential, for sure). I also found that the metagame aspect made it impossible to play and direct simultaneously- my season in the Premier league was not without controversy, and one player left as a result of this.

This meant that a new player entering at D-level would normally play an irrelevant season, and would take many seasons to reach the top. If I were to redesign the tournament, I would strongly consider making it have only 3 tiers, and having the bottom tier have larger leagues, e.g.

Premier League: 7 players, 4 relegations
A1-2: 7 players, 2 promotions, 3 relegations each
B1-3: 14 players, 2 promotions each.

This has the capacity for up to 63 players, and means that the pyramid isn't too deep, and there are only the top 21 above the bottom league, so hopefully the promotion-by-dropout dynamic can be reduced.

For 77 players (close to the maximum we achieved of 84 players), you can add an extra B league, and promote the 4 winners plus 2 highest scoring second placers. In light of how hard the tournament is to run, though, I would cap it at 63 players, and turn people away/wait list them. (e.g. based on time spent playing/ some other heuristic for commitment). Maintaining an active wait list is one way of keeping the tournament running easier, btw.
_________________________________________

Other tournaments:

I think the reason the leagues were so successful when they were running was because they were part of a programme of tournaments that ran throughout the year. People were used to tournament play, and the leagues could be the bread-and-butter games. I don't think they suit as the "premier event", but when they are the only tournament, people play one-off games as the bread-and-butter, and the leagues are the important games.

You can see the tournaments that were ran simultaneous to the leagues on tournaments.webdiplomacy.net

I will summarise my thoughts on those I know about, because they seem to be a distant memory

1. GFDT: I really liked this tournament (thewonderllama's creation), because anyone could participate, the format made a lot of sense, and it wasn't too much of a game burden, so people could play their best (in the league that's not so possible because there are too many games). The 2 rounds + final format takes about 10 months, so you should be able to run it annually. Not too hard to run, either.

2. The Masters: The idea behind the tournament was to be a strict no-metagame tournament, designed to make meta-gaming almost impossible. As such it was kind of an antidote to the league. You have 49 players, and play each player exactly once across 8 games. It is anonymous players (or at least, was when the feature was added), and you can only get points by winning a game, so there were no alliances to the end of the game. It was quite long, but if you keep to schedule, lasts about a year. Can be quite hard to run, but again, if it were possible for the TD to set games up directly, rather than getting players to set them up, it would be much easier to run. Personally I didn't enjoy it, but that's biased by the fact that I am much better at drawing than at winning, only played 2 games in it, and was very, very tired at the time.

3. Champions Trophy: The tournament winners over the last year play a showcase match (or two in event of a draw). Ended up feeling like a GR challenge game, and not so meaningful. To make it a success, you could make it anon, and then have a forum discussion thread to encourage spectators. If you don't do this, there's not really enough people involved to make it feel like a tournament. On the plus side, it's basically trivial to run.

4. World Cup: Apparently the 2012 World Cup is still running(?!). Its fun, but I don't think it is necessary to revive this in order to have a strong tournament schedule. It is apparently super hard to run!

TheGhostMaker really is the Nicholas Parsons of webDip.

In defense of the World Cup I have to say it was my favourite of the tournaments. The time commitment was low and getting to know a few of the players a bit better in my part of the world was a great bonus. Why it was so demanding from an organisational perspective I don't know. I don't think it should be. Simplify it by scrapping public press and impose a 1918 draw to stop madness similar to the last tournament, and it should be a winner.

To clarify, I don't think the World Cup isn't very fun, I really enjoyed playing the inaugural edition. However, I think the individual tournaments are more important for having a successful overall program of tournaments.

The World cup is probably hard to run because there are lots of different game types and different people involved, who maybe individually have less commitment than do players in individual tournaments

Any tournament is only as good as the players in it. The Premier League right now has some really good players, but it's also a little unbalanced because of uneven player participation (I hesitate to say commitment because I don't know exactly what's going on with everyone). But all that is impossible to know ahead of time - the last Masters I played in, the early games were great, but we also had some people who clearly weren't interested in playing.

I have an idea that I think has been tossed around before, and it's a good one because I requires no work from me. We need to emphasize to people that the tournaments are a big deal. Could we get little trophies or something to put by the usernames, next to the points marker and the possible donation badge, for the current Leagues/Masters/whatever champion? There's got to be three or four different kinds of wingding trophies we (somebody) could easily add as a little visual reminder/reward/whatnot.

Another idea: I really enjoyed bo's PPSC series. I want people to do more series like those, maybe with some sort of official blessing.

"I have an idea that I think has been tossed around before, and it's a good one because I requires no work from me."

+1.

"I want people to do more series like those, maybe with some sort of official blessing. "

Go ahead, you have my blessing.
Oh shit, that means work for you. Tough cookies :-)

"Go ahead, you have my blessing."

Okay!

In all seriousness, we love and encourage all types of ideas on leagues and competitions. In fact, *all* of the competitions that you see here, Mafia, cups, leagues, even fucking GR, they have all come about through individuals such as yourself stepping up to the plate and doing something cool. Hell, this whole site exists because Kestas thought it'd be a cool thing to spend his personal time on.

So yes, please, feel free to take initiative. If you want some sort of official blessing for some initiative, then mail to [email protected]. But rest assured we love good ideas.

Ah crosspost with your other thread. Good move, why wait? :-)

I am a self-starter, I guess. I will be expecting those little wingding awards, though.

One of the more interesting one's i've seen is an Eliminator Tournament where basically if you're eliminated from a game you don't go on to the next round. There's some technicalities to make sure there's enough people for next set of games (too many then people with lowest SC's get dropped, not enough then players who lasted the longest get to re-enter, etc). End game either somebody soloed or you would have to calculate size in draw or in tie look back at old games. Was kinda cool, made for a different philosophy of game.

Another interesting one i saw was a bit of a meta/team tournament where there were four games with 7 teams (21 players) and each team had a player in each game with the goal for the team to get best possible results across the four games and negotiating being allowed across the different games (we agree to give you this center in this game, if you support our team cause in that game type stuff). Gets complicated because you may eventually have to deal with selling out one of your teammates in one game for sake of overall betterment in another and dealing with the diplomacy of that kind of internal sourness. Requires talented "team leaders".