Some ideas I was toying with regarding an online ladder.
In its current form the ladder formula is extremely simple, factors are only that a game was played, whether it was a win or a draw, and the ratings of the two players involved.
One particular thing that has always irked me is that even if the top player plays the bottom player, and wins, he will still get a point for it. This means that those at the pointy end of things can farm newbies and kid themselves that they're Patton reincarnated, so, to prevent this - once a players score has increased to a point past his opponents (lets say 50-100 points), he will receive no points for a win.
This encourages people to play those closer to their own skill level if they wish to climb the ladder further.
Score varying depending on what type of win it is. At the moment the win is either 1 or 0, I feel that score should be based more on how much the game was won by, ie, a minor victory nets a lesser score than a major or total, surrender obviously means full points to the winner. This incentivises the loser of the game to fight it out, and try to mitigate the loss to an extent.
Point multipliers for larger games? At a guess, most CM games are in the 1500-4000 point range, longer games take considerably more time and effort to setup and play, so there should be some sort of small reward for putting in that effort. As an example, tiny, small, and medium games stay at the 1.0x score multiplier, large games get 1.25x multiplier, huge games get 1.5x multiplier. Larger custom games can be agreed on by the players.
The input for the ladder would be via a fill-in-the-blanks page which generates the report, this then immediately gets added to the live ladder and is updated in real time, however, periodically the site admin would have to go through and check/confirm the entries to make sure all is above board. After confirmation these entries are then 'cemented' into the ladder. Prior to them being confirmed, if the loser of the game wishes to dispute the result for whatever reason, he may do so. Once the game is confirmed and 'cemented', no challenge may be accepted.
There would be an annual ladder, and an all-time ladder. The annual ladder would have the top 10 players fight it out each year in a finals knock-out series. Winner is crowned ladder champion for the year. (Ending top of the ladder would merit an award too, like minor/major premiers in many sports titles).
Anyway this is just my thoughts on the subject, unless my back problems get to a point where I have to give up truck driving and take up coding I doubt I will be doing any of this myself, but it's food for thought.