The FGM Ladder - Countdown to the End of 2015

I second Meat Grinder's suggestions for ladder improvements. Definitlely I agree that the current system favors too much those who play often. For me actually such system is a little bit off putting because I have a pain to start a new game knowing that it never will be possible for me to chase the top as I can not afford to play that many games.
We had once a very nice formula for calculating ladder points in our ancient polish CM1 club. Unfortunately the site is gone and I can not recover the formula, however it was said it came from cards games. Indeed there were scaled points for winning and negative points for loosing. But on top of that there was one more factor which IMO was crucial. There were bonuses for the low ranked players for winning the top ranked ones, and penalties for the top players for losing against the newbies. In fact if a ladder top player achieved a small win only against a newbie he could still get negative points!! Thus a psychological factor is introduced: Should I rather play a low ranked player to assure a theoreticaly easy win but risk a small chance of losing and suffering point penalties? And consequently for a really strong player it took only a few battles to get to the top but he was always in danger there as he could be challenged by new players. And this simple rule created a lot of emotions within the ladder. I still remember hot threads about the game where the leader had been beaten by a guy from rank 40...

What do you guys think?
 
Cześć Fuchs

A couple of things about higher level player losing more points to lower lever is the assumption that the level you are at is true and accurate. In chess you must play many many games before your standings show your true level. So the only problem I see with that is top level players only play against top level players.

Did that situation happen on your Polish site?
 
Interesting. Around a year ago I developed an ELO system that solved the old problem that only balanced battles were good ladder battles. In fact it allows to play even the most extremely unblanaced battles, without punishing the player of the weaker side. I offered it exclusively (for free ofcourse) to FGM, everything finished with all formulas in an Excel sheet. No interest. :D
I am very interested to see the new system.
If I read "average" then I am a bit sceptical, because averaging is smoothing and I don't think it can be a good solution to the underlying problem, which suffers not from too steep transient signals, but to get the (im)balance as weighting factor correctly into the equation.
 
Floki said:
One thing I like about The Blitz ladder is the record keeping of it, what scenarios you played, record against players that kind of thing. Is that something on the table for us or is that too hard to implement?
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I too like the idea of recording the name of the scenario played. Very valuable data can be collected to give players/scenario designers a good idea of how "balanced' a scenario really is. This can open up the possibility of making adjustments to players scores based on what scenario they played. Personally, I find comparing the scores from the H2H scenarios I have played with other matches of the same scenario much more interesting/revealing than just looking at what the scenario score was of my own match.

Here is my proposed revamped Ladder Results Form that I showed Bootie and Ithikial earlier in the year:

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Anyone think this is "too long for player to fill out"?

The idea is that all the fields (except the Battle Notes, which are optional), are drop down menus, no typing.
 
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Basically the same form with an additional field or two? Looks good to me
 
Um looking roughly to be the same info that is asked for now, just in a different way. Also what's in the green box, that info is required for all battles, not just QB's.
 
Ithikial said:
Also what's in the green box, that info is required for all battles, not just QB's.
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I would say that for anything other than QBs, that information should be redundant and not be something players should be required to fill in. If there is a concern that players need to fill in too much, then designing these three fields out of non-QB battle reports makes sense.

Why?

Because by stating the name of the scenario they are playing, that information (size, date, length) is already known. I have suggested to you before that compiling and keeping a list of all the scenarios being played/available to play and their associated size/date/length etc is really not that difficult to collect and maintain. I would be happy to do it. I would imagine that there would be on average about 3-4 new scenarios being created/released each week across all CMx2 platforms (easy to check) and are typically announced at well known locations. Some fraction of these will ever get played at the FGM ladder. Most CM matches take in the order of a month to finish so it's not like there is an immediate rush/issue of having to constantly keeping the list updated daily. The list of scenarios could be updated just monthly, from a number of sources, including even just the players advising of the new scenario they are playing.

However at least having a list of scenario names would be required for the dropdown list I have suggested to work of course.
 
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Bullman said:
However at least having a list of scenario names would be required for the dropdown list I have suggested to work of course.
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And that is a hell of a lot of work across what is soon to be 7 base games and a whole lot of modules. You have the scenarios that come from BF's team with each release, battlepacks (such as the one that's about to be released for CMBN), and then the community. Collating all that info is a time sink for very little gain when you are talking just over 100 games registered with the ladder each year.

Got to talk to Bootie in the new year about the site displaying the info we already have already in the background displayed better on the site and be somewhat interactive. My ideal is for members to be able to view a webpage with an built in Excel webpart that includes a membership drop down list about individual players showing there ladder history. From this you tell if a player enjoys playing scenarios more than QB's, what games they own and relative skill based on recorded wins and losses. Should help some when trying to find an opponent.
 
Ithikial said:
And that is a hell of a lot of work across what is soon to be 7 base games and a whole lot of modules. You have the scenarios that come from BF's team with each release, battlepacks (such as the one that's about to be released for CMBN), and then the community. Collating all that info is a time sink for very little gain when you are talking just over 100 games registered with the ladder each year.
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Yeah I'm going to have to go ahead and disagree with you there.

So you are saying generating at least a tabulated list of all scenarios across all platforms is a hell of a lot of work? Bah to that!

Well depends on how you want to go and do that of course. If you are thinking of tiresome bit by bit manual entry in to a spreadsheet, then yeah. But why would you think that?

Are you even considering that it is possible to instantly generate a tabulated data file listing of even 100s/1000s of scenarios that exist in a scenario folder that includes all their inherit data (actually there are at least 18 bits of information that will be tabulated)?

I have uploaded one that I created of my CMBN scenario folder for peeps to peruse.

I really do not think we are on the same page when it comes to these things.
 

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Oh interesting there does seem to be a desire for an ELO system. That does not come through in the 2016 ladder suggestion thread. I'm still new here but it sounds like you cannot see a record of your games on the web site. Is that correct? That would be nice to add - it would be good to go to anyone's profile and see who they played against and what the out come was.
 
I like what A Canadian Cat has to say, ( Plus being a fellow Canadian myself ) we are always correct and always " Sorry " if we make a mistake.;)
 
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