Warrior General Games

The problem exists with how much stock you put into those games. The ladder game is actually rendered worthless imo. I am going to take my League playoffs far more seriously than one ladder game when it comes down to it. It doesn't build a rivalry playing someone over and over either. It actually makes it more boring. I liked the idea of a ladder system in that it brought more challenges from outside my league. Not to play more games against the teams I already am scheduled against every season.

Originally posted by bhall43
The problem exists with how much stock you put into those games. The ladder game is actually rendered worthless imo. I am going to take my League playoffs far more seriously than one ladder game when it comes down to it. It doesn't build a rivalry playing someone over and over either. It actually makes it more boring. I liked the idea of a ladder system in that it brought more challenges from outside my league. Not to play more games against the teams I already am scheduled against every season.

With the number of teams, I really think this is the mountain/mole hill.

Originally posted by Time Trial
With the number of teams, I really think this is the mountain/mole hill.

Short term yes. Long term not really. You said it yourself. The cream rises to the top.

Originally posted by bhall43
Assuming that the leagues are competitive from top to bottom sure. But we all know that won't be the case after so long. And after awhile the ELO will pit teams in a pretty general stagnant place most likely if they are consistent. It concerns me that ladder matches could end up pitting me against playoff opponents in the midst of playoffs or even just before. There could be cases in which you play 3 ladder matches against the same opponent during end season and playoffs.

A ladder match with your league opponent on the opening days is just the tip of the iceberg. You already play the people in your league 1 to 2 times in a regular season. Playing them more than that is really just kinda silly.

It depends a bit on the size of the ELO change per game. It's much more likely to be an issue now, at the beginning of the season (first 3-4 weeks, maybe) for rookie teams - it's why I didn't even bother to run my old rankings until day 10, for example. After that there's going to be a lot of variation in the records of opponents and such. Long term, until we know how leagues will work moving season to season and getting into the plateau/veteran games, we just have no idea how much of an issue it is. If there's only going to be one "World League" with the top teams in the game in it, then expect to play them in league and in ladder and ultimately in tournament games too, there's just no getting around it. If there's going to be 4-8 top leagues, then expect the best teams from the leagues to play each other during ladder games, including sometimes within your own league. If there's 15 top leagues, then you'll almost never play someone from your own league during ladder games unless you're both just crushing everyone else in the game.

I think the ladder is intended to replace the WL.

My suggestion with the ladder is that the closer you are to the end of the season, the fewer positions between the ladders you should be playing.

For instance, you now can play any team within ten ranks of your team.

As you got near the end of each season, you should only play people within 5 ranks.

With two ladder games left you should play teams within 3 ranks.

The final ladder game should put 1 v 2, 3 v 4, etc.

Originally posted by Time Trial
I think the ladder is intended to replace the WL.

My suggestion with the ladder is that the closer you are to the end of the season, the fewer positions between the ladders you should be playing.

For instance, you now can play any team within ten ranks of your team.

As you got near the end of each season, you should only play people within 5 ranks.

With two ladder games left you should play teams within 3 ranks.

The final ladder game should put 1 v 2, 3 v 4, etc.



We've been told basically nothing about how the game will look when there are teams of multiple age groups running around.
One ladder, or multiple ladders? I'm guessing one ladder, but that's really dumb unless the ladder games are mixed ages. And mixed age ladder games are pretty dumb too. So it really should be multiple ladders - one for each experience tier, or whatever they're called.
How do the leagues work from season to season, especially once teams sell off and so forth? I can't really comment on the problem of playing ladder games in-league if we don't know how the league compositions work from season to season.
When you say we "can" play any team within ten ranks of your team - what's the reason behind that? Why isn't it just 1v2 3v4 every week? What rules are in place to determine ladder games aside from your rank, or is it just random draw?

At first glance, I'd want ladder to be 1v2 3v4 every week, regardless of league. Teams with tied rank should be random drawn. If you want to put in a mechanism to "prefer" non-league matchups when doing random draw of the ties, that's probably a good idea. There should be a unique ladder for each age tier and ladder matches should be within age tiers. Someone wants to explain some reasoning behind doing it differently, I'd be open to listen, but that seems like the way it should be.

I agree.

I think the reason behind playing "within 10 ranks" of your ladder position was so that you weren't playing the same teams over and over. (I think, not their reasons)

There is only one ladder, but the worst teams at the bottom of the age group will actually have a tough team beating the best teams at the top of the lower age group. It won't be as good in the first year, but I was beating level 25 Vet teams with my level 13 to 20 team (I aged, they did not). As I got closer to level 20, I went 10-0 against vet teams.

I think you will get an award for being top of your age class in every season. I think they were also talking about awards for most improved as well, but that could have been a GLB dream I had.

That's just terrible. Basically the only way for the older teams to get higher avg elo ratings over the younger teams is going to be through beating the younger teams, repeatedly and en masse. This is going to end up meaning that large numbers of ladder games are garbage games, and thus no one's going to care about them or think about them as "real games" for the career of the dot.

Originally posted by NiborRis
That's just terrible. Basically the only way for the older teams to get higher avg elo ratings over the younger teams is going to be through beating the younger teams, repeatedly and en masse. This is going to end up meaning that large numbers of ladder games are garbage games, and thus no one's going to care about them or think about them as "real games" for the career of the dot.

I think you will be surprised.

Are you saying that a team today will be interestingly competitive with a team at this point next season? Oh God I hope not.

Think about this - a rookie team's first ladder game will either be against another rookie team with an identical record - like we have this season - or with a sophomore team that was trying hard enough to go about .500, which would keep its ELO rating at about the standing level. There are going to be plenty of teams that will be quite reasonable but only go .500 their first season, and I know as a rookie next year I would not be excited about that matchup. Maybe for teams that are restarting because they want to fire up superstars, but just flat out new players without superstars (there will be a lot of those teams)? This can't be good. And the rookie vs 2nd year competition isn't going to get better as the season goes on like it did with you vs plateau teams, and I'm guessing your plateau team competition was not made of the best teams - in the test server there almost certainly was a huge gap between the top and the bottom of the leagues without much middle class. Here we should find a thick middle class.

I really think it would work out just fine to just force teams into pre-plateau ladders and a end-game plateau ladder (and then I suppose a Legends ladder, right?).

If the players aren't going to get appreciably better by next season then maybe I need to just quit, because I'm not sure I can take two whole seasons of games of this "quality". Ugh.

As it is, I'm predicting that by the time we have a full tier of leagues - rookie to plateau - a rookie team's ladder games are probably going to be at least 30% unwatchable, non-competitive affairs whose only purpose is to suck rating points to the older teams (which is basically how ELO ratings work), and could be as high as 70%.

Now, maybe if I had some idea of how leagues will work going forward, something would be different, but that's how ELO will work.

Originally posted by NiborRis
Are you saying that a team today will be interestingly competitive with a team at this point next season? Oh God I hope not.

Think about this - a rookie team's first ladder game will either be against another rookie team with an identical record - like we have this season - or with a sophomore team that was trying hard enough to go about .500, which would keep its ELO rating at about the standing level. There are going to be plenty of teams that will be quite reasonable but only go .500 their first season, and I know as a rookie next year I would not be excited about that matchup. Maybe for teams that are restarting because they want to fire up superstars, but just flat out new players without superstars (there will be a lot of those teams)? This can't be good. And the rookie vs 2nd year competition isn't going to get better as the season goes on like it did with you vs plateau teams, and I'm guessing your plateau team competition was not made of the best teams - in the test server there almost certainly was a huge gap between the top and the bottom of the leagues without much middle class. Here we should find a thick middle class.

I really think it would work out just fine to just force teams into pre-plateau ladders and a end-game plateau ladder (and then I suppose a Legends ladder, right?).

If the players aren't going to get appreciably better by next season then maybe I need to just quit, because I'm not sure I can take two whole seasons of games of this "quality". Ugh.

As it is, I'm predicting that by the time we have a full tier of leagues - rookie to plateau - a rookie team's ladder games are probably going to be at least 30% unwatchable, non-competitive affairs whose only purpose is to suck rating points to the older teams (which is basically how ELO ratings work), and could be as high as 70%.

Now, maybe if I had some idea of how leagues will work going forward, something would be different, but that's how ELO will work.

Teams will only play teams in their own age group to start because their ELO will all be low. Eventually, the #1 team in the lower age group will have a 50% chance of playing the lowest ten teams in the above age range and a 50% chance of playing the next ten teams in his own age range.

The person in the #2 spot for that age range will play the top team and the bottom 9 teams OR the next ten teams in his own age range.

The lower you are in the top ten, the less chance you will have of playing a team from the higher age range. AND they will be the worst teams in the age above.

Honestly, let's see how it plays out. Again, tightening up the ladder to 5 spots instead of ten would mean very few cross age range games, and most would be competitive.


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On another subject, so now instead of updating the W/L/T records on the ladder page, they removed them. Would rather see the ELO rating than the W/L/T record, but at least let us see something! We are going to be getting to the point where someone at the top will be undefeated, would be nice to know team records without having to click on each team to figure out where the cut-off is.

Originally posted by Time Trial
Teams will only play teams in their own age group to start because their ELO will all be low. Eventually, the #1 team in the lower age group will have a 50% chance of playing the lowest ten teams in the above age range and a 50% chance of playing the next ten teams in his own age range.

Unless they are going to just give every team a ratings boost equal to the starting ELO rating when they promote to the next age bracket, no, that's not what will happen. A team that goes .500 will be "about" the exact same ELO as when they started (it will be slightly off for "strength of schedule", sort of), which means they will have the same ELO rating as a new team next season.

There's so much we DON'T know about how the system works that we don't have a lot of choice but to see it play out. But honestly if they'd tell us the details there's a lot of heartache we can prevent up front, which I'd like to do since ladder games are supposed to be half the "important" games in a player's career.

...to be honest, adding an "age promotion" amount to every team's ELO rating at the start of each season isn't a terrible idea. For 2nd year, the worst 2nd year teams will still be rated above the rookies to start, but if a 2nd year team is bad enough and the 1st year team is winning enough, they might eventually start playing. And that's probably a reasonable overlap; it's when the .500 rookies are playing the .500 2nd year teams that it's going to be ugly. I'd probably want to spend some time thinking about it, and K-values compared to your starting ELO rating/"age promotion" boost would be important to get right.

To the original suggestion, I have to say it was highly entertaining to see teams that tied 0-0 in league play get a rematch in the ladder.

Originally posted by NiborRis
Unless they are going to just give every team a ratings boost equal to the starting ELO rating when they promote to the next age bracket, no, that's not what will happen. A team that goes .500 will be "about" the exact same ELO as when they started (it will be slightly off for "strength of schedule", sort of), which means they will have the same ELO rating as a new team next season.

There's so much we DON'T know about how the system works that we don't have a lot of choice but to see it play out. But honestly if they'd tell us the details there's a lot of heartache we can prevent up front, which I'd like to do since ladder games are supposed to be half the "important" games in a player's career.

...to be honest, adding an "age promotion" amount to every team's ELO rating at the start of each season isn't a terrible idea. For 2nd year, the worst 2nd year teams will still be rated above the rookies to start, but if a 2nd year team is bad enough and the 1st year team is winning enough, they might eventually start playing. And that's probably a reasonable overlap; it's when the .500 rookies are playing the .500 2nd year teams that it's going to be ugly. I'd probably want to spend some time thinking about it, and K-values compared to your starting ELO rating/"age promotion" boost would be important to get right.


They set up the ELOs with an age system in the test server, but that might have just been as a result of not enough games and because the vet teams started as vet teams instead of playing their way through.

Just so long as it isn't so much in the later years. Like I said, I was beating the worst ELO vet teams even when I was 5-11 levels under them.

Huh.

http://glb2.warriorgeneral.com/game/compare_teams/29/27

Teams played in league week 1, tied.
Teams played in ladder week 1, 10-0.
They're now tied at the top of the division, 2-0-1, and 3-1-1 in overall record. One is ranked 43rd, one is ranked 47th.
So now they're playing again ladder week 3.
And they still have a second league game left.

I bet they're getting sick of each other already