An Open Inquiry: Ladder Interest

Hello,

some of you may remember me, others may not. I used to run the CivFanatics Civ 2 ladder. I originally started the ladder because I was a fan of the game and because I wanted to practice my programming skills. For many reasons, I stopped the project after a year. I am thinking about starting it again.

I was very dedicated to the ladder, but because of many problems (cheating being #1) as well as my time commitments, I was unable to continue at the time. Now I have some fresh ideas on how to solve these problems. These ideas are ongoing, always being refined, and open for discussion- I welcome anyone who is interested to send me a private message on this forum.

Just for your information, my goals are to create a functional ladder (such as what we had before) with minimal cheating and human intervention (maintenance). This does not mean that I will ignore the problems of the past- it means that I will try to find a system that will minimize those problems. I believe one of my mistakes before was to release the ladder before completely thinking about the task. This time I would try to get it right the first time (of course adjustments can be made for unforseen problems).

Hopefully, those of you who knew me while I was running the ladder knew me as a person who was very dedicated to it. Being wiser and more knowledgeable now in the various problems associated with running a ladder, I believe I can build one better the second time around- for both you as the player and me as the operator.

This is just an inquiry to gauge interest, if there is no interest then I will not pursue this matter further. Let silence serve as a sign of disinterest- otherwise leave a message here or leave me a private message. Thank you.

Trajan

i would be intrested in the ladder again

My Tribe and I would be interested, still.

I welcome the idea of restarting the ladder, and I have a few suggestions.

1) Please allow players to add description of the game. This was what really interested me in ladders to begin with, when Gameleague was around. This way, players could discuss whether a person won by lucky huts or brilliant strategies.

2) Please implement the Gameleague system of the winner reporting the wins and the loser confirming the loss. This seems to work the best and has withstood the test of time.

In addition, as we discussed today, support for tribes will reinvigorate interest in it.

I agree, a ladder would be welcomed. Perhaps, seperate scoring for diffent settings, within reason. 2x2x ladder, 1x1x ladder and the occasional 2x1x ladder. Any thought on this would be great....

I think it would be great to start up the ladders again. I would fully support it

i the semi dedicated administrative slave for atawas last try at it count me in. one thought no one will like, how bout 2x1x games only, take out the 2x2x horse bull and make the game militarily realistic without the need for a perfect land like in 1x production., just a thought
Jack

Oh yeah i agree with what robbie said about the description of the game and losers confirming the losses this will save us from that horsecrap of a person reporting wins over all the top people in the ladders which happened a few too many times for my liking

also the activity monitor, nobody can stay on top, because they haven't played in 3 months...like gameleague..there were people in league, that never played a game, and stayed at 1000 points, or won 2 or 3, and stayed at #8 OR, cheated a few, and stayed at number 1-4 for months by never playing anybody good. There should be different points amounts awarded for beating different level oppponents as well, this would require having titles, or levels of skill. obviously, you would want more points beating me and robbie in a 3 civs game, than 2 newbies

I think ressurecting ladder play for Civ 2 would be splendid!

Having somebody reorganize a tribes system would be pretty sweet as well.

Tribes kicks regular MP to the curb. And as we all know, MP just beats SP all to death.

BTW, General, Nice sig line ! I have to agree.

I haven't seen this much excitement since somebody stuck a banana down my pants and turned a monkey loose.

Count me in.

Work has begun on the ladder. The single player/multiplayer ladder will be worked on first. It will be similar to the old CivFanatics ladder, but will contain improvements including some features borrowed from GameLeague. This includes the win-confirmation feature and the ability to add game comments.

Tribes has been discussed, but will not be implemented until later. The multiplayer ladder should occupy quite a bit of my time for the time being.

Suggestions and ideas are always welcome.

Trajan

Same as last time. In other words, no Tribes.

let us hope not ... tribe tribe tribes

No, I did not say no tribes. I think the last time I attempted to set up tribes, I was way in over my head because of all that I tried to accomplish. This time, I will take the same approach as I am doing with the multiplayer ladder- keep it simple and robust. To that end, the tribes system will be simpler than last time. Its main goals will be:

1) Set up a system where tribe leaders can administer their tribe
2) Only tribe leaders are allowed to conduct adminstrative actions (i.e. drop members, add members, report victories)
3) Although only tribe leaders are allowed to report victories, all tribe members will be able to add game comments to tribe game reports
4) There will be aggressive enforcement of the inactivity policy. Tribes who do not conclude (finish) a match within the first 30 days will be deleted. Tribes who only have one member (the leader him/herself) will be deleted within 7 days. The tribe leader's email address will be used as the main tribe email address for account creation purposes. Just as with the multiplayer ladder, your email address is kept for all time and is always 'remembered', even if your account is disabled for any reason. This means that you cannot just purposefully do nothing to get your tribe deleted and create a new one with the same email address. A major problem with tribe administration was that many people created tribes, but very few actually played. Therefore I need these mechanisms in order to keep the database manageable and to keep people serious when they create a tribe. This policy is still up in the air. I may end up deciding to make tribe creation manual.

The main difficulties with tribes lies in data management (the elimination of junk such as inactive tribes and those 3 trillion tribes with only one member as mentioned above). Therefore, I would like those of you who are interested in tribes to think about this issue and see if you can come up with a 'mechanism' to minimize it (as I am doing).

These are my ideas regarding tribes. But I would also like to get an idea of how many people are actually interested in tribes. This is not a slight to the people who want tribes, it is merely information for me to gauge interest on tribes. The main tribe hawks I already am familiar with, are there any other people out there who are very interested in tribes?

Trajan

[/QUOTE]

as per Trajan's previous post:- Tribes who do not conclude (finish) a match within the first 30 days will be deleted.

Click to expand...

... did you mean, get a loss reported against them, or actually deleted? You should set up another thread for people who are interested in tribes. that way you will at least have a number of civfanatics who are interested, plus others we will recruit from elsewhere...

Maximus, to answer your question, tribes who stall or otherwise don't complete their matches will probably have a loss reported against them. I guess I was a little harsh to say they should be deleted.

However, after having studied many other ladder sites, I've decided to make the tribe/clan signup process manual. Just about every ladder site has made their clan/tribe signup procedure manual- most likely for the data management issues I mentioned earlier.

But once registered, the tribe will be fully functional without ladder operator intervention (theoretically speaking) as the match reporting system will be fully automated.

Also, I am thinking about modifying the ladder scoring system. The current system has its flaws, most notably that the seventh place person in a 7 player game could lose up to 60% of his/her total points (I know that 7 player games are rare, but you can guess that going down the line even 4 or 5 player games could have some huge point losses for the 4th or 5th place finishers). In addition, it is very complex and requires much more coding on my part to make sure it works right (needs a lot of quality assurance attention). If there is any system out there you can think of that might be better, I'm all ears. I am currently researching this issue and looking for a better scoring system that will fit our needs better.

I will start a tribes thread for discussion of tribe-related issues.

Trajan

After further discussion with some players, single/multiplayer ladder will be limited to 5 civilizations. Coding for 6 and 7 player matches is excessive and since those types of games rarely occur anyway, I have decided to exclude those types of games. People have commented to me that map sizes rarely allow for more than 4 or 5 players while ensuring everybody has a fair start.

Trajan