Mountain Goats Championship

[Cyril EEC]

Hello players of Mountain Goats !

Player of MG for a while now, I wanted to add my part to the community. As Arena is not perfect, I wanted to create a championship based on divisions and promotion/relegation season after season that I find always very satisfying when you have the opportunity to climb the ladder. I guess we could have a season every 2 month, something like this and do I really need to explain how the promotion/relegation would work.

I have started to think about some things but maybe you have some experience on how it could be done

• 2 player games only for the moment but we could imagine creating another championship with more if wanted

• I imagine 1 private Round Robin tournament per division with invitation

• It is unfortunately impossible to make 2 games per opponent (one where we would start, the other where we would not) so I guess we will let the chance do it

• At the end of the season, First in D1 is Champion, lasts are relegated etc...

• The structure of the championship will evoluate, depending on the number of players

• For the first season, we will organize divisions by ELO. Then newcomers will start at the bottom of the ladder. I suppose "leavers" between seasons would not be replaced or I need to define how the replacement occur ?

Who would be interested ?

PS : If it already exists, tell me ! I'll be more than happy to join !

[beerdless]

Great proposition, though I do have some questions:

1. How would you advertise this championship? I cannot think of anything else besides posting here or pestering your opponents in the chat when you play, so it may be hard to both attract interested players and get a good spread of skill levels.

2. How big would each division be? I imagine they would be quite small at first, but shall this get more popular, a Round Robin style tournament may push a heavy burden onto participants who would now have a stack of games to finish at once.

3. How many players will be promoted and relegated? Having only the top player be promoted is a bit extreme, as the majority of participants would neither be promoted nor relegated, so they may feel there is no point in playing future seasons.

4. At which division would new players join? Say a season has passed already, with said promotions and relegations performed, do they all get put in the bottom division, regardless of their Elo, or would they be stratified amongst all? For the former, the bottom division would need to use a different tournament style due to its large size, and the number of promoted and relegated players would need to change based on this total as well. For the latter, existing participants may feel this is unfair because they have fought for the past 2 months, yet a new player may start off above them even though they had not done any work to earn that position.

5. How would you deal with players leaving the championship? This would mess with the number in each division, which feeds into my previous questions. If I were a player put into the bottom division due to my Elo, it would take me many seasons to even reach the top division, let alone win the championship. I would not feel this is worth it, given the time and energy invested.

This would be a big undertaking, so make sure you are ready to take on that work! You may also want to make a Group and invite players to it, if you have not done so already.

[Cyril EEC]

1 : I'm starting by telling about it on this forum !
2 : I had in mind like 10 persons for example per division max but I'm not comfortable enough with customization of Tournaments. Isn't there a way to make sure everybody's playing against everybody without having 9 games all of a sudden ?
3 : No not just one but not too much also. It has to be challenging also to climb. Of course, the number would depend on the structure (and so on the number of players)
4 : As I said, the first season would be by elo (or is it not more fun if it was at random) and after, newcomers begin at the bottom.
5 : For players leaving, I have the feeling that if we replace them, it will be very hard to choose who's replacing so I guess i would let the place empty if I can say and they would count as relegated persons.

[Grizar]

Hello.

Great idea ! That would need a huge investment in preparing and organizing the divisions, but there are several solutions that would make it possible.

First of all : create a private group dedicated to the championship. Or even one group for each division, so that you could easily manage players for each division (promotion, relegation, leaving, newcomers…).

Then create private tournaments for each division, with restricted access related to the different groups (for example : « Alexia tournaments » run in that way, with only private access, and it works).

Concerning the number of players per division : it depends on the duration of a game and also the duration of each season.
For my Moutain Goats tournaments, I set 5 days per player, so 10 days for a duel. We could imagine reducing that duration to 7 days (so 3,5 days per player), if players are sufficiently dedicated and often connected. In brief : 1 game = 1 week.
If the season lasts 2 months, that gives : 8 players per division => 7 games => 7 weeks. Which let approx. 1 « break » week to prepare the next season.
If the season lasts 3 months, that gives : 12 players per division => 11 games => 11 weeks + the 1 « break » week.

Format of each tournament is the most problematic subject.
The ensure each week = 1 single new game, that would need to choose the swiss system. So you can set « number of games = number of players – 1 » with the option that prevents 2 players from meeting multiple times activated. So that you have a swiss system running like a round-robin, but with games activated one by one.
The main problem is the tiebreak, if several players have the same number of victories. In swiss system, the tiebreak rules are based on the average points of all opponents, then the average level of all opponents.
But if all players encounter in the way described above (swiss running like round-robin), both tiebreak results will be the same for everyone… so there will be impossible to decide between several players with the same number of victories.

The only way to manage these tiebreak situations is to set round-robin tournaments, which take into account the accumulated « goal-average » in all games played. That would be perfect for Mountain Goats.
But for round-robin tournaments on BGA, all games start simultanesously, that won’t be comfortable to play.
It’s a shame that the scheduling of game dates in round-robin tournaments hasn’t been reintroduced on BGA...