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Topic: Arimaa Team League? (Read 9457 times) |
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megajester
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Arimaa Team League?
« on: Oct 18th, 2009, 4:02am » |
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I know we'd all like to see some more PvP action to really get the community going. I think the EU v US match is a great idea, but of course we have many other players who are not from these countries. An Olympiad has also been suggested, but i think this might be a bit discouraging for people from countries with only one or two players. So...
what about an Arimaa Team League?
My hazy idea of the format is as follows: 6 team captains are appointed, and they call their teams whatever they like, something sports-team-ish. Depending on the uptake the teams could be anything from 3 to 10 or more players strong. Each round takes one month. So, in month one Team A would play Team B, Team C would play Team D, Team E would play Team F. The strongest player from Team A plays the strongest from Team B and then the next strongest players play each other and so on. The matched-up players would play their own game (or games, we could say one as silver one as gold) whenever in the month they felt like it. By the end of the month you get the match results, and on to the next month, when Team A moves on to Team C etc etc... So a "season" (if all play all once) would last 6 months. Maybe this could replace Player of the Month in the sense of involving cash prizes.
This would be an event where nobody gets left out, players of all nationalities and strengths are catered for, and everybody gets a piece of the action.
Whaddya all think? (I do apologize if someone else has proposed exactly the same thing and I missed it...)
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Arimabuff
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Re: Arimaa Team League?
« Reply #1 on: Oct 18th, 2009, 6:10am » |
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What's "P v P"?
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tize
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Re: Arimaa Team League?
« Reply #2 on: Oct 18th, 2009, 7:19am » |
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PvP = Player vs Player which is HvH games in Arimaa language.
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omar
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Re: Arimaa Team League?
« Reply #3 on: Oct 18th, 2009, 8:44am » |
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Good idea. It think it's worth trying.
The problem we might encounter is the same one that happened with the Blitz tournament that Tuks initiated. Basically that players forget to play the games unless the games are preset for them in the gameroom with a specific start time. Trying to preset the games means you have to know when they will be played. The two players would have to communicate, agree on a time and let the tournament coordinator know. In the world championship we use a web based time selection tool that lets the players enter their preferred times and then run a scheduler that assigns the game times. The output of the scheduler is then used to preset the scheduled games in the gameroom and that makes sure that the games are played because if a player doesn't show up in time it automatically becomes a forfeit. The time selection tool we use for the world championship is very specific to the one game per week schedule we've defined for that tournament. We would need a more general version of this tool for other tournaments or other situations where games need to be scheduled. Something where you specify the time of the first slot, the size of slots (like 1 hour) and number of slots would be good. But filling out the preferred time for one month might be real pain; it's bad enough for one week. Maybe we need a completely different way of specifying preferred times and agreeing on a particular time. In the mean time I guess what could be done is to tentatively schedule the games to be played on the last day of the month and then when the players agree on an earlier time they can inform the tournament coordinator to change the game time. It's a bit of a pain for the tournament coordinator though.
I won't be able to be the coordinator for this; at least not right now with the events coming up. But I can set you up with an account where you can setup the scheduled games in the gameroom and change their times later.
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| « Last Edit: Oct 18th, 2009, 8:47am by omar » |
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Fritzlein
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Re: Arimaa Team League?
« Reply #4 on: Oct 18th, 2009, 4:30pm » |
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Omar points out a critical problem for organizing events. Experience has shown time and time again that you can't just leave it to the players to find a time for their games, or else the games won't be played. The games must be scheduled, and players who don't show up must be forfeited to keep the tournament moving. But how can one schedule games in a fair way?
A second problem with league play is getting teams of comparable strength. What if, when you announce your league, Adanac and chessandgo and I form a team? Who will form other teams? If anyone does, will the matches be fun and/or interesting?
I suspect there is more promise in an event like U.S. vs E.U., where geography provides a rough division of players, and the participants are motivated by patriotism. The problem you point out, that many players are excluded, could be remedied by making it a three-way tournament, with the rest of the world making the third team. I would be very interested in participating in a US vs. EU vs. ROW match, and I am not sure who would be favored to win. Hopefully a captain would step forward for each region, recruit players from his region, assign players to matches on a weekly basis, etc.
At the moment the only option for scheduling games is the tool that Omar uses to pair the World Championship, so any such tournament could not overlap with the preliminaries or finals of the World Championship. I guess we wouldn't want it overlap anyway, because we don't want to lose participation from players who don't have time for both. However, if we want a team event to occur after the World Championships are over, we should start organizing it now.
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megajester
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Re: Arimaa Team League?
« Reply #5 on: Oct 19th, 2009, 2:32am » |
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I see where you're coming from Fritzlein. Perhaps you're right, after all a US v EU v ROW would work quite well actually. However it's only one match and if we can engage the community for all of the months in between yearly championships, capturing the atmosphere of league sports and gaining a following in the process, I think that'd be well cool.
I have given this a lot of thought, and I think I have found ways to address your concerns. Perhaps the best way would be to explain precisely how I think it could be organized.
1. We carry out a survey to find out how many would be up for participating in the league, and what their average rating is. This will let us know how large our teams will be and help us to set a team rating ceiling (see below). Of course it would also help us see if this is just too early for this sort of thing, and if we would be better off with a US v EU v ROW format.
2. If all goes well with the survey, the top 6 players from those that responded who are willing and able would be invited to name teams and start recruiting players. A special area could be set up in the forum for this. There would be no objection to one or more of these players naming his team, say, Team America and trying to recruit an all-American lineup. So you could maintain somewhat of the EU v US feel, though of course like with football clubs anyone can play for anyone. At the end of the recruitment period, we would randomly distribute the remaining players among the teams who still have empty slots.
We would place a ceiling on the average rating of the players in any team. If the average rating of the players who responded to our initial survey was, say, 1700 we might set the team ceiling at 1900. This would mean that if you, Fritzlein, and chessandgo did come together to form a team you would have to pad the rest of your roster with, say, 1500 players. We would also use this average when randomly assigning the remaining players at the end of the recruitment period.
I hope this will solve the problem of how to create more-or-less equal teams without randomly matching them, which would be pretty boring.
3. At the beginning of each round (whether 2 weeks, 3 weeks, a month, or whatever) we would pair up the players from the matched teams in order of strength. I did think of letting the team captains decide who would play on Table 1, Table 2 and so forth but I'm worried that would make things too complicated. We could use the weekly scheduling system already in place (providing I've understood it correctly) to preassign a game time individually for each game in the match for the last week of the round. Of course this would mean a lot of work for whoever fields requests from the players to change their allotted time, but provided the rounds are not too close together yours truly would be honored 
4. The tournament would either be a round robin or a double round robin. There are online tools which we could use to set up a fixtures list right at the outset. We could have a forum section specifically for the league, where after each round we could post results, commentary, and league standings. The other issue to resolve is whether we would award points for match results (eg. 3 for a win, 1 for a draw etc.) or simply tot up the games won and lost. And of course whether or not there'll be a prize... ($)_($)
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Fritzlein
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Re: Arimaa Team League?
« Reply #6 on: Oct 19th, 2009, 4:45am » |
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I expect that given the current size of the playing pool, three teams might be doable, but six teams is a bit over-ambitious. True, there are lots of new players signing up these days, but past experience is that most new players are shy about playing humans until they have completed the bot ladder.
On the other hand, maybe I am underestimating the interest in HvH games among the new wave of players. I don't want to discourage you from organizing something new; it would be very cool if you could pull it off.
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Adanac
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Re: Arimaa Team League?
« Reply #7 on: Oct 19th, 2009, 6:42am » |
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on Oct 19th, 2009, 4:45am, Fritzlein wrote:I expect that given the current size of the playing pool, three teams might be doable, but six teams is a bit over-ambitious. True, there are lots of new players signing up these days, but past experience is that most new players are shy about playing humans until they have completed the bot ladder.
On the other hand, maybe I am underestimating the interest in HvH games among the new wave of players. I don't want to discourage you from organizing something new; it would be very cool if you could pull it off. |
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I would join if there was a team tournament. Most of the high-ranked EU and ROW players are currently inactive and are very unlikely to compete, whereas all of the top US players are all still active in Arimaa. If we get something like 3, 3 and 6 players for EU, ROW and USA then we could simply split the US team into East & West or North & South or whatever other split creates 3 players for each team. By HvH rating the top 7 players by region are (I included 8 for USA since The_Jeh & mistre are both active and nearly identical in HvH rating) :
EU
chessandgo France 2647
robinson Germany 2182
Belbo Germany 2177
PMertens Germany 2151
arimaa_master Czech Republic 2054
Tuks Germany 2054
BlackKnight Germany 2013
ROW
Adanac Canada 2331
UltraWeak China 2321
blue22 Japan 2242
99of9 Australia 2241
jdb Canada 2112
Simon Canada 1742
onigawara Japan 1669
USA
Fritzlein United States 2486
RonWeasley United States 2240
omar United States 2176
camelback United States 2165
mdk United States 2157
ChrisB United States 2081
mistre United States 2004
The_Jeh United States 2001
I only listed the top players for purposes of seeing how balanced the teams might be. Of course, it would be great to have all of the many new players join the teams as well. There's no better way to improve than to play lots of games against other humans 
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| « Last Edit: Oct 19th, 2009, 6:50am by Adanac » |
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megajester
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Re: Arimaa Team League?
« Reply #8 on: Oct 19th, 2009, 7:28am » |
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I suppose there's only one way to settle this for sure: Have a survey.
Something simple like,
"If there was a team league which ran for several months of the year, where you play one or two games every 3 weeks-ish and your opponents are always more-or-less your level, would you sign up?"
(And perhaps this for bot ladder climbers: "If no, would it make a difference if the games were unrated?")
If say we had 30+ people say yes, we could have 6 x 5-a-side teams like in my proposal. Or whatever else you guys think would work
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Fritzlein
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Re: Arimaa Team League?
« Reply #9 on: Oct 19th, 2009, 9:33am » |
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on Oct 19th, 2009, 7:28am, megajester wrote:I suppose there's only one way to settle this for sure: Have a survey.
[...]
If say we had 30+ people say yes, we could have 6 x 5-a-side teams like in my proposal. Or whatever else you guys think would work |
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As a cautionary tale about surveys, twelve people expressed interest in a blitz tournament earlier this year. The standings show that only 24 of 132 games were played, and only 3 of 90 HvH games were played. The level of interest reported on a survey is likely to be higher than the level of dedication.
That said, a survey would give us a sense of how many teams there might be players for, and whether some sort of geographic division might work out. My personal guess is that hoping for thirty-plus players is wildly optimistic. I'm just hoping we get that many for the World Championship! The Continuous Tournament I ran two years ago probably appeals to the same crowd, and then there were ten to sixteen interested humans, depending on the week. There would have to be a lot of newly-minted interest to get up to thirty who want to play every week in the off season.
on Oct 19th, 2009, 6:42am, Adanac wrote:| Most of the high-ranked EU and ROW players are currently inactive and are very unlikely to compete, whereas all of the top US players are all still active in Arimaa. If we get something like 3, 3 and 6 players for EU, ROW and USA then we could simply split the US team into East & West or North & South or whatever other split creates 3 players for each team. |
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I'm with you in wanting a geographic split, but I'm with megajester in terms of thinking of larger teams. If we think we can get twelve people on board for several weeks of play, let's have two teams of six rather than four teams of three. With only two large teams we could still have a six-game season by letting #1, #2, and #3 play each of #1, #2, #3 on the other team, and then reverse colors. The same could be happening with #4, #5, #6 on each team playing each other and (should we be so lucky) #7, #8, and #9.
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megajester
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Re: Arimaa Team League?
« Reply #10 on: Oct 19th, 2009, 12:50pm » |
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Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm...
I'm gonna be really optimistic here (you have my permission to call me Polyanna) but I think there may be one or two factors that scuppered the blitz tournaments that the league idea might just solve.
Firstly, the blitz tournaments didn't have a scheduler.
Secondly, it was as individuals, not as teams.
These factors together made it sooooooo eeeeeeasy to procrastinate, because it can take forever before you feel like it AND the guy turns up both on the same day, and by that time the initial enthusiasm is gone. Inertia, basically.
With the league idea I hope the combination of a threat of forfeit and a sense of "I mustn't let the team down" might just help things along.
OK 6 teams might be too many, I just thought two or three teams might get bored of each other all year. But why make it all year? Especially if this is a pilot we don't want to bite off more than we can chew. How about four teams? A season would be over in three rounds. If we get a decent uptake + commitment, then we could take it further.
What do you think, could we run a survey from the gameroom?
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qswanger
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Re: Arimaa Team League?
« Reply #11 on: Oct 19th, 2009, 1:03pm » |
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I would definitely consider myself one of the "newly-minted" here as far as interest is concerned. I still don't have very many games under my belt as I currently prefer the human vs. human postal games to anything else. I have about a dozen or so games going right now that I'm enjoying more than the bot ladder (again contradicting Fritzlein's assumptions ... sorry), of which I'm only about 14 bots through. I think I'm learning a lot ... and I'm definitely enjoying playing. Hopefully my rating will start shooting up a little bit more. I imagine having relative newbies on any of the teams would be a bit of a crap-shoot since they usually are so unpredictable and their ratings are not very stable yet.
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| « Last Edit: Oct 19th, 2009, 1:04pm by qswanger » |
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novacat
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Re: Arimaa Team League?
« Reply #12 on: Oct 20th, 2009, 5:46am » |
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I'd be up for it.
On a somewhat related note, my suggestion to help with scheduling is to ease communication in the game room. I find the hardest thing to schedule games is that I don't know of any real direct communication with players. Other than inviting them to play at that moment (which I have used unsuccessfully as an instant chat device), one must hope the person enters the chat room to communicate.
One example is Manuel, who I see in the game room often, but only when I am busy and just passing through. I played one game with him and have been hoping to play a rematch with him for several months now, but don't know a good way to communicate with him. Please tell me if there is a direct chat option or other communication tool I can use.
I just looked through the forums and found the PM option, but am having a hard time finding Manuel's account.
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Fritzlein
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Re: Arimaa Team League?
« Reply #13 on: Oct 20th, 2009, 6:28am » |
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on Oct 19th, 2009, 12:50pm, megajester wrote:| What do you think, could we run a survey from the gameroom? |
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Unfortunately, there is no survey feature in the gameroom. Instead Omar could post an announcement in the gameroom, directing interested people to come to this thread and declare themselves.
on Oct 20th, 2009, 5:46am, novacat wrote:| On a somewhat related note, my suggestion to help with scheduling is to ease communication in the game room. I find the hardest thing to schedule games is that I don't know of any real direct communication with players. Other than inviting them to play at that moment (which I have used unsuccessfully as an instant chat device), one must hope the person enters the chat room to communicate. |
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Yes, the lack of instant messaging in the game room is an awkward limitation. I use the game invitation feature as a substitute way to send a message. I usually append, "I'm in the chat room," because conversations are seldom resolved in a single exchange. That often gets the job done, but is still somewhat unsatisfactory.
An IM feature has been suggested before. I encourage you to re-post the suggestion in the "Site" forum so that it stays on Omar's radar. Realistically, since there is already a workaround, he might pay attention to other problems first, but then again he might stumble across an easy plug-in solution if it is on his mind.
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Ice
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Re: Arimaa Team League?
« Reply #14 on: Oct 20th, 2009, 8:21am » |
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A couple of suggestions / ideas that I think would help.
Have a method for drafting or adding new players that join the community.
I could see this as a great way to provide some support to new players. If members of a team reached out to new players and set them up with a HvH game against someone from a different "team" of a similar level and was there to answer questions afterwards. Having experienced players that were part of a team and giving new players an avenue that might be more natural to ask questions.
Have a way to only commit to a certain number of games at a time. Maybe something similar to the 25 man roster in baseball vs 40 man. i.e. before each match figure out how many games people are willing to play this time around and players on a team can opt out of a match or volunteer for this round.
I know in the past I've tried to join a tournament only to get really busy a couple of months later and not be able to continue. I felt bad that I wasn't able to finish but it just became too much. I'd be much more willing and happy to join a team if each time around I only had to commit to a game / week for the next month or one game next week.
Addition: I forgot to add that I love this idea!
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| « Last Edit: Oct 20th, 2009, 8:22am by Ice » |
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