Now that the recent tournament was a success, there's lots of talk about organising more of them, how to improve eletd tournaments in general, and what ruleset is the best. Clearly, the idea of more-or-less regular tournaments is popular in the eletd community. On a seemingly different note, Cisz brainstormed with me about reviving and improving the old challenges; in particular, he felt it would be good if users could keep a display showing which challenges they completed, to show off skill. If this would work right, he said, we could both add easier challenges to appeal to newcomers, and add more difficult ones to distinguish between the real pros. So Cisz and I thought of an elegant, rather ambitious, and Very Cool solution: we could create a ladder system for eletd players! The ladder system we envisioned would work as an alternative to Blizzards official ladder, but adapted to the differences between normal Warcraft and Element TD. The major difference is that our ladder measures best performances, while Blizzards ladder measures avarage performance. Blizzards ladder goes to great length to measure ALL games played by a player, as losing games costs you ladder points. There is no such requirement for Element TD; I only want to count the great performances of a player. I couldn't care less about all those times the player failed miserably, for whatever reason; what matters is that the system registers the one time the player beats vhx. The exception are tournament games; the system should capture the output of such a match whether or not the losing player is willing to cooperate. At its core, the system would be a large database of players, each player having a current ladder score and a list of completed challenges. Additionally, the system could keep details about tournaments a player played, and the like, but that's not really important to the system and can be decided on later. In theory, one could add any way to gain score points to this system, but as of now we thought of three methods. [*]A second way is by competing in tournaments. Any possible type of tournament can be used here, so that resolves most of the 'which tournament is best' discussion.[/*:m:32ngykyq] [*]The last way we thought of is a direct match between two (or more) ladder players. Any match type can be used here. It does not even have to be a fair match; a good player could challenge a medium player to play an extreme-nonextreme match. As long as both players accept the match as fair, it is fair.[/*:m:32ngykyq] To balance the ladder, we could add score decay; if you don't play eletd in a while, your score would decrease. This is optional, however. The major difficulty in creating such a system is tracking player accomplishments, in all its forms. A player finishing the vhx challenge would need to tell this information to the ladder system, in an easy and cheating-resistant way. The best way we could come up with to this date is the following: At the end of the game, the map outputs a code containing encoded data on the accomplishments of the player, as well as a checksum (to avoid cheating) and some information on the user - say, ladder username - to avoid submitting other players' codes. The player would have to submit this code to the ladder system website, which would add this information to the database. The main problem with this scheme is keeping the code short enough. Players aren't going to properly enter a 30-character code, no matter how nice and shiny the ladder is. So the code should not be longer than, say, 8-10 characters (numbers and case-insensitive letters). This can easily be done if the player tells the game what challenge he is attending before starting it. I envision a user interface like this: [Game start] [X]Ladder [ ]Normal [ ]Match [ ]Tournament match [X]Challenge (game message)Please enter challenge code: (chat message)!challenge vhxnd In this example, 'vhxnd' is a challenge code the user found in the forums, meaning (for example) 'win very hard extreme without using the darkness element'. This challenge code could be significantly longer than the code the user has to input on the website, as he can copy/paste it from the forums (or more likely, from the ladder website). Matches and tournament matches could be encoded in a similar way. Using this method, the code the user would have to submit to the website could stay quite short, as the only information it has to contain is 'yes, the player did it'. So what would be required to make such a system? It would contain a ladder website and database; this is a significant amount of work, but certainly feasible. The other part is support from the eletd map itself, so it makes a nice addition to the final release. This part is quite a bit of work too, though. So... what do you guys think, both about the general idea and this implementation? Consider most details above to be draft-level, and tell me what you think.
