On the fly league, think outside the box.
There's no easy fix, I believe many of the aforementioned problems can be overcome to some degree by allowing teams to be created on the fly. The trick is to maintain the incentive, reward and recognition which differentiates a fun match from a rated team match.
One possibility is to switch to individual ELO ratings (reward). The catch is these ratings can only be garnered on the ducati servers hosting official team matches. The matches would be of a of a fixed time frame (user choice). Kind of a forced camaraderie, yes they are individual ratings, but one has to play a team game on a match server in order to get em.
With individual ratings, its now much easier to arrange competitive matches. It is obvious that four 1700 players versus four 1100 players is not a fair match. Other possibilities include team captains taking turns choosing players from a pool of observers or setting some maximum average rating in advance. The whole thing has more flexibility, even substitutions really shouldn't pose a problem. The rating provides motivation (human nature).
Note, I'm talking about a full fledged rating system such as the Glicko system (now public domain) where each and every kill is considered and strength of the opponent is factored in. Also, a player capturing the flag should be credited with a single kill for each player on the opposing team (team play incentive). Ratings would be calculated on an event by event basis where a single match is an event.
I'm not sure how logistically feasible any of this is? I believe the server is already reporting each players kill ratio to various clients so hopefully its not too much of a stretch to believe that it could also report to a league site maintaining a ratings data base.
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Matches On The Fly
I had a very similar idea for a long time now. The main difference to your suggestion is that I would not use kills, only the outcome of the CTF match itself. So, basically, have no teams at all in the league, only players. Each player has an individual (ELO) rating.
To play a match, a couple of players just meet and divide themselves into a red and a green team. Preferrably in a way that the teams are about even, which should be reflected by the sum/average of the ELO ratings in each team. At the end of the match, the ELO shifts are calculated as usual, where the team ELOs are the average of the player ELOs. The shifts are then distributed over the players. This is very similar to [dmp]'s public CTF ladder system with following main differences: we have matches with fixed duration, not single captures which affect score, and we have registered players only. Substitutions during a match could be handled by calculating the average ELO over time.
This is also somewhat similar to [dmp]'s suggestion of a team based ladder, but with team ELOs based on player ELOs. IMHO, all of these suggestions require a server plugin which does the bookkeeping automatically, to make it feasible.
I think that something like this could really boost activity in the league, because it shouldn't be harder to arrange an 'official' match then than it is now to arrange a 'fun' match. It would potentially also allow for 2vs3 matches and other variants.
What you would lose, is your team identity, so it really would be a different league. However, the current team based CTF approach could be combined with the other approach: You'd have the normal team matches, but also official ad-hoc matches. The latter would only have an influence on individual ELO rating, while the other could possibly affect both (or only team rating).
To play a match, a couple of players just meet and divide themselves into a red and a green team. Preferrably in a way that the teams are about even, which should be reflected by the sum/average of the ELO ratings in each team. At the end of the match, the ELO shifts are calculated as usual, where the team ELOs are the average of the player ELOs. The shifts are then distributed over the players. This is very similar to [dmp]'s public CTF ladder system with following main differences: we have matches with fixed duration, not single captures which affect score, and we have registered players only. Substitutions during a match could be handled by calculating the average ELO over time.
This is also somewhat similar to [dmp]'s suggestion of a team based ladder, but with team ELOs based on player ELOs. IMHO, all of these suggestions require a server plugin which does the bookkeeping automatically, to make it feasible.
I think that something like this could really boost activity in the league, because it shouldn't be harder to arrange an 'official' match then than it is now to arrange a 'fun' match. It would potentially also allow for 2vs3 matches and other variants.
What you would lose, is your team identity, so it really would be a different league. However, the current team based CTF approach could be combined with the other approach: You'd have the normal team matches, but also official ad-hoc matches. The latter would only have an influence on individual ELO rating, while the other could possibly affect both (or only team rating).
A year ago i tried to set up something like this in the fun league. Every now and than it is a bit active and a bit not. Personally I see the fun league the first of the JALL (Jet Another League League), it was created about a year ago with the aim to generate more happenings on the ducati match servers when the league itself was inactive due to various reasons.
mistake