Make ladders more dynamic

Trevor,

This is a too simplistic view of the problem. Apparently it helps, but creates other problems.
For example, newcomers to the ladder that want to climb on the ranking, they need to be challenged before they can issue a new challenge. Due to the fact that on the lower part of the ranking normally you find less active players, the newcomers will not be challenged and they will be stuck.

The same applies to an active player in the middle or top of the ranking, he will be stopped until the time he is challenged.

The other suggestions I wrote are more effective.

Anyway, as a customer, it is not acceptable that the site is changed, implying changes to the rules of our ladders, without prior warning.

Yes, we analyzed the wildcard option, but it is usable by everyone, during the whole tournament, changing the mechanics of the tournament. We cannot introduce wildcards in the middle of the tournament. Wildcards would help if we could assign X wildcards to a newcomer.

Hi Carlos

I agree with you. I meant my post as a criticism but I wrote in a hurry and I wasn't clear enough. It is not acceptable to change the rules in the middle of the tournament.

In one of the editions of our ladder tournament we decided to increase the number of maximum challenges, This change turned out to be a huge error because it was difficult for players manage such a higher number of pending challenges that lead to a much more confusing situation.

In conclusion, an increase in the number of maximum challenges doesn't necessarily lead to more games played.

Hi Paulo,
Yes, that is what I meant. I think that we achieved, in our tournaments, to find a good balance between the maximum number of challenges and the total time to play (time to accept the challenge + time to play). If you increase the number of challenges, you also need to increase the time to play, because the players need to plan their tennis games with the professional and family life. But you cannot increase it to much, because then you get confusion - you might have a game happening a lot of time after the challenge.
This is why I find this change introduced by Trevor too simplistic.
We have discussed this subject between ourselves and reached the conclusion that our initial suggestions are better:
1. Loser has an "idle time" after a game
The idea is to have some time during which the loser remains "idle" for X days, after finishing a game. The goal is that this player is available for being challenged during these X days, thus allowing other players to challenge him. The winner does not have this "idle time", as a benefit for winning the game. This solution will allow more chances for lower ranking players to find challenge opportunities.
2. Not able to challenge too many times
In this case, the idea is simple. If a player challenges more than Y times, he has to wait for a period of Z days to be able to challenge again. For example, a player that has played 3 games, him being always the challenger, he has to wait 5 days before being allowed to perform a new challenge. Of course, during this period of 5 days, it is likely that he will be challenged by a lower ranking player.

If you split between Ingoing and Outgoing challanges, you can always set to 2 the outgoing challanges and set to 1 the ingoing challanges. This means each player has the control to challange upon its availability to a max of 2 matches but needs always to be available to receive at least 1 challange to defend its ranking position - which is the topic which is raising more discussion on our ladder tournment this year.
In this case it's pretty much what's implemented today but forcing each player to be opened to play with a lower ranking player.
(of course there is always the risk that a player to try to move the ingoing challange to as late as possible by accepting the challange too late or to try to schedule the game as late as possible...but this always depends on the attitude and fair play of each one of us).

Luis,
Your view is correct, but if we set outgoing = 2 and incoming = 1, it results on a total of 3 challenges that most of our players cannot cope on the defined times (3 days to accept; 12 days to play). It gets worse. Otherwise, we will not increase the times, because then you have an awkward behavior, in which you might be playing more than 2 weeks after the challenge.
I still insist that our 2 suggestions are far better.

Hi Trevor

This issue has not been corrected yet.

Our ladder does not use the leap frog system and the previous challenge system functioned quite well and was not affected by the problems that Carlos mentioned.

The ladder administrators should be able to chose between the classic maximum pending challenge system and this new one!

Thanks

Paulo Luz