Small update: restored 1-standard-deviation adjustment, since having only 50% of ranked players used in aggregate scoring reduces the resolution as far as clan ratings go (now we're at about 84%- anyone at -1 standard deviations or better) and led to a participation cost. Now we have a slight participation bonus instead, which destroys the strategy of only throwing your 1-2 best players at each ladder to boost clan ratings.
Sorry; I don't have much time so I ended up erring on the side of brevity. Basically each ranked player also has "Contribution Points" for each team they're in that are always 50 * (1 + how many standard deviations away you are from the mean).
So say I've got a rating of 1950 in the 1v1 league, where the mean is 2000 and the standard deviation is 25. I'm 2 standard deviations below, so my contribution score is 50 * (1 + -2) = 50 * -1 = -50.
Based on how the normal distribution/bell curve works, 84% of players should have contribution points that are >= 0.
These contribution scores are used to add up points across different leagues. For example, CORP's score of 2006 comes from 2000 + the 6 net contribution points they get from orionaux. Players also have aggregate scores that they get from participating in multiple leagues.
Previously, it used to be 50 * (how many standard deviations away you are from the mean) but that penalized participation- Optimum, for example, fell from 4th to dead last (by a huge margin) since it had more ranked players than anyone else- and statistically, some of them are below average so it hurt us.
There was basically an advantage for clans having fewer players participate that I wanted to neutralize- my options were either not countin contribution points if they were <0 (so additional participants couldn't hurt their clan and people wouldn't be taking a huge risk by joining multiple leagues- but this would mean that there'd be an absolute minimum # of points that at least a few players or clan would be stuck at, making them hard to compare against each other) or to add some sort of flat/simple participation reward or penalty.
I ended up just measuring from the mean-1 standard deviation so everything's just shifted a bit now and clans are no longer penalized for additional participants unless all the additional participants are in the bottom 16% of players. Basically reverting to a system that incentivizes participation rather than discouraging it.
TL;DR: I'm making small tweaks to the scoring to make it work better.
I don't think this is currently possible, but will it be possible at some point to sub players in and out? So if one of the players in a 3v3 team doesn't want to play anymore, but the other two don't want to have to start from scratch, they can replace him with another player? I think that would be interesting.
Currently not an option to swap out players and I don't know whether it'd be a good idea to add it in. I'd have to do some testing to see how it's going to affect scoring and whether it'd be exploitable, especially on the clan rating side.
Because there's not that much diversity when it comes to skill right now- we've only got 44 players in 1v1, and about 15-20 games are created each day. Odds are you'll be playing against a player 20-100 points better than you, just because of how sparse the league is right now.
I'm working on it, though- and you're more than welcome to help.
Outside the automation stuff, the goals for IPL right now are:
- hit up the leaders for all clans without full 1v1 participation and aim for full 1v1 participation
- get more clans to participate
- get clans to participate in 2v2 and 3v3
(those first three should help a lot- basically, we need to spread the word)
Beyond that, I'm building some moderation tools/commands and recruiting a moderation council so we can roll this out more efficiently. Working on a way to report games and unethical opponents/groups + ban/revoke privileges from anyone who games the system (on top of the automated safeguards, ofc; just hard to automatically weed out loss delayers and other people like that). It wouldn't be that big of a priority, but I think IPL's got a shot at being the successor to the Clan League system, and to pull that off it has to be significantly less messy than what we're seeing in Clan League right now.
