). One of which is, for the lower tiers, to try and group players into similar-ish timezones, but that doesn't take into account whether people are accessing KGS at the same local time anyway. I also know a lot of people seem to like the current system's mixing up in the divisions each month to vary opponents.So, some of the alternative suggestions have been:
1) Make the divisions bigger
Obvious up-side is more people, more chances to play. Downside is people struggle to make time to play the current allotted number of available games anyway, even if people were online, and too many active players mean the activity gets rewarded more heavily than the result. It's been one of the main tenets of the league it seems to reward activity, and I personally like this as well - it encourages people to play regardless of winning chances, and that seems a good thing for a study room league.
It could be possible to make them bigger if the number of versus games are reduced to 2 per person I guess? Seems like a big change to make though, and will make things even worse if the added players are not particularly active. 3 kind of seems to work well.
I personally think the biggest problem comes not in the division size, but the activity of the players. The difficulties seem to arise when 3 or 4 of the players go awol. As this generally seems to be a problem in the lower tiers, maybe the caps can be increased for those only?
So, my suggestion on this one would be stick to 3 games per player/player, 14 per division for alpha and beta, 20 per division for gamma which seems to have a few inactives each month, and up to 30 for delta - not because we expect to have 30 players, but a bunch of signer ups just don't actually play, so the number of active players is always less than it looks, and allowing the cap to go high will hopefully get around the September problem of being forced to drop to 7 players in a division. Allowing this should also not require any complicated coding requirements.
2) Allow players to play other people in the same tier, but in different divisions
Recommended not that long ago by frango, the idea is that Delta I could play someone in Delta III for example, as if they were in their own division. There are a lot of merits to this idea, but a lot of potential obstacles to overcome too. Obviously it completely solves the struggling to find players issue, but massively increases the number of possible games each player can play. It will be hard to stop someone from storming their league with over 100 games played, even if they are all losses!
One suggestion to combat this was to keep the 39 game cap, but this of course allows players to get all 39 games against weaker people, and then not have to play any further games. As such, it could be possible for 2 or 3 players in the same division to all have a perfect 39-0 record. Likely? Not really, but there are gamesmanship possibilities that may be hard to stop from being abused. If the suggestion of slightly increasing the division size of gamma and more substantially increasing delta (see last paragraph of 1) doesn't alleviate the problem, this could be a good potential solution, but of course will be very hard to code as the current system would not support it in any way - restricting matches, allocating versus results, displaying a 3 dimensional matrix to handle divisions properly, etc.
3) Stop moaning, heretic, things are great!
The third option is to leave everything as it is, because it's great already
Thoughts, comments, ideas, suggestions, criticisms, feedback, caustic tirades?
