The Nexuiz ladder(s) are dead. And has been like that for years now :(
How can we make it active again? New rules? New point system? What?

Discuss :P

New website*, new mappool, medals and a ranking system (e.g. "10 wins in a row" medal etc.), skill-based leagues (one for pros, one for amateurs), maybe prizes for special events if you can find sponsors, small league-related news on the front page (*take a look at http://www.esl.eu), users should be able to choose their location at the front page (North America, EU, AU), maybe integrate http://www.nexuizclans.com for the NA part, of course you need admins for each location, ...

The ladder site will look different. Z will redesign it. And we can add ladders for NA.
Medals sounds interesting :P

I heard www.nexuizclans.com will close down (according to Doku and Z), so we don't need to integrate.

straight forward score system
centralized integrated score keeping / auth server/s
ladder reset every X months
new/inter/pro class ladders
non limited map pool. if both sides agree on a map, why the hall not allow it?

tZork wrote:ladder reset every X months

I can 'save' old results if needed.
Just give me a job. i don't care i can promote it too. whatever

Ixion. What made you leaving the ladder? And all the others? What made you leave the ladder? Or better, what made you stop playing ladder matches? Was it the point that it was regardless if you play or not, because you already had your points? Well, for some it may have been the reason to not go on playing.

Encourage the players to be active in giving them points for activity, take them points for being inactive. Like I claimed years ago already.

I think another reason for the fall of the ladders (amongst others) was Nexuiz itsself with more and more strange issues with every update, concerning lag / antilag. At a time many people said okay, I can't play properly, my aim doesn't work anymore. Hey, letz wait for the next update and hope things are getting better.

They just haven't in my point of view, and other players' too.

any PHP/MySQL devs want to help me finish the nexuiz statistics system and start building a ladder on top of it?

Urmel wrote:I think another reason for the fall of the ladders (amongst others) was Nexuiz itsself with more and more strange issues with every update, concerning lag / antilag. At a time many people said okay, I can't play properly, my aim doesn't work anymore. Hey, letz wait for the next update and hope things are getting better.

I still believe people just CLAIM that. And once one person claims that randomly, others start to believe it and say "so THAT is why my aim sucks so much"... but fact is, it always did, they just didn't notice before.

The real problem of antilag is the player model animations being so wrong that sometimes half the player model is outside the hitbox, and the old antilag method somewhat mitigated that problem by letting you hit the bbox OR the model which is outside the bbox. The player model bboxes are however FINALLY being worked on. I recommend ladder server admins to not force fbskins, but the "Shock trooper" player model, as it's the only one which is in all animations correctly positioned.

Another thing why the ladder is inactive now is that old players at some point simply get enough of the game. There is only so much you can do in there. Once you know it all, you know it all. Ladder players are typically very conservative about choice of maps, so they don't even get to learn new tactics on new maps they haven't played on for years already. And new players simply aren't that interested about the ladder any more - as there is now "competition among the competitions". We have ladder, we have various tournaments. As a new player, what are you supposed to join? ALL? Never gonna happen. Due to this, the ladder is much less exposed now.

It's basically a clone of the issue we have with servers: too many servers, and too many competitions, for the current player count. Since May 2008, the player count has been constant at an average of 80, but the number of servers and competitions increased a lot. The ladder is no longer THE competition of Nexuiz. And what point is a ladder if only few people participate, as the others are busy with other competitions? In such a "split world", tourneys work much better as they work for "any size".

For the current server count, ladder count, tourney count, we'd need like 300 average active players, and not just 80.

tzork wrote:ladder reset every X months

Yes, that's one of my ideas too. The results needs to be saved somehow though.
I think the ladder became inactive because you knew who would win before you played. And most players lost motivation by the amount of points the top players had.

So after each reset we would see a surge in matches (every one wanna be #1!!), and in a few months you'll see the best & active player(s) at #1. Ladder dies. Ladder reset. Activity. Repeat.

Urmel wrote:Ixion. What made you leaving the ladder?

I lost my motivation. I think I wanted a ladder reset, but I didn't know that at that time.
I played less and lost my skills. So I couldn't win against the players around my points.

Urmel wrote:Ixion. What made you leaving the ladder? And all the others? What made you leave the ladder? Or better, what made you stop playing ladder matches? Was it the point that it was regardless if you play or not, because you already had your points? Well, for some it may have been the reason to not go on playing.

Encourage the players to be active in giving them points for activity, take them points for being inactive. Like I claimed years ago already.

I think another reason for the fall of the ladders (amongst others) was Nexuiz itsself with more and more strange issues with every update, concerning lag / antilag. At a time many people said okay, I can't play properly, my aim doesn't work anymore. Hey, letz wait for the next update and hope things are getting better.

They just haven't in my point of view, and other players' too.

I stopped playing because back in the day people would refuse to play me on the ladder, and that's not a joke.

These days though there is enough players who I could play against

Hmyeah. This thread however is about why we have enough players to play against you but still nobody does. Maybe the sign up system doesn't work anymore

Ah well they didn't want to lose there points..which has already been mentioned here

i am admin of 2 ladders, if anyone is willing to help me out on the creation of a global and complete ranking/skill system and classifie the players mail me at:
nexuiz.italia.staff@gmail.com

or irc #nexuizitalia

or again www.nexuiz.it

k0jak wrote:Ah well they didn't want to lose there points..which has already been mentioned here

Ah about losing points in the ladder.. Here's maybe an idea on how to do the scoring.. Don't just throw away old results after X months.. That's non-continous Rather use an exponential decay on each players score.. Like once a day, or once an hour, do the following update step:

new_score = old_score - gamma * old_score

Where gamma is a factor between 0 and 1. I would suggest something close to 0, e.g. 0.01 (That depends on the rate of decay wanted). But how to get the score off zero in the first place? Well, update the score from this rule after each game:

Winning Player:

new_score = old_score + 1

Losing Player:

No change

So, if you don't play your score rots, if you play and lose, your score rots.. If you play and win, your score goes up.. So to stay on top you have to constantly play matches and win them..

I guess there could be variations of this scheme, but how's this for a start?