There is room for improvement. One issue with the league right now as I see it is there are not enough teams. While the goal for TPG in its inception was for it to be open to players of all skill levels, this experiment has more or less failed in my opinion. The majority of the players on the current line-up of teams are very experienced, highly rated Hawken veterans. In all honesty, we could more or less just get together on one or two ventrilo clients on the weekends and have what we have right now. Teams with members that are not part of this clique have done poorly and/or disbanded to date. This will not encourage larger numbers of pilots to sign up in the future, rather the opposite.
TPG needs more players. The skill level of current teams is a barrier towards that goal. What can we do to encourage players of many skill levels join the competitive scene?
I propose a handicap system to balance out this problem. This is not uncommon in other types of league sports. Pool leagues, for example require higher rated players to score a percentage higher than their lower rated opponents to secure a win. MMR could fulfill the same role for TPG. A simple formula would be to take the average MMR of Team A, subtract it from the average MMR of Team B and use that remainder to assign a handicap to the higher rated team. A simple method would be to assign a “kill” value to MMR (say 20 MMR = 1 kill) So for example:
1. Team A has 6 players on its roster with MMR’s 2100, 2300, 2400, 2000, 2000, 2200 for an average of 2167.
2. Team B has 8 players on its roster with MMR’s 2000, 1900,1700,1800, 1800, 1600, 1700, 1600 for an average of 1763.
3. The difference between the teams in MMR is approx 400 (2167-1763 = 404), meaning that Team A needs to score 20 (400/20 = 20) points higher than Team B to win the match.
Not a perfect system; Team A could put two 1300 rated players on their roster with no intention of them ever playing and sandbag their team average MMR to 1950 meaning they would only have to score 9 points higher against Team B. This problem could be circumvented by a) requiring all players on a roster to play a certain percentage of season matches or by only using the actual players in a match for the calculation. Team A could also sandbag their personal MMR’s through subpar play in pub matches. This problem could be circumvented by taking note of all player MMR’s before the handicap system goes into effect.
Do you think it would encourage more teams to join TPG? Do you have concerns about it’s design? Do you have concerns about its implementation? Let me know.
Edited by Hocisern, June 16 2014 - 08:30 AM.

 

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