Cap on team's played games in champions ladder. What do you think?

I think that a cap could improve the ladder experience, 25 games per team should be fine, maybe 30, but not more.
These are the pro I see in this variant:

  1. Clawpomb spam mitigation. In my opinion Clawpomb combination is perfectly its original context, which is tabletop tournaments or leagues, where all teams have the same number of games played and are more or less equally skilled, but face a team with 3 or 4 Clawpomber with your nearly rookie team is a bit unfair and rarely fun. Sometimes and with some teams you can manage it, but more often your only chance is concede or lose 2 hours watching your team going in pieces...this lead to the point n.2
  2. I think the worst thing in champs ladder are those bashy teams with 45/50 games played and a terrible record that are playing only to cripple other teams. Don't want to be misunderstood: I am not saying that everyone that play in champs must play for the playoffs, everybody has his own fun, and if someone's fun is losing 3-0 trying to kill pixels and fouling every turn perfectly fine for me! But at least try to do it with the skills you have gained in 25/30 games. Because the problem is that these killer teams at one point start to farm spp mainly by concessions becoming more and more scary without risks.
  3. Improve level and number of players in the ladder. I personally know some good coaches that just play a couple of games in champions ladder because at the moment if you try to be competitive and qualify for playoffs I think you must play at least 50 games per season: with the level of attrition in the league you probably must restart 2 or 3 times, if you are lucky. Some people simply don't have the time to play so much and also if they are able to qualify playing 20 games then they have little hopes against teams with 40 or more games under their belt, so these guys don't even try to play with a certain constance and prefer to play casually or in their own private leagues.
  4. Bit more balance between bash and agi teams. At the moment seems to me that the ladder is very bashy oriented...while a bash team can have a lot of games under his belt, also counting on concessions, for an agi team is often far more difficult survive to the point of being very competitive. Probably a cap that reduces the attrition in the ladder and the gap between high bash levelled teams and agi ones in the playoffs, could make the last ones more appealing.
    I am not a computer expert, but just as my opinion, if the program can recognize 0 games teams shouldn't be too difficult make it recognize 25/30 games ones. If not, also a simple warning of manual ban after tot games could improve the champs ladder experience...
    What do you think? Thanks and sorry for my English.

A cap reduces games played. That makes matching worse. We tried a cap in the WC and it wasn't particularly great. As it stands the ranking system puts a fairly soft cap at about 40 games.

  1. This is a matching issue, and something I am trying to get Cyanide to deal with by implemented a rookie team protection mechanism, i.e. by reducing the max TV-gap for rookie teams to, e.g., 300TV and increasing it by 20TV per game up to the current 500TV.

  2. There are a total of 7 teams in the current ladder with >=40 games played, and between them they have played 321 games; there are 38 teams with >=30 games played. I think you're overstating the problem. Death is part of BB and some teams play to kill players.

  3. Actually most teams which qualify play about 30 matches, so those players are working from a false perception.

  4. The balance is actually pretty good in CCL, certainly far better than other matchmaking environments. Yes, Chaos and Orcs are played more than other races, but you find that in pretty much all open environments. That said, I don't think your suggestion would change the balance at all: people already have a finite team life of 6 weeks.

@dode74 what was wrong with the WC? Don't understand why a cap should reduce the game's number...when you have done tot games you always can do another run also with the same race. And the record between the same races at 30 games should be a bit more fair and rapresentative about who has done better

  1. This should be ok
  2. We are at 9th November, ladder finish on 29th... Sure, if everyone can play 20 games in the first week also all matchmaking issues are gone. But not everyone can...
    I have said that try to kill players is perfectly ok and a good strategy but I wish that the online game stays the more close possible to tabletop (maybe too romantic vision...) and I think, repeat, personal opinion, that in the original idea of Blood bowl is simply not possible to push the killer strategy to certain extremes...
  3. I am not sure that those data are very representative... Obviously everyone try all the races, but even if I haven't seen the leaderboard for few days I am pretty sure that in the top 100 there aren't more high elves or union elves than chorfs and dwarves...

What you describe is not what happens. Set a cap and people see it as a requirement and we saw really large dropoffs at the end.


The ranking system takes games played into account.

  1. I hope they do something like this.
  2. Take last season, or the season before, then. You still get small numbers of teams with that many games played: 20 in S9, 14 in S8 etc.
  3. Why does who is in the top 100 matter? The competition is within races, not between races: it becomes between races once you get to the playoffs.