FAF League Month System

The FAF League System

League Site: https://www.faforever.com/competitive/leaderboards/leagues

Ladder League Season 8: November 1st - December 1st

What is it?
I’m sure many of you can recall architect and rowey’s ladder events that were meant to juice up the activity for ladder by introducing a sort of competitive board that rewarded activity. Well, long story short that’s basically the system I’m bringing back here. It will be a month long contest to determine the top, active ladder player for that month.

What’s Different?
I’ve decided to personally take charge of keeping it going so I hope to keep it maintained at a regular interval. I’m unsure what precisely I will do as the intervals but I expect I’ll do something like one month of leagues, one month off, one month of leagues, etc. Before it seemed to be more of a yearly event but I want it to be something that people of all rating levels can look forward to throughout the year.

I’ve also adjusted the point system to be a bit less focused on spamming games and to give people that play well, albeit with less games, a shot at winning even if they don’t sit on FAF for the whole day. Before the point breakdown was 2/0/1 for W/L/D and that tended to mean that two people would often skyrocket ahead of everyone else in their division and others could never really catchup. While it certainly rewarded activity, I think it just didn’t deliver any sort of competitive feeling as you tried to maintain your position because it always just came down to an equation of who had more time to invest into the ladder. I’ve decided to adjust the point breakdown to 2/-1/0 to see if that makes it easier for people behind to catch up to those on the top spots on the leaderboards.

I’ve also updated the league division breakdowns in order to remove an issue that seemed to occur during the last few ladder events. Mainly, people at the top of their league never being able to get a top slot because they could never match against those in the bottom tier of their league. I’ve broken the league up into 500 rated chunks in order to see if this prevents the issue and to see if further work will need to be done to make it fair for all players involved.

I’ve also added rewards for all leagues, but I’ll expand on those rewards down below.

The Leagues and Their Rewards
Supreme Commander League: 1800+
Major League: 1300-1800
Captain League: 800-1300
Lieutenant League: 300-800
Operator League: <300

The top player in each league will be given a custom avatar that will be active unless they lose their title in the next ladder league month as well as a permanent "Ladder Warrior" avatar. In the top two leagues, the winner will also receive a $50 reward for topping their league. Finally, the top scoring player that mains a faction for more than 50% of their games will also win a King avatar for their faction (if 1800+) or a Prince avatar for their faction (if 1300-1800).

Avatars (Going from Operator to Supreme League Champion):
https://imgur.com/a/tNodPat

Seasonal Winners:
Season 3: https://imgur.com/a/ZQarHXt
Season 4: https://imgur.com/a/fxTWseQ
Season 5: https://imgur.com/a/8D83JxM
Season 6: https://imgur.com/a/yX0ewko
Season 7: https://imgur.com/a/Otd2MI7
Season 8: https://imgur.com/a/kWTnzUh

Good luck everyone!

The Seventh Season is Over!

The Champions of Each League:

1800+: P0P0LIAK0V73 with a total score of 72!
1300-1800: GrunttiNoob with a total score of 80!
800-1300: GingerbreadMan with a total score of 128!
300-800: Squale972 with a total score of 185!
<300: Iruma-Kun with a total score of 101!

The Kings of Each Faction:

Aeon: ThomasHiatt with a 85% Aeon pick rate and a score of 71.
Cybran: ezwithmantis with a 100% Cybran pick rate and a score of 28.
UEF: Swkoll with a 100% UEF pick rate and a score of 56.
Seraphim: P0P0LIAK0V73 with a 70% Seraphim pick rate and a score of 72.

The Princes of Each Faction:

Aeon: Furior with a 67% Aeon pick rate and a score of 21.
Cybran: GrunttiNoob with a 93% Cybran pick rate and a score of 80.
UEF: Space4Man with a 100% UEF pick rate and a score of 56.
Seraphim: Commander_Adama with a 55% Seraphim pick rate and a score of 36.

Top 10 Lists: https://imgur.com/a/Otd2MI7

Next Season will start in November.

For fund rewards, the winners of the top 2 brackets must contact me with a Paypal address at some point in the near future.

So since it’s been a year since I began using leagues, I decided to take a look at how ladder activity has changed through time.

Back in September 2019, ladder had 918 unique users. In September 2020, ladder had 1800 unique users.

This sounds great and for the most part it is. We saw a 100% growth in players in both <300 and 300-800 brackets. We also saw a 45% increase in the 800-1300 bracket. Finally, there’s 30% more players in 1300-1800.

However, there was actually a 58% decrease in 1800+ players since then. That sounds quite extreme, but really it means there’s about 9 less players in the 1800+ bracket. To me that value can easily be explained by FAF burnout due to repeated high level tournaments as well as a list of other more personal motivations to play FAF less often. Overall, it seems like ladder is more vibrant.

It's nice to see the increased ladder activity in the most populated ranges of ladder. I think that the decrease in 1.8k+ bracket should be taken with a grain of salt since the sample is so small that just a couple people leaving causes the whole bracket's activity to drop by whopping 50% since when there are few people playing fewer play and so on.
While it's true that after major tournaments there is a decrease of activity on the ladder and 1vs1 ( 1.8k+) but I think that it's also true that the same tourneys massively increase the activity before they take place (not necessarily ladder but for sure custom 1vs1).
The bigger problem is something I talked about with Petric: The old Pros have less time to play the game and there are few new generation players that reach 2k+ level.

its nice to see the Iteratons over the years of the Ladder leauge staring with Arcitekts version that he started with to the ground work that i had made on the faf website with rackover, to how it is now under FTX. and from what ftx say not has broght more people in to playing ladder which was the intention of this from the beginng. I see this as a Big Postive

The Eighth Season is Over!

The Champions of Each League:

1800+: Swkoll with a total score of 80!
1300-1800: demonstreamer666 with a total score of 144!
800-1300: Crazy_Cossack with a total score of 154!
300-800: panzer24 with a total score of 199!
<300: Teruco with a total score of 147!

The Kings of Each Faction:

Aeon: Blast_Chilled with a 100% Aeon pick rate and a score of 2.
Cybran: Noob6 with a 53% Cybran pick rate and a score of 23.
UEF: Swkoll with a 100% UEF pick rate and a score of 80.
Seraphim: Tagada with a 50% Seraphim pick rate and a score of 8.

The Princes of Each Faction:

Aeon: TA4Life with a 65% Aeon pick rate and a score of 95.
Cybran: HOSCHMOSCH with a 50% Cybran pick rate and a score of 120.
UEF: ALEKSIS334 with a 100% UEF pick rate and a score of 74.
Seraphim: ETFreeman with a 100% Seraphim pick rate and a score of 48.

Top 10 Lists: https://imgur.com/a/kWTnzUh

Next Season may start in January; it will depend on the release of the new division system.

For fund rewards, the winners of the top 2 brackets must contact me with a Paypal address at some point in the near future.

This was the first month in which over 2000 unique users played ladder on FAF. The distribution was 23/93/307/598/1388. That's 2409 players!

How are faction kings and princes selected? It looks like Blast Chilled won Aeon king with one game played and won? Tagada won Seraphim king with only 50% Seraphim over ETFreeman with 100%? I do not understand.

Kings must:

• Be in 1800+ bracket
• Play their dominate faction for 50% or more of their games
• Have more points in their bracket than anyone else that fulfills the criteria for said faction

Princes are the same, just in 1300-1800.

Being a king of Sera while playing random, mmm.

Feels like King and Prince of faction should revert to a tournament at some point in the near future, especially if/when 1800 ladder players burn out and disappear after LotS - Aeon avatar getting handed out after winning one game is pretty lol.

No, they will stay with leagues. Well not really because I'm not sure I can attach it to the division system, so they might be up for grabs as tourney avatars once the league system becomes outdated. I wish I had the ability to hand out MORE avatars in the same way as king/prince avatars but it's way too much for me to bother with doing it manually.

Perhaps king/prince of faction should be awarded solely through tournaments rather than based on the ladder league. At the 1800+ level it's just too funky because, if you take out the top 2 players, there's barely any games being played. Swkoll gets an award for always choosing UEF but SilentNoob gets nothing because he mixed up the factions. Those tournaments don't seem like they would be very difficult to set up and there's a built-in prize (avatar) even if FAF can't find a cash prize.

It would make more sense to give out "prince" awards on the ladder league for specific ladder maps rather than for factions (e.g., a win is 2 points and a loss is -1, but only counted map-by-map). That would be a way to give out a bunch of avatars. As long as you can calculate the winners just by ladder league statistics, it shouldn't be too much work. With 15 maps in the pool, that would be 15 total winners. The award would be especially meaningful i think. (It wouldn't mean anything to the 1800+ crew, who can't get enough ladder matches and already have other avatars, but I think it would mean a lot to someone in the 1300+ bracket). And, for the same reasons, giving out 12 similar awards to the 800+ bracket would be meaningful to the people who get them. It would also mean everyone in the top 20 of a ladder league would have a decent chance of picking up one "prince" award so there would be hope for everyone near the top of the league that by winning more matches they could win something. It would reward skill on a specific map, which I think is often overlooked in favor of overall rating/total number of wins.

Too hard to keep track of and even if the tracking was easy, I'm not spending 12 hours of my life every month going through the mod client and the FAF user list to hand out the avatars and take them away from the last league's winners. Someone wants to make some automated program that does it and doesn't require my input? Fine. I wouldn't even give someone mod client access to do it manually because they will get burned out in 2 league seasons and then I'm suddenly the dude that needs to take over doing it.

I'm not interested in separating the king and prince avatars from the league system. If there is 0 interest in 1800+ players getting the king avatar by playing 20 minutes on ladder, what even makes you think they would go through the tribulations and effort of an entire tournament?

I expect there would be interest in a "king of faction tournament" based on a history of such tournaments. If there is no interest in a tournament and the ladder league is a bad way to award people as "kings" of a faction, then maybe we just don't give that award to anyone.

I wouldn't mind crunching the numbers to calculate the winners of 27 "prince" or "baron" of map awards. I would just need something like a printout (in text format, or csv, or excel) of every ladder match with the IDs of the players (I'd rather use ID than name because people can change their name during or after a ladder season), the map name, and whether the system scored it as a win/loss/draw for player 1. I could easily sort it out in excel to calculate the appropriate winners and then report back the IDs of the winners. I could definitely do this once every 60 days.

Creating 15 or 27 avatars and adding them to people, that I have no idea how to do or how much time that would take. But figuring out who the winners are would be easy for me. Also, we could recognize people's success without actually giving anyone an avatar, if that aspect of the whole thing is too much work. I would crunch these numbers for FAF even if it was just to report it to the forum.

You can feel free to do so, I have no problem attaching additional awards to leagues. I just am not interested in being the dude staring at the mod client for the entire day handing out/revoking the avatars.

Though just to reiterate, this is probably the last league anyway since divisions are expected to be released around the same time as TMM which is in the next 2 months anyway.

Who should I ask to get the data about ladder matches in a workable format?

what are you looking for @arma

@nine2 A list of all ladder matches played during the most recent ladder league in a text format or a spreadsheet format like csv

One column for Player 1 player ID (or their current name--but I don't want a situation where a player changed their name during the league so their name is written differently for different matches)

One column for Player 2 player ID

One column for whether it was a win, lose, or draw for Player 1

One column for the name of the map.

If that's not easy to do, you could just do a text dump of info about every single ladder match during the league, and I could make a text parser to collect the info and put it into a spreadsheet myself. From there I could calculate each player's "score" per map (let's say +2 for a win on that map, -1 for a loss, +0 for a draw).

Separately I would either need to figure it out which division each player was in. It shouldn't be hard to figure out for myself (just look it up on the ladder league web site) or if it was handy to you, I could use a list of which playesr belong to which divisions

@arma473 that will be thousends of games

You can get this information from the API the same way the league page itself does https://github.com/FAForever/website/blob/develop/scripts/updateLeagues.js