The Weakest Link '09: General Discussion

[Silfir]

With that selection choosing the Fire league would mean that you get to avoid non-melee characters completely? Anyway, I didn't plan on letting the players choose their leagues - they will be randomly assigned to them, possibly with the exception of the people who want to play on the server (they'll get the server league, but still a random character).

Assigning races and classes to teams - wasn't that the hallmark of the Race Wars? We might have another one of that too, but later

[F50]

One, but he'll die ten thousand times over 8 years trying. Each death is blamed on bad luck or overconfidence.

Sigged (tenchar)

[JellySlayer]

Here's a few possibilities:

Each team gets to choose a class/race combination that is added to a pool, but these combinations are randomly distributed among the teams. Since there is a good chance that your class/race combo will end up on another team, it is advantageous not to make it too easy; but since there is a small chance it could end up with your own, it's less likely that something borderline unplayable will turn out.

Each team assigns the class/race combination to the next team. This will likely maximize difficulty for all parties.

Each team is can pick their own race, but is randomly assigned a class afterward.

[Silfir]

Those are all possibilities, but I still don't quite see why leagues should be able to pick their characters in any way, or those of the other leagues... (It's "leagues", not "teams", don't forget! )

[gut]

Maybe YOUR league won't be a team, but my team
will kick your league's ars like a blink dog.

[Epythic]

Each team assigns the class/race combination to the next team. This will likely maximize difficulty for all parties.

I really like this one.

Maybe YOUR league won't be a team, but my team
will kick your league's ars like a blink dog.

What if you and Silfir are in the same team?

Jokes aside, one more reason to guarantee "stupid" race/class combos.

[vogonpoet]

Well I would go for random everything personally. If we really want competition between leagues, we should set up a different style of team based succession game next time round... for now, for the Weakest Link,

random andorm adomrn nramod etc ect cet...

[Soirana]

I like random but IMO that should mean smaller teams. 8 max, maybe even smaller. Do you really want to get first touch on DE thief on ID12. That is already pretty much deathzone...

I mean with weaker chars playing order starts to matter significantly. The only way imagine to control it is have smaller number of rounds...

[Silfir]

I'd like to keep league numbers below 8 at least as well, possibly smaller, regardless of class! That's why I'm not keen on sticking with the four leagues thing. At the moment we have about 24 players (don't remember exactly), that's six players per league, which I like very much, but there will definitely be additional participators, so more leagues might be in order.

The only trouble being that the smaller the leagues, the more we'll need, and the greater the load for the league managers. Soirana and gut have already volunteered to manage one league each, but if there's, say, six in total (with a six player limit, that assumes 36 players in total, which we might beat this year...) I need to do four. It's certainly doable - Grey did it last year - but it would take quite a lot of time.

Let's assume that league management manpower is not a problem - volunteers might be found, after all. We arrive at another problem: Six leagues means a 12 player League of Mana if we allow for runners-up to qualify as well. 12 players is too damn large. Either only the winners qualify or we need two semi-finals leagues sized six each in which the first three qualify. I'd favor the latter, by the way. The semifinals plus finals won't take much longer than a single 12 players finals league will, and it helps seperate the truly skilled from the merely lucky some more

So yeah, smaller leagues are definitely a plus, but we'll have to balance it out - making them too small won't make for an interesting league either. Six players is feasible and balanced in both directions, I think.

But a definite decision will have to wait until we know more about how many people will show up.

[Epythic]

I like random but IMO that should mean smaller teams. 8 max, maybe even smaller. Do you really want to get first touch on DE thief on ID12. That is already pretty much deathzone...

Of course it's unfair - that's the whole point, isn't it?

I mean, ~I20 is where the fun starts. The upper levels are just boooring. Smaller teams mean shorter rounds and less competing players; I like the "I got where noone else got" style of the Weakest Link ruleset.

I think each team should have at the very least 10 players, maybe even more.