Yeah, one of the reasons we used ELO to determine who to invite to compete for new blood in the TC Aces league was to avoid favoritism, where we just invite people we know. We don't necessarily have to use ELO. Other methods can be the winner of Vassal tourneys, etc.

@sozin I would be interested in organizing a league below the TC Aces level like you mentioned - as a promo/relegation league if you will. Much like Riot Games' promotion league for LCS and the Challenger series below it.

Here's a idea separate from a league or ELO system...loosely taken from this Nova Squadron podcast: http://novasquadronradio.com/episode-15-the-outryder-cup/

What if the Vassal community had an annual event of team tournament based on your local community (depending on how many people use vassal, it could be city, state, country, surrounding states or countries : ) Just if Paul Heaver, Texx and Morgan wanted to participate they couldn't come together to dominate, haha.

It could be smaller teams of maybe 3 people and there is some sort of qualifying rounds to then go to elimination rounds for seeding (odd number makes it easy to know which side won).

We could do this at a more quiet time of year (Galactic Cup is keeping a lot of people busy).

Just an idea...I don't think I'm the right person to run it (The Outryder Cup was very creative in how lists were determined, etc.) but I think it could be fun break from the individual where the focus is the team!

Here's some simple etiquette stuff that stmack outlined well in his TC post. I'll copy and paste some important points from his post here:

1. This isn’t meant to be a big commitment, you aren’t obligated to accept all challenges or play more games than you’re comfortable in doing but there’s no maximum or minimum to the amount of games you can play (assuming you can find a willing opponent). And don’t worry, after signing up not all of your Vassal games need to be ladder games all of a sudden, you can still experiment and play casual games.

2. When you do find an opponent and you both want to play a ladder game just start a log, have both players state in chat it’s a ladder game. When revealing your lists please make sure both players have a link to saved squad in a squad builder ready and then count down from 3 and link at the same time. Then you can load your squads (please have them saved ahead of time) without any worry of advantage to who loads second and continue from there. Save the logs for maybe a week or so in case anything comes up but assuming people act like they would at their local league there shouldn’t be too many issues.

There we have it! No obligation, and just be clear that you want the match to be an ELO ladder match, and no problems should be had!

Dare I say, the first ELO match since late July got played tonight!

Thanks mrfroggies for the great game, and for helping get this thing going again!

It felt semi-competitive, semi-casual, semi-stressful, and the results got posted to a website that only semi-means anything! Haha.

Some more information on how to report matches and approve matches can be found here:

http://www.challengeboards.net/boards/instructions/2177#approval

Also, it looks like there are 2 different X Wing ranking systems on the Challenge Boards.

Make sure you sign up for an use X Wing Vassal .

Alright, I'm convinced to give it a try. I should have done this a long time ago, but I felt after my placing at Nationals that I probably wasn't good enough. Now I see how ELO is simply an effort by the community to provide the opportunity for competitive X-wing online. Fun! Looking forward to when I have some time for my first match.

Dare I say, the first ELO match since late July got played tonight!

Thanks mrfroggies for the great game, and for helping get this thing going again!

It felt semi-competitive, semi-casual, semi-stressful, and the results got posted to a website that only semi-means anything! Haha.

Some more information on how to report matches and approve matches can be found here:

http://www.challengeboards.net/boards/instructions/2177#approval

Thanks for the great Phil! It was good to shake the rust off. Made a few mistakes but I felt good about my play over all. It was nice to see Crackshot in action, even though it hurt.

Also, it looks like there are 2 different X Wing ranking systems on the Challenge Boards.

Make sure you sign up for an use X Wing Vassal .

Looks like I'm banned from the X-Wing Vassal board. I'm not sure what I did to get banned but I must have been a real jerk

Played my first ELO game against PhantomFO last night! Very close game. After a big opening round by Phantom, I weathered the storm to get the narrow victory at the end.

Got my first game in tonight. Thanks for the match, drteeth! It was really close, and a couple of my mistakes probably should have ended up worse than they did. But my TIE interceptors kept the heat on, and pulled out a win in the end.

And thanks to phild0 for bringing the ELO challenge boards to the attention of the forums once again. This will be fun!

A few more games played! Very nice all!

I think a good way to get more people into the ladder would be some incentive for playing MORE ELO games, not JUST winning them. Any ideas?

I'd think like...play 5-10 ELO games in a month, get entered into a drawing for something X Wing related. Could honestly be a $15 expansion if we could set up a simple $1 donation system or something.

I dare say, that sounds like a good idea to me!

When I was playing ELO games, it was in the period when the phantom pre-March nerf was out in full force. The lists I was playing against were solely designed to win tournaments. There was little variety outside of ps10 corran or whisper decimator lists. While that kept me going for a while, I just prefer seeing more variety when I use my limited online play time.

Maybe this is going to be different with the explosion of options people haven't had time to try out yet, but I expect every other game to sport 2+ TLT turrets at least.

When I was playing ELO games, it was in the period when the phantom pre-March nerf was out in full force. The lists I was playing against were solely designed to win tournaments. There was little variety outside of ps10 corran or whisper decimator lists. While that kept me going for a while, I just prefer seeing more variety when I use my limited online play time.

Maybe this is going to be different with the explosion of options people haven't had time to try out yet, but I expect every other game to sport 2+ TLT turrets at least.

I don't know. I'm using this as a testing ground for some of my semi-proven squads. You know, the ones where you win a bunch of matches but you aren't sure of the caliber of player or how competitive the squad is, so you don't know how well your squad actually holds up. I have a feeling there will be lots of variety out and about now.

Hi guys, figured I should chime in here since well I started it and have been MIA for a while. Just wanted to say thanks to @phild0 for trying to keep this going. I think there's various reasons that it has declined a bit, at least for myself but likely most of these are common among other players.

One is that X-wing on vassal seems more active in the Store Championship/Regionals season, more people are going to events and they want prepare for those events, what better way than playing competitive matches online. Second is that the majority of X-wing players (sorry Aus et al) just finished their summer which being from up North at least makes me much less inclined to stay inside and play X-wing (online or offline) when it's nice out... not to mention other summer obligations like weddings, etc.

Nationals and Worlds are great but the amount of participants is obviously much lower. Speaking for myself I find I usually lose a bit of interest between end of Regionals and when Worlds happens and then start prepping for SCs in January. The point I'm slowly getting to is that the ladder also has a limited lifespan (max time frame is 1 year), so wondering if there's an ideal point to reset the ladder, since it has to happen anyway (unless we switch sites or something). Would we want it to run something like June 1st to May 30th, to kind of culminate in the busy season? or is the current Jan 1st to Dec 31st better? Or should we reset more often (perhaps when waves are released)?

I think the last option is too often for the current volume of games but if it kept people interested I'd be all for it.

Lastly is the lack of incentive holding people back? If we were hypothetically provided prize support by an online retailer would that be a good thing that would drive up participation or would we then have to worry about people gaming the system or even just have it take away from the casual-competitive feel the original goal was?

edit: One thing I wish the site had was the ability to have multiple admins for a board, even though it's pretty set it and forget it, it'd be easier to have a few people help keep it up to date (though maybe I can just make an admin account that can be shared with a few people for next "season").

I'm open to suggestions to all of that and any other ideas people may have.

I'm sort of neutral on ELO; I only use Vassal "by appointment" these days, and usually it's to test or practice a specific squad, so the competitiveness of it is rather lost on me.

I'm chiming in, though, because I think invitation-only/"elite" leagues and tournaments are a missed opportunity for the community and for the game. One of X-wing's major strengths is that it's accessible, and one of the things I'm really proud of on behalf of the player base is that we're typically very welcoming of new players. Running an "elite" set of games works in the opposite direction: it tells someone who's just found X-wing (or in this case, just found Vassal) that there are the Important People, and then there's everyone else.

There's a fine line between exclusive and exclusionary , is what I'm saying.

You hope you don't put the TCA league on the wrong side of that line! Ricky and I work pretty hard on making what happens in that league available to everyone , and Outer Rim Smugglers and PaulD do awesome video replays of the games, and the players do a great job of bringing creative lists, making it an effective crucible for the evolving X-Wing meta. I think the name puts people off ("Aces" is a little to self-aggradizing), I'll start working with my Dread Pirate Lord Kelvan Tiberius on branding :-)

In the past we've talked about creating a whole chain of linked leagues on Vassal, similar to the european football setup, with relegation and promotion rules and everything, as a way of bringing more players into the fold of fun league play ("Vassal League Play"), but the concept kept slipping due to real life obligations / time commitment of organizing a big league.

if the community rallied around this, and organizers stepped up for each league, then I think Ricky and I would be open to doing that project.

I was responding more to Tender Fiddles, who was musing about starting up another invitation-only league. I'm aware of how much TCA does to make the games public and accessible showcases, and it's that kind of effort that makes it work--but it is a lot of effort and dedication, from multiple people, and another new league might not be able to manage the same.

Sozin hit the nail on the head with the league. The name was mostly to do whatever I could to get prize support (of which i have been severely lazy... put that on the to do list)

I just like running leagues (fantasy football, fantasy basketball, local xwing) and I figured my style of doing previews and analysis would be fun. Plus I know a ton of good xwing players and I wanted to see them play. I wasn't even going to be in the league until Sozin and Theorist more or less told me to play.

Paul also hit a point where when we weren't entirely sure who to invite we just look at who's good and invite them. The ELO board just kinda fit that way.

We are up to 10 games played since I made the first post! That's like a 10,000% increase since July. Mathwingers correct my math if I'm wrong.

Very cool!

Three of them are mine! Soon to be four against you!

Chasing Matt-Shadowlord has become my sole reason for existence, **** you Phild0, I'm supposed to be studying, not playtesting and theorycrafting

I have a new squad to test. Going to try and get a game in soon.

ive registered - hope to get games in at some point

Friendly X-Wing Vassal ELO reminder!

Been a week or so since I've gotten in an ELO game! Someone's gotta get in there and knock down those 4-5 top ranked players, and we'll need people playing games to do it! Haha.

Also, I've seen a few new players sign up, which is great. Let's just try to get more games in! It doesn't take much to sign up, doesn't take much extra work to play/report, and you get to show off any wins you get.

My last one was a 3 hr brawl with markcsoul. It was Swarm + Doom Shuttle vs 3 Advanced + Punisher, and was incredibly down to the wire. Mark pulled off some fantastic plays, I made a few myself, and it ended up coming down to a stressed 1 (or 2) hull Howlrunner vs a stressed 1 (or 2) hull Tempest+AccC. Mark's Howl blanked attack and defense in what could easily have went the other way. Good showing, Mark!

I've seen quite a few more games put in recently, very good! MrSunol has climbed his way up to Top 4!

This is a call to the rest of you Vassal players, sign up, get other people to sign up, challenge me or other players to a game with a little more at stake than a casual game! It doesn't take many games to climb to the top. Khyros is 7-0 and in 6th!

I've gotten a good amount of games in. The problem is most have been against players in the top 20, so it's harder to get wins. I'm 4-3 now, and if I lose a couple more I risk being below a lot of people who have only done a game or 2.

Signed up for the ELO rankings, I'll be looking for challengers!

Lots of games have been played the last 2 months! Thanks all for signing up and willingly playing games that count towards your ELO ranking. Looks like this ladder closes up at the end of this year, 12/31/15. Just a couple weeks left to get some rankings up, keep up the good work!