Not sure if this should e here or on the OP page but here goes...

I ran a casual league last year and it certainly helped build the community up a bit but one of the issues we found was that the system penalises some of the more competitive players. Sure, I get it, a league needs games to be a league but we really wanted to keep the doors as open as possible to all players. The problem came at league end when some of our players were 3 games behind the leaders through no fault of their own. They had regular attendance but just weren't there at the same time as some of the casual guys.

The only fix I can think of is to track attendance and award victories for missed/unplayed games to the regular attendees but this seems to push the boat in the opposite direction and penalise the casual guys a bit more. I'm thinking this may be the fairest way as the casual guys generally don't pay into the prize fund but the competitive guys do.

Anyone got any thoughts on how I could balance this without coming over heavy handed on the casual guys? Don't want to exclude anyone but the current system pushes us towards a race to smash as many games as possible in...

You can use challonge to keep track of the league, and use its scoring system (I think it is ELO)

You can have a rule where it's required you play each person at least once.

My league uses the Avg MoV to track who's winning.

So it doesn't matter how many games you play, although we do have a minimum requirement. But you could play 6 games or 26 games, and it wouldn't matter a lot.

Winning and losing still factor into it, since winning gives you a higher MoV. We've gone through 2 seasons so far and I think it's worked out pretty well.

Or you could simply weight wins/losses so that the competitive people tend to get more points/win but casuals benefit from volume of games.

I use the following

1 point for a loss

3 points for a win

You cannot play the same person over and over. If you play the same person more than 4 times in a 6 week span, any subsequent games don't count. No one has issues with this.

In general, out mixed casual/competitive players tend to score best. People who are generally casual and play a lot of games and earn points that way, but a competitive player who cleans up most of the time can outpace even with 1/3 of the games.

I feel like it works pretty well. I have debated dropping it to 2/1 instead since I prefer having a higher volume of casual players because they tend to invite new players in a bit better in my experience, but you have to value the experience and insight of playing a competitive person so I think the 3/1 is the most fair for both groups.

Are you allowing people to play multiple league games in the same day or week? When my store ran a league, only the first game you played at the store each week counted. We also did 3 points for a win, 1 point for a loss, and no points if you didn't show up that week.

Just make sure not to let people duck other players. Some unsavory types like to pad their wins by not playing good opponents, and that cheats everyone.

Cheers for the replies fellas. Here's what I've done:

Everyone has 1 league game against each opponent. They need to play 1 game per week to keep on schedule but the gaming club is open long enough for 2-3 games per week. They can play as many league games each week as they can fit in but both players must be in agreement the results count towards the league. This gives some room for life getting in the way and still allows plenty of time to get all games completed. If an opponent requests a game twice and is refused (and the game isn't completed by league end); then a full win is awarded to the player who was requesting to play the games. I think it's about as balanced as I could make it and keeps it fair on the people who are showing the highest levels of commitment.

Or you just make it so that only the first game a person plays per week actually counts for their record. The rest is just fun games. That's what we did.