I want to organize a fortress league. I want it to be an ongoing affair, with a Fall Season and a Spring Season, and playoffs and championships, and of course champions. I'm looking for server admins who would be willing to run an extra server and folks generous enough to get involved with the league organization itself.
First let's talk about the league organization. We'll organize with Me as Lord Almighty Dictator over the league.
Basically that's just to avoid design by committee, which I hate with a passion more than that which is reserved for luke's shenanigans. So I'm shooting for 4-6 people, including myself, who will be well-versed in the league rules and processes, both of which will be as thin as possible anyway. We'll set a schedule, so each scheduled game will be set in stone, and the entire schedule has to be made before the first game plays, obviously, and with enough lead time for people to mark their calendars. Each team should play once a week, sometimes more, and should get at least one break. I'll probably make the schedule myself and run it by the other organizers for review. After the games start, organizers have to track the games themselves and their results, mediate conflicts between teams, and generally do whatever is needed to keep the games running smoothly and as fun as possible. We'll schedule the playoffs early in the season, possibly even before the season starts, but we obviously can't fill in the slots with team names until the season is played. So in short, we'll know everything we need to know before the season kicks off, and there should be enough organizers kicking around that should one or more of us fall off the face of the earth for a little while, the league will continue.I'd like to have server admins either setup another instance of the server for the league (which will be used for actual games). If not that, then they should come up with a way to keep players off a server during a league game. Dr Joe Tron suggested we setup an alternate network, provide an alternate client for league players, and have our own master server. That solution looks pretty good, we'd need people to volunteer to make packages. I'm willing to go that route, and Joe is willing to host the master server for the league in that case.
Team captains will be responsible for organizing their teams and representing their teams in mediation if need be.
We'll have an awards ceremony after the championship. The exact mechanism for it is yet to be determined. Maybe we'll all meet up in a freeciv server.
(That's a joke, luke!)I want to run a short season in July, with abbreviated playoffs in August as a dress rehearsal. We'll start the first long season in September or October, aiming for playoffs in early January, NFL style. Then the second long season will start in February and run for about 4 months. Summers off, or we do an all-star season then. I'd like the July season to be free for all to join, but I'm interested in requiring a per-team entry fee for the long season. The collection of these fees will pay for whatever support costs are needed for the league. I'm not in a position right now to give in detail what those costs will entail. We'll try to capitalize as much as possible on the league, mainly to pay for itself. I don't think this community is quite large enough to support it as a business, so it'll run as a non-profit (like most local sporting leagues anyway). Teams will determine amongst themselves how to make the entry fee, either by splitting it amongst the players, or maybe one generous individual wants to put it up for the whole team, whatever.
So, this thread is to get people who are willing to volunteer to be organizers and/or server admins that want to participate in the league. Interested team captains are welcome as well, and pretty much anybody else who has something productive to offer, of course. I'm particularly interested in SPOON veterans, especially SPOON and LADLE veterans, because I'm drawing from some spoon experience here.
A lot of players have been wanting to run another spoon but fix the problems the spoon actually had. I see this league as providing those fixes, I think the spoon ran like it should have been league play, and here is what I want to do from there.
So far, people that have volunteered, with level of commitment ranging are:
Me
DrJoeTron
Ghableska (with his own caveats, weird guy)
Your_mom expressed some interest and I think we can shanghai him in
wrtlprnft expressed interest too, but had to run off. I think he'll be interested after reading this post and/or further discussion.
Haven't spoken to any server admins yet (besides me and joe being server admins, of course, and wrtlpwned, who had to leave pretty quickly)
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