Xbox LIVE Addicts: Friendly Fire's Blog - Xbox LIVE Addicts

After last weeks dive in the wonderment that is league spreadsheets, onto the other side of being a league organiser.

It's that terrible part of that emboldened title, the organiser bit. There are definitely at least a few pitfalls which you fall into when trying to set up a league.

Clear Idea for a League
Will more than likely be the first stumbling block you come across. Whilst for sports games the process is simple, look at the real world, then copy it to a league. On the other end of the scale you have handicap leagues, where you'll have to struggle between balancing the handicapping process, and keeping it fun for all competitors. For the Forza 3 Handicap League ( A fantastic idea from Haggler1, by the way) this balancing process literally took a couple of months, and even then we still changed it slightly for the 2nd season.

Day / Time / Length of Each Night, and of the League itself
Probably an obvious thing to suggest, but you have to be aware of how long each session of the league will take, and on which day. You won't get a lot of people wanting to play into the early morning hours, additionally weekend 'days' tend to get filled with 'honey-do' lists for the more senior site members. So you tend to have a narrow playable time band of 8-10pm, with a length normally shorter than a hour.

As for the league itself, 6 to 10 weeks is going to be good for the majority of leagues. With longer leagues, you'll more than likely have to maintain some sort of alternates list, to replace people who drop out, or have moved on to other games. Speaking from experience, keeping track of alternates is good practice anyway.

The Joy of Rules, and Those Tough Decisions
Rules are a necessary evil when running leagues, you need them so people know the full details of how the league it going to be run. Sometimes these may include obvious things such as no glitching, using of exploits etc. but they may also include rules on what happens if people can't connect / drop out of a room.

And with rules, come responsibilities. Occasionally, you'll have to make a judgement decision on rule-breakers, and any punishments you feel are just. Punishments can be something as simple as a place drop / points removal, to expulsion from the league for more serious breaches. Impartiality is also key. Rules have to apply to everyone equally, including the Organiser themselves. So where possible, using game replays, try to come to a fair decision.

Once the decision is made, stick by it. The only time you should change a decision is when you receive new evidence on the alleged incident. I know that sounds a little CSI, but that's how you should treat it, you can only go on the evidence available.

Don't run away, it's not that bad I assure you. All I wanted to do is show some of the stuff that I've come up with to make the running of some of my leagues a whole lot easier.

Looking at something I create for a racing league...

Here we have the initial setup sheet with room for both Drivers and teams, there is a duplicate list for teams as it's necessary for team calculations (more on that later). Should you need a replacement driver, you'd just add them to the driver list along with the relevant team name, this way the old driver's points are still shown on the Driver's standings. I've take the liberty of adding a few people and teams on, to make showing the results a little easier.

Also, the points for the different finishing positions can be altered here.

Onto the actual races results.

All that is need here, is the driver name to be entered, and times, if they're wanted. Both the team names and the points for each position are retrieved from the initial setup sheet.

After entering a few more results, we can have a peek at the Driver standings.

But Friendly and Oak are on the same points, how does it know which one is supposed to be placed higher? Well that's where the calculations sheet comes in.

Firstly, we can total up the different places each driver has received, This is done by looking for the driver name, and the place number in the results spreadsheet.

It's a little messy, but it ends up looking something like this.


Using this, we can now calculate any tie breakers, basically checking to see if a tie breaker can be used.

Firstly, we can rank people according to the points they have got, as we've have a tiebreaker, we can then split drivers on the amount of 1st places they have, if they're still equal we'd have to go on 2nd places, and so on. Since Friendly has won a race, Oak would lose this tiebreaker.

Once all tiebreakers are resolved, these rankings are then used to create the driver table. The same would happen for team tiebreakers too.

See that wasn't so bad was it?