Joining a team

[Gritty]

I see there are Stan Net Team's about, with 4 players per team, playing different boards etc, but how do you go about joining a team?

I found the form to complete, but it says about the teams you would which to join.

How do I know what teams are about who may need to recruit an extra player? Do people leave existing teams, perhaps to join others, or maybe to cut back on their games?

[Stan Steliga]

The team stuff is on hold at this point.

[Gritty]

Probably for the best as I do have a ridiculous amount of games on the go at the moment.

When you say "on hold" is there a current season bouncing along, or are we in pre-season at the moment, and teams will start signing up at a later date?

I may have to start thinking about recruiting a team of my own then. Do I want to be top-dog in a poor team, or play board 4 in a crack team, and hope I don't let them down too often. Decisions, decisions.

[savin]

Gritty,

The major reason the team tournaments are on hold is we had a huge problem with teams losing members. Before we start up a set of teams tournaments again we really need to find a way to make sure the teams:

1) Feel like a team. Many players were just seeeing it as a way to get some more games and were ccompletely forgetting they were actually on a team.

2) the players on teams have shown themselves to be likely to stay at the site.

The good news is that we have all the code in place to run tream tournaments. The bad news is we have not found a way to fix our major two problems.

To address point 2) above we might restrict joining a team to:
A) Subscribers, or
B) players who have completed at least 50 established games at the site and been active at the site for at least a year.

We know statistically that this change in requirements would reduce the number teams who lost players by 90%. During previous tournaments over 40% of the teams lost one or more players during the tournament.

Addressing problem #1 we know the issue is that a team needs to have a sense of identity or it is really nothing more than a way to get a few more games. This could be a group 4 long time friends at Stan's. It could be four people from the same country. But whatever it is it has got to mean something to the 4 players or it will not work.

We also know that its importtant that the players on a team be not too far separated in ability. A 400 point rating difference from best to worst (in the new rating system) is about the maximum difference before it causes some issues. This further restricts the teams, we may have 4 good friends but they might have a rating difference of 800 points.

Lastly, to really make this work we need a member of the site to volunteer to be a coordinator for forming the teams. That means emails, that means dealing with the occassional player leaving the site, -- in short it means work.

So .. for now its not the back burner. If someone steps forward to volunteer we would be more than willing to set the tournaments up. But we don't have time to help people find team members etc. We do have a way to help the administrator manage a list of people interested in joining a team.

Any way .. probably too much info.

[Gritty]

Thanks for that, and I do see the problem. I was wondering how you would go about dealing with teams that change members or need to change members.

I could probably just about raise a team of 4 players who know each other on a personal face-to-face basis, BUT the ratings would be more than 400 points apart.

Shame, as I like the idea of team play, but would be tricky to get it working. How about if teams were made up of more members that play each game, so a squad of 6, and the captain selects 4 to play any particular match. That should increase the chances of a team always being able to fulfill a fixture of 4 matches, and would mean that joining the team need not mean such a high increase in matches, as squad rotation would mean players don't have to play every fixture the team plays.

Just an idea off the top of my head.

[savin]

Gritty,

The big issue is that most CC chess touraments last at least 6-9 months and more likely 12+ months. We would probably not run that many team tournaments at once, so having alternates does not really make that big a difference. The primary purpose for tournaments is to give the players a nice organized way to get appropriate chess games created. The last team tounament had about 45 teams (I think). Most players really prefer to play people around their own level, there are exceptions, but its true for most. That means a difference of more that 300 rating points is making the game less fun for the players. We try to take this into account when organizing these tournaments.

[reyn]

savin said:

Lastly, to really make this work we need a member of the site to volunteer to be a coordinator for forming the teams. That means emails, that means dealing with the occassional player leaving the site, -- in short it means work.

Been there, done that with the Collaborative teams.

And when Savin says it involves a lot of work, listen to him very carefully. There's nothing more frusterating then players leaving games totally unannounced and having to deal with the aftermath. In my situation, it was not the occasional player.

[Gritty]

Fair enough.