Anyone who knows me well will know that a large part of my time on FUMBBL is devoted to Leagues, both as a player and as staff. I won’t bore you with why, I my have done so already if you read my first blog entry. :)


League Players

Anyone who knows me better still will know how much I appreciate all the efforts of the Players, that often go far beyond just playing, of my groups and conversely how I loath those that sign up only to never bother putting in the minimum effort or courtesy to actually play.

When Leagues are made or broken by such actions I think there should be consequences. Although I appreciate that this is of no concern to FUMBBL Staff, I am a leading Lobbyist for a Coach run L Player Black List… despite getting sanction for this by Angie on the proviso that the list be nothing more than a collection of names, so far I have failed to rally the support of other L Commissioners for this to be of any great value as a tool for Groups.

Most Groups maintain a list of banned coaches, either on their pages or privately. But these lists are of no value to the L Community at large.

League Directory

Every so often a Coach, either an R convert, R experimenter or nOOb will come to the League or Tournament forum seeking a Group to join and post something along the lines of: “I want to join a group. I am North American. Can anyone suggests a good one”

Then ensues the list of advertisements from Groups fitting that very sparse list of requirements.

Ok, the Coach could do some leg work himself, he could look at the:

Groups Link – I did this when I first started playing in L. It provides very little really. There are just too many groups, a lot inactive. Against the clutter you might find something that sounds good, but is it the right time zone, is it the right format? These questions are not always easily identifiable from here.

The Groups could also give a new L initiate the false impression that the Groups with fewer members aren’t as good as those on the top of the list. They did me.

League/Tournament Forums – Whilst this is a great way to see what Leagues forums are active, that is all it is – Forum Activity, and worse still, only FUMBBL League Forums, some leagues maintain their forums off the FUMBBL site such as WARSEER.

Also, some leagues don’t have a very active forum presence; they may favour IRC chat such as the WIL or other National Leagues. Worse yet, if a League Forum is currently abuzz with activity, chances are you just missed the start of a new season and might be in for a long wait.

Exceptional League Players

Just as a few bad Coaches can break a League, a few good ones can really make one too.

These are the players that don’t join every league on a whim, they look for leagues that they know they will enjoy, that they have the time to participate and contribute in.

These are the Jewels of the group. They play all their games; they make the initial approaches to Schedule, they actively contribute to the community and some even offer help as staff.

Coaches like Azrahn injected new life into the OCCS for me personally. His initiative in adding a great amount of fluff to the Tournament inspired me to sign back up and start playing again and even write match reports for teams that had been left to procrastinate outside of a group.

Such players should be advertised as an Asset to the League Community such that if such a Coach should apply to your Group, you snap them up.

“Ok. That’s all good and well, but what’s your point?”

My point is that we have the initiative and ability to make L better, the question is do we have the desire to do so?

My proposition is that we create a Group for Groups, a League of Gentlemen to help us achieve a better L, to help us achieve all of the above.

League of Gentlemen

This Group will first and foremost be a directory of currently active Leagues as a reference to who runs the league and what it offers. This will be of a tabulated form that will include the following info:

Name (With URL)
Theme
Structure/Format
Timezones
Round Time
Recruitment status
Eligibility to Join requirements
Approx. Season Length
No. Seasons Running

To prevent this list being too long, to qualify for introduction to the list Groups would be required to be:

Currently Active
Public
(Initially) Active for more than One Season

The hopes would be that this directory would become the first destination for anyone seeking to Join a group.

Blacklist

Most groups already maintain a blacklist. However, it does not help Group B from accepting a coach that got banned from Group A.

The Blacklist would be a simple table that lists a coach’s name and the group that listed him.

Entry to the Blacklist would be made on a case by case basis and initially a name would be submitted by a Registered Group Commissioner and state why the coach is being put forward. That coach would then be contacted to state his case.

The hope would be that the black list feature need not be used much at all, and its simple construction would be a deterrent to behave in a manner would otherwise have them banned from a league. Final decision to add a Coach to this list would reside with the staff of the League of Gentlemen.

Blacklist Maintenance

The blacklist would be maintained pragmatically by a simple program I would write.

The blacklist would be a collection of coach ids. These ids would be used to extract the coach name and the last time they logged on to FUMBBL. In this way, a coach could not circumvent any bans by getting FUMBBL Staff to change his account name, and the list would not become cluttered with coaches that have long gone due to a “last logged on” date filter.

White List

The Blacklist is the ugly part of the League of Gentlemen, although I think a necessary one, the White List however exemplifies what it hopes to promote.

Every two months each registered group can submit one Coach for introduction to the White list with a brief reason why.

This list would be maintained as per the Blacklist.

So, there is my proposal for the League of Gentlemen.

It would not be run by me alone, but rather all the registered Groups with a small staff that maintained the site and judged list entries.

To get this working we would need the interest of Group commissioners to actually sign up to the idea. Once we have a good representation of FUMBBL Groups I would approach FUMBBL staff to see if we could get a sticky placed on the Tournament and League Forums that directs would-be Group searches to the group for a first stop.